Lesbos Archives - The Automatic Earth

Video: To consternation of @BrianStelter, Ted Koppel contended during 10/1 Kalb Report @PressClubDC: “You would be lost without @realDonaldTrump. CNN’s ratings would be in the toilet without Trump.” Stelter: “Ted, you know that’s not true. You’re playing for laughs.” #NPCLive pic.twitter.com/XGZl9yNzqh

— Brent Baker (@BrentHBaker) October 3, 2018

And then he closed the spigots…

• Fed’s Powell Says US Outlook ‘Remarkably Positive’ (R.)

U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on Tuesday hailed a “remarkably positive outlook” for the U.S. economy that he feels is on the verge of a “historically rare” era of ultra-low unemployment and tame prices for the foreseeable future. It is a view, he said, based on how a changed economy is operating today, with businesses and households immunized by strong central bank policy from the inflationary psychology that caused unemployment, inflation and interest rates to swing wildly in the 1960s and 1970s. It is an outlook that includes an economic performance “unique in modern U.S. data,” with unemployment of below 4 percent expected for at least two more years and inflation remaining modest even as wages rise.

And it is an outlook he feels will even survive the Trump administration’s efforts to rewrite the global trading system, a policy shift Powell said may lead to one-time price hikes, but not to persistent changes in the annual rate of inflation going forward. “This forecast is not too good to be true,” Powell told the National Associate for Business Economics, but instead “is testament to the fact that we remain in extraordinary times.” “These developments amount to a better world for households and businesses which no longer experience or even fear the scourge of high and volatile inflation.”

There can be no doubt.

• Another Market Volatility Surge Is Likely Ahead (Colombo)

The U.S. stock market is climbing to record highs once again and volatility has calmed down dramatically from its panic-induced levels reached earlier this year. Traders have become complacent as they passively ride the stock market higher and bet on lower volatility again. While it may seem like all is well, several reliable indicators are warning that another powerful volatility surge is likely ahead.

The first indicator is the 10-year/2-year Treasury spread that is calculated by subtracting the 2-year Treasury note yield from the 10-year Treasury note yield. The 10-year/2-year Treasury spread is helpful for estimating when the next recession is likely to occur, as I explained in a recent Forbes piece. The chart below (which I recreated from a chart made by BofA’s Savita Subramanian) shows that the inverted 10-year/2-year Treasury spread leads the CBOE Volatility Index or VIX by approximately three years. If this historic relationship holds true, we are about to experience a whole lot more volatility over the next few years.

The next chart shows the positioning of the “smart money” and “dumb money” in the Volatility Index or VIX futures. The “smart money”, or commercial futures hedgers (who tend to be right at major market turning points), are building up another bullish position in VIX futures, just like they did one year ago ahead of the stock market correction and volatility spike. In addition, the “dumb money”, or large traders (who tend to be wrong at major turning points), have built up a large short position, like they did before the early-2018 volatility spike. The positioning of these groups of traders indicates that another volatility spike is likely ahead in the not-too-distant future.

Decades old, started when Trump was a toddler, good luck. Of course they pay as little as they can, but once the IRS signs off on it…

• White House Responds To “Misleading” NYTimes’ Trump Tax Fraud Story (ZH)

Update 2: The White House has finally responded to the NYTimes story…(via Sarah Sanders) “Fred Trump has been gone for nearly twenty years and it’s sad to witness this misleading attack against the Trump family by the failing New York Times. Many decades ago the IRS reviewed and signed off on these transactions. The New York Times’ and other media outlets’ credibility with the American people is at an all time low because they are consumed with attacking the president and his family 24/7 instead of reporting the news.

The truth is the market is at an all-time high, unemployment is at a fifty year low, taxes for families and businesses have been cut, wages are up, farmers and workers are empowered from better trade deals, and America’s military is stronger than ever, yet the New York Times can rarely find anything positive about the President and has tremendous record of success to report. Perhaps another apology from the New York Times, like the one they had to issue after they got the 2016 election so embarrassingly wrong, is in order.”

The NYT reported that Trump and his siblings set up a “sham” corporation to help disguise otherwise taxable income that came from gifts from their parents. The president also allegedly helped his father take improper tax deductions that amounted to millions of dollars and helped formulate strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings, with the Internal Revenue Service reportedly providing little pushback against the Trumps’ reported tactics. According to the leaked confidential filings, Trump’s parents left more than $1 billion to their children, which would have resulted in a roughly $550 million tax bill at the time.

However, the Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million on that source of income, according to the NYT report. To achieve this, the newspaper cited records that showed Trump helped undervalue his father’s real estate holdings, which led to a lower tax bill when he and his siblings inherited the properties. In total, Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, based on questionable tax dealings starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day. And, in what will attract the most attention, the newspaper wrote that Trump’s behavior amounted to fraud in some cases.

I don’t think this one’s over yet.

• Italy Folds To Europe On Budget Deficit; Euro Surges (ZH)

After two days of brutal punishment by the markets which sent Italian bond yields to 4 years highs and slammed the euro, the Italian government appears to have folded to pressure from Brussels (and the one place in the world where the bond vigilantes still operate, just ask Sylvio Berlusconi), and according to Corriere della Sera, Italy’s draft budget plan will pledge to cut the deficit to 2% in 2021, after Rome reversed a proposal to maintain a 2.4% shortfall in the face of pressure from the EU. As a result, while the 2019 deficit will still rise to 2.4% of GDP in 2019, it will decline by 0.2% to 2.2% in 2020, and another 0.2% the year after. In kneejerk reaction, futures lept to fresh session highs, Treasury yields jumped by 2bps to 3.07% and the EURUSD spiked 50 pips higher to 1.1590.

Italy is not out of the woods yet though: according to Mizuho, the sustainability of the euro’s rebound will depend on whether the EU sees Italy’s latest budget plan as appropriate. It could be that Italy has already made compromise with the EU, but hard to predict whether the euro’s rebound has more legs until we see a reaction from the EU: “It all boils down to the EU’s response”, and if the ongoing war of words is any indication, merely promising to trim the deficit in the next three years will hardly be smiled upon. Others were even more skeptical. According to bond fund manager Daintree Capital, “The euro’s definitely reacting to the headlines on Italian budget plans, and it will continue to do so for future headlines.” However, “anyone who believes a populist government is all of a sudden going to be particularly responsible in a fiscal sense, has a misguided view.”

Merkel’s losing it.

• Merkel’s End Could Spark EU Breakdown (Luongo)

I saw a recent poll from Die Welt which has Alternative for Germany (AfD) creep past Merkel’s Grand Coalition partner, the Social Democrats (SPD), and challenge the CDU itself. Because when you back out the Christian Social Union’s (CSU) total which runs between 8% and 9% AfD is now in a position to become the party with the highest backing in Germany. And this is happening on the eve of Bavarian State elections this month. [..] I’ve talked about AfD’s chances to achieve this result in the past in terms of them crossing the 16% Chasm. And it appears, that slowly, they are doing so. German politics, from what I understand, is not used to this kind of upheaval and certainly not these kinds of leadership challenges. Earlier this year Merkel barely survived a challenge by former CSU Leader Horst Seehofer over immigration.

So, where to things go from here? As Mercouris points out, Merkel has very skillfully gutted the landscape of the CDU to keep potential leaders from emerging within the party. The SPD is falling off a cliff having lost more than half of its support since the 2014 elections. And the CSU is primarily a Bavarian party so they don’t have the support of the entirety of Germany. This landscape is why we’ve seen the Greens rise to 15% as well as AfD’s rise. And that cannot be ignored. The hard left of German politics is now split and ineffectual. But, no party has emerged in this chaos to take the reins of power.

This is reminding me of Italy’s situation at the end of 2017 with no less than five parties polling in double digits. It’s a messy situation and it makes more sense in Germany that big shifts in voter preference would occur at a slower rate given the stability of German coalition governments since the modern state was founded after World War II. In other words Germans are loathe to make these kinds of changes. So, you know the situation must be bad if these numbers are changing this quickly. So, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise really to see this type of breakdown and the slow rise of AfD past the 16% chasm. It may be the riots in Chemnitz that finally begin pushing their poll numbers into the 20’s nationally.

Glass half full: “”There’s more selection for home buyers to choose from today.”

• Vancouver Home Sales Crash 44% As “For Sale” Inventory Soars (ZH)

What happens when prices rise so high that a chasm forms between bids and asks? The market grinds to a halt. That’s what happened in Vancouver housing in September, when according to the Real Estate Board of Vancouver (REBGV), residential property sales tumbled by 17.3% from August 2018, and a whopping 43.5% from one year ago. In fact, a total of only 1,595 transactions took place as both buyers and sellers continue to sit on their hands amid confusion whether the recent torrid price gains will continue or whether the housing bubble has burst. Sales of detached properties in July was just 508, a decrease of 40.4% from the 852 recorded in September 2017, and the 812 apartments sold was a 44% drop compared to the 1,451 sales in September 2017.

And no, it’s not seasonal: last month’s sales were a whopping 36.1% below the 10-year September sales average. The reason for the collapse in transactions: the formerly all too willing buyers, mostly Chinese oligarchs who would use Vancouver real estate as their offshore Swiss bank account, have disappeared. Meanwhile sellers are dumping properties in the market in hopes of a quick flip. “Fewer home sales are allowing listings to accumulate and prices to ease across the Metro Vancouver housing market,” Ashley Smith, REBGV president-elect said. “There’s more selection for home buyers to choose from today. Since spring, home listing totals have risen to levels we haven’t seen in our market in four years.”

What would we do without our housing bubble?

• Australia Banking Royal Commission Could Trigger House Price Collapse (ABC.au)

There is a lot riding on the policy recommendations from the banking royal commission, not least of which is the stability of the Australian property market, according to some respected analysts. Independent economist Saul Eslake said there was potential for the royal commission’s recommendations to have what economists refer to as “unintended consequences”. The unintended consequences Mr Eslake is referring to include a steep fall in house prices spurred on by a royal commission-inspired clampdown on bank lending. Capital Economics chief economist Paul Dales said while house price falls to date have been small, Australia could be in for a record housing decline, at least in its recent history.

“At the moment the trajectory is a bit worrying cause the house prices seem to be declining at a faster rate and, in our view at Capital Economics, this will eventually prove to be the largest downturn in Australia’s modern history,” he said. Mr Dales is forecasting a protracted slowdown in the housing market as a result of a crackdown in bank lending standards, the banking royal commission itself and rising interest rates. “There’s significant time delays with these things,” he said. “I would have thought over the next six to 12 months is where we would, if there was going to be a big pullback in lending, that’s when we would see it and then, thereafter as and when the royal commission makes any recommendations and the Government implements them, the next six to 12 months after that.

Korea’s move on.

• DMZ Demining Operations Lay Groundwork For Korean Peninsula Peace (YH)

After a 15-minute bumpy ride along a dusty, hilly path inside the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), dozens of South Korean troops in full gear disembarked near a grisly site of intense battles during the 1950-53 Korean War. Accompanying them in the buffer zone separating the two Koreas was a phalanx of security guards, medical specialists and other personnel specializing in disposing of unidentified explosives and excavating war remains. They are part of the 120-member team tasked with removing landmines in the Arrowhead Ridge, or Hill 281 in Cheorwon, some 90 kilometers northeast of Seoul — a site that the two Koreas have designated for a joint project to retrieve war remains from April to October next year.

There were three key battles against communist forces on the notorious ridge from 1952-53. The remains of more than 200 South Korean soldiers and dozens of U.N. Command (UNC) forces, such as U.S. and French troops, are thought to be buried in it. “We have made preparations (for the landmine removal) for a long period and are well prepared now,” the commander in charge of the frontline areas told reporters on condition of anonymity on Tuesday, the second day of the demining work set to continue until Nov. 30. “We will not rush and will carry out our mission with the first and foremost priority placed on the safety of our troops,” he added.

EU and NATO want to keep pushing, but how about democracy?

• Russia May Veto Greece-FYROM Name Deal at the UN (GR)

Russia is implicitly threatening that it may block the Prespa agreement at the UN Security Council. In a statement on Monday, following the referendum in FYROM, the Russian foreign ministry says that the low turnout “means that the referendum cannot be recognised as valid.” It clearly indicates that the voters “chose to boycott the solutions imposed on Skopje and Athens.” The statement also blasts leading politicians from NATO and EU member states who participated in “large-scale propaganda campaign directly, freely interfering in the internal affairs of this Balkan state.” Despite the low turnout, Prime Minister Zoran Zaev vowed to push ahead with the name change on Monday.

The Russian foreign ministry condemned the move: “There is a clear drive to ensure Skopje’s entanglement in NATO despite the will of the Macedonian people.” Russia is traditionally wary of NATO’s enlargement in eastern Europe. The alliance’s 1999 bombings of its ally Serbia caused a major rift in Russia’s relations with the West at the time. Moscow says that a long-term solution can only be agreed upon by the two parties on their own, without any external interference, and only within the framework of the law and with broad public support.

Inequality in Europe rises fast, too. Where are the breaking points?

• The Case For Paying Every American A Dividend On The Nation’s Wealth (MW)

The newest research shows that unconditional cash transfers boost work productivity and quality of life, including better mental and physical health, and reduce crime. A study by the Roosevelt Institute in New York, a left-leaning think tank, concludes that giving $500 a month to every adult American could meaningfully grow the U.S. economy and address its widening wealth gap. (The top 1% of Americans now receive 20% of the national income, while those in the bottom 50% receive 13%; in 1980, the numbers were essentially reversed, at 11% and 20%, respectively, according to the 2018 World Inequality Report.)

Yet basic income in the U.S., characterized as a utopian solution by its true believers but as welfare, socialism or worse by its detractors, has gone nowhere. Basic income did enjoy a bit of a heyday in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s and was even embraced in conservative circles; free-market economist Milton Friedman went so far in 1962 as to propose a negative federal income tax that would guarantee a basic income to the poorest Americans while also incentivizing work. Other ideals of the era — the four-day workweek, the 30-hour workweek, the all but limitless vacation allotment — have fallen by the wayside, even as U.S. labor conditions have worsened.

In France, this is a nation-wide law.

• Restaurants In Austin Banned From Throwing Away Food (Hill)

Restaurants in Austin, Texas, will no longer be allowed to throw out food waste, the city announced this week. Under a new policy that began Monday, all food-permitted businesses in the city are required to keep organic material, such as food scraps and soiled paper products, from landfills. Businesses can dispose of their food waste by donating extra food, giving scraps to local farms for animals, or composting, the city government said in a press release announcing the policy.

The city’s Universal Recycling Ordinance also requires businesses to provide employees with training on organic waste diversion, and to post information about the plan. Official city data shows that 37 percent of material sent to landfills is organic and could have otherwise been donated or composted, the city said. Austin’s ordinance is the latest move by a major city to introduce eco-friendly policies. Dozens of cities and businesses nationwide have banned plastic straws and other single-use plastic items in an effort to cut down on waste.

Welcome to Europe.

• ‘We Have Found Hell’: Trauma Runs Deep For Children At Dire Lesbos Camp (G.)

The drawings tell of trauma. Stormy seas dotted with terrified faces. Lifeless bodies of children floating among the waves. And planes dropping bombs, down on to homes and on to people. Eyes that weep blood. The pencil scrawls were made by children who are part of a growing phenomenon in the Moria refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece. All have attempted suicide or serious self-harm since they came to this place. Approximately 3,000 minors live in the Moria camp, which Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) calls a giant open-air “mental asylum” owing to the overcrowding and dire sanitary conditions. Last Tuesday an adolescent attempted to hang himself from a pole. In August, a 10-year-old boy only just failed to take his own life.

The camp, among hills dotted with olive trees a few kilometres from the island’s capital town of Mytilene, is home to 9,000 asylum seekers living in a centre designed to hold one third of that number. Migrants live in groups of up to 30 people, crammed into tents or metal containers situated just centimetres apart. Rubbish, scattered everywhere, makes the air almost unbreathable. Most come from war-torn countries like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. They arrive in dinghies from the Turkish towns of Ayvalik or Canakkale. According to aid agencies, the controversial deal brokered between Brussels and Ankara aimed at stopping the flow of migrants to Europe via Turkey, combined with the refusal on the part of European countries to take in asylum seekers arriving in Greece, have transformed Lesbos into an Alcatraz, leaving people imprisoned on the island with no way out.

“Although the vast majority of migrants who arrive in Moria are traumatised, after having fled from violent conflicts in their home countries, conditions in the camp have exacerbated their trauma,” says Luca Fontana, field coordinator of MSF on the island. “After two years, some are still awaiting transferral, even if they know they could be deported to Turkey at a moment’s notice. I’ve worked in camps infested with Ebola in Sierra Leone and Guinea, but I guarantee you that this is the worst situation I’ve ever seen.”

Debt Rattle September 26 2018

Sep 262018

September 26, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:14 am Finance Tagged with: Brexit, Corbyn, elephant bird, Fed, honeybees, Lesbos, Monsanto, parasites, SPV, suicide, SWIFT, Trump, waste 5 Responses »

Pablo Picasso Five women 1907

• Europe, Russia And China Join Forces To Dodge Iran Sanctions (CNBC)

• Europe Unveils “Special Purpose Vehicle” To Bypass SWIFT (ZH)

• Fed Likely To Raise Rates, Possibly End ‘Accommodative’ Policy Era (R.)

• Free-Riding Investors Set up Markets for a Major Collapse (Rickards)

• Corbyn Vows To End ‘Greed-is-Good’ Capitalism In UK (G.)

• Why Corbyn Is Promising A “Green Jobs Revolution” (NS)

• Brexit Agreement Could Come In October – Merkel (CNBC)

• 1000s Told To Flee As Florence-Triggered Floods Wash Into South Carolina (R.)

• Global Waste Could Increase By 70% By 2050 – World Bank (WEF)

• The Man Who Beat Monsanto: ‘They Have To Pay For Not Being Honest’ (G.)

• Monsanto’s Glyphosate Linked To Global Decline In Honey Bees (ZH)

• IRC Warns Of Mental Health Crisis On Lesbos As Greece Moves Asylum Seekers (R.)

• Ending Decades Of Doubt, ‘Biggest Bird’ Dispute Put To Nest (AFP)

Not much on the Kavanaugh front right now, other than the same voices saying more of the same. We don’t expect that to last through the day today. We expect mayhem. But first, some economy:

• Europe, Russia And China Join Forces To Dodge Iran Sanctions (CNBC)

In the latest sign of the growing divide between Washington and its allies, the European Union’s foreign policy chief announced Monday that the bloc was creating a new payment mechanism to allow countries to transact with Iran while avoiding U.S. sanctions. Called the “special purpose vehicle” (SPV), this mechanism would aim to “assist and reassure economic operators pursuing legitimate business with Iran,” according to a joint statement released by the remaining members of the Iran nuclear deal — France, Britain, Germany, Russia and China.

“This will mean that EU member states will set up a legal entity to facilitate legitimate financial transactions with Iran and this will allow European companies to continue to trade with Iran in accordance with EU law and could be open to other partners in the world,” Federica Mogherini, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, told the UN General Assembly on Tuesday. The technical details will be worked on by experts in future meetings, she said. American sanctions have already been imposed on a number of Iran’s industries — including aviation, metals, automotives and its ability to trade gold and acquire dollars — as a result of President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal. On November 4, a second round of penalties will fall on Iran’s massive oil sector, which accounts for 70 percent of the country’s exports. Iran is the world’s seventh-largest oil producer.

More detail on the above.

• Europe Unveils “Special Purpose Vehicle” To Bypass SWIFT (ZH)

Germany, France and the U.K. would set up a multinational state-backed financial intermediary that would deal with companies interested in Iran transactions and with Iranian counter-parties. Such transactions, presumably in euros and pounds sterling, would not be transparent to American authorities. European companies dealing with the state-owned intermediary technically might not even be in violation of the U.S. sanctions as currently written. And, in a potentially massive development, the system would be likely be open to Russia and China as well as it would enable the world’s economies to trade with each other, fully independent of SWIFT.

Europe would thus provide an infrastructure for legal, secure sanctions-busting — and a guarantee that the transactions would not be reported to American regulators. That said, Washington would not be without recourse, although at that point, all the U.S. could do is sanction the participating countries’ central banks or SWIFT for facilitating the transactions (if the special purpose vehicle uses SWIFT, rather than ad hoc messaging).

That, Hellman and Batmanghelidj wrote, would be self-defeating: “There are two possible outcomes if these institutions proceed to work with Iran despite U.S. secondary sanctions. Either U.S. authorities fail to take enforcement action given the massive consequences for the operations and integrity of the American financial system, serving to “defang” the enforcement threats and reduce the risk of European self-sanctioning on the basis of fear, or U.S. authorities take such an enforcement action, a step that would only serve to accelerate European efforts to create a defensible banking architecture that goes beyond the Iran issue alone.”

Europe, naturally, needs a “neutral” pretext to implement this SPV, and that would be Brussels’ desire to continue transacting with Iran: “We are not backing down [on the Iran nuclear agreement],” said a European diplomat. He said the speeches of European leaders at a Security Council meeting Mr. Trump is hosting on Wednesday on nonproliferation, including Iran, will reflect the Monday night statement. Additionally, as basis for the potentially revolutionary development, the participants of the 2015 nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA, “underlined their determination to protect the freedom of their economic operators to pursue legitimate business with Iran.”

There’s one thing only that keeps the wheeels turning: cheap debt. They’re about to take that away. I added the graph.

• Fed Likely To Raise Rates, Possibly End ‘Accommodative’ Policy Era (R.)

With the Federal Reserve widely expected to raise interest rates on Wednesday, financial markets are focused on whether signs of an acceleration in U.S. economic growth will prompt the central bank to ramp up the pace of monetary policy tightening. This week’s two-day policy meeting could mark the formal end of the “accommodative” level of rates the Fed has used to support the American economy since the onset of the 2007-2009 recession. The Fed’s current policy statement has included that description of loose policy as a staple element in recent years, though officials recently have described it as out of date and likely to be removed, either this week or in the near future.

The probability the Fed will raise its benchmark overnight lending rate by a quarter of a percentage point on Wednesday, in what would be its third hike this year, is nearly 95 percent, based on an analysis of fed fund futures contracts by CME Group. The larger question is whether the Fed reshapes its monetary policy outlook for the next few years to factor in stronger GDP growth or whether concerns about a possible global trade war or economic slowdown cause it to stick close to its current view.

Jamie Dimon as a parasite.

• Free-Riding Investors Set up Markets for a Major Collapse (Rickards)

The biggest free riders in the financial system are bank executives such as Jamie Dimon, the CEO of J.P. Morgan. Bank liabilities are guaranteed by the FDIC up to $250,000 per account. Liabilities in excess of that are implicitly guaranteed by the “too big to fail” policy of the Federal Reserve. The big banks can engage in swap and other derivative contracts “off the books” without providing adequate capital for the market risk involved. Interest rates were held near zero for years by the Fed to help the banks earn profits by not passing the benefits of low rates along to their borrowers. Put all of this (and more) together and it’s a recipe for billions of dollars in bank profits and huge paychecks and bonuses for the top executives like Dimon.

What is the executives’ contribution to the system? Nothing. They just sit there like parasites and collect the benefits while offering nothing in return. Given all of these federal subsidies to the banks, a trained pet could be CEO of J.P. Morgan and the profits would be the same. This is the essence of parasitic behavior. Yet there’s another parasite problem affecting markets that is harder to see and may be even more dangerous that the bank CEO free riders. This is the problem of “active” versus “passive” investors. An active investor is one who does original research and due diligence on her investments or who relies on an investment adviser or mutual fund that does its own research.

T he active investor makes bets, takes risks and is the lifeblood of price discovery in securities markets. The active investor may make money or lose money (usually it’s a bit of both) but in all cases earns her money by thoughtful investment. The active investor contributes to markets while trying to make money in them. A passive investor is a parasite. The passive investor simply buys an index fund, sits back and enjoys the show. Since markets mostly go up, the passive investor mostly makes money but contributes nothing to price discovery.

That’ll be good for a whole lot more smear. The Telegraph runs a we ad right now that says: “We must ditch Chequers or be condemned to a crazed Corbynista takeover”. And a photo of Hitler accompanied by: “The Nazis were socialists”.

• Corbyn Vows To End ‘Greed-is-Good’ Capitalism In UK (G.)

Jeremy Corbyn will on Wednesday attack the “greed-is-good” capitalism that he claims has resulted in large swaths of the UK being left behind, promising a raft of new policies including a “green jobs revolution” that will create 400,000 new positions. The Labour leader will attempt to reset the theme of the Labour conference which has so far been dominated by deep divisions over its Brexit stance and return to his core argument about the failure of the broken economic system. Corbyn will use his main conference speech to set out his plans to change the direction of the economy, following a week in which his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, laid out a series of redistributive policies.

The Labour leader will say: “Ten years ago this month, the whole edifice of greed-is-good, deregulated financial capitalism, lauded for a generation as the only way to run a modern economy, came crashing to earth, with devastating consequences.” ”But instead of making essential changes to a broken economic system, the political and corporate establishment strained every sinew to bail out and prop up the system that led to the crash in the first place. “People in this country know – they showed that in June last year – that the old way of running things isn’t working any more. That’s why Labour is offering a radical plan to rebuild and transform Britain.” Corbyn will announce plans for a rollout of green technologies including 13,500 onshore and offshore wind turbines, solar panels on thousands of roofs and wide-scale home insulation.

Well, he doesn’t hold back.

• Why Corbyn Is Promising A “Green Jobs Revolution” (NS)

A Labour government would “kickstart a green jobs revolution” in a bid to radically overhaul the economy after Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn will say in a conference speech that implicitly criticises the last Labour government tomorrow. Laying out his party’s vision to reduce carbon emissions and create 400,000 new skilled jobs by 2030, the Labour leader will tell delegates in Liverpool that his government will return “skills and security to communities held back for too long” with a large-scale programme of investment in green infrastructure and training. Sources close to Corbyn have described the speech as a direct pitch to communities that voted for Brexit – “the millions of people who have been most directly affected by deindustrialisation and austerity” – and its policy platform as a bid to remedy to its root economic causes.

Corbyn will announce plans to reduce carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2030, and to zero by 2050, through a large-scale programme of public sector investment and sweeping changes to planning regulations. A Labour government would seek to increase offshore wind power by seven times, double onshore wind, treble solar panel, and would launch a £12.8 billion home insulation programme. An independent panel of researchers said that the plans – which would involve both public and private sector investment – would create some 400,000 skilled jobs. Corbyn will describe the plans as a “radical plan we need to rebuild and transform Britain”, adding: “The old way of running things isn’t working anymore.”

If May gives in enough, it could come later today.

• Brexit Agreement Could Come In October – Merkel (CNBC)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tuesday that a Brexit agreement between the European Union and the U.K. is possible in October, but it is not yet clear what the British government wants. Speaking at a conference in Germany, Merkel said the U.K. cannot choose to be part of the single market — the European common area where goods, services and people move freely — without respecting all its principles. The U.K. government wants to control the number of European citizens moving to the U.K. During a cabinet meeting Monday, Prime Minister Theresa May’s government agreed that EU workers should face the same immigration rules as non-EU citizens. Some have argued that restricting the number of low-skilled EU migrants will hurt the U.K. economy.

Merkel also said Tuesday that European businesses need clarity, which demands “hard work” from Brexit negotiators in the next six to eight weeks. There have been repeated comments from both sides of the English Channel that negotiations need to be intensified to reach a deal by no later than November. However, many analysts are sceptical that a Brexit agreement will be reached. “We have highlighted for some time that the risks of ‘no deal’ are appreciably high,” Dean Turner, economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, said in a note Tuesday morning. “We don’t believe that this will happen by design, as it is in neither sides’ interests to generate the kind of economic disruption that would likely ensue. But with every day that passes without progress, the risks grow that such an outcome could occur by accident.”

Two weeks on…

• 1000s Told To Flee As Florence-Triggered Floods Wash Into South Carolina (R.)

Thousands of people in the Georgetown, South Carolina, area were urged to evacuate their homes on Tuesday as rainwater unleashed by Hurricane Florence surged down rivers, threatening to submerge some neighborhoods under 10 feet of water. Georgetown, which sits at the confluence of the Waccamaw, Great Pee Dee and Sampit rivers, was largely spared the initial fury of Florence, which came ashore on Sept. 14 as a Category 1 hurricane, killing 46 people in three states. But the port city of more than 9,000 stands in the path of what the National Weather Service has said could be significant flooding as water dumped by the storm system drains to the ocean.

“We are urging people to take this event seriously. We expect the flooding to be worse than Hurricane Matthew a couple years ago,” said Randy Akers, deputy public information officer for Georgetown County. “We always urge people to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.” Akers said between 6,000 and 8,000 people have been exhorted to leave, but it was not clear how many had done so as of Tuesday evening. He said the county lacked authority to mandate evacuations.

They blame it on mismanagement. Not on producing the waste in the first place. World Bank.

• Global Waste Could Increase By 70% By 2050 – World Bank (WEF)

Global waste could grow by 70 percent by 2050 as urbanisation and populations rise, said the World Bank on Thursday, with South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa set to generate the biggest increase in rubbish. Countries could reap economic and environmental benefits by better collecting, recycling and disposing of trash, according to a report, which calculated that a third of the world’s waste is instead dumped openly, with no treatment. “We really need to pay attention to South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, as by 2050, South Asia’s waste will double, sub-Saharan Africa’s waste will triple,” said Silpa Kaza, World Bank urban development specialist and report lead author.

“If we don’t take any action it could have quite significant implications for health, productivity, environment, livelihoods,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from Belarus. The rise in rubbish will outstrip population growth, reaching 3.4 billion tons by 2050 from around 2 billion tons in 2016, according to the report. High-income countries produce a third of the world’s waste, despite having only 16 percent of world’s population, while a quarter comes from East Asia and the Pacific regions, it said. While more than a third of waste globally ends up in landfill, over 90 percent is dumped openly in lower income countries that often lack adequate disposal and treatment facilities, said the report.

“This guy is dealing with the reality of his mortality..”

• The Man Who Beat Monsanto: ‘They Have To Pay For Not Being Honest’ (G.)

Regardless of the outcome, Johnson v Monsanto was always going to be a newsworthy trial, because the judge allowed the cancer patient’s legal team to bring scientific arguments to the courtroom. The proceedings further shined a light on internal Monsanto emails over the years that Johnson’s attorneys said showed how the company had repeatedly rejected critical research and expert warnings. Some evidence suggested that Monsanto had also strategized plans to “ghostwrite” favorable research. Monsanto, which was bought by pharmaceutical giant Bayer earlier this year, has continued to argue that Roundup does not cause cancer and that critics are “cherrypicking” studies while ignoring research that showed its products were safe.

The jury disagreed. They ruled that Johnson also deserved $250m in punitive damages and $39.2m for losses. When the verdict was announced, Johnson said his body briefly went into a kind of shock. “I felt like all the fluids went out of my body and rushed back in,” he recalled. The jury’s unanimous decision said Monsanto’s products presented a “substantial danger” to people and the company failed to warn consumers of the risks. “They have been hiding for years and getting away with it,” Johnson said. “They have to pay the price for not being honest and putting people’s health at risk for the sake of making a profit.”

Prior to the verdict, Johnson said he had no expectations about the outcome. “I never really discussed winning or money or amounts with the legal guys,” he said, adding that he did fear the implications of a Monsanto win: “If we lose, the facts won’t keep coming out. That would be the worst part.” Pedram Esfandiary, one of Johnson’s lawyers, said he was consistently impressed with Johnson’s ability to remain optimistic and focused on exposing the facts and protecting others from Roundup hazards. “This guy is dealing with the reality of his mortality,” he said. “His life is on the line because of what happened … He was concerned about getting the truth out.”

Time for a boycott. Demand labels that say whether glyphosate was used in crops.

• Monsanto’s Glyphosate Linked To Global Decline In Honey Bees (ZH)

In recent times, US beekeepers have reported a massive loss of bees or CCD. Millions of bees mysteriously disappeared, leaving farms with fewer pollinators for crops. Officials have been baffled, and the media has been quite about the bee population collapse. Explanations for the phenomenon have included exposure to pesticides or antibiotics, habitat loss, and bacterial infections. The latest study now adds herbicides to the list as a possible contributing factor. “It’s not the only thing causing all these bee deaths, but it is definitely something people should worry about because glyphosate is used everywhere,” said Motta.

And that, researchers, believe, is evidence that glyphosate might be contributing to the collapse of honeybees around the world. The Western honeybee, the world’s premier pollinator species, has been in high demand for its services on fruit, nut, and vegetable farmers. Among the nuts, almond growers have the largest need for bee pollination. Bee pollination is worth $15 billion to the US farming industry.

Any sharp change in global bee populations could affect the beef and dairy industries. Bees pollinate clover, hay, and other forage crops. As the bee population dwindles, it increases the cost of feedstock. That forces inflation into beef and milk prices at the grocery store and ultimately hurts the American consumer. This could then lead to increased imports of produce from foreign countries where bee populations are healthy, further widening the trade deficit. Couple this with the current trade war and this particular “black swan” – or rather “black bee” – problem, may be just the tipping point that finally forces the US economy to catch down to the rest of the world.

EU starts investigating abuse of funds. Been going on for years now. 30% of people have attempted suicide.

• IRC Warns Of Mental Health Crisis On Lesbos As Greece Moves Asylum Seekers (R.)

Greece moved another 400 people from its biggest migrant camp on Tuesday as the International Rescue Committee (IRC) charity warned of a mental health emergency there with 30 percent of people having attempted suicide. The government, under pressure from aid groups and local authorities, has said it will transfer 2,000 people from Moria camp on Lesbos to the mainland by the end of the month. In a report published on Tuesday, the IRC said asylum-seekers in Moria, most of whom are Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan, were under “enormous mental strain”. Citing testimonials of patients who have visited its own clinic on the island, IRC said that in addition to the 30 percent of people who had attempted suicide about 60 percent had contemplated it.

“Several times I have attempted suicide,” it quoted Ahmad, a 35-year-old Iraqi single father of four children as saying. “The only reason I am glad I didn’t succeed is because of the children.” Asylum seekers were living in conditions that did not meet humanitarian standards, IRC said. Eighty-four people shared one shower and 72 shared one toilet. “The sewage system is so overwhelmed that raw sewage has been known to reach the mattresses where children sleep, and flows untreated into open drains and sewers,” IRC said. Moria, in a disused military base, now holds nearly three times as many people as it was designed to, according to government figures, forcing hundreds to spill over in tents in an olive grove.

Close to 900 people were moved between Sept. 10-20 and a another 1,000 will be transferred this week, Migration Minister Dimitris Vitsas said on Monday. Most are taken to facilities in northern Greece.

Oh, to once have met one, just the once.

• Ending Decades Of Doubt, ‘Biggest Bird’ Dispute Put To Nest (AFP)

[..] scientists said Wednesday they have finally solved the riddle of the world’s largest bird. For 60 million years the colossal, flightless elephant bird — Aepyornis maximus — stalked the savannah and rainforests of Madagascar until it was hunted to extinction around 1,000 years ago. In the 19th century, a new breed of buccaneering European zoologist obsessed over the creature, pillaging skeletons and fossilised eggs to prove they had discovered the biggest bird on Earth. But a study released Wednesday by British scientists suggests that one species of elephant bird was even larger than previously thought, with a specimen weighing an estimated 860 kilogrammes (1,895 pounds) — about the same as a fully grown giraffe.

“They would have towered over people,” James Hansford, lead author at the Zoological Society of London, told AFP. “They definitely couldn’t fly as they couldn’t have supported anywhere near their weight.” In the study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Hanson examined elephant bird bones found around the world, feeding their dimensions into a machine-learned algorithm to create a spread of expected animal sizes. Until now, the largest-ever elephant bird was described in 1894 by the British scientist C.W. Andrews as Aepyornis titan — a larger species of Aepyornis maximus. But a French rival of Andrews dismissed the discovery of titan as just an outsized maximus specimen, and for decades the debate remained deadlocked.

Hanson said his research proved titan was indeed a different species. But he also found that its bones were so distinct from other elephant bird specimens that titan was in fact an entirely separate genus. Named Vorombe titan – Malagasy for “big bird” – the creature would have stood at least three metres (10 feet) tall, and had an average weight of 650 kilogrammes, making it the largest bird genus yet uncovered. “At the extreme extent we found one bone that really pushed the limits of what we now understand about bird size,” said Hanson, referring to the 860-kilogramme specimen. “And there were some that led up to that too, so it’s not an outlier — there was a range of masses that are extraordinarily large.”

Debt Rattle September 18 2018

Sep 182018

September 18, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:30 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, Brexit, debt, declassified, elephant, Lagarde, Lesbos, monsters, trade war, Trump, Wikileaks 7 Responses »

M. C. Escher Development II 1939

• Trump Orders More Russia-Related Probe Documents To Be Declassified (R.)

• David Stockman Exposes The “$20 Trillion Elephant In The Room” (ZH)

• An Economic Recovery Based Around High Debt Is Really No Recovery (G.)

• Four Lessons (Not) Learned From The Financial Crisis (F.)

• Trump Is ‘A Symptom And Not The Cause’ Of The Trade War With China (CNBC)

• UK Will Shift Brexit Stance In Its ‘Darkest Hour’ Claim EU Officials (G.)

• Christine Lagarde Warns Of ‘Dire Consequences’ Of Disorderly Brexit (G.)

• Monsters All the Way Down (Kunstler)

• Vulnerable Migrant Groups Must be Removed from Greek Island – MSF (GR)

• WikiLeaks Slams AP “Assange Letter” As Fake, Denies He Sought Russian Visa (ZH)

As I said would happen a few weeks ago. Inevitable. But what a curious choice of headline for Reuters. The docs are related to the probe, not to Russia.

• Trump Orders More Russia-Related Probe Documents To Be Declassified (R.)

U.S. President Donald Trump has directed the Justice Department to immediately declassify more information related to the investigation into possible election meddling by Russia, the White House said on Monday. Trump’s demands mark his latest effort to turn up the heat on the Justice Department, whom he and his Republican allies have accused of running a tainted probe into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Among the documents Trump ordered the Justice Department and the director of national intelligence to make public are 20 additional pages of FBI surveillance warrant applications related to his former campaign adviser Carter Page.

Trump also ordered the release of FBI interview reports with Justice Department official Bruce Ohr related to the Russia probe, and FBI interview reports related to the Page surveillance warrant applications, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said in a statement. Finally, Trump directed the Justice Department to release, without redactions, text messages relating to the Russia probe from former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and other officials, including FBI agent Peter Strzok.

Trump fired Comey in May 2017, originally citing the Russia probe, and then saying that the firing was not “because of the phony Russia investigation.” McCabe was fired in March by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Strzok was also recently fired, and has been criticized for sending texts disparaging Trump as a presidential candidate.

Look at that graph. And keep looking.

• David Stockman Exposes The “$20 Trillion Elephant In The Room” (ZH)

In a recent interview with Sprott Media in Vancouver, Stockman reiterated that he remains a skeptic, particularly in an era where central banks (thanks to their $20-trillion-plus aggregate balance sheet) have destroyed price discovery and contributed to the blowing of a debt bubble that – when it finally pops – will make the aftermath of the financial crisis appear tame by comparison. Stockman begins his interview by clarifying that he would be optimistic about the long-term prospects for growth and markets if it wasn’t for this $20 trillion ‘elephant in the room’.

“I am an optimist, I truly am – if it weren’t for the fact that central banks are totally out of control. So my talk centered on the Great $20 trillion elephant in the room, which is the balance sheets of all the central banks in the world, in excess of what it probably should be in a rational stable historically prudent world”. As central banks have bought up assets, they’ve repressed interest rates, rigged equity prices and provided the fuel for the explosion of debt that has occurred over the past 20 years, Stockman said.And when the music finally stops – as they say – it will be the central banks that bear the brunt of the blame.

“And it’s that $20 trillion, built up over the last two decades, that has basically distorted everything – falsified prices, repressed interest rates, caused an explosion of debt. Twenty years ago there was $40 trillion of debt in the world today there is $250 trillion worth of debt in the world. The leverage of the world has gone from 1.3 times which is stable…to 3.3 times, which basically means the world has created a huge temporary prosperity by burying itself in debt.

Same difference.

• An Economic Recovery Based Around High Debt Is Really No Recovery (G.)

Rickard Nyman and Paul Ormerod have compared economic forecasting by humans and machines in both the US and the UK, and come up with some stark conclusions. At the start of 2008 the survey of professional forecasters in the US failed to predict that within a year their country would be in a deep recession. Had US policymakers relied on machine-learning algorithms they would have been much better prepared for the trouble ahead. Even more impressive results using machine learning were obtained for the UK. There’s more, however. Nyman and Ormerod sift through all the economic and financial variables that might have been responsible for causing the downturn and come up with a conclusion that explodes the myth that overspending governments were to blame.

“The evidence suggests quite clearly that public sector debt played no causal role in generating the Great Recession” they say. “In contrast, the ratio of private sector debt to GDP does appear to have played a significant role, especially in the UK.” In truth, the idea that state profligacy caused the Great Recession has never been credible. What really happened was that the expansion of the global marketplace led to cheap goods flooding the west. Inflationary pressure abated and that persuaded central banks to cut interest rates. Financial deregulation meant the only remaining constraint on excessive borrowing – high interest rates – was removed – and so credit was cheap and readily available. The private sector loaded up on debt, which was fine so long as the assets on the other side of the balance sheet were going up in value. When the markets turned, things went pear-shaped very quickly.

Excellent example.

• Four Lessons (Not) Learned From The Financial Crisis (F.)

Let’s say you know three people: Alexandra, Meg and Melanie. Alex owes Meg $5, and Meg owes Melanie $5. Further say that they have run into financial trouble. You, the government, believe that if this is not addressed then it could have terrible consequences for the rest of the macroeconomy. So you decide to come to the rescue by paying the $5 . . . but to whom? You have three choices, each of which costs exactly $5: i. Give the money to Alexandra, who passes it to Meg, who passes it on to Melanie. All debts are retired and the economy returns to financial health. ii. Give the money to Meg, who passes it on to Melanie. They both return to economic health, while Alexandra remains saddled with debt. iii. Give the money to Melanie, who then becomes viable once again. Alexandra and Meg remain weighed down.

Guess which one we did? The one that bailed out Wall Street while leaving Main Street indebted. This has two huge consequences. One, higher levels of debt reduce spending and therefore represent a drag on the economy. Second, they increase “financial fragility,” or the likelihood of system-wide insolvency. If the second part sounds like the financial crisis, it should. Fortunately, however, we have avoided such a consequence. Reuters suggests that the structure of debt has changed in a positive way and we should be especially thankful for the low unemployment rate which has meant that people have not had difficulty making payments.

But data from the Bank for International Settlements (displayed below) show two things: 1) the ratio appears to be making an upward turn and 2) it remains much closer to the dangerous levels of the 2000s than those of the New Economy of the 1990s. It was precisely that 2000s level that raised red flags to analysts like Steve Keen, who went on to be recognized as the economist who most accurately forecast the financial crisis. Incidentally, he’s worried again.

It should have been resolved years ago.

• Trump Is ‘A Symptom And Not The Cause’ Of The Trade War With China (CNBC)

George Yeo, Singapore’s former foreign minister, said at the conference that the “big story” here was the rise of China. The trade war is but one manifestation in the tensions between the world’s two largest economies which could go on for years, he added. There’s a growing anxiety in the U.S. about China’s rise, said Yeo, who is currently chairman of logistics company Kerry Logistics Network. He pointed to how former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon said it was an “economic war” and not a trade war. “For Peter Navarro, it’s Death by China,” Yeo added, referring to Trump’s trade advisor and fierce China critic, who wrote a book of that title. “It’s not difficult for an economic war to become a political war to become a real war,” he said.

Both superpowers need to find some kind of “accommodation” in this multi-polar world, Rodrik stressed. China may say that it knows how to manage its economy, and the West needs to recognize Asia’s largest economy has its own model. “On the other hand, I think China will need to understand that it has been a free rider on the system created by the U.S., of openness, and it would have to provide a certain amount of … policy space for the Europeans and the Americans too,” he said, adding that this would be an example of “peaceful co-existence.” “China is playing the long game,” Rodrik said, and the question is how the world can accommodate such a new power. “I view Trump really as a temporary phenomenon, there are deeper issues,” he concluded.

Oil on fire.

• UK Will Shift Brexit Stance In Its ‘Darkest Hour’ Claim EU Officials (G.)

The British government will have to experience its “darkest hour” and stare into the abyss of a no-deal Brexit before it will cave in to Brussels demands, senior EU diplomats have predicted. Ahead of a summit of EU leaders in Salzburg, diplomats in Brussels privately warned that Theresa May still needed to make a significant shift on her red lines for a deal to be possible, with the Irish border issue remaining a major hurdle in the talks. The stark prediction came as a French government official said that the president, Emmanuel Macron, wanted to nail down the key terms of the future deal now, rather than allow any ambiguous drift on the major issues after 29 March 2019.

That was at odds with the UK environment secretary, Michael Gove, who had claimed over the weekend that any deal with the EU on the political declaration could be undone by MPs after Brexit, as he urged his Tory colleagues to support the Chequers proposals “for now”. Brussels wants credible assurances from May that any deal will not be unpicked by her successor. The prime minister was only to be given “a few minutes” to talk to leaders at a dinner on Wednesday night in Salzburg before the 27 talk among themselves the following day, in a sign of the low expectation that she will have anything significant to say until after the Conservative party conference.

Let’s hope someone pays attention.

• Christine Lagarde Warns Of ‘Dire Consequences’ Of Disorderly Brexit (G.)

The UK economy would rapidly start to contract in the event of a disruptive exit from the EU next spring, according to a stark International Monetary Fund report that highlights the recession risks of a no-deal Brexit. Christine Lagarde, the IMF’s managing director, added that there would be costs to the UK under any outcome that involves leaving the EU. Expressing the IMF’s growing concern at the possibility of an acrimonious divorce next March, Lagarde said: “If that happened there would be dire consequences. It would inevitably have consequences in terms of reduced growth, an increase in the [budget] deficit and a depreciation of the currency. “In relatively short order it would mean a reduction in the size of the economy.”

Lagarde said the IMF’s forecast of 1.5% growth next year was based on a smooth exit from the EU. Her remarks were seized upon by the chancellor, Philip Hammond, as evidence that the UK had to strike a deal that would safeguard jobs and prosperity. “As the IMF has said, no deal would be extremely costly for the UK as it would be for the EU,” Hammond said. “Despite contingency planning, it would put at risk the significant progress made over the past 10 years in repairing the economy.” No 10, however, pointedly refused to endorse Hammond’s gloomy predictions. When asked about what he had said, her spokesman referred to what Theresa May told the BBC in an interview broadcast earlier: “The PM said very clearly that she believes our best days are ahead of us and that we will have plans in place for us to succeed in all scenarios.”

All roads lead to Podesta.

• Monsters All the Way Down (Kunstler)

Robert Mueller’s fishing crew was out trawling for Manafort, a blubbery swamp mammal valued for its lubricating oil when, by happenstance, a strange breed of porpoise called a Podesta got caught up in the net. Turns out it was a traveling companion of the Manafort. Back in 2014, the pair swam all the way to a little country called Ukraine via the Black Sea where the Podesta used some Manafort SuperLube on then-president of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych. The objective was to grease the wheel of NATO and the EU for Ukraine to become a member. But the operation went awry when Yanukovych got a better offer from the Eurasian Customs Union, a Russian-backed trade-and-security org.

And the next thing you know, the US State Department and the CIA are all over the situation and, whaddaya know, the Maidan Square in Kiev fills up with screaming neo-Nazis and Mr. Yanukovych gets the bum’s rush — and despite the major screw-up, the Manafort and the Podesta swim off with a cool few million in fees and return to the comforts of the swamp where they finally part ways. Mr. Mueller is apparently concerned about just what happened with those fees. Possibly the loot ended up getting washed and rinsed through an international banking laundromat, and somehow went unreported to the federal tax authorities.

Of course, the charge raises some interesting questions, such as: were Manafort and Podesta over in Ukraine as opportunistic freelancers, or were they part of phase one of a US government effort to get Ukraine to sign up for Team West against its old Uncle Russia, the manager of Team East? Kind of seems like that was exactly what they were doing, so it will be interesting to see whether Mr. Mueller may have stepped into a big pile of dog shit on his way to the Manafort plea session in federal court.

Please stop it.

• Vulnerable Migrant Groups Must be Removed from Greek Island – MSF (GR)

Greek authorities must remove children and other vulnerable groups from the Moria refugee camp on Lesvos as their physical and mental health is in danger, the Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) aid agency said on Monday. A total 615 migrants arrived on Lesvos island in the past three days, local authorities say, adding to the already overcrowded Moria migrant registration center and making living conditions hazardous to public health. The MSF suggests that at least the vulnerable groups (children, elderly, ill) must me moved to the mainland. Overall, there are 11,000 asylum seekers on Lesvos at the moment, with 9,000 of them at the Moria camp.

The policy of over-concentrating migrants and refugees in the Greek islands has led to more than 9,000 people — one third of them children — to be packed in the Moria camp, which has a maximum capacity of 3,000 people, MSF says. “Every week, Medecins Sans Frontieres teams see incidents of adolescents who have attempted suicide or make self-inflicted wounds. They also offer help in serious incidents of violence and self-harm. The lack of access to emergency medical care shows the significant gaps in the protection of children and other vulnerable groups,” the aid agency statement says.

Picked the story up yesterday on Twitter. Tyler doesn’t do the greatest write-up, but I can’t really repost the AP thing either. WikiLeaks was very clear in its reaction:

“”Mr. Assange did not apply for such a visa at any time or author the document. The source is document fabricator & paid FBI informant Sigurdur Thordarson who was sentenced to prison for fabricating docs impersonating Assange, multiple frauds & pedophilllia.”

Pointing to this 3-year old Iceland news article: https://grapevine.is/news/2015/09/25/siggi-the-hacker-gets-3-years-in-prison/.

“Thordarson distributed these docs to Scandinavian media outlets years ago who found them to be untrustworthy. Thorsdarson, a proven serial document fabricator & media hoaxer has been released, so the docs are being recycled yet again.”

Looks like AP was had. Why they run with it anyway is unclear. Due diligence, anyone? Yeah, they claim to have talked to FIVE different Wikileaks people, all anonymous of course. AP claims to have 1000s of docs, and this is the best they can get out of all that?

• WikiLeaks Slams AP “Assange Letter” As Fake, Denies He Sought Russian Visa (ZH)

For years international media outlets worked collaboratively with WikiLeaks to publish leaked files on subjects ranging from the Iraq and Afghan wars to Syria to State Department diplomatic cables, but now it’s WikiLeaks itself that media outlets are attempting to expose. An exclusive Associated Press story claims that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sought to obtain a Russian visa as his legal troubles and pressures from Western politicians grew. This comes after US officials have long sought to smear Assange as a Russian asset and the WikiLeaks organization as a whole as working with Russian intelligence.

The AP has published a letter it says is from a WikiLeaks laptop and penned by Julian Assange only days after the group made world headlines by publishing hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables in 2010, however WikiLeaks immediately disputed the authenticity of the letter. The AP story begins as follows: “Julian Assange had just pulled off one of the biggest scoops in journalistic history, splaying the innards of American diplomacy across the web. But technology firms were cutting ties to his WikiLeaks website, cable news pundits were calling for his head and a Swedish sex crime case was threatening to put him behind bars. Caught in a vise, the silver-haired Australian wrote to the Russian Consulate in London. “I, Julian Assange, hereby grant full authority to my friend, Israel Shamir, to both drop off and collect my passport, in order to get a visa,” said the letter, which was obtained exclusively by The Associated Press.

Amazon is scary.

How Amazon got to be so powerful, and what it means for our economy: pic.twitter.com/hCGsdUa5v2

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) September 17, 2018

Debt Rattle August 28 2018

Aug 282018

August 28, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:38 am Finance Tagged with: BBC, Brexit, DOJ, FBI, FISA, Iran, Lanny Davis, Lesbos, May, NAFTA, Roger Waters, Skripal, suicide, Trump 17 Responses »

Vincent van Gogh Cypresses in starry night (reed pen) 1889

• Meadows: FBI/DOJ Leaked To Press, Used Articles To Obtain FISA Warrants (ZH)

• Lanny Davis Admits Being Source For CNN Trump Tower “Bombshell” (ZH)

• Trump Announces US-Mexico Trade Deal, Setting Stage For Nafta Overhaul (G.)

• Iran Says It Has Full Control Of Gulf And US Navy Does Not Belong There (R.)

• Theresa May Says A No-Deal Brexit ‘Wouldn’t Be The End Of The World’ (G.)

• Out In Left Field (Kunstler)

• Skripals – When the BBC Hide the Truth (Craig Murray)

• ‘Criminal’ Roger Waters Blacklisted By Ukraine Over Russian Interviews (RT)

• Greece Needs €4.7 Billion In Additional Tax Revenues To Reach Targets (K.)

• Children Attempting Suicide At Greek Refugee Camp (BBC)

• The Impending End Of Most Life On Earth (G.)

2nd special counsel, where are you?

• Meadows: FBI/DOJ Leaked To Press, Used Articles To Obtain FISA Warrants (ZH)

Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-NC) dropped a late-night bombshell on Monday suggesting there’s evidence that the FBI and DOJ rigged their own FISA spy warrants by leaking information to the press, then using the resultant articles to obtain court authorization to surveil targets. “We’ve learned NEW information suggesting our suspicions are true: FBI/DOJ have previously leaked info to the press, and then used those same press stories as a separate source to justify FISA’s,” tweeted Meadows. Until now, we’ve known that the creator of the so-called Steele Dossier, former UK spy Christopher Steele, leaked information directly to Yahoo! News journalist Michael Isikoff – whose article became a supporting piece of evidence in the FBI’s FISA warrant application and subsequent renewals for Trump adviser Carter Page.

So while we’ve known that Steele seeded Isikoff with information from his dubious dossier, and that the FBI then used both Steele’s dossier and Isikoff’s Steele-inspired article to game the FISA system, Rep. Mark Meadows now says that the FBI/DOJ directly leaked information to the press, which they then used for the same type of FISA scheme. Strong evidence was discovered in January suggesting that former FBI employee Lisa Page leaked privileged information to Devlin Barrett, formerly of the Wall Street Journal and now with the Washington Post. Whether any of Barrett’s reporting was subsequently used to obtain a FISA warrant is unknown.

Meanwhile, Rep. Meadows’s Monday night tweet comes hours before twice-demoted DOJ employee Bruce Ohr is set to give closed-door testimony to the House Oversight Committee. Ohr was caught lying about his involvement with opposition research firm Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson – who employed Steele. Ohr’s CIA-linked wife, Nellie, was also employed by Fusion as part of the firm’s anti-Trump efforts, and had ongoing communications with the ex-UK spy, Christopher Steele as well.

Cohen’s lawyer is the best thing that happened to Trump in ages.

• Lanny Davis Admits Being Source For CNN Trump Tower “Bombshell” (ZH)

On July 26th, CNN unleashed a “bombshell” report that Michael Cohen was claiming that candidate Trump knew in advance about the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting. Dropping this line in the middle of their story: “Contacted by CNN, one of Cohen’s attorneys, Lanny Davis, declined to comment.”Then, last week, amid the deafening euphoria of the ‘anti-Trump’-ers, Davis told Anderson Cooper: “I think the reporting of the story got mixed up in the course of a criminal investigation. We were not the source of the story.” Davis increasingly backed away from the story in recent days, telling the Washington Post that he is not certain if the claim is accurate, and that he could not independently corroborate it. Destroying CNN’s “bombshell” story, crushing the hopes of millions of ‘not my president’-ers.

As Buzzfeed notes, after Davis publicly backtracked from the claims, the New York Post and the Washington Post outed him as their confirming source and published apologies from Davis But, of course, CNN was giving up such a great story so easily (whether it’s true or fake news), and followed up anxiously by none other than Brian Stelter who gushed over Twitter in the face of Davis’ refutation of their entire story that: ” Re: CNN’s July 27 story about Cohen claiming that Trump knew in advance about the Trump Tower meeting: “We stand by our story, and are confident in our reporting of it.”” All of which brings up to date, safe in the knowledge that despite Davis’ denial that CNN’s story ever occurred, CNN has “a source” that confirmed it and that’s good enough for them.

BUT… Now, after all that pre-amble, double-talk, and utterly bullshit fake news reporting, Lanny Davis – who we perhaps need to remind readers once again is an extremely well-paid f**king lawyer and communications expert – has told Buzzfeed that he was the anonymous source in a July CNN story. Tonight, Davis told BuzzFeed News that he regrets both his role as an anonymous source and his subsequent denial of his own involvement. Davis told BuzzFeed News that he did, in fact, speak anonymously to CNN for its story, which cited “sources with knowledge” — meaning more than one person. “I made a mistake,” Davis said. Regarding his comments about a month later to Cooper, he added, “I did not mean to be cute.”

Canada on hold.

• Trump Announces US-Mexico Trade Deal, Setting Stage For Nafta Overhaul (G.)

Donald Trump has said he will strike a new trade deal with Mexico while ripping up the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) and threatening a trade war with Canada. “I’ll be terminating the existing deal and going into this deal,” the US president told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. “We’ll be starting negotiating with Canada relatively soon. They want to negotiate very badly.” He added: “One way or the other, we have a deal with Canada. It’ll either be a tariff on cars or it will be a negotiated deal. Frankly, a tariff on cars is a much easier way to go but perhaps the other would be much better for Canada.”

Trump also said it might be possible to make a deal involving all three countries, like the 24-year-old Nafta pact, but that separate bilateral agreements are also a possibility. However, any trade deal would have to first be approved by Congress, and time is running out. Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto will soon leave office and there is no guarantee his successor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, will agree to the same terms. Nafta reduced most trade barriers between the US, Mexico and Canada. But Trump and other critics say it encouraged US manufacturers to move south of the border to exploit low-wage Mexican labour.

They have a point.

• Iran Says It Has Full Control Of Gulf And US Navy Does Not Belong There (R.)

Iran has full control of the Gulf, and the U.S. Navy does not belong there, the head of the navy of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, General Alireza Tangsiri, said on Monday, according to the Tasnim news agency. The remarks come at a time when Tehran has suggested that it could take military action in the Gulf to block oil exports of other regional countries in retaliation for U.S. sanctions intended to halt its oil sales. Washington maintains a fleet in the Gulf which protects oil shipping routes. Tangsiri said Iran had full control of both the Gulf itself and the Strait of Hormuz that leads into it. Closing off the strait would be the most direct way of blocking shipping.

“We can ensure the security of the Persian Gulf and there is no need for the presence of aliens like the U.S. and the countries whose home is not in here,” he said in the quote, which appeared in English translation on Tasnim. Tension between Iran and the United States has escalated since President Donald Trump pulled out of a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers in May and reimposed sanctions.

Just the end of her.

• Theresa May Says A No-Deal Brexit ‘Wouldn’t Be The End Of The World’ (G.)

Theresa May claimed that a no-deal Brexit “wouldn’t be the end of the world” as she sought to downplay a controversial warning made by Philip Hammond last week that it would cost £80bn in extra borrowing and inhibit long-term economic growth. The prime minister conceded that crashing out of the European Union without a deal “wouldn’t be a walk in the park” but went on to argue that the UK could make an economic success of the unprecedented situation if it proved impossible to negotiate a satisfactory divorce. Her comments were designed to distance herself from pessimistic Treasury forecasts highlighted by the chancellor at the end of last week, predictions that incensed the Tory right and led to renewed calls from hard Brexiters for Hammond’s dismissal.

Speaking to reporters as she began a three-day trip to Africa, May cited and endorsed remarks about the Brexit situation made last week by Roberto Azevêdo, the director general of the World Trade Organisation, to justify a gentle rebuke of the chancellor. The prime minister said: “Look at what the director general of the World Trade Organisation has said. He has said about the no-deal situation that it will not be a walk in the park, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. “What the government is doing is putting in place the preparation such that if we are in that situation, we can make a success of it, just as we can make a success of a good deal.”

Huber. Remember the name.

• Out In Left Field (Kunstler)

With Russian “meddling” stalled in the dead letter office, The New York Times has apparently re-branded itself Floozie Central in its quixotic campaign to unseat the Golden Golem of Greatness by all means necessary. The Stormy Daniels affair, and its slime-trail of payoffs, is the slender thread that the Resistance hopes to hang Donald Trump on. The great legal minds of cable TV have been very busy trying to suss out which part of the $130,000 non-disclosure payoff might apply as a campaign financing violation. If Rudy Giuliani still had his wits about him, of course, he would claim that the money was just Ms. Daniel’s going rate for an overnight frolic amongst her legendary twin peaks, that is, a sex worker’s simple transaction fee.

Where does it say in the constitution that a president may not consort with tramps and hussies? It was hilarious to discover that Mr. Trump’s erstwhile personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, picked DC Swamp attorney and Clinton insider, Lanny Davis, to represent him in negotiations with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. It must be like the old days in the locker room of the Burning Tree Golf Club for Lanny and Bob. They go back at least to the days when the Clintons fended off accusations of issuing pardons to special friends for a $450,000 payoff on Bubba’s last day in office, January 19, 2001. And there must have been a reunion around 2010 on the Uranium One matter, in which a tidy $145-million from Russian Oligarch Central landed in the Clinton Foundation coffers after Madam Secretary Hillary signed onto a go-ahead with the U-1 deal.

Meanwhile, way out in Left Field — Salt Lake City, actually —a forgotten lone ranger named John W. Huber is ostensibly toiling away on a roster of allegations so far ignored by the Mueller team, namely the politicization of the FBI and the Department of Justice, and the actions taken deviously by senior employees there against Mr. Trump during and after the 2016 election. Mr. Huber was tapped to carry out this assignment by Attorney General Jeff Sessions late in 2017.

BBC Newsnight correspondent Mark Urban met with Skripal multiple times in 2017.

• Skripals – When the BBC Hide the Truth (Craig Murray)

On 8 July 2018 a lady named Kirsty Eccles asked what, in its enormous ramifications, historians may one day see as the most important Freedom of Information request ever made. The rest of this post requires extremely close and careful reading, and some thought, for you to understand that claim. “Dear British Broadcasting Corporation, 1: Why did BBC Newsnight correspondent Mark Urban keep secret from the licence payers that he had been having meetings with Sergei Skripal only last summer. 2: When did the BBC know this? 3: Please provide me with copies of all correspondence between yourselves and Mark Urban on the subject of Sergei Skripal. Yours faithfully, Kirsty Eccles

The ramifications of this little request are enormous as they cut right to the heart of the ramping up of the new Cold War, of the BBC’s propaganda collusion with the security services to that end, and of the concoction of fraudulent evidence in the Steele “dirty dossier”. This also of course casts a strong light on more plausible motives for an attack on the Skripals. Which is why the BBC point blank refused to answer Kirsty’s request, stating that it was subject to the Freedom of Information exemption for “Journalism”.

“The information you have requested is excluded from the Act because it is held for the purposes of ‘journalism, art or literature.’ The BBC is therefore not obliged to provide this information to you. Part VI of Schedule 1 to FOIA provides that information held by the BBC and the other public service broadcasters is only covered by the Act if it is held for ‘purposes other than those of journalism, art or literature”. The BBC is not required to supply information held for the purposes of creating the BBC’s output or information that supports and is closely associated with these creative activities.”

Fun.

• ‘Criminal’ Roger Waters Blacklisted By Ukraine Over Russian Interviews (RT)

Pink Floyd founder Roger Waters has found himself blacklisted by being added to the Ukrainian database of national enemies, after statements to Russian media about Crimea and the conflict in Ukraine. Waters, 74, is wrapping up his US+Them European tour with concerts in St. Petersburg and Moscow this week and spoke with several Russian outlets about both music and his political activism. The rock musician has been an outspoken champion of the Palestinian cause and a critic of Western-backed rebels in Syria. On Monday, however, his name appeared in the “purgatory” database of Mirotvorets (Peacemaker), maintained by people connected with Ukraine’s security and intelligence services and listing alleged enemies of the state.

The site says “criminal” Waters is responsible of “anti-Ukrainian propaganda, attacks on the territorial integrity of Ukraine [and] participation in attempts to legalize the Russian annexation of Crimea.” As proof, the site lists links to two interviews Waters gave to Russian media outlets RIA and Izvestiya, and quotes specifically a statement about the city of Sevastopol being Russian and important to Russians. Waters called “laughable” the idea of blaming Russia for the conflict in Ukraine and said the blame rests with Victoria Nuland, the senior State Department official for Europe and Eurasia during the Obama administration. [..] Waters also expressed concern about the US leadership, which he said does not seem to recognize any agreements and does whatever it wants. Such a policy will eventually get everyone killed, the rock star told Izvestiya, in an interview published Monday.

Already grossly overtaxed.

• Greece Needs €4.7 Billion In Additional Tax Revenues To Reach Targets (K.)

The Greek government will have to collect additional tax revenues of 4.7 billion euros in the first post-bailout period of enhanced supervision (2018-2022) by its creditors, in order to achieve the agreed primary surpluses and record surpluses. These revenues are not expected to come only from economic growth but also from the imposition of new taxes, notably the trimming of the tax reduction from a current level of 1,900 euros to 1,250 euros – a change that will affect 6 million salaried employees and pensioners.

In 2018, direct taxes are projected to generate 17.4 billion euros, slightly less than the 17.7 billion of 2017. The reduction is entirely attributable to the fact that high tax rates result in an ever-increasing reduction of declared incomes. As for indirect taxes, they are expected to drop to 35.2 billion euros this year compared with 35.4 billion in 2017, while no significant change is expected for 2019, despite the projected economic growth. For 2020, tax revenues are expected to rise further when the government is seen reducing the tax-free threshold. It is indicative that revenues from direct taxes are seen rising to 18.40 billion euros that year, versus 17.43 billion in 2019.

“..her family spend all day queuing for food at the camp and all night ready to run..”

• Children Attempting Suicide At Greek Refugee Camp (BBC)

At Moria camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, there is deadly violence, overcrowding, appalling sanitary conditions and now a charity says children as young as 10 are attempting suicide. The Victoria Derbyshire programme has been given rare access inside. “We are always ready to escape, 24 hours a day we have our children ready,” says Sara Khan, originally from Afghanistan. “The violence means our little ones don’t get to sleep.” Sara explains that her family spend all day queuing for food at the camp and all night ready to run – in fear of the fights that break out constantly. Conditions are so appalling that charities have actually left in protest.

The place smells of raw sewage, and there are around 70 people per toilet, according to medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF). Some people live in mobile cabins, but rammed in-between them all are tents and tarpaulin sheets – homes for those who cannot obtain any official living space. The camp is also now sprawling into surrounding countryside. One tent houses 17 people – four families under one canvas. MSF says there are currently more than 8,000 people crammed into Moria camp, which was supposed to house 3,000. [..] The camp opened in 2015 and was initially designed as a transit post for people to stay for a matter of days – but some have been here for years.

It is controlled by the Greek government, and the overcrowding is because Greece is enforcing the EU’s “containment” policy, keeping people on the island rather than transferring them to the Greek mainland. It is part of the EU-Turkey deal which aims to return thousands of refugees to Turkey, and it has been in force since March 2016. From then to July 2018, according to EU figures, 71,645 new refugees arrived in Greece by sea and only 2,224 have been returned to Turkey. George Matthaiou, a Greek government press representative on Moria, concedes conditions are terrible, but blames the EU rather than Greece. “We don’t have the money. You know the situation of Greece, economically,” he says. “I want to help but I can do nothing, because the European Union closed the borders.”

“I’m not going to write anymore because there’s nothing more that can be said..”

• The Impending End Of Most Life On Earth (G.)

We’re doomed,” says Mayer Hillman with such a beaming smile that it takes a moment for the words to sink in. “The outcome is death, and it’s the end of most life on the planet because we’re so dependent on the burning of fossil fuels. There are no means of reversing the process which is melting the polar ice caps. And very few appear to be prepared to say so.” Hillman, an 86-year-old social scientist and senior fellow emeritus of the Policy Studies Institute, does say so. His bleak forecast of the consequence of runaway climate change, he says without fanfare, is his “last will and testament”. His last intervention in public life. “I’m not going to write anymore because there’s nothing more that can be said,” he says when I first hear him speak to a stunned audience at the University of East Anglia late last year.

From Malthus to the Millennium Bug, apocalyptic thinking has a poor track record. But when it issues from Hillman, it may be worth paying attention. Over nearly 60 years, his research has used factual data to challenge policymakers’ conventional wisdom. In 1972, he criticised out-of-town shopping centres more than 20 years before the government changed planning rules to stop their spread. In 1980, he recommended halting the closure of branch line railways – only now are some closed lines reopening. In 1984, he proposed energy ratings for houses – finally adopted as government policy in 2007. And, more than 40 years ago, he presciently challenged society’s pursuit of economic growth.

[..] In 1971, 80% of British seven- and eight-year-old children went to school on their own; today it’s virtually unthinkable that a seven-year-old would walk to school without an adult. As Hillman has pointed out, we’ve removed children from danger rather than removing danger from children – and filled roads with polluting cars on school runs. He calculated that escorting children took 900m adult hours in 1990, costing the economy £20bn each year. It will be even more expensive today.

Debt Rattle December 21 2017

Dec 212017

December 21, 2017 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:32 am Finance Tagged with: bitcoin, Brexit, Catalonia, EU, Greece, IMF, Lesbos, May, NATO, Poland, tax bill, Trump, Uber 3 Responses »

Claude Monet Houses of Parliament (Sun Breaking through the Fog) 1904

• Trump Plans Tax Bill Signing on January 3 Due to Technical Issue (BBG)

• Why Wall Street Is Furious At The Trump Tax Plan (ZH)

• Peak Valuations and Market Corrections (Rosso)

• Silicon Valley Homes Going For Nearly $2 Million Over Asking Price (ZH)

• Bitcoin Is Biggest Bubble Of Them All, And It’s The Fed’s Fault – Ron Paul (CNBC)

• Uber Loses EU Court Fight as Judges Take Aim at Gig Economy (BBG)

• Gloomy Brexit Forecasts For UK Are Coming True, Says IMF (G.)

• Bank of England To Allow EU Banks To Operate Unchanged After Brexit (G.)

• UK PM May Heads to Poland to Seek Brexit Ally After Firing Her Deputy (BBG)

• Poland Protests EU ‘Nuclear Option’ Over Judicial Independence (G.)

• Catalonia Poised For Hung Parliament In Bitterly Contested Election (G.)

• How The US Swindled Russia in The Early 1990s (Zuesse)

• Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Now Has A $1 Billion Price Tag (G.)

• Russians, Chinese Seek Out Greek Properties for Bargains, Visas (BBG)

• Lesvos Mayor Files Suit Over Conditions At Moria Migrant Camp (K.)

Don’t have the impression it’s a great piece of work. But the entire MSM has only one goal: bash anything Trump. A neutral assessment might be appropriate, but where does one get one?

• Trump Plans Tax Bill Signing on January 3 Due to Technical Issue (BBG)

President Donald Trump plans to sign the tax bill on Jan. 3 to ensure automatic spending cuts to Medicare and other programs don’t take effect, according to a House Republican aide familiar with the plans. The White House informed House GOP members of the timetable, following the likely decision by House Republicans to leave the so-called PAYGO provision out of a year-end spending deal to avoid a government shut down before Friday, the person said who asked not to be named because the plan hasn’t been publicly announced. Trump and GOP leaders have repeatedly said the president would sign the legislation before Christmas. White House National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn signaled Wednesday morning that the signing date could be pushed back because of the potential for triggering the cuts.

Under the PAYGO law, automatic cuts to Medicare and other spending categories would be triggered by the tax bill in January because the bill is scored as increasing the deficit by $1.5 trillion over 10 years. Waiting until January means that those cuts would be delayed until 2019, according to budget expert Ed Lorenzen of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. White House officials insisted that no firm timetable had been set. Trump could sign the tax legislation earlier if Congress passed a waiver to the PAYGO rules, but that is unlikely to happen before lawmakers leave Washington for a holiday recess. “I think we’re just working out some of the logistics on that,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday on Fox News. “He’ll sign it as quickly as he can.”

But wait, wasn’t Trump making Wall Street that much richer?

• Why Wall Street Is Furious At The Trump Tax Plan (ZH)

Back in October 2016, the “millionaire, billionaire, private jet owners” of America’s elitist, liberal mega-cities (A.K.A. New York and San Francisco) celebrated the tax hikes that a Hillary Clinton presidency would have undoubtedly jammed down their throats proclaiming them to be a ‘patriotic duty’. Unfortunately, now that Trump has given them exactly what they apparently wanted…an amazing opportunity to ‘spread their wealth around”…they’re suddenly feeling a lot less patriotic. Of course, as we’ve noted numerous times, while most people across the country and across the income spectrum will benefit from the Republican tax reform package, the folks who stand to lose are those living in high-tax states with expensive real estate as their SALT, mortgage interest and property tax deductions will suddenly be capped. And, as Bloomberg points out today, that has a lot of Wall Street Traders in New York drowning their sorrows in expensive vodka and considering a move to Florida.

“One trader, sipping a Bloody Mary on a morning flight to somewhere more tropical, said he’s going to stop registering as a Republican. En route, he sent more than a dozen text messages ripping the tax bill. A pair of hedge fund managers said the tax bill is too tilted toward corporations, rather than individuals who should get more relief. “My clients are hard-working young professionals on Wall Street. I don’t have a lot of good news for them,” said Douglas Boneparth, a financial adviser in lower Manhattan who counsels people throughout the industry. Most are coming to terms with it. “I don’t think anyone is going to be surprised by the economic reality.” “This provides a clear incentive for financial advisers to go independent,” said Louis Diamond of Diamond Consultants. “We’re hearing from a lot of clients on this; it’s just another reason why it makes a ton of sense, economically, to become self-employed.”

All bubbles have limited lifespans.

• Peak Valuations and Market Corrections (Rosso)

[..] global diversification has enhanced portfolio returns this year. Spreading wealth among different markets and sectors has allowed investors to capture strong equity performance. You see, on the trend higher, investors may seek to employ a series of risk horses to fully participate in the race. Fixed income or bonds, and cash equivalents do a good job of helping investors manage risk through bear markets as they are negatively correlated to stocks. On the way down, stocks across markets connect and head south in sync; some fall faster than others. Unfortunately, when stock diversification is needed the most, it fails. With current valuations and stock prices extended well beyond their long-term trends, investors must be aware of reversions that have the probability of wiping out a decade or longer in gains.

Stock diversification will not protect you if or when this occurs (let me know if you’ve heard this from your broker’s research hub as of late; I bet you haven’t). Strategists for big-box financial retailers are consistently wishy-washy when it comes to the current unsustainable altitude of stock prices. It’s not in their best interest to take a stand. It would be a death knell for their careers. Recently, one of the paunchiest of the brethren shared on CNBC: Stocks are “slightly overvalued;” followed by – “that doesn’t mean you should do anything here.” Perfect. Well done. That’s how seven-figure compensation packages are earned, folks. When it comes to retail investors, time is as or more precious a commodity as money; we at RIA consistently write and research the math of investment losses to make sure you remain emotionally grounded and don’t allow greed to blind your judgment. We are not afraid to outline the risks inherent in extended markets.

Personally, I’m not willing to give up a decade or two to break even. Are you? Don’t worry about your friendly neighborhood talking heads. They’ll continue to collect big paychecks and hefty year-end bonuses as long as they play senior managements’ game. A broker’s research department superstar spokesperson is paid handsomely to point out when markets reach new highs but rarely expound on how long it takes to achieve or in most cases, reclaim them. A big-box financial retail investment strategist’s primary role is to forge and fortify a firm’s presence or brand and help front-line brokers keep investors fully invested through rough market cycles, nothing more.

It’s different this time, though….

• Silicon Valley Homes Going For Nearly $2 Million Over Asking Price (ZH)

If you’re still holding out hope that the following chart is anything but another massive housing bubble in the making then you should probably ignore the disturbing evidence to the contrary that we’re about to present below… Back in 2005/2006, one of the key signs that housing markets across the country were overheating was the number of houses that, thanks to soaring demand from speculators, were suddenly selling at prices well in excess of their asking price. That said, as a local CBS affiliate in San Francisco points out, the premiums of 2005/2006 pale in comparison to homes in Silicon Valley today that are selling for as much as $1-$2 million over their original asking prices.

But if you thought they area housing market couldn’t get any more outrageous, consider a home on Colorado Avenue in Palo Alto. It listed for $2.9 million, but sold for $3.9 million, $1 million over asking price. Another home on Anacapa Drive in the Los Altos hills listed for $2.8 million, but sold for $4.5 million. That is $1.67 million over asking. Finally, there is this home on University Avenue in Los Altos that listed at $7.9 million, but sold for $1.8 million over asking. In 2017, 10 homes in the mid-Peninsula area sold for $1 million over asking. Six of those listings belonged to Deleon Realty.

Where does the money come from that’s used to buy bitcoin?

• Bitcoin Is Biggest Bubble Of Them All, And It’s The Fed’s Fault – Ron Paul (CNBC)

He’s taken on President Donald Trump and the Federal Reserve. Now, libertarian former congressman Ron Paul is taking on bitcoin. According to Paul, cryptocurrencies have become an asset that rivals the bubble he sees in stocks. “I think it’s going to continue to do exactly what it’s doing. It’s going higher and it’s going lower,” he said Tuesday on CNBC’s “Futures Now.” “We can look at what’s happening now, which to me is a climactic end of QEs.” Paul, who has done commercials touting currency competition for a company that benefits from bitcoin’s rise, views the crypto craze as a side effect of central banks doing several rounds of quantitative easing to cope with the last financial crisis. “I look at the problems we face. I think they’re gigantic and people are desperate and looking everywhere. Why would they buy bonds that pay negative interest rates? Why would they buy stocks, and say well this time it’s different? ” asked Paul.

“Cryptocurrency is a reflection of the disaster of the monetary dollar system.” Paul, who’s also a medical doctor and former Republican presidential candidate, argues that cryptocurrencies are in an “exponential bubble” where trying to calculate its real value is extremely difficult. Bitcoin, the largest of the cryptocurrencies, has been trading above $17,000. He hasn’t been able to pinpoint when a plunge could happen in cryptocurrencies or the stock market. But Paul says the danger is real. “They’re both big bubbles in the sense that it occurred because there was excessive credit. But if you look at the curves, I think that the cryptocurrency curve looks more threatening,” Paul said.

Looks like ‘we are tech’ was always a losing argument.

• Uber Loses EU Court Fight as Judges Take Aim at Gig Economy (BBG)

Uber Technologies Inc. will be regulated in European Union countries as a transport company after the bloc’s top court rejected its claim to be a digital service provider, a decision that could increase legal risks for other gig-economy companies including Airbnb. While the EU Court of Justice’s ruling covered UberPop – which used drivers without taxi licenses and has already been shuttered in many countries due to the legal issues – it’s a real blow as the first definitive finding that Uber must be regulated by transport authorities. The decision clarifies for the first time that connecting people via an app to non-professional drivers forms an integral part of a transport service. It rejects Uber’s view that such services are purely digital and could fuel further scrutiny of other gig-economy firms.

Paris regulators are already clamping down on Airbnb, treating the home-rental service more like a hotel, and British food-delivery start-up Deliveroo is in the spotlight for its treatment of workers. In the EU judges’ view, “the most important part of Uber’s business is the supply of transport – connecting passengers to drivers by their smartphones is secondary,” said Rachel Farr at law firm Taylor Wessing. “Without transport services, the business wouldn’t exist.” Uber has argued that it’s a technology platform connecting passengers with independent drivers, not a transportation company subject to the same rules as taxi services. The case has been closely watched by the technology industry because of its precedent for regulating the gig economy, where freelancers make money by plying everything from spare rooms to fast-food deliveries via apps on smartphones and PCs.

“After today’s judgment innovators will increasingly be subject to divergent national and sectoral rules,” said Jakob Kucharczyk, of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which speaks for companies like Uber, Amazon.com, Google and Facebook. “This is a blow to the EU’s ambition of building an integrated digital single market.” While the ruling is valid EU-wide, it remains limited to Uber’s services and won’t directly affect other disputes Uber is facing over how its drivers are treated. One such case is pending at the U.K. court of appeal.

You don’t really need to be a genius to see this.

• Gloomy Brexit Forecasts For UK Are Coming True, Says IMF (G.)

The IMF has strongly defended its gloomy forecasts for the UK after Brexit, saying pre-referendum warnings of slower growth were coming true. Christine Lagarde, the fund’s managing director, said the vote to leave the EU in June 2016 was already having an impact and Britain’s weaker growth this year was in contrast to accelerating activity in the rest of the world. Speaking at the Treasury as the IMF announced the results of its annual health check of the UK economy, Lagarde hit back at those who lambasted the fund when predictions of an immediate post-referendum recession failed to come to pass. “We feared that if Britain decided to leave, it would most likely entail a depreciation of sterling, higher inflation leading to a squeeze on disposable income and a reduction in investment,” she said.

“People said ‘Oh those experts’, but we are seeing the narrative we identified as a potential risk being rolled out as we speak. This is not the experts speaking, it’s what the economy is demonstrating.” The IMF trimmed its forecast for UK growth this year from 1.7% in October to 1.6%, and said it expected the economy to grow by 1.5% in 2018. It was one of several economic forecasters to say the UK would suffer a downturn should voters back leaving the EU. Last year, the fund had said growth for 2017 would be 1.1%, before raising the forecast to 2%. Since the turn of the year, Lagarde said activity had slowed notably and the UK’s recent performance was a disappointment in the light of the best showing by the global economy since the financial crash.

A deliberate mess?

• Bank of England To Allow EU Banks To Operate Unchanged After Brexit (G.)

The Bank of England plans to allow European banks to maintain their UK operations under current rules following Brexit, in a direct challenge to European Union regulators to adopt the same policy towards UK-based banks. The Bank said it wanted to press ahead with assessing the risks posed by the 177 banks and insurance companies based in the European Economic Area that have branches in London, following the agreement between Theresa May and EU officials to move to the second stage of Brexit talks. In a move that pre-empts trade talks between the UK and EU, the Bank said it would assess each foreign bank’s branch operation to decide whether it needed to be converted into a subsidiary, which effectively separates it from its overseas parent with its own capital.

Banks domiciled in the EEA will be keen to maintain UK branches, which are cheaper to run and come under more direct head office control. They also maintain their chief regulator in their home country. Most branches are expected to retain their current status despite needing to satisfy stringent rules. The BoE said it would carry out a broad assessment of the risks posed by branches, though it would rely heavily on cooperation with regulators across the EU. Branches that are considered to pose a systemic risk to London’s financial centre could be forced to convert to being subsidiaries. The Treasury is expected to give the Bank additional powers to supervise foreign bank branches in the UK, a job largely done by regulators based inside the EU.

Some pro-Brexit campaigners are expected to view the move as throwing away a major bargaining chip in trade talks. The UK might have threatened to block EU access to facilities in the City as the price of concessions in other areas, such as manufacturing and fishing rights. However, Mark Carney, the Bank’s governor, told MPs on the Treasury select committee on Wednesday that the decision to allow EU banks to continue operating under existing UK rules had been taken on the assumption that a “high degree of supervisory cooperation with the EU” would continue after Brexit.

Desperate?!

• UK PM May Heads to Poland to Seek Brexit Ally After Firing Her Deputy (BBG)

Fresh from sacking her trusted deputy, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May heads to Poland on Thursday to attempt to get close – but not too close – to its new government. May was forced to tell First Secretary of State Damian Green to resign Wednesday afternoon after an inquiry into his behavior found he’d made misleading statements over pornography found on his parliamentary computer by police nearly a decade ago. Green is the third Cabinet minister to quit in two months. A couple of recent Brexit-related successes mean the prime minister is better equipped to handle Green’s departure than she might have been a month ago: The European Union has agreed to move negotiations on to the next phase, and late Wednesday, May’s flagship Brexit Bill completed the detailed scrutiny stage of its journey through the House of Commons.

Still, his departure leaves her without her closest ally in Cabinet. The flight to Warsaw will give May a chance to consider how she manages without him. She’ll be accompanied by her most senior ministers for a summit where she’ll promise cooperation on defense and security as part of a charm offensive to win friends in Europe before negotiations on post-Brexit trade start in March. But Poland’s rift with the EU over judicial reforms – and its government’s fears of a shortfall in EU funding after Britain leaves the bloc – threaten to overshadow the meeting with new Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki. “The prime minister will raise her concerns with the prime minister when they meet,” May’s spokesman James Slack told reporters in London.

“We place importance on respect for the rule of law and we expect all our partners to abide by international norms and standards.” Britain’s rush to forge links with Morawiecki’s populist administration reflects a desire both to win friends for the talks ahead and to reassure former eastern European countries that it will continue to support them against Russian expansionism after Brexit. British troops are already stationed in Poland, and May will announce increased cooperation on cyber security.

You are not sovereign. All your base are belong to us.

• Poland Protests EU ‘Nuclear Option’ Over Judicial Independence (G.)

The Polish government has accused the European commission of a politically motivated attack after the EU’s executive body triggered a process that could see the country stripped of voting rights in Brussels, over legal changes that the bloc claims threaten the independence of the judiciary. In a highly symbolic moment, Poland’s fellow 27 EU member states were advised by the commission on Wednesday that the legislative programme of Poland’s government was putting at risk fundamental values expected of a democratic state by allowing political interference in its courts. The row represents the greatest crisis in the EU since Britain’s decision to leave the EU last year, with the Polish government showing little inclination to back down.

Frans Timmermans, the vice-president of the commission, told reporters in Brussels that in two years 13 laws had been adopted that put at serious risk the independence of Poland’s judiciary and the separation of powers. “Judicial reforms in Poland mean that the country’s judiciary is now under the political control of the ruling majority. In the absence of judicial independence, serious questions are raised about the effective application of EU law,” Timmermans, a former Dutch diplomat, said. “We are doing this for Poland, for Polish citizens.” Poland’s new prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, responded on Twitter: “Poland is as devoted to the rule of law as the rest of the EU.” The Polish foreign ministry said in a statement: “Poland deplores the European commission’s launch of the procedure […] which is essentially political, not legal.”

‘Election’ today. Can’t even really call this an election. The goal seems to be to divide the independence vote among multiple parties.

• Catalonia Poised For Hung Parliament In Bitterly Contested Election (G.)

Catalans head to the polls on Thursday to vote in an extraordinary and bitterly contested election that will pit secessionists against unionists and determine the next phase of the long-running campaign for independence from Spain. The election was called by the Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, at the end of October when the central government took control of Catalonia and sacked the regional government after it staged an illegal independence referendum and made a unilateral declaration of independence. Polls suggest Catalonia is set for a hung parliament, with the pro-independence Catalan Republican Left party (ERC) vying for first place with the unionist, centre-right Citizens party.

With no clear winner in sight, Thursday’s result is likely to lead to coalition negotiations to form a government that will either maintain the drive for independence in some form or defend the constitutional status quo. Tensions remain high in the region following the referendum and the Spanish police’s heavy-handed efforts to stop it. Secessionists believe that Madrid’s imposition of direct rule and the jailing of senior independence leaders could increase support for their cause. Unionists, however, argue that Catalans are sick of the social unrest and economic uncertainty generated by the unilateral actions of the government of deposed regional president Carles Puigdemont.

The exceptional circumstances surrounding the election are compounded by the fact that Puigdemont has been campaigning from Belgium. He fled to Brussels hours before Spain’s attorney general asked for charges of rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds to be brought against his cabinet almost two months ago. Puigdemont’s former number two, Oriol Junqueras, has been fighting the election from prison, where he and two prominent independence leaders are being held as part of a judicial investigation into October’s events. “This is not a normal election,” Puigdemont told supporters via video link on Tuesday evening as the campaign drew to a close.

A long list of documents. NATO expansion.

• How The US Swindled Russia in The Early 1990s (Zuesse)

Due to a historic data-dump on December 10th, the biggest swindle that occurred in the 20th Century (or perhaps ever) is now proven as a historical fact; and this swindle was done by the US Government, against the Government and people of Russia, and it continues today and keeps getting worse under every US President. It was secretly started by US President George Herbert Walker Bush on the night of 24 February 1990; and, unless it becomes publicly recognized and repudiated so that it can stop, a nuclear war between the US and all of NATO on one side, versus Russia on the other, is inevitable unless Russia capitulates before then, which would be vastly less likely than such a world-ending nuclear war now is.

This swindle has finally been displayed beyond question, by this, the first-ever complete release of the evidence. It demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt (as you’ll verify yourself from the evidence here), that US President G.H.W. Bush (and his team) lied through their teeth to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev (and his team) to end the Cold War on Russia’s side, when the US team were secretly determined never to end it on the US-and-NATO side until Russia itself is conquered. And this swindle continues today, and keeps getting worse and worse for Russians.

Until now, apologists for the US-Government side have been able to get away with various lies about these lies, such as that there weren’t any, and that Gorbachev didn’t really think that the NATO issue was terribly important for Russia’s future national security anyway, and that the only limitation upon NATO’s future expansion that was discussed during the negotiations to end the Cold War concerned NATO not expanding itself eastward (i.e., closer to Russia) within Germany, not going beyond the then-existing dividing-line between West and East Germany — that no restriction against other east-bloc (Soviet-allied) nations ever being admitted into NATO was discussed, at all. The now-standard US excuse that the deal concerned only Germany and not all of Europe is now conclusively disproven by the biggest single data-dump ever released about those negotiations.

When everything is measured in monetary value, nothing will be left in the end.

• Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Now Has A $1 Billion Price Tag (G.)

Years ago, camping in Alaska’s Arctic national wildlife refuge, I watched a herd of caribou – 100,000 bulls, cows and their three-week-old calves – braid over the tundra, moving to a rhythm as old as the wind. “Not many places like this left today,” said my friend Jeff, sitting next to me above an ice-fringed river. And so Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski believes this refuge – 80 miles east of Prudhoe Bay – could generate $1bn over 10 years once it’s opened to oil leasing. She and her Republican colleagues slipped this drilling provision into the Senate Republican tax bill. Murkowski repeatedly says this development would cover just 2,000 acres, “about one ten-thousandth of ANWR”.

The acronym ANWR conveniently deletes the words “wildlife” and “refuge”, with no regard for the polar bears, Arctic fox, musk oxen and migratory ground-nesting birds that come there every summer, some species from as far away as Patagonia. Alaska’s lieutenant governor, Byron Mallott, has said that drilling in ANWR is necessary to deal with climate change. His caddywhompus logic: we need to drill for more oil to raise money to address a problem that’s caused by humanity’s addiction to oil. Why not just say the truth? We want the money. Murkowski adds: “We have waited nearly 40 years for the right technology to come along for a footprint small enough for the environment to be respected.” They have not. Alaskans have been trying to drill here for decades, using one crazy rationale after another.

At one hearing the state’s lone congressman, Don Young, put a blue pen mark on his nose to show how small the industry footprint would be. Clever man. The development would in fact be a spider web of roads, pipelines, well pads and landing strips smack in the middle of the biological heart of the refuge. It would look less like a refuge and more like Prudhoe Bay, where thousands of spills have been reported. Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington says the whole idea is “ludicrous”, noting that the Republican tax plan would add roughly $1.5tn to the national deficit in five years [with the richest 1% of Americans reaping half of the tax cuts]. “I am disturbed,” she says. She should be. Christopher Lewis, a retired BP manager of exploration, has said: “I do not believe that there are any adequate, commercially viable reservoirs in the Arctic refuge.” The reality is “there are other less sensitive and less costly places to explore”.

Brutal.

• Russians, Chinese Seek Out Greek Properties for Bargains, Visas (BBG)

George Kachmazov, a Russian realtor, is buying up property in Athens. The Moscow-based chief executive officer of real-estate platform Tranio.com has bought a building in the Greek capital and is in the process of acquiring five others with a view to selling apartments to international investors. For Kachmazov, the sales pitch is clear: buying property in Greece can give an investor a so-called golden visa to the country – and with it an entree into much of Europe. What’s more, the country’s real estate market may be poised for a rebound, helping buyers make some money on their purchase. “Greece’s real estate market is one of the remaining few in Europe that hasn’t recovered since the 2008 economic crisis,” Kachmazov said in an interview in Athens.

Prices in Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Poland and Hungary are heading toward pre-crisis levels because of high liquidity in Europe, he said. Kachmazov is among agents making a beeline for Greece to help property hunters from Russia, China, Turkey and elsewhere bet on a market that may be on the cusp of a revival as the country exits its bailout program in August 2018. Property prices in Greece have fallen more than the 25% contraction in the economy since Europe’s sovereign debt crisis began in 2008. Prices of apartments in Athens more than five years old shrank by 45% between 2008 and June 2017, according to Bank of Greece data.

“The belief is that the worst is over and that this is a good time to take advantage of the low prices and to benefit from future capital gains as the market recovers,” said Carrie Law, CEO of Juwai.com, a Chinese international property website. Juwai this year signed an agreement with Warren Buffett’s real estate brokerage firm to advertise homes in the U.S. The average price per square meter in Greece is 2,846 euros ($3,369), according to Germany-based statistics company Statista. That’s almost 1,000 euros cheaper than Portugal, which has a similar golden visa program for property buyers, one and a half times cheaper than in Spain and Germany, and almost three times cheaper than in Italy and Austria. Greece is more expensive than Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Estonia.

There are reportedly highly superior facilities lying idle on the mainland. But the EU doesn’t want the refugees there.

• Lesbos Mayor Files Suit Over Conditions At Moria Migrant Camp (K.)

The mayor of the eastern Aegean island of Lesvos has filed suit against all responsible parties over the conditions at the Moria refugee and migrant processing center. Spyros Galinos filed his suit in Lesvos’s Court of Misdemeanors, claiming that the law is being broken at the government-run facility, which is supervised by the military. His action comes two days after foreign media published videos shot covertly inside the camp and showing the squalor and cramped conditions to which thousands of refugees and migrants are being subjected. The mayor stressed that the facility, a former military base, should not be accommodating more than 1,800 people at a time if decent living standards are to be ensured.

“Unfortunately, though, for the past two years and this year especially there is an extremely large number of third-country citizens and vulnerable groups (men, women – among which pregnant women – and children) indiscriminately trapped and cramped together, coming to more than 6,000 individuals,” Galinos said in his lawsuit. He also stressed poor safety and sanitation standards, saying that an inadequate water and sewerage network is putting the lives of the camp’s residents and workers at risk. People living at the camp “every day experience serious psychological problems and have been led to suicide attempts and self-harm, while others are compelled to serious acts of lawlessness in order to survive,” Galinos said.

His suit came just hours after about a dozen people were injured in a brawl that went on for hours between rival groups at the camp and resulted in extensive destruction. The mayor further stressed the impact of conditions at Moria on the lives of the island’s residents, saying that authorities are failing in their duty to control and monitor such a large number of refugees and migrants. Galinos added that overcrowding at the camp has forced hundreds of migrants to move into the main town of Mytilene in search of some kind of shelter, “taking over public spaces, the city’s parks, sidewalks and courtyards of public and municipal buildings.” In the suit, Galinos asks that “all responsible parties” are taken to task over the situation, as “their actions and omissions are malicious and deliberate, and put at risk the desperate and poor people trapped in [Moria’s] illegal facilities.”

“The disruption of social cohesion and the risk of criminal offenses in defense of life and property by a part of the island’s native population is evident and very likely,” Galinos warned. Since the onset of the refugee crisis at the start of 2015, the residents of Lesvos and its mayor have been distinguished for the support they have given to tens of thousands of migrants that have landed on the island’s shores.

Debt Rattle December 20 2017

Dec 202017

December 20, 2017 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:38 am Finance Tagged with: bitcoin, Brexit, China, Coinbase, Facebook, Gibraltar, Greece, homeless, Lesbos, overspending, refugees 10 Responses »

Claude Monet Houses of Parliament, Sunset 1904

• Bitcoin Plunges Over $2,500, Bounces Back Somewhat, Bitcoin Cash Surges (MW)

• Coinbase Enables -Then Disables- Bitcoin Cash Trading: Insider Trading? (BI)

• From Bitcoin To Hashgraph: The Crypto Revolution (Mike Maloney)

• Is It 1999? 2007? Or Both? (Roberts)

• China Is Having Second Thoughts About Cracking Down On Ballooning Debt (CNBC)

• EU Commission May Launch Moves To Punish Poland Over Legal Reforms (R.)

• Facebook’s New Nemesis Is a Besuited German Antitrust Watchdog (BBG)

• Un-Merry Christmas: Perverse Incentives to Over-Consume and Over-Spend (CHS)

• Too Late, Theresa – Brexit Offer To EU Citizens Leaves Many Cold (R.)

• Centuries-Old Gibraltar Dispute Threatens Brexit Progress (BBG)

• UK Government Condemned Over ‘Abject Failure’ To Tackle Homelessness (Ind.)

• Salaries Continue To Decline In Greece

• Footage Emerges From Lesbos Refugee Camp Showing Shocking Conditions (K.)

• 10 People Injured In Clashes At Moria Refugee Camp On Lesbos (K.)

• Our Selective Blindness Is Lethal To The Living World (G.)

Pretty wild. You sure you want your savings go through that?

• Bitcoin Plunges Over $2,500, Bounces Back Somewhat, Bitcoin Cash Surges (MW)

The price of bitcoin plunged about 14% — more than $2,500 — Tuesday night after cryptocurrency trading site Coinbase said it would allow its customers to buy and sell its rival offshoot currency, bitcoin cash. In a matter of hours, the price of bitcoin dropped from $18,125 to as low as $15,578. Bitcoin later rallied somewhat and was trading within a $1,000-range; it was last at $16,875 Tuesday night. Bitcoin futures on the CME Group’s Chicago Mercantile Exchange were last trading at $17,425, off more than $700 from the afternoon. Bitcoin cash, meanwhile, rallied more than 50% to all-time highs above $3,300. It was last trading at $3,303, according to CoinMarketCap. “Sends and receives are available immediately,” Coinbase said in a blog post Tuesday announcing bitcoin-cash trading.

“Buys and sells will be available to all customers once there is sufficient liquidity on GDAX. We anticipate that this will take a few hours.” However, Coinbase and its GDAX exchange late Tuesday suspended bitcoin-cash trading after just four minutes until 9 a.m. Pacific time Wednesday, apparently until traffic settles down and liquidity is established. Bitcoin cash was created by a split from bitcoin on Aug. 1 by a faction of disgruntled developers, and allows virtual miners to process transactions in larger units — 8 megabytes rather than the 1-MB bitcoin blocks. The fledgling cryptocurrency has expanded 10-fold since then, and is now the third-largest by market cap, at $55.6 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.com.

Volatility, liquidity, insider trading.

• Coinbase Enables -Then Disables- Bitcoin Cash Trading: Insider Trading? (BI)

Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency trading platforms, shocked the crypto-world with its announcement Tuesday evening that it would allow users to buy and sell bitcoin cash. The news sent bitcoin cash, the spin-off cryptocurrency of bitcoin launched in August, to an all-time high above $3,609 per data from Markets Insider. On Coinbase’s GDAX platform, the price of the cryptocurrency reached well above $8,000 per coin. Bitcoin cash’s appreciation began slightly before the announcement on some exchanges, raising concerns about the possibility of insider trading by employees with advanced knowledge of the news. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in a post early Wednesday morning that the company was looking into the matter.

“Given the price increase in the hours leading up the announcement, we will be conducting an investigation into this matter”, he said. If we find evidence of any employee or contractor violating our policies- directly or indirectly- I will not hesitate to terminate the employee immediately and take appropriate legal action. The price spike appeared to put pressure on Coinbase. Nearly four hours after the San Francisco-based firm announced it was supporting bitcoin cash trading, it said users wouldn’t be able to buy and sell the cryptocurrency until Wednesday. “An update on Bitcoin Cash for our customers: sends and receives are functional,” the company said in a tweet at 11:15 p.m. ET. “Buys and sells on Coinbase.com and in our mobile apps will be available to all customers once there is sufficient liquidity on GDAX. We anticipate that this will happen tomorrow.”

Ouch. The company said in a blog post it disabled trading because of “significant volatility.” In addition to bitcoin cash spiking by almost $1,000, cryptocurrency trading volumes reached an all-time high above $49 billion, according to data from CoinMarketCap. Coinbase has struggled to fully function under such demand in the past.

Bitcoin this week

Our friend and gold bug Mike has lofty words.

• From Bitcoin To Hashgraph: The Crypto Revolution (Mike Maloney)

Today, mankind stands at a crossroads, and the path that humanity chooses may have a greater impact on our freedom and prosperity than any event in history. In 2008 a new technology was introduced that is so important that its destiny, and the destiny of mankind are inextricably linked. It is so powerful that if captured and controlled, it could enslave all of humanity. But if allowed to remain free and flourish – it could foster unimaginable levels of peace and prosperity. It has the power to replace all financial systems globally, to supplant 90% of Wall St, and to provide some functions of government. It has no agenda. It’s always fair and impartial. It can not be manipulated, subverted, corrupted or cheated.

And – it inverts the power structure and places control of one’s destiny in the hands of the individual. In the future, when we look back at the 2.6 million-year timeline of human development and the major turning points that led to modern civilization – the creation of farming, the domestication of animals, the invention of the wheel, the harnessing of electricity and the splitting of the atom – the sixty year development of computers, the internet and this new technology will be looked upon as a single event…a turning point that will change the course of human history. It’s called Full Consensus Distibuted Ledger Technology, and so far its major use has been for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin….but its potential goes far, far beyond that.

Of course, as always, Lance has a lot more to say (click the link). I picked out his graph beacuse it is exceptionally strong.

• Is It 1999? 2007? Or Both? (Roberts)

I have combined the three periods below, scaled to 100, so you can see just how far we have currently gone. Sure. This time could be different. It just probably isn’t.

Beijing has been aware of this for a long time. Don’t watch what they say, watch what they do.

• China Is Having Second Thoughts About Cracking Down On Ballooning Debt (CNBC)

China is planning to relax its goal of cutting debt in its economic outline that’s set for release Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. The revised plan will instead clamp down on the rise in borrowing, sources told the WSJ. The move would fly in the face of the Chinese government’s mission to bring down the country’s soaring debt, a goal President Xi Jinping has made a cornerstone to his economic platform. The weakened priority may prove to be a concession by top Communist Party leaders that China’s economy may be more reliant on leveraged growth than the government would like. The Journal added that, by cooling its stance on debt, Beijing is hinting that it would rather fuel growth with higher debt than pursue austerity measures.

Chinese debt levels jumped the most in four years in September, according to Reuters. There’s speculation that the size of China’s debt load may be three times its economy. China may be feeling pressure to keep its economy growing as the U.S. is set to pass its biggest tax overhaul in 30 years this week, which will lower the corporate tax rate to theoretically make more companies competitive with China. To be sure, Xi and the Communist Party have been hard at work to curb borrowing between banks, the Journal noted. But since the crackdown on intrabank lending, smaller banks have scaled risky borrowing.

Don’t think Poland will react very well to being ‘punished’.

• EU Commission May Launch Moves To Punish Poland Over Legal Reforms (R.)

In what would be an unprecedented move, the European Commission could invoke Article 7 of the European Union’s founding Lisbon Treaty to punish Warsaw for breaking its rules on human rights and democratic values. “Unless the Polish government postpones these court reforms, we will have no choice but to trigger Article 7,” said a senior EU official before a Commission meeting on Wednesday, where Poland’s reforms are on the agenda. Poland’s new prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki said in Brussels last week that “the decision has already been made”. The Commission’s deputy head Frans Timmermans warned in July that Poland was “perilously close” to facing sanctions. Such a punishment could still be blocked. Hungary, Poland’s closest ally in the EU, is likely to argue strongly against it.

But the mere threat of it underlines the sharp deterioration in ties between Warsaw and Brussels since the socially conservative Law and Justice (PiS) won power in late 2015. The Commission says Poland’s judicial reforms limit judges’ independence. Polish President Andrzej Duda has until Jan. 5 to sign them into law. If all EU governments agree, Poland could have its voting rights in the EU suspended, and may also see cuts in billions of euros of EU aid. The PiS government rejects accusations of undemocratic behavior and says its reforms are needed because courts are slow, inefficient and steeped in a communist era-mentality.

Cartel Office, no less.

• Facebook’s New Nemesis Is a Besuited German Antitrust Watchdog (BBG)

Andreas Mundt is Facebook’s new nemesis. Mundt, 57, is the president of the Federal Cartel Office, Germany’s competition regulator. For nearly two years, his agency has been probing whether a key part of the Silicon Valley giant’s business model is an abuse of a market dominance. In a case that caused much surprise outside Germany, Mundt unveiled preliminary findings on Tuesday, saying Facebook may take advantage of its popularity to bully users into agreeing to terms and conditions they often don’t understand. The small print allows using the data to generate the targeted ads that make the company so rich. “Competition law would be poorer without somebody like Andreas Mundt,” said Nelson Jung, a lawyer at Clifford Chance in London. “He’s characterized by his willingness to push boundaries and challenge the status quo.”

Facebook took a dim view, saying the report painted an “inaccurate picture” of how it operates, homing in on the criticism that it’s dominant, an important legal term that might curb future behavior. [..] Facebook didn’t hold back in its attempt to rebut Mundt’s report, saying that it’s wrong to label it as “dominant” in Germany. “A dominant company can save the expense of innovating because it doesn’t have to fear someone else developing better features. We must constantly innovate to attract people. If we fail, people will go elsewhere.” According to Mundt, when data is called the new currency of the digital age, then the relationship to competition law is obvious. That’s also why he’s rejecting criticism that the probe blurs the line between privacy and antitrust enforcement.

“It can only be an antitrust issue if a customer can’t avoid the company because it’s dominating the market. Of course that has a privacy angle but it certainly also has an antitrust angle.” Mundt calls the Facebook investigation a “pioneer case” since “for the first time we’re looking into the relation between market power and big data.” For him, it’s as important as the European Union’s clampdown on Alphabet’s Google, which in July was fined 2.4 billion-euros for skewing shopping search results. “I like the Google decision, it set out some markers for the future,” Mundt said. “That’s what we’re trying with the Facebook case as well, regardless of what the result will now be.”

Well, Toys ‘R’ Us is already dying. Our economies run on overspending.

• Un-Merry Christmas: Perverse Incentives to Over-Consume and Over-Spend (CHS)

Few topics are off-limits nowadays: the personal and private are now splashed everywhere for all to see. One topic is still taboo: the holiday’s perverse incentives to over-consume and over-spend,lest our economy implode. This topic is taboo because it strikes at the very heart of our socio-economic system, which is fundamentally based on permanent growth, the faster the better, as if unlimited expansion on a finite planet is not just possible, but desirable. In the current Mode of Production, the solution to every social and economic ill is to “grow our way out of it.” The solution to unemployment: jump-start growth by expanding consumption, spending and borrowing. The solution to stagnant wages: jump-start growth. The solution to declining profits: jump-start growth. The solution to government deficit spending: jump-start growth. And so on.

So what happens when most people have not just the basics of life, but a surplus of stuff? Where is the growth going to come from if people already have everything? The answer is three-fold: 1. Replace a perfectly good product with a new product and dump the old one in the landfill. 2. Buy duplicates and put the surplus products in the closet or storage facility. 3. Buy gimmicks (Pet Rocks, etc.) that are tossed in the dump shortly after the holiday gift-giving season ends. But does this Landfill Economy make sense? The cheap oil is about gone, and so does it make any rational sense to burn the last of the cheap fossil fuels on assembling stuff nobody needs in China, shipping it thousands of miles to retailers or Amazon warehouses, adding it to the immense piles of stuff most households already own, and then shipping the old but still functional products to the landfill, just to keep the economy humming?

This is of course insane. Decisions aren’t being made as if scarcity matters; the goals and incentives are set to encourage perverse and destructive overconsumption and overspending: not only are we squandering resources in the sacrifice to the false gods of “growth,” we’re indebting households to do so, stripping income that could have been saved and invested in productive uses. In the lunatic asylum of the current economic model, media anchors sport grins of delirious joy when reporting increases in holiday spending, as if a bump higher from $680 billion to $700 billion is a gargantuan win for the flailing economy.

There are no Britons ready to fill the roles at either the high end -academics- or the low end -fruit pickers-.

• Too Late, Theresa – Brexit Offer To EU Citizens Leaves Many Cold (R.)

Back from Brussels with a hard-fought Brexit deal, Prime Minister Theresa May wrote an open letter to the three million citizens of other European Union states living in Britain. “I know our country would be poorer if you left and I want you to stay,” she wrote after striking the initial agreement, which promises to secure their British residency rights after Brexit and allows the negotiations to move onto trade relations. But for some EU nationals – who have endured uncertainty over their rights since the Brexit vote in June 2016, not to mention an unpleasant feeling that many Britons do not want them around – May’s Dec. 8 deal is too little, too late. It’s too late to keep German nurse Daniela Jones in the chronically short-staffed National Health Service (NHS), where she worked for 35 years.

It’s too late for French psychotherapist Baya Salmon-Hawk, who after 40 years in Britain has moved to Ireland to remain in the EU. It’s too late for French accountant Nathalie Duran, who is planning early retirement in France because after 31 years as a taxpayer in Britain she objects to being told she has to pay a fee and fill in forms to be granted a new “settled status”. “I will have to regretfully decline your generous offer for settled status and oblige your lovely countrymen’s wishes and go home,” she wrote on Facebook in a response to May laden with irony. Duran told Reuters that the prime minister’s “late outpouring of love” for EU citizens, after years of tough talk on the need to cut immigration, could not mask negative attitudes towards immigrants unleashed by the Brexit vote. “I think it’s turning ugly,” said 56-year-old Duran. “It’s now OK to say ‘go home foreigners’.”

It’s whack-a-mole thing. New issues keep popping up.

• Centuries-Old Gibraltar Dispute Threatens Brexit Progress (BBG)

A 300-year-old argument between Britain and Spain over a small piece of land is threatening to derail Theresa May’s plans to help businesses navigate Brexit. U.K. officials fear Spain will threaten to veto a Brexit transition phase if the British prime minister refuses to negotiate a separate deal with the government in Madrid that covers the disputed territory of Gibraltar. While the peninsula has been in British hands since 1713, Spain maintains a claim over the 2.6 square miles (6.7 square kilometers) of land. Fears are growing among ministers in London that a new framework for the next phase of Brexit talks, due to be outlined by the European Union on Wednesday, might reignite the centuries-old arguments, a U.K. official said.

May faces pressure to quickly strike a deal on transitional terms to assure U.K.-based businesses that trade rules won’t change suddenly on Brexit day in March 2019. May wants an agreement on the transition – or “implementation” – phase by March 2018 in order to shift talks on to the long-term future trade agreement. She hopes the two-year period of stability immediately after Brexit will help encourage businesses to stay based in the U.K. Last week, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy suggested his government would need to give its explicit consent to any transitional deal affecting Gibraltar. The measure would require separate negotiations between London and Madrid, he said. [..] One U.K. official who asked not to be identified said British overseas territories must be included within the EU’s guidelines for negotiating an overall transitional period. To do anything else would be a contradiction in the EU’s own position, the official said.

So does Labour stand up for them? really? How do they do that?

• UK Government Condemned Over ‘Abject Failure’ To Tackle Homelessness (Ind.)

The Government has been condemned for taking an “unacceptably complacent” attitude towards tackling homelessness, as soaring numbers of people are forced to live on the streets or in temporary accommodation. A damning report by the cross-party Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said ministerial attempts to solve the “national crisis” had ended in “abject failure”. Figures show more than 9,000 people are sleeping rough on the streets of England at any one time – up 134% since 2011. Over 79,000 households, including 120,000 children, are meanwhile homeless and living in temporary accommodation – a rise of 65% since 2010.

Recent research by charity Shelter revealed that child homelessness has reached a 10-year high, with nearly 130,000 children in Britain set to wake up homeless and in temporary accommodation this Christmas. But the Government’s commitment to eliminate rough sleeping by 2027 will only address the “tip of the iceberg”, according to the PAC report, which found there to be an “unacceptable shortage” of realistic housing options for the homeless or those at risk of homelessness.

Which cuts consumer spending, which cuts jobs, which cuts consumer spending, rinse and repeat.

• Salaries Continue To Decline In Greece

Salaries have declined considerably and the number of workers on low wages has expanded, explaining the increase in jobs recorded by the Labor Ministry’s hirings database Ergani this year. A direct comparison of the first three weeks of October 2017 with the same period last year changes the rosy image of the local labor market that the government is attempting to present. The figures for this year show that more than six in 10 (64.27%) of the total 1,824,437 workers employed at 247,236 enterprises were on salaries of up to 1,000 euros per month gross. Fewer than two-thirds of them, accounting for 759,326 in absolute figures or 41.62% of all workers, were employed full-time, while the rest (22.65%) appeared to have part-time jobs that earned less than 500 euros a month.

Data also show the number of self-employed increased by 121,913 from October 2016, but this was not accompanied by an increase in salaries. The average salary in October 2017 dropped to 1,024.90 euros from 1,060.30 a year earlier. Across the labor market, full-time workers accounted for 68.44% of the total, virtually unchanged from the 68.28% rate in October 2016. However, the number of enterprises rose by 14,085, or 6.04%, from 233,151 in October last year. Over the 12-month period, flexible employment (part-time and shift work) grew by 30,556 jobs or 7.98%.

A growing trend has been recorded toward jobs paying between 500 and 600 euros per month: One in nine workers (11% or 200,759) fall into this revenue category, up by a remarkable 13.9% from October 2016 – a rise that is far greater than the overall increase in jobs. Eurostat data showed on Tuesday that while the hourly cost of labor in Greece rose 0.8% in the third quarter of 2017, salary costs fell 1.8% and non-salary costs (social security contributions etc) increased 8.6%.

It’ll be a bitter winter.

• Footage Emerges From Lesbos Refugee Camp Showing Shocking Conditions (K.)

US-based internet media company BuzzFeed has published a series of photographs and videos shot by residents inside the government-run Moria refugee and migrant processing center on the eastern Aegean island of Lesvos. The scenes of misery and squalor are also evident in a report on Deutsche Welle on Monday, which was International Migrants Day, showing footage taken by hidden camera inside the same facility. BuzzFeed’s Ryan Broderick said in his report that a 25-year-old man from Iraq named Noor and a 27-year-old man from Syria named Ammar agreed to provide the reporter with videos from inside the fenced-in perimeter of the former army camp, which is run by the Greek military.

The footage, which Broderick also posed on his Twitter account, provides a rare glimpse at conditions inside the camp, which was originally built to accommodate some 2,000 migrants and refugees and is now home to around 6,000 people, including unaccompanied minors, children, pregnant women and disabled or elderly individuals. Images of a shower area show a row of filthy stalls with doors hanging off their hinges, allowing little if any privacy. Many residents collect water in plastic bottles to bathe themselves rather than entering the showers, the witnesses inside the facility are quoted as saying after sending photographs of huge piles of plastic water bottled. The toilets are so unsanitary, they add, that many residents prefer to go to the bathroom in the open air, in a part of an olive tree grove set aside for this purpose.

Streets in the camp flood in the rain and are lined with tents that may accommodate more than one family and have been strengthened to withstand winter conditions with plastic sheets. In another video, two police officers are seen forcibly carrying a man by his arms and leg and shouting abuse at him after breaking up a fight between residents. Several international rights groups have decried conditions at Moria for months, calling on the Greek government to ease overcrowding and improve accommodation and sanitation standards. Squalid and cramped conditions have also led to riots and fights breaking out inside the facility.

“300 to 350 unaccompanied minors and hundreds of children, women and elderly and disabled people.”

• 10 People Injured In Clashes At Moria Refugee Camp On Lesbos (K.)

Around 10 people were rushed to hospital on Lesvos on Tuesday night following violent clashes between rival groups in the Moria refugee and migrant camp. Riot police were called in to quell the unrest, which reportedly broke out between rival groups of Iraqi and Afghan nationals and resulted in several small fires being set. Tension is rife at Moria, where scant resources are being stretched at almost three times the camp’s capacity and conditions are squalid.

Among its 6,000-plus residents there are around 300 to 350 unaccompanied minors and hundreds of children, women and elderly and disabled people. Tuesday night’s clashes came a day after American news outlet BuzzFeed and Germany’s Deutsche Welle published videos of the camp’s interior showing the extent of the filth and squalor to which residents are being subjected. Journalists are not allowed into the military-run camp without the prior agreement of authorities, so the exact extent of Tuesday’s and other similar clashes are not known.

Blind to the species that were already gone when you were born.

• Our Selective Blindness Is Lethal To The Living World (G.)

What you see is not what others see. We inhabit parallel worlds of perception, bounded by our interests and experience. What is obvious to some is invisible to others. I might find myself standing, transfixed, by the roadside, watching a sparrowhawk hunting among the bushes, astonished that other people could ignore it. But they might just as well be wondering how I could have failed to notice the new V6 Pentastar Sahara that just drove past. As the psychologist Richard Wiseman points out: “At any one moment, your eyes and brain only have the processing power to look at a very small part of your surroundings … your brain quickly identifies what it considers to be the most significant aspects of your surroundings, and focuses almost all of its attention on these elements.” Everything else remains unseen.

Our selective blindness is lethal to the living world. Joni Mitchell’s claim that “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” is, sadly, untrue: our collective memory is wiped clean by ecological loss. One of the most important concepts defining our relationship to the natural world is shifting baseline syndrome, coined by the fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly. The people of each generation perceive the state of the ecosystems they encountered in their childhood as normal and natural. When wildlife is depleted, we might notice the loss, but we are unaware that the baseline by which we judge the decline is in fact a state of extreme depletion. So we forget that the default state of almost all ecosystems – on land and at sea – is domination by a megafauna.

We are unaware that there is something deeply weird about British waters; they are not thronged with great whales, vast shoals of bluefin tuna, two-metre cod and halibut the size of doors, as they were until a few centuries ago. We are unaware that the absence of elephants, rhinos, lions, scimitar cats, hyenas and hippos, that lived in this country during the last interglacial period (when the climate was almost identical to today’s), is also an artefact of human activity. And the erosion continues. Few people younger than me know that it was once normal to see fields white with mushrooms, or rivers black with eels at the autumn equinox, or that every patch of nettles was once reamed by caterpillars. I can picture a moment at which the birds stop singing, and people wake up and make breakfast and go to work without noticing that anything has changed.

Debt Rattle June 14 2017

Jun 142017

June 14, 2017 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:34 am Finance Tagged with: defaults, Dodd-Frank, Lesbos, public pensions, refugees, Rome, Russia, Schaeuble, Trump, UK, vote 17 Responses »

Fred Lyon San Francisco cable car turnaround 1946

• A Record 60% Of Americans Disapprove Of President Trump (ZH)

• Age Is The New Dividing Line In British Politics (YouGov)

• UK Low Income Families Forced To Walk ‘Relentless Financial Tightrope’ (G.)

• Gundlach Says DC Establishment Wants to ‘Wait Trump Out’ (BBG)

• Trump Administration Welshes on “Repeal Dodd Frank” Promise (NC)

• Tillerson Says Allies Pleading With US To ‘Improve Russia Relations’ (RT)

• Are Public Pensions A Thing Of The Past? (CNN)

• Death Of The Human Investor: Just 10% Of Trading Is Regular Stock Picking (C.)

• OPEC Oil Production Jumps In May Despite Output Cuts Deal (CNBC)

• China Defaults Feared as Firms Confront Short Debt Addiction (BBG)

• Greeks Promised Economic Boost Despair of Ever Seeing Debt Deal (BBG)

• Schaeuble Promises Greece Deal With Lenders On Thursday (R.)

• Foreign Buyers Snap Up Greek Property (K.)

• State Of Emergency Declared On Lesvos As 800 Left Homeless (AP)

• ‘Impossible And Risky To Take In More Migrants’ – Rome’s Mayor (RT)

A nation divided.

• A Record 60% Of Americans Disapprove Of President Trump (ZH)

Despite record high stock prices, 43-year lows in jobless claims, and near record-high optimism among small business owners, Gallup reports the percentage of Americans who disapprove of the job President Trump has risen to a record 60% this week. As Gallup details, despite the president’s claim on Monday at a Cabinet meeting that “Never has there been a president, with few exceptions – in the case of F.D.R. he had a major Depression to handle – who’s passed more legislation, who’s done more things than what we’ve done,” his administration has been roiled by controversies. Most recently, Trump ran into a buzz saw of criticism with his decision, announced June 1, to withdraw the U.S. from participation in the Paris climate accord.

He has also been under significant political scrutiny over the June 8 testimony of former FBI Director James Comey before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Those events coincided with the lower averages seen in the past two weeks. But, given that his averages were almost as low in the weeks leading up to them, it is difficult to establish direct causality between specific events and the president’s ratings.

The highly polarized nature of Americans’ views of Trump (and Obama before him) have been well-documented, and that pattern continues: Trump’s 8% average approval rating among Democrats last week is right at his 9% average to date; His 83% approval among Republicans is three points lower than his average among that group; Among independents, his approval is 31%, five points lower than his average among that group; Notably the spread between Republican ‘confidence’ and Democrat ‘confidence’ (via Bloomberg) has not been this wide since before Barack Obama was elected…

Trump’s job approval ratings are the worst of his administration so far, and Trump continues to have the lowest ratings for a newly elected president in Gallup’s history of approval ratings. The previous low first-year approval rating in June for an elected president was Bill Clinton, with a 37% approval June 5-6, 1993. The approval ratings of all other presidents since 1953 in June (May in the case of Eisenhower) of their first year after being elected were above 50%.

Another nation divided, but not along the same lines. Older people, especially pensioners, vote Conservative, and a much higher percentage of them actually vote.

• Age Is The New Dividing Line In British Politics (YouGov)

Since last week’s election result YouGov has interview over 50,000 British adults to gather more information on how Britain voted. This is part of one of the biggest surveys ever undertaken into British voting behaviour, and is the largest yet that asks people how they actually cast their ballots in the 2017 election. The bigger sample size allows us to break the results down to a much more granular level and see how different groups and demographics voted on Thursday. In electoral terms, age seems to be the new dividing line in British politics. The starkest way to show this is to note that, amongst first time voters (those aged 18 and 19), Labour was forty seven percentage points ahead. Amongst those aged over 70, the Conservatives had a lead of fifty percentage points.

In fact, for every 10 years older a voter is, their chance of voting Tory increases by around nine points and the chance of them voting Labour decreases by nine points. The tipping point, that is the age at which a voter is more likely to have voted Conservative than Labour, is now 47 – up from 34 at the start of the campaign.

Despite an increase in in youth turnout, young people are still noticeably less likely to vote than older people. While 57% of 18 and 19 year-olds voted last week, for those aged 70+ the figure was 84%.

Corbyn growth territory.

• UK Low Income Families Forced To Walk ‘Relentless Financial Tightrope’ (G.)

Low-income families are going without beds, cookers, meals, new clothes and other essential items as they struggle to cope with huge debts run up to pay domestic bills, according to a survey highlighting the cost-of-living crisis experienced by the UK’s poorest households. Clients of the debt charity Christians Against Poverty (CAP) had run up an average of £4,500 in debts on rent or utility bills, forcing them on to what the charity described as a “relentless financial tightrope” juggling repayments and basic living costs, leaving many acutely stressed and in deteriorating health. The pressure of coping with low income and debt frequently triggered mental illness or exacerbated existing conditions, with more than a third of clients reporting that they had considered suicide and three-quarters visiting a GP for debt-related problems.

More than half were subsequently prescribed medication or therapy. “The crippling reality of living in poverty and debt is still unashamedly evident in every home we visit, and year on year we see financial difficulty taking a tighter grip,” said Matt Barlow, the UK chief executive of CAP. Experts said the survey highlighted the extreme hardship faced by the “new destitute” – people on low incomes who might in the past have been able to rely on a welfare safety net to help them through financial shocks but who now were forced to go into debt to survive, leaving them struggling to afford even the basics. Debt had a crushing effect on living standards, the CAP survey found, with one in 10 clients unable to afford to buy or repair a bed, washing machine, TV, sofa or fridge. Roughly the same proportion could afford to acquire furniture only on punitive rent-to-buy terms, for example paying £6 a week to acquire a bed and mattress over a set three-year period.

The impact on family life was severe, with a quarter of clients saying debt caused relationship breakdowns, and more than two-thirds saying they felt unable to cater for their children’s needs. A sixth said they could not afford to feed their children three meals a day. A third feared eviction. A tiny handful of clients – predominantly single mothers – reported that they had turned to prostitution to make ends meet. Prof Suzanne Fitzpatrick, of Heriot Watt University, the co-author of groundbreaking research into destitution, told the Guardian: “The new destitute are citizens who would previously have managed to avoid absolute destitution with the help of the welfare safety net. But the level of working age benefits is now so low that people barely managing to get by can easily find themselves in a position where they can’t afford even the basic essentials to eat, stay warm and dry, and keep clean.”

“If you’re a trader or a speculator, I think you should be raising cash today, literally today..”

• Gundlach Says DC Establishment Wants to ‘Wait Trump Out’ (BBG)

DoubleLine Capital’s Jeffrey Gundlach said the establishment in Washington is trying to undermine President Donald Trump by running out the clock on his administration. “They’re really just trying to wait Trump out, trying to obstruct his agenda as much as possible,” Gundlach, one of the few money managers to predict Trump’s election, said during a webcast Tuesday. “Small change is what they’re looking for.” Gundlach, manager of the $53.9 billion DoubleLine Total Return Bond Fund, spoke during televised Senate testimony by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, which the money manager called “a sideshow or entertainment.” He called the U.S. political conflict “rope-a-dope,” a strategy used by boxer Muhammad Ali to wear out opponents.

Among Gundlach’s other observations:
• There’s a low probability of a recession.
• The days of low volatility markets are probably numbered.
• Expect higher bond yields and lower stock prices this summer.
• Yields on 10-year Treasuries are likely to end 2017 roughly in the 2.7% to 2.8% range, from about 2.2% currently.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 Index closed at record highs Tuesday prior to Gundlach’s talk. Futures trading implies a 98% probability the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates by 0.25% when it meets Wednesday. “If you’re a trader or a speculator, I think you should be raising cash today, literally today,” Gundlach said. “If you’re an investor, I think you can sit through a seasonally weak period.” The Total Return fund was up 2.7% this year through June 12, beating 84% of its peers, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Yves Smith’s piece is too long and comprehensive to do justice here. Click the link.

• Trump Administration Welshes on “Repeal Dodd Frank” Promise (NC)

After having promised banks to get rid of Dodd Frank, which was never a strong enough bill to have a significant impact on profits or industry structure, Trump didn’t even back the House version of the bill to crimp Dodd Frank. But you’d never know that from the cheerleading from bank lobbyists upon the release of a 147 page document by the Treasury yesterday, the first of a series describing the gimmies that the Administration seeks to lavish on banks. As we’ll touch on below, the document repeatedly asserts that limited bank lending post crisis to noble causes like small businesses was due to oppressive regulations. We wrote extensively at the time that small business surveys showed that small businesses then overwhelmingly weren’t interested in borrowing and hiring. Businessmen don’t expand operations because money is cheap, they expand because they see a commercial opportunity.

But the even bigger lie at the heart of this effort is the idea that the US will benefit from giving more breaks to its financial sector. As we’ve written, over the last few years, more and more economists have engaged in studies with different methodologies that come to the same conclusion: an oversized financial sector is bad for growth, and pretty much all advanced economies suffer from this condition. The IMF found that the optimal level of financial development was roughly that of Poland. The IMF said countries might get away with having a bigger banking sector and pay no growth cost if it was regulated well. Needless to say, with the banking sector already so heavily subsidized that it cannot properly be considered to be a private business, deregulating with an eye to increasing its profits is driving hard in the wrong direction.

[..] So if it wasn’t Dodd Frank, what was led the banks to focus so much on high FICO score borrowers? It was mortgage servicing reforms, which made it hard to foreclose due to stopping abuses, like dual tracking (continuing to foreclose even when supposedly considering a mortgage modification). To look at the bigger picture, it’s hard to take bank complaints about oppressive regulation seriously in light of this:

But the domestic echo chamber makes that hard to do.

• Tillerson Says Allies Pleading With US To ‘Improve Russia Relations’ (RT)

All of America’s allies and partners have been calling on Washington to improve its relations with Russia, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson acknowledged after the US Senate reached a bipartisan deal to boost sanctions against Moscow. “I have yet to have a bilateral, one-on-one, a poolside conversation with a single counterpart in any country: in Europe, Middle East, even South-East Asia, that has not said to me: please, address your relationship with Russia, it has to be improved,” Tillerson said on Tuesday during testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Foreign Operations. Tillerson added that the countries urging the US to review its Russian policy “believe worsening this relationship will ultimately worsen theirsituation.” He added: “People have been imploring me to engage and try to improve the situation, so, that was our approach anyway.”

Earlier, Tillerson warned that the US Senate’s bipartisan deal on new set of restrictive measures against Moscow might further worsen relations with Russia and hinder existing efforts on joint US-Russia progress to fight terrorism in Syria. “There are efforts under way in Syria specifically, those are, I would say, progressing in a positive way,” America’s top diplomat said on Tuesday during testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Despite the relationship between US and Russia being “at an all-time low,” according to Tillerson, the “objective is to stabilize that” rather than deteriorate it further. Washington is “engaged” and working with Moscow “in a couple of areas,” including on such issues of international importance as the Ukrainian and Syrian crises. “We have some channels that are open, where we are starting to talk, and I think what I wouldn’t want to do is close the channels off,” Tillerson told the Senate committee, warning that to establish “something new… will take time.”

Yes, they are.

• Are Public Pensions A Thing Of The Past? (CNN)

New teachers and state workers will no longer get a traditional pension in Pennsylvania. Governor Tom Wolf signed a bill Monday, making it the ninth state to replace the pension with a “hybrid” retirement plan. It goes into effect in 2019. The new plan combines elements of a traditional pension and a 401(k)-style account. Overall, new workers will contribute more of their salary, work longer, and likely receive a smaller payout in retirement than under the current system, according to a report from the state’s Independent Fiscal Office. But Pennsylvania’s pension system is currently one of the most underfunded in the country and is in need of reform. The bill had bipartisan support. “It’s a win for Pennsylvania taxpayers and fair to Pennsylvania’s workforce,” Wolf said at a press conference Monday.

The reform will build upon previous legislation to help fully fund the pension system and preserve a path to retirement for public workers, said Greg Mennis, a director at Pew Charitable Trusts. “Our research indicates that this would be one of the most – if not the most – comprehensive and impactful reforms any state has implemented,” he wrote in a letter urging state lawmakers to pass the bill. Over the past 10 years, Rhode Island, Virginia, Tennessee and Georgia have created plans similar to Pennsylvania’s. They require workers to contribute some of their salary to a pension-like plan that guarantees a certain payout based on their salary. Workers also contribute to a 401(k)-style plan that they can take with them if they leave public service. The state will make contributions to both plans on their behalf.

In Pennsylvania, workers will be defaulted into a hybrid plan, but there will be two other versions they could opt into. Under the default, workers will have to contribute a total of 8.25% of their salary. (Teachers currently contribute 7.5% and other public workers pay 6.25%.) Most will have to work until 67, instead of 65, in order to get their full payout in retirement. A state employee who works for 35 years and earns a final salary of $60,000, currently receives an estimated $40,000 a year in retirement. Under the reformed system, that same worker would receive $34,1048, according to the Independent Fiscal Office report. [..] Like pension plans in other states, Pennsylvania’s was badly hurt by the Great Recession. It also took a hit because of retroactive benefit increases made before the market took a dive. The pension fund went from a nearly $20 billion surplus in 2000 to a $70 billion deficit in 2015.

ZIRP machines have taken over.

• Death Of The Human Investor: Just 10% Of Trading Is Regular Stock Picking (C.)

Quantitative investing based on computer formulas and trading by machines directly are leaving the traditional stock picker in the dust and now dominating the equity markets, according to a new report from JPMorgan. “While fundamental narratives explaining the price action abound, the majority of equity investors today don’t buy or sell stocks based on stock specific fundamentals,” Marko Kolanovic, global head of quantitative and derivatives research at JPMorgan, said in a Tuesday note to clients. Kolanovic estimates “fundamental discretionary traders” account for only about 10% of trading volume in stocks. Passive and quantitative investing accounts for about 60%, more than double the share a decade ago, he said.

In fact, Kolanovic’s analysis attributes the sudden drop in big technology stocks between Friday and Monday to changing strategies by the quants, or the traders using computer algorithms. In the weeks heading into May 17, Kolanovic said funds bought bonds and bond proxies, sending low volatility stocks and large growth stocks higher. Value, high beta and smaller stocks began falling in a rotation labeled “an unwind of the ‘Trump reflation’ trade,” Kolanovic said. “Upward pressure on Low Vol and Growth, and downward pressure on Value and High Vol peaked in the first days of June (monthly rebalances), and then quickly snapped back, pulling down FANG stocks” — Facebook, Amazon.com, Netflix and Google parent Alphabet, the report said.

Told you those output cuts wouldn’t go anywhere.

• OPEC Oil Production Jumps In May Despite Output Cuts Deal (CNBC)

OPEC’s oil production jumped in May, despite the exporter group agreeing last month to extend its six-month deal to cap output into 2018. Production across OPEC rose by about 336,100 barrels per day to 32.1 million bpd, according to secondary sources, led by increases from Libya and Nigeria, which are exempt from the deal, and Iraq. Output from Libya surged by more than 178,000 bpd to 730,000 bpd as the country’s rival factions moved toward reconciliation, and supplies disrupted throughout years of conflict remained on line. In Nigeria, production was up more than 174,000 bpd to 1.68 million bpd as supplies sidelined by militant attacks on energy infrastructure last year came back into operation. With the gain, Nigeria reclaimed the title of largest African producer in OPEC from Angola, where output fell by 54,000 bpd, the biggest drop among the 13 members in May.

Iraq, OPEC’s second-largest producer, contributed the third-biggest increase with a more than 44,000 bpd jump. Baghdad has yet to cut deeply enough to hit its quota of 4.35 million bpd under the output cut deal. In May, it produced 4.42 million bpd. Only four countries were producing at or below the levels they agreed to in November: Saudi Arabia, Angola, Kuwait, and Qatar. Last month, OPEC and other exporters extended an agreement to remove 1.8 million barrels a day from the market in order to shrink brimming global stockpiles of crude oil. In May, inventories in the OECD, a group of mostly wealthy countries, remained 251 million barrels above the five-year average.

More ground for shadow banks to take over.

• China Defaults Feared as Firms Confront Short Debt Addiction (BBG)

China’s leverage crackdown is forcing local companies to confront their addiction to short-term bond sales that they use to roll over debt. The shock therapy is worsening the outlook for corporate defaults in the second half of this year after borrowing costs jumped to a two-year high. With yields surging, Chinese non-banking firms sold 131 billion yuan ($19.3 billion) of bonds with a maturity of one year or less in May, the least since January 2014 and less than half of the same month last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. About 87% of the short note sales last month will be used for refinancing, according to Bloomberg data.

The habit of relying on borrowing short-term money to repay maturing debt has pushed up such liabilities to a total of 5.2 trillion yuan on China’s listed non-financial companies’ balance sheets as of March 31, the highest on record, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. With no sign of an end to the government’s campaign against leverage, the average coupon rate for bonds maturing in one year or less rose to 5.5% in June, deterring issuers from raising money to roll over debt. “Small issuance of short-term bonds will be a normal phenomenon in the coming six months because cash supply will probably remain tight,” said Ma Quansheng at Fullgoal Fund Management. “Both default risks and the number of corporate bond defaults may increase.”

The loose funding environment last year helped Chinese companies raise enough money to withstand repayment pressure so far in 2017. There have been 13 onshore defaults in the public bond market in 2017, compared with 16 in the same period of 2016. The yield on one-year AAA rated company bonds averaged 4.19% this year, up from 2.97% in 2016. HFT Investment Management said more note defaults may come as the economy doesn’t look good. In the second half of this year, Chinese non-banking firms must repay 2.36 trillion yuan of bonds. “The current rising borrowing costs may have a big impact on companies’ operations and finance,” said Lu Congfan at HFT Investment Management. “What can you do when you must refinance to repay maturing debt while facing such high borrowing costs? That would be a question challenging many local companies in the second half or next year.”

Well, well… Let’s see it.

• Schaeuble Promises Greece Deal With Lenders On Thursday (R.)

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said on Tuesday he was confident that Greece and its international lenders will reach a compromise deal this week, a step that would unleash more loans for Athens. “We’ll manage it on Thursday. You’ll see,” Schaeuble said during a panel discussion in Berlin. Officials have said eurozone finance ministers and the IMF are likely to strike a compromise on Greece on Thursday, paving the way for new loans for Athens while leaving the contentious debt relief issue for later. IMF head Christine Lagarde suggested a plan last week under which the Fund would join the Greek bailout now, because Athens is delivering on agreed reforms, but would not disburse any IMF money until the euro zone clarifies what debt relief it can offer Greece.

Greeks don’t believe you, Wolfie…

• Greeks Promised Economic Boost Despair of Ever Seeing Debt Deal (BBG)

Alexis Tsipras has spent nearly two years telling Greeks that a debt deal and inclusion in the ECB’s quantitative-easing program will unleash an investment boom that salves the pain of austerity. The prime minister’s message hasn’t convinced Panagiotis Kouinis, a 60-year-old civil engineer in Corinth who says business has steadily dwindled through all of Greece’s eight-year crisis and has now ground almost to a halt. “What I know is they tell you pensions will be cut another 20%, wages down, and what is quantitative easing?” Kouinis said in an interview in his office near the city center. “Do we have to be economists so we can understand what they’re saying?” Across the country in places like Corinth, an industrial hub 80 kilometers west of Athens, Greeks have spent years treading water as news bulletins bombard them daily with reports of meetings and decisions in Brussels and Frankfurt that will determine their economic future.

In the meantime, as the ECB’s stimulus measures – including its asset-purchase program – buoy the rest of the euro-area economy, Greece’s output has been stagnant, leaving its people the most pessimistic in the region. Yet the ECB remains unlikely to include Greek bonds in its QE program in the foreseeable future, according to a person familiar with the matter. That’s because a meeting on Thursday of euro-area finance ministers, whose electorates are leery of debt relief, looks like delivering another fudge. There may be agreement to disburse more bailout loans but without easing repayment terms enough to satisfy the ECB and IMF. That would leave Tsipras high and dry.

[..] Despite some signs of an improvement in industrial output, Greece has been heavily reliant on consumers and a booming tourist sector to keep GDP – which shrank by a quarter in the early years of the crisis – from continuing its slide. While the economy hasn’t been in a recession since 2015, and grew 0.4% at the start of the year, it hasn’t strung together more than two quarters of consecutive expansion in more than a decade. Accountancy firm PWC said in March that infrastructure investment plunged during the crisis, leaving a backlog of planned and in-progress projects amounting to more than 21 billion euros. Near Corinth, that includes rail, waste management, road and marina developments. “With taxation what it is, not only will no-one come to invest here, but they’d need to be mad to,” said Kouinis, the civil engineer. “Growth needs to start from public works, because the private sector has been killed.”

Foreigners buy apartments in Athens to rent out to other foreigners on Airbnb. So wrong in so many ways.

• Foreign Buyers Snap Up Greek Property (K.)

Property buyers from abroad are this year growing at the fastest pace in a decade, as booming Greek tourism has had a positive impact on the property market too. According to the latest data from the Bank of Greece, in the first quarter of the year the inflow of capital from abroad for real estate acquisitions increased by 61.7% on an annual basis. The March figures have signaled a further improvement, since in the first couple of months the yearly rise had come to 56.7%. If the existing growth rate is sustained throughout 2017, it is likely that by the end of the year more than 430 million euros will have been invested the Greek property market from other countries. The equivalent figure for the whole of 2016 had amounted to 270 million euros, up 45.3% on the 2015 inflow of 186 million euros.

The only time a similar growth rate had been recorded before was in the first quarter of 2007, when foreign investors spent 66.5% more money on property acquisitions than a year earlier. Real estate professionals say this uptick in foreign funds entering the local property market is particularly positive because it came during a period when transactions are usually sparse: Expressions of buying interest this year started in the winter months, not in the summer when demand typically peaks. This has bolstered optimism about an even better summer in terms of transactions, which may reach their high for the entire period since the outbreak of the financial crisis.

The major rise in inflows this year is due to the increase in demand for apartments in Athens, primarily in the city center and the southern suburbs. This mainly concerns flats eligible for short-term leasing through Internet platforms such as HomeAway, Airbnb and FlipKey. It also concerns luxury mansions that would fit the bill for the same type of online platforms as well as for the purpose of getting a Golden Visas (for buys of properties worth 250,000 euros or more by investors from outside the European Union). Besides those buyers aiming for the five-year residence permits, considerable buying interest is also coming from Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany and the Scandinavian countries.

It’s a miracle there are not many more victims.

• State Of Emergency Declared On Lesbos As 800 Left Homeless (AP)

Authorities in Greece have declared a state of emergency on the island of Lesvos after an earthquake left one woman dead and more than 800 people displaced. The 6.1 magnitude undersea quake on Monday occurred south of Lesvos but was felt as far as Istanbul, Turkey. Officials from the island’s regional government on Tuesday said homes in 12 villages in southern Lesvos had been seriously damaged or destroyed. The mostly elderly residents affected were being housed with relatives, in hotels or at an army-run shelter. The earthquake marked the second crisis to hit the island in the last two years, after hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees, including many fleeing war in Syria and Iraq, crossed to Lesvos on boats from Turkey as they headed to Europe.

Brussels should be forced to take in 100,000. In their new swanky buildings.

• ‘Impossible And Risky To Take In More Migrants’ – Rome’s Mayor (RT)

Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi has asked the Italian Interior Ministry for stricter measures to be taken toward the influx of foreigners into the capital. A letter outlining the need for a “moratorium” on “the continued influx of foreign citizens” was sent by Raggi to Roman prefect Paola Basilone. “I find it impossible, as well as risky, to think up further accommodation structures,” she wrote in the letter, as quoted by La Repubblica on Tuesday. “This administration, given the high flows of unregistered migrants, hopes the assessments of new facilities take into account the evident migrant pressure on Roma Capitale [the City of Rome] and the possible devastating consequences in terms of social costs as well as for the protection of the beneficiaries themselves.”

In May, Raggi told RT that she was working to help accommodate refugees and asylum seekers in Rome, but also that she also has a responsibility to her constituents and other countries in the EU must do their part. “Let’s put it this way – Rome would be better off if European states didn’t build walls along their borders, but rather followed through on their obligations and respected the migrant quotas agreed upon by the EU,” she told RT’s Sophie Shevardnadze. “According to the law, the city of Rome must accept migrants, as Mayor – I have to follow the law and do everything in my power to make sure that people are granted a safe place to stay here. But if other European countries decide to finally follow through on their obligations, we will welcome that decision.” “As mayor of Rome, I have to accommodate migrants, but I am also responsible for the security of my city and its residents. We cannot ignore either issue.”

Debt Rattle June 13 2017

Jun 132017

June 13, 2017 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:55 am Finance Tagged with: cows, derivatives, Greece, Lesbos, overvalued, profitable, Qatar, QE, seed bank, stocks 1 Response »

Pablo Picasso Les femmes d’Alger Version 0 1955

• The Average Stock Is Enormously, Tremendously Overvalued (Katsenelson)

• 72% Of US Businesses Are Not Profitable (Simon Black)

• UBS Has Some Very Bad News For The Global Economy (ZH)

• Fed To Raise Interest Rates, Give More Detail On Balance Sheet Winddown (R.)

• EU Plans to Force Relocation of Euro Clearing After Brexit (BBG)

• Norway Central Bank Explains How Money Is Created (Norges Bank)

• Qatar Spends $8 Million To Airlift 4,000 Cows (BBG)

• Things To Come (Jim Kunstler)

• Multi-Million Dollar Upgrade Planned To ‘Failsafe’ Arctic Seed Vault (G.)

• EU To Open Case Against Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic Over Refugees (R.)

• ECB Unlikely to Include Greece in QE in Coming Months (BBG)

• Greek Debt Deal ‘Not Far’ Says New French Finance Minister (AFP)

• One Dead As 6.3-Magnitude Earthquake Rocks Greek Islands Lesbos, Chios (AFP)

No markets, no discovery, just smoke.

• The Average Stock Is Enormously, Tremendously Overvalued (Katsenelson)

We are constantly looking for new stocks by running stock screens, endlessly reading (blogs, research, magazines, newspapers), looking at holdings of investors we respect, talking to our large network of professional investors, attending conferences, scouring through ideas published on value investor networks, and finally, looking with frustration at our large (and growing) watch list of companies we’d like to buy at a significant margin of safety. The median stock on our watch list has to decline by about 35–40% to be an attractive buy. But maybe we’re too subjective. Instead of just asking you to take our word for it, in this letter, we’ll show you a few charts that not only demonstrate our point, but also show the magnitude of the stock market’s overvaluation and, more importantly, put it into historical context.

Each chart examines stock market valuation from a slightly differently perspective, but each arrives at the same conclusion: the average stock is overvalued somewhere between tremendously and enormously. If you don’t know whether “enormously” is greater than “tremendously” or vice versa, don’t worry, we don’t know either. But this is our point exactly: When an asset class is significantly overvalued and continues to get overvalued, quantifying its overvaluation brings little value. Let’s demonstrate this point by looking at a few charts. The first chart shows price-to-earnings of the S&P 500 in relation to its historical average. The average stock today is trading at 73% above its historical average valuation. There are only two other times in history that stocks were more expensive than they are today: just before the Great Depression hit and in the 1999 run-up to the dot-com bubble burst.

We know how the history played in both cases—consequently stocks declined, a lot. Based on over a century of history, we are fairly sure that, this time too, stock valuations will at some point mean revert and stock markets will decline. After all, price-to-earnings behaves like a pendulum that swings around the mean, and today that pendulum has swung far above the mean. What we don’t know is how this journey will look in the interim. Before the inevitable decline, will price-to-earnings revisit the pre-Great Depression level of 95% above average, or will it maybe say hello to the pre-dot-com crash level of 164% above average? Or will another injection of QE steroids send stocks valuations to new, never-before-seen highs? Nobody knows. One chart is not enough. Let’s take a look at another one called the Buffett Indicator. Think of this chart as a price-to-sales ratio for the whole economy, that is, the market value of all equities divided by GDP. The higher the price-to-sales ratio, the more expensive stocks are.

What does this say about where the S&P is?

• 72% Of US Businesses Are Not Profitable (Simon Black)

Total Household Wealth is exactly what it sounds like– the total net worth of every person in the United States, from Bill Gates down to the youngest newborn baby. So when you add up all the 330+ million folks in the Land of the Free and tally up their combined net worth, the total is $94 trillion. The thing is that the VAST majority of that wealth, especially the incredible growth over the last 8 years, has been from increases in just two asset classes: real estate and the stock market. In fact, stocks and real estate alone account for roughly 2/3 of the wealth increase since 2009. I’ll come back to that in a moment. Now, simultaneously, we see plenty of other interesting data, also published by the Federal Reserve and US federal government. Both the Fed and Census Bureau, for example, tell us that over 80% of businesses in the US are “nonemployer” companies, i.e. businesses which only employ one person (the owner), and often provide his/her primary source of income.

Yet according to the Federal Reserve, only 35% of these small businesses are profitable. Most are operating at a loss. In other words, only 35% of the companies which make up 80% of American businesses are profitable. You’re probably already doing the arithmetic– this means that a whopping 72% of all US businesses are NOT profitable. That hardly sounds like record wealth to me. Shifting gears, there’s the little factoid that an astounding 40% of young Americans are living with their parents– the highest%age in the last 75 years. And who can blame them considering student debt in the Land of the Free also hit a record $1.4 trillion three months ago, more than double the amount since the Great Recession. Speaking of record debt, US credit card debt passed a record $1 trillion, and total US consumer credit hit a record $3.8 trillion last month. Again, all of this hardly seems like ‘wealth’ to me.

Then there’s the issue of wages, which have remained essentially flat since the 2009 Great Recession if you adjust for inflation. According to the US Department of Labor, inflation-adjusted wages, aka “real hourly compensation” in the US fell an annualized 0.9% last quarter, and fell a dismal 5.6% in the previous quarter. Adjusted for inflation, the average American isn’t making any more money. Once again, this is a pitiful excuse for ‘wealth.’ American businesses aren’t more productive either. The same Labor Department report shows that productivity in the Land of the Free was flat in the first quarter of this year. And productivity actually declined in 2016– something that hasn’t happened in at least the last 50 years. Not to mention total economic growth in the Land of the Free has been pretty pitiful, logging a pathetic 1.6% last year. And GDP growth in the first quarter of 2017 was just 1.2% on an annualized basis. The US economy has exceed hasn’t surpassed 3% growth in more than 10-years.

Oversaturated with debt.

• UBS Has Some Very Bad News For The Global Economy (ZH)

[..] fast forwarding just over three months later, where are we now? To answer that question, overnight UBS released its much anticipated update on the current state of the global credit impulse, and it’s nothing short of a disaster. As Kapteyn writes in what may have been the most eagerly awaited report in recent UBS history, “we have been inundated with questions about the chart below, first published in March. Yes, the global credit impulse is still falling. And yes, it matters because the correlation of this global credit impulse with global domestic demand is 0.61.” But it’s what follows next that should send shivers down the spine of anyone still clutching to the failed “recovery” narrative:

From peak to trough the deceleration in global credit growth is now approaching that during the global financial crisis (-6% of global GDP), even if the dispersion of the decline is much narrower. Currently 55% of the countries in our sample have experienced a -0.3 standard deviation deterioration in their credit impulse (median over 12 months) compared to 77% of countries in Dec ’09 when the median decline was -1.4 stdev.” Here is what the stunning collapse in the credit impulse looks like as of today:

While we urge all readers to get in touch with their friendly UBS sales coverage for the full report, here is a quick primer from UBS on what the current data is telling us, not so much about China where the credit impulse slowdown was discussed previously, but about the world’s biggest economy. From UBS: The credit impulse in the US has also turned down, seemingly on the back of a sharp drop in demand for C&I loans. The slowdown is more visible in the bank loan data than the Flow of Funds data we are using to calculate the credit impulse (the FoF is 3x as broad and includes non-bank credit as well). But the slowdown is nonetheless at odds with confidence being expressed about investment and future borrowing plans.

The US credit impulse was running at 0.7% GDP back in September 2016 and by March had fallen to -0.53% GDP (recovering somewhat in April based on bank loan data). Why does this matter? Because as UBS shows in the chart below, in the US the correlation between activity and the impulse is very strong, and the lack of credit growth could constrain an acceleration in GDP from weak Q1 levels (the credit impulse suggests domestic demand growth should be close to 1% rather than the 2+% which consensus is currently tracking).

Yawn.

• Fed To Raise Interest Rates, Give More Detail On Balance Sheet Winddown (R.)

The U.S. Federal Reserve is widely expected to raise its benchmark interest rate this week due to a tightening labor market and may also provide more detail on its plans to shrink the mammoth bond portfolio it amassed to nurse the economic recovery. The central bank is scheduled to release its decision at 2 p.m EDT on Wednesday at the conclusion of its two-day policy meeting. Fed Chair Janet Yellen is due to hold a press conference at 2:30 pm EDT. “The expectation of a rate hike…is widely held, and has been reinforced by the most recent round of Fed communications,” said Michael Feroli, an economist with J.P. Morgan. Economists polled by Reuters overwhelmingly see the Fed raising its benchmark rate to a target range of 1.00 to 1.25% this week.

The Fed embarked on its first tightening cycle in more than a decade in December 2015. A quarter%age point interest rate rise on Wednesday would be the second nudge upwards this year following a similar move in March. Since then, the unemployment rate has fallen to a 16-year low of 4.3% and economic growth appears to have reaccelerated following a lackluster first quarter. However, other indicators of the economy’s health have been more mixed. The Fed’s preferred measure of underlying inflation has retreated to 1.5% from 1.8% earlier in 2017 and investors are growing increasingly doubtful policymakers will be able to stick to their anticipated pace of tightening of three interest rate rises this year and next.

There’s money in derivatives yet.

• EU Plans to Force Relocation of Euro Clearing After Brexit (BBG)

Firms that clear euro-denominated derivatives may be forced to relocate to the European Union from London after Brexit under EU proposals to be rolled out on Tuesday, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Under the European Commission’s plans for overhauling supervision of clearinghouses that are based outside the bloc, firms deemed systemically important to the EU financial system could be required to accept direct oversight by the bloc’s authorities, the person said, asking not to be named because the proposals aren’t yet public. Firms could also be forced to move their euro clearing operations to a location inside the EU, the person said.

This so-called location requirement has spurred warnings from the industry of skyrocketing costs, and has helped to turn clearing into a political football as the EU and U.K. prepare for divorce negotiations. In a June 8 letter to Valdis Dombrovskis, the EU’s financial-services policy chief, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association said a survey of data from 11 banks showed that requiring euro-denominated interest-rate derivatives to be cleared by an EU-based clearinghouse would boost initial margin by as much as 20%. The proposals to be published on Tuesday are largely in line with initial plans floated last month by the commission, the EU’s executive arm.

Central banks and shunned economists seem to be the only ones who understand this.

• Norway Central Bank Explains How Money Is Created (Norges Bank)

Today, there are two forms of central bank money. One of the forms is common knowledge – banknotes and coins. The other, bank reserves at Norges Bank, is less well known. The sum total of banknotes and coins and bank reserves at Norges Bank is about NOK 85 billion.[5] But the total money supply is much larger than this. Customer deposits in banks are also money. These deposits, referred to as deposit money, total more than NOK 2 trillion in Norway. This money is created by banks, not by Norges Bank. Chart 1 shows the money supply and the supply of banknotes and coins in Norway since 1960. In Norway, the money supply mainly comprises deposit money in banks.[6] In the early 1960s, banknotes and coins accounted for a fifth of the money supply. Current accounts and cheques were already becoming commonplace.

Since then, banks’ deposit money has increased dramatically, and today, banknotes and coins make up less than 2.5% of the money supply. In other words, virtually all the money we use has been created by banks. So how do banks create money? The answer to that question comes as quite a surprise to most people. When you borrow from a bank, the bank credits your bank account. The deposit – the money – is created by the bank the moment it issues the loan. The bank does not transfer the money from someone else’s bank account or from a vault full of money. The money lent to you by the bank has been created by the bank itself – out of nothing: fiat – let it become. The money created by the bank does not disappear when it leaves your account. If you use it to make a payment, it is just transferred to the recipient’s account.

The money is only removed from circulation when someone uses their deposits to repay a bank, as when we make a loan repayment.[7] The money supply is therefore only reduced when banks’ claims on the rest of the economy decrease. Banks also fund lending by raising loans themselves instead of creating money in the form of deposits. In order to reduce risk, banks also use other forms of investment in addition to lending.[8] Nevertheless, the money supply is growing at almost at the same pace as total bank credit. To sum up: banks create money out of nothing and withdraw it when loans are repaid. Growth in total bank credit is normally matched by growth in the money supply.[9] This does not sound encouraging. Is money an illusion? Why is today’s privately issued deposit money often perceived to be as safe as money issued by the central bank?

Flying pigs would have been even nicer.

• Qatar Spends $8 Million To Airlift 4,000 Cows (BBG)

Call it the biggest bovine airlift in history. The showdown between Qatar and its neighbors has disrupted trade, split families and threatened to alter long-standing geopolitical alliances. It’s also prompted one Qatari businessman to fly 4,000 cows to the Gulf desert in an act of resistance and opportunity to fill the void left by a collapse in the supply of fresh milk. It will take as many as 60 flights for Qatar Airways to deliver the 590-kilogram beasts that Moutaz Al Khayyat, chairman of Power International Holding, bought in Australia and the U.S. “This is the time to work for Qatar,” he said. Led by Saudi Arabia, Qatar stands accused of supporting Islamic militants, charges the sheikhdom has repeatedly denied.

The isolation that started on June 5 has forced the world’s richest country by capita to open new trade routes to import food, building materials and equipment for its natural gas industry. The central bank said domestic and international transactions were running normally. Turkish dairy goods have been flown in, and Iranian fruit and vegetables are on the way. There’s also a campaign to buy home-grown produce. Signs with colors of the Qatari flag have been placed next to dairy products in stores. One sign dangling from the ceiling said: “Together for the support of local products.” “It’s a message of defiance, that we don’t need others,” said Umm Issa, 40, a government employee perusing the shelves of a supermarket before taking a carton of Turkish milk to try. “Our government has made sure we have no shortages and we are grateful for that. We have no fear. No one will die of hunger.”

“..they had no idea what to do about it, except maybe try to escape the moment-by-moment pain of their ruined lives with powerful drugs. And then, a champion presented himself..”

• Things To Come (Jim Kunstler)

As our politicos creep deeper into a legalistic wilderness hunting for phantoms of Russian collusion, nobody pays attention to the most dangerous force in American life: the unraveling financialization of the economy. Financialization is what happens when the people-in-charge “create” colossal sums of “money” out of nothing — by issuing loans, a.k.a. debt — and then cream off stupendous profits from the asset bubbles, interest rate arbitrages, and other opportunities for swindling that the artificial wealth presents. It was a kind of magic trick that produced monuments of concentrated personal wealth for a few and left the rest of the population drowning in obligations from a stolen future. The future is now upon us. Financialization expressed itself in other interesting ways, for instance the amazing renovation of New York City (Brooklyn especially).

It didn’t happen just because Generation X was repulsed by the boring suburbs it grew up in and longed for a life of artisanal cocktails. It happened because financialization concentrated immense wealth geographically in the very few places where its activities took place — not just New York but San Francisco, Washington, and Boston — and could support luxuries like craft food and brews. Quite a bit of that wealth was extracted from asset-stripping the rest of America where financialization was absent, kind of a national distress sale of the fly-over places and the people in them. That dynamic, of course, produced the phenomenon of President Donald Trump, the distilled essence of all the economic distress “out there” and the rage it entailed.

The people of Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin were left holding a big bag of nothing and they certainly noticed what had been done to them, though they had no idea what to do about it, except maybe try to escape the moment-by-moment pain of their ruined lives with powerful drugs. And then, a champion presented himself, and promised to bring back the dimly remembered wonder years of post-war well-being — even though the world had changed utterly — and the poor suckers fell for it. Not to mention the fact that his opponent — the avaricious Hillary, with her hundreds of millions in ill-gotten wealth — was a very avatar of the financialization that had turned their lives to shit. And then the woman called them “a basket of deplorables” for noticing what had happened to them.

The permafrost is not all that perma.

• Multi-Million Dollar Upgrade Planned To ‘Failsafe’ Arctic Seed Vault (G.)

The Global Seed Vault, built in the Arctic as an impregnable deep freeze for the world’s most precious food seeds, is to undergo a multi-million dollar upgrade after water from melting permafrost flooded its access tunnel. No seeds were damaged but the incident undermined the original belief that the vault would be a “failsafe” facility, securing the world’s food supply forever. Now the Norwegian government, which owns the vault, has committed $4.4m (NOK37m) to improvements. The vault is buried 130m inside a mountain in the Svalbard archipelago and contains almost a million packets of seeds, each a variety of an important food crop. The vault was opened in 2008, sunk deep into the permafrost, and was expected to provide protection against “the challenge of natural or man-made disasters” and “to stand the test of time”.

But the vault’s planners had not anticipated the extreme warm weather seen recently at the end of the world’s hottest ever recorded year. “The background to the technical improvements is that the permafrost has not established itself as planned,” said a government statement. “A group will investigate potential solutions to counter the increased water volumes resulting from a wetter and warmer climate on Svalbard.” One option could be to replace the access tunnel, which slopes down towards the vault’s main door, carrying water towards the seeds. A new upward sloping tunnel would take water away from the vault.

A former Svalbard coal miner, Arne Kristoffersen, told the Guardian most coal mines on the islands had upward sloping entrance tunnels: “For me it is obvious to build an entrance tunnel upwards, so the water can run out. I am really surprised they made such a stupid construction.” Hege Njaa Aschim, the Norwegian government’s spokeswoman for the vault, said: “The construction was planned like that because it was practical as a way to go inside and it should not be a problem because of the permafrost keeping it safe. But we see now, when the permafrost is not established, maybe we should do something else with the tunnel, so that is why we have this project now.”

Hollow threats.

• EU To Open Case Against Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic Over Refugees (R.)

The European Union’s executive will decide on Tuesday to open legal cases against three eastern members for failing to take in asylum-seekers to relieve states on the front lines of the bloc’s migration crisis, sources said. The European Commission would agree at a regular meeting to send so-called letters of formal notice to Poland and Hungary, three diplomats and EU officials told Reuters. Two others said the Czech Republic was also on the list. This would mark a sharp escalation of the internal EU disputes over migration. Such letters are the first step in the so-called infringement procedures the Commission can open against EU states for failing to meet their legal obligations. The eastern allies Poland and Hungary have vowed not to budge. Their staunch opposition to accepting asylum-seekers, and criticism of Brussels for trying to enforce the scheme, are popular among their nationalist-minded, eurosceptic voters.

Speaking in Hungary’s parliament earlier on Monday, Prime Minister Viktor Orban said: “We will not give in to blackmail from Brussels and we reject the mandatory relocation quota.” A spokeswoman in Brussels did not confirm or deny the executive would go ahead with the legal cases, but referred to an interview that Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker gave to the German weekly Der Spiegel last week. “Those that do not take part have to assume that they will be faced with infringement procedures,” he was quoted as saying. Poland and Hungary have refused to take in a single person under a plan agreed in 2015 to relocate 160,000 asylum-seekers from Italy and Greece, which had been overwhelmed by mass influx of people from the Middle East and Africa. Poland’s Interior Minister Mariusz Blaszczak was quoted as saying on Monday by the state news agency PAP: “We believe that the relocation methods attract more waves of immigration to Europe, they are ineffective.”

Not going to happen, it would solve many of Greece’s problems, and Germany is not done with it yet.

• ECB Unlikely to Include Greece in QE in Coming Months (BBG)

The ECB is unlikely to include Greek bonds in its asset-purchase program for the foreseeable future, a person familiar with the matter said, as European creditors aren’t prepared to offer substantially easier repayment terms on bailout loans to improve the nation’s debt outlook. Euro-area finance ministers will meet in Luxembourg on June 15 to discuss debt-relief measures that the ECB has said are needed before it will consider purchasing Greek bonds. The so-called Eurogroup is expected to complete a review of Athens’s rescue program that would allow for the disbursement of at least €7.4 billion in aid needed for a similar amount of bond repayments in July. An agreement among the ministers will likely allow the IMF – whose participation in the rescue program is a requirement for many nations – to commit in principle to a conditional loan, said the person.

But the extent and wording of debt-relief commitments probably won’t convince the Governing Council of the ECB to buy Greek bonds. And while the government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is relying on quantitative easing to aid Greece’s return to the public debt market, the ECB won’t factor fiscal consequences into its policy-making decisions and excessive emphasis on QE inclusion would be misguided, according to the person. [..] The ECB’s quantitative easing is scheduled to continue until December 2017, with economists saying purchases will be gradually tapered throughout 2018. This would leave little time for purchases of Greek bonds before the program’s end.

Meanwhile, France, which is trying to bridge differences on the debt issue, has proposed automatically reducing loan repayments when Greece misses growth targets, according to two people with knowledge of the talks. European officials see the proposal as a step in the right direction but doubt it will be enough to convince the ECB to include Greece in its bond purchase program if the IMF maintains its position that the country’s debt is unsustainable. Other euro-area member states so far have opposed France’s proposal, the people said.

Is Macron going to stand up to Merkel and Schäuble? I’m not convinced.

• Greek Debt Deal ‘Not Far’ Says New French Finance Minister (AFP)

A deal on debt relief for Greece is “not far,” France’s new finance minister Bruno Le Maire said Monday ahead of crunch eurozone talks on the issue on Thursday. “I am optimistic that we will have a good solution. We are not far from agreement,” Le Maire said ahead of a meeting with Greek PM Alexis Tsipras. “We are really doing our best to find an agreement,” he had said earlier after seeing his Greek counterpart Euclid Tsakalotos. “It’s difficult. It’s complicated,” he said. At the June 15 meeting, Le Maire said he planned to propose a “mechanism” of “flexibility” to lessen Greek debt repayment based on its economic growth. “It’s a mechanism which should allow us to revise certain (debt) parameters based on Greek growth,” he told reporters.

The issue of debt relief for Greece has sharply divided its international creditors, the EU and the IMF, for months in the latest round of talks. The impasse has held up a tranche of bailout cash which Greece needs to repay loans in July, and Athens says its fragile recovery has also been impaired. Tsipras has said he will ask EU leaders to resolve the issue at the end of June if no solution is forthcoming on Thursday. “Piling drama on the problem helps no one,” he said on Monday. The Europeans expect Greece’s economy to grow strongly and its government to bring in large surpluses in revenue in the coming years, allowing it to pay down its debts. But the IMF is less optimistic, arguing there must be further relief for Athens before it can label its debt sustainable and justify loaning Greece any more cash.

New French President Emmanuel Macron last month called Tsipras after his election, saying he was in favour of “finding a deal soon to alleviate the weight of Greece’s debt over time.” Macron’s position puts him at odds with Germany where Greek debt relief – following three different bailouts with public money for the country since 2010 – is seen as a vote loser ahead of general elections in September. Macron explained his thinking about Greece in an interview to the Mediapart website two days before his election. “I am in principle in favour of a concerted restructuring of Greek debt and in keeping Greece in the eurozone. Why? Because the current system is unsustainable,” he said.

Wonder what the older, religious people on Lesbos must be thinking by now. It once was a quiet place.

• One Dead As 6.3-Magnitude Earthquake Rocks Greek Islands Lesbos, Chios (AFP)

A woman died and 10 people were hurt on Monday when a 6.3-magnitude earthquake struck the Greek islands of Lesbos and Chios and the Aegean coast of western Turkey, officials said. The middle-aged victim had been trapped for around seven hours in the ruins of her home in the Lesbos village of Vrisa, the area that bore the brunt of the strong quake and where several homes collapsed. “Our fellow citizen who was trapped in the house that collapsed in Vrisa was pulled out dead,” Lesbos mayor Spyros Galinos said in a tweet. The earthquake also struck the Aegean coast of western Turkey after 1200 GMT.

Video footage shot by a Vrisa resident on a cellphone showed masonry from several single and two-level homes clogging the streets. “It’s a difficult situation, we are facing a disaster,” Christiana Kalogirou, governor of the north Aegean region, told Greek state TV station ERT, adding: “Some 10 people are injured.” “The army is bringing in tents so people can spend the night,” she said, adding that the south of Lesbos had taken the brunt of the quake. The tremor, felt as far as Athens and Izmir in Turkey, damaged at least three churches and shops in south Lesbos, local owners said, while rock slides blocked some roads.

Debt Rattle January 29 2017

Jan 292017

January 29, 2017 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 11:10 am Finance Tagged with: abuse, ban, Canada, centralization, decline, Greece, Lesbos, malevolence, populist, refugees, Trump 2 Responses »

Michael Andrews A Shadow 1974

• Donald Trump’s Cruel Ban On Refugees Sets A Chilling Precedent (Robert Fisk)

• Judges Block Parts of Trump’s Order on Muslim Nation Immigration (BBG)

• Malevolence Tempered by Incompetence (Wittes)

• Trump’s Muslim Ban Triggers Chaos, Heartbreak, And Resistance (IC)

• Science Can Decode the Laws of History and Predict US Political Violence (PT)

• UK Agrees £100m Fighter Jet Deal With Turkey Despite Human Rights Abuse (Ind.)

• Canada’s Justin Trudeau Takes A Stand On US Refugee Ban (BBC)

• Centralization and the Decline of Europe (IL)

• Muslims Make A Pitch For Populist Vote As Dutch Politics Turns Sharp Right (G.)

• How Great the Fall Can Be (Greer)

• This Could Be Greece’s Last Chance To Save Itself (CNBC)

• Greece’s Best-Selling Daily To Cease Publication Due To Debts (AFP)

• Second Man Dies At Lesbos Refugee Camp Within Days (Kath.)

Strong from Fisk: “It’s OK to use pilotless planes to assault men and women in other countries. It’s OK if your allies steal land from others for their own people, if you support Arab dictatorships that emasculate and execute and rape their prisoners, as long as they are “allies” of the USA.”

But do note: none of these things have occurred under Trump. So where were you when Obama became the Drone King? When Hillary said We Came We Saw He Died? Do you feel those things are less important or less cruel than what happened yesterday in US airports? Now is the time to speak.

• Donald Trump’s Cruel Ban On Refugees Sets A Chilling Precedent (Robert Fisk)

So Donald Trump is going to f**k them all. No excuses for such filthy words today. I’m only quoting the man whose Pentagon offices he just used to disgrace himself – and America. For it was Secretary of Defence James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis who told Iraqis in 2003 that he came “in peace’ – he even urged his Marines to be compassionate – but said of those who might dare to resist America’s illegal invasion of their country: “If you f**k with me, I’ll kill you all.” There’s no getting round it. Call it Nazi, Fascist, racist, vicious, illiberal, immoral, cruel. More dangerously, what Trump has done is a wicked precedent. If you can stop them coming, you can chuck them out. If you can demand “extreme vetting” of Muslims from seven countries, you can also demand a “values test” for those Muslims who have already made it to the USA.

Those on visas. Those with residency only. Those – if they are American citizens – with dual citizenship. Or full US citizens of Muslim origin. Or just Americans who are Muslims. Or Hispanics. Or Jews? Refugees one day. Citizens the next. Then refugees again. No, of course, Trump would never visit such obscene tests on Jewish immigrants – for they would be obscene, would they not? – and nor will he stop Christians from Muslim countries. America has always condemned sectarian states, but now Trump declares that he approves of sectarianism. Minorities will be welcome – the Alawites of Syria, to whom Bashar al-Assad belongs, will presumably not count, and I guess we can expect all US embassies to have three queues for visa applicants. One for Muslims, one for Christians, and a third marked ‘Other’. That’s where most of us will be standing in line. And by doing so, we will automatically give approval to this iniquitous system – and to Trump.

There’s no point in wasting time over the obvious: that America has bombed, directly or indirectly, five of the seven nations on Trump’s banned list. Sudan just escapes, but the US blew a packed Iranian passenger airliner out of the sky in 1988 and has raised no objections to Israel’s bombing of Iranian personnel in Syria. So that makes six. There’s nothing to be gained by reiterating that the four countries whose citizens participated in the international crimes against humanity of 9/11 – Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Emirates and Lebanon – do not feature on the list. For the Saudis must be loved, cosseted, fawned over, approved, even when they chop off heads and when their citizens funnel cash to the murderers of Isis. Egypt is ruled by Trump’s “fantastic guy” anti-‘terrorist’ president al-Sisi. The glisteningly wealthy Emirates won’t be touched. Nor will Lebanon, although its tens of thousands of dual-national Syrians may have a tough time in the future.

But no, this vile piece of legislation is not aimed at nations. It’s targeting refugees, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The Muslim ones, that is, not the Christians. How can they ever withstand a “values test”? And what are America’s “values” anyway? It’s OK to attack sovereign states. It’s OK to use pilotless planes to assault men and women in other countries. It’s OK if your allies steal land from others for their own people, if you support Arab dictatorships that emasculate and execute and rape their prisoners, as long as they are “allies” of the USA. It’s OK to fast-track Saudi visas – as the Brits have been doing for years – even if they are members of the most inspirational Wahhabi cult in the world: membership includes the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Isis, you name it.

There’s even no value in touting our own participation in this charade. Having just patted the killer governments of the Gulf on the head – and heading off to do the same to Turkey’s autocrat-in-chief – our poodlet prime minister, fresh out of Washington, hasn’t uttered a word about Trump’s wickedness. Wasn’t it Britain – and America, for heaven’s sake – that was weeping copious tears, buckets of the stuff, for the 250,000 (or 90,000) Muslim refugees of eastern Aleppo a couple of months ago? And now, so much do we care for them, that they are being well and truly f****d.

More of this please.

• Judges Block Parts of Trump’s Order on Muslim Nation Immigration (BBG)

Two judges temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from enforcing parts of his order to halt immigration from seven Middle Eastern countries, after a day in which students, refugees and dual citizens were stuck overseas or detained and some businesses warned employees from those countries not to risk leaving the U.S. A nationwide ruling in Brooklyn, New York, barring refugees and visa holders already legally in the U.S. from being turned back came hours after the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups sued to halt the Jan 27 order. A separate order in Alexandria, Virginia, forbid the government from removing about 60 legal permanent residents of the U.S. who were being detained at Dulles International Airport.

Neither ruling strikes down the executive order, which will now be subject to court hearings. White House officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment late Saturday night. There were wrenching scenes – and angry protests – at major airports across the country before the court orders were issued. At Los Angeles International Airport, a lawyer reported that an 80-year-old insulin-dependent visitor was being held by officials and had no contact with her worried family. Shane Moss, a 38-year-old from Missouri, was returning from Thailand with his girlfriend, a dietician and joint Canadian-Iranian citizen with a valid work visa, when they were forced to separate. Hours later, he had not heard from her. “They won’t tell me anything,” Moss said. “I’m worn out. I’ve been up for 20-something hours and we’ve still got to get home to Kansas City.”

[..] The executive order, issued on Friday, bars citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, from entering the U.S. for the next three months in an effort to stop terrorists and gain hold of the immigration system. White House officials told reporters, before the court orders were issued, that green card holders from those countries who found themselves abroad and trying to come back would be evaluated case by case. Last year there were nearly 32,000 immigrant visas issued in the U.S. to the seven affected countries. The order also halts refugee resettlement to the U.S. for 120 days, and orders that refugee admissions for 2017 be cut to 50,000 from the planned limit of 110,000.

This is from what I would call a decidedly right wing lawyer (though he also says he’s ‘pro-refugees’). “I believe in strong counterterrorism powers. I defend non-criminal detention. I’ve got no problem with drone strikes. I’m positively enthusiastic about American surveillance policies. I was much less offended than others were by the CIA’s interrogations in the years after September 11.” But who says: “It will cause hardship and misery for tens or hundreds of thousands of people because that is precisely what it is intended to do.”

• Malevolence Tempered by Incompetence (Wittes)

Put simply, I don’t believe that the stated purpose is the real purpose. This is the first policy the United States has adopted in the post-9/11 era about which I have ever said this. It’s a grave charge, I know, and I’m not making it lightly. But in the rational pursuit of security objectives, you don’t marginalize your expert security agencies and fail to vet your ideas through a normal interagency process. You don’t target the wrong people in nutty ways when you’re rationally pursuing real security objectives. When do you do these things? You do these things when you’re elevating the symbolic politics of bashing Islam over any actual security interest. You do them when you’ve made a deliberate decision to burden human lives to make a public point. In other words, this is not a document that will cause hardship and misery because of regrettable incidental impacts on people injured in the pursuit of a public good. It will cause hardship and misery for tens or hundreds of thousands of people because that is precisely what it is intended to do.

[..] I think we can, without drawing any kind of equivalence between this order and Jim Crow, make a similar point here: Is this document a reasonable security measure? There are many areas in which security policy affects innocent lives but within which we do not presumptively say that the fact that some group of people faces disproportionate burdens renders that policy illegitimate. But if an entire religious grouping finds itself irrationally excluded from the country for no discernible security benefit following a lengthy campaign that overtly promised precisely such discrimination and exactly this sort of exclusion, if the relevant security agencies are excluded from the policy process, and if the question is then solemnly propounded whether the reasonable pursuit of security is the purpose, I think we ought to exercise one of the sovereign prerogatives of philosophers—that of laughter.

So yes, the order is malevolent. But here’s the thing: Many of these malevolent objectives were certainly achievable within the president’s lawful authority. The president’s power over refugee admissions is vast. His power to restrict visa issuances and entry of aliens to the United States is almost as wide. If the National Security Council had run a process of minimal competence, it could certainly have done a lot of stuff that folks like me, who care about refugees, would have gnashed our teeth over but which would have been solidly within the President’s authority. It could have all been implemented in a fashion that didn’t create endless litigation opportunities and didn’t cause enormous diplomatic friction. How incompetent is this order? An immigration lawyer who works for the federal government wrote me today describing the quality of the work as “look[ing] like what an intern came up with over a lunch hour. . . . My take is that it is so poorly written that it’s hard to tell the impact.”

I would wax triumphant about the mitigating effect of incompetence on this document, but alas, I can’t do it. The president’s powers in this area are vast, as I say, and while the incompetence is likely to buy the administration a world of hurt in court and in diplomacy in the short term, this order is still going take more than a few pounds of flesh out of a lot of innocent people. Moreover, it’s a very dangerous thing to have a White House that can’t with the remotest pretense of competence and governance put together a major policy document on a crucial set of national security issues without inducing an avalanche of litigation and wide diplomatic fallout. If the incompetence mitigates the malevolence in this case, that’ll be a blessing. But given the nature of the federal immigration powers, the mitigation may be small and the blessing short-lived; the implications of having an executive this inept are not small and won’t be short-lived.

It started at least a week ago.

• Trump’s Muslim Ban Triggers Chaos, Heartbreak, And Resistance (IC)

Following an executive order signed late Friday, President Donald Trump on Saturday launched a sweeping attack on the travel rights of individuals from more than a half dozen Muslim majority countries, turning away travelers at multiple U.S. airports and leaving others stranded without answers — and without hope — across the world. Trump’s order triggered waves of outrage and condemnation at home and abroad, prompting thousands of protesters to flood several American airports and ultimately culminating in a stay issued by a federal district judge in New York City on the deportation of people who were being detained by immigration officials. Similar stays were issued by judges in Washington, Massachusetts, and Virginia.

The administration’s assault on civil liberties explicitly targeted the world’s most vulnerable populations – refugees and asylum seekers fleeing devastating wars – as well as young people with student visas pursuing an education in the United States, green card holders with deep roots in the country, and a number of citizens of countries not included in the ban. It also impacted American children traveling with, or waiting to meet, their non-citizen parents. With an estimated 500,000 people in the crosshairs, Trump’s order was carried out swiftly and sowed confusion among the nation’s immigration and homeland security agencies – which were excluded from the drafting process and were scrambling to understand how to implement it, according to media reports and two government officials who spoke to The Intercept.

Days before the executive order was signed, reports began to emerge that valid visa holders were suddenly being prevented from reentering the country after taking trips abroad. A senior U.S. immigration official, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, confirmed to The Intercept that the rash of unusual student visa revocations began roughly a week before the official order was signed. Many of the stories the official heard about were anecdotal. Others, however, the official was able to review via internal Department of Homeland Security monitoring systems. While visas are revoked every day with little explanation afforded to those affected, the backgrounds of the individuals in these cases raised no red flags, the official said.

On the contrary, the impacted individuals whose files the official reviewed included a young mother of a U.S. citizen child, and students at some of the nation’s top universities publicly recognized for their outstanding achievement. These students had already undergone rigorous U.S. government vetting before being admitted to the country, and had only traveled abroad briefly over their winter break. The Intercept has independently verified two of these stories by speaking to those denied entry, who asked that their names not be used because they are attempting to appeal the decisions.

Interesting notion: “elite overproduction”.

• Science Can Decode the Laws of History and Predict US Political Violence (PT)

Consider the “structural-demographic theory” that was first proposed by the sociologist Jack Goldstone and subsequently developed and tested with data by others, including myself. The theory explains major outbreaks of political violence, such as the French Revolution or American Civil War, by focusing on several interrelated processes. One is the falling or stagnating living standards of the general population. But contrary to the widely held view, popular discontent by itself is not a sufficient cause of a civil war or a revolution. A more important factor is what has been called “elite overproduction” – that is, the appearance of too many elite candidates vying for a limited supply of power positions within the government and the economy. As written about in my book War and Peace and War, elite overproduction results in intense intra-elite competition, polarisation, and conflict that ultimately takes violent forms.

[..] The structural-demographic theory has been tested by several investigators on many historical societies. The theory predicts very long-term cycles in which periods when societies are internally at peace are succeeded by waves of unrest. Both of these “integrative” and “disintegrative” phases are about a century long. The theory focuses entirely on the dynamics of political instability within states as external wars have a logic of their own (in fact, it is typically societies which are in their integrative phases that prosecute successful wars of external conquest). Our empirical investigations of a variety of historical societies confirm that they go through structural-demographic cycles. But on top of the long cycles are often superimposed shorter oscillations with periods of roughly 50 years.

It appears that people eventually tire of incessant fighting, so during the disintegrative phases human generations experiencing a lot of fighting tend to alternate with relatively peaceful ones. Recently the Journal of Peace Research published my article in which I tested the predictions of the theory on American data. Constructing and analysing a database on US political violence (between 1780 and 2010), I found that the dynamics of violent incidences were just as predicted by the theory: a long structural-demographic cycle with a 50-year cycle superimposed on it:

This is really the worst news of all. Money, and the military-industrial complex, still rule supreme. Nothing at all will improve until we root it out.

• UK Agrees £100m Fighter Jet Deal With Turkey Despite Human Rights Abuse (Ind.)

The UK has signed a £100m deal to design new fighter jets for Turkey, despite the country’s President undertaking a severe crackdown on his regime’s opponents. Theresa May said it could open the way to billions of pounds worth of business, as she became the first foreign leader to visit Turkey since Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered a wave of arrests and sackings in the wake of last summer’s coup. Questioned over human rights concerns, Downing Street officials said the deal to design the TF-X jets was sealed in light of Turkey’s status as a Nato ally and claimed Ms May could approach human rights as a “separate” issue. The PM did warn the President it was “important” for him to uphold human rights, as the stony faced Turkish leader looked on.

The UK is already mired in controversy regarding some £3bn worth of licences granted to export arms to Saudi Arabia as the Kingdom embarked on a deadly bombing campaign in Yemen. The announcement in Ankara yesterday means BAE Systems and Turkish Aerospace Industries have signed a “heads of agreement”, establishing a partnership for the development of the Turkish Fighter Programme or TF-X. Downing Street sources said the £100m contract has the potential to facilitate multibillion pound contracts between the UK and Turkish firms over the project’s 20-year lifetime. Ms May added: “It marks the start of a new and deeper trading relationship with Turkey and will potentially secure British and Turkish jobs and prosperity for decades to come.”

How will Justin avoid a major battle with Washington? Build a wall?

• Canada’s Justin Trudeau Takes A Stand On US Refugee Ban (BBC)

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has taken a stand on social media against the temporary US ban on refugees and immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries Mr Trudeau underscored his government’s commitment to bringing in “those fleeing persecution, terror & war”. The US Department of Homeland Security said the entry ban would also apply to dual nationals of the seven countries. However, Mr Trudeau’s office says Canadian dual nationals are exempt. “We have been assured that Canadian citizens travelling on Canadian passports will be dealt with in the usual process,” a spokeswoman for Mr Trudeau said in an emailed statement.

US President Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser Mike Flynn “confirmed that holders of Canadian passports, including dual citizens, will not be affected by the ban,” the statement said. Canada’s Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen is a dual national who arrived as a Somali refugee. Within hours, Mr Trudeau’s tweets had been shared more than 150,000 times. “Welcome to Canada” also became a trending term in the country. Mr Trudeau, who gained global attention for granting entry to nearly 40,000 Syrian refugees to Canada over the past 13 months, also sent a pointed tweet that showed him greeting a young refugee at a Canadian airport in 2015.

Growth, centralization and decline. I’ve made the connection many times.

• Centralization and the Decline of Europe (IL)

The famous French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand supposedly said that a weakness of the Bourbon monarchs was that they learned nothing and forgot nothing. If so, the genetic descendants of the Bourbons are now in charge of Europe. But before explaining why, let’s first establish that Europe is in trouble [..] because of statism and demographic change. What’s far more noteworthy, though, is that even the Europeans are waking up to the fact that the continent faces a very grim future. For instance, the bureaucrats in Brussels are pessimistic, as reported by the EU Observer. “…the report warns of a longer term risk for the EU economy. “As expectations of low growth ahead affect investment today, there is potential for a vicious circle,” the commission’s director general for economic and financial affairs writes in the report’s foreword. “In short, the projected pace of GDP growth may not be sufficient to prevent the cyclical impact of the crisis from becoming permanent (hysteresis), ” Marco Buti writes.”

The people of Europe share that grim assessment. Pew has some very sobering data on angst across the continent. Support for European economic integration – the 1957 raison d’etre for creating the European Economic Community, the EU’s predecessor – is down over last year in five of the eight EU countries surveyed by the Pew Research Center in 2013. Positive views of the European Union are at or near their low point in most EU nations, even among the young, the hope for the EU’s future. The favorability of the EU has fallen from a median of 60% in 2012 to 45% in 2013.

Establishment-oriented voices in the United States also agree that the outlook is rather dismal. Writing in the Washington Post, Sebastian Mallaby offers a grim assessment of Europe’s future. “…since 2008…, the 28 countries in the European Union managed combined growth of just 4%. And in the subset consisting of the eurozone minus Germany, output actually fell. …most of the Mediterranean periphery has suffered a lost decade. …The unemployment rate in the euro area stands at 9.8%, more than double the U.S. rate. Unemployment among Europe’s youth is even more appalling: In Greece, Spain, France, Croatia, Italy, Cyprus and Portugal, more than 1 in 4 workers under 25 are jobless.” The bottom line is that there’s widespread consensus that Europe is a mess and that things will probably get worse unless there are big changes.

But the key question, as always, is whether the changes are positive or negative. And this is why I started with a reference to the Bourbon kings. European leaders today also are infamous for learning nothing and forgetting nothing. [..] As Nassim Nicholas Taleb has sagely observed, it is centralization and harmonization that creates systemic risk. And all this talk about “common resources” and “public risk sharing” is simply the governmental version of co-signing a loan for the deadbeat family alcoholic. Yet Europe’s ideologues can’t resist their lemming-like march in the wrong direction. What makes this especially odd is that there is so much evidence that Europe originally became rich for the opposite reason.

Elections in (7?) weeks and everyone turns right. Pragmatism, politicians call it.

• Muslims Make A Pitch For Populist Vote As Dutch Politics Turns Sharp Right (G.)

Nourdin el Ouali has grown used to far-right attacks on Dutch Muslims, and to dog-whistle politics. But when the country’s prime minister wrote an open letter last week, in effect demanding that minorities integrate or “go away”, he was still shocked. Mark Rutte’s letter comes less than two months before a national election, and after months of watching populist Geert Wilders rising into the top position in national polls. If the election were held tomorrow his far-right party would probably be the largest in parliament. The letter did not directly mention Muslims, and began instead by attacking people who drop litter or spit on buses. However, in his warning of “something wrong” in Dutch society, the message was clear.

Rutte’s naked bid to woo far-right voters for the 15 March election prompted scathing criticism across mainstream society, and worry among Dutch Muslims, who have already endured a sharp rise in hate crime and say they face regular discrimination in daily life. “It concerns me a lot, because it’s the prime minister who wrote the letter,” says Ouali, a Rotterdam native, founder and city councillor for the progressive Nida party. “You would expect a different role from someone in this position, to rise above it all, bring people together – not writing this kind of letter where he really in a sneaky way talks about Dutch identity, implying there are groups [of Dutch citizens] that are a threat to the Dutch way of life.”

“..those of my readers who have worked themselves up to the screaming point about the comparatively mild events we’ve seen so far may want to save some of their breath for the times ahead when it’s going to get much, much worse.

• How Great the Fall Can Be (Greer)

What kinds of meltdowns are we going to get when internet service or modern health care get priced out of reach, or become unavailable at any price? How are they going to cope if the accelerating crisis of legitimacy in this country causes the federal government to implode, the way the government of the Soviet Union did, and suddenly they’re living under cobbled-together regional governments that don’t have the money to pay for basic services? What sort of reaction are we going to see if the US blunders into a sustained domestic insurgency—suicide bombs going off in public places, firefights between insurgent forces and government troops, death squads from both sides rounding up potential opponents and leaving them in unmarked mass graves—or, heaven help us, all-out civil war?

This is what the decline and fall of a civilization looks like. It’s not about sitting in a cozy earth-sheltered home under a roof loaded with solar panels, living some close approximation of a modern industrial lifestyle, while the rest of the world slides meekly down the chute toward history’s compost bin, leaving you and yours untouched. It’s about political chaos—meaning that you won’t get the leaders you want, and you may not be able to count on the rule of law or even the most basic civil liberties. It’s about economic implosion—meaning that your salary will probably go away, your savings almost certainly won’t keep its value, and if you have gold bars hidden in your home, you’d better hope to Hannah that nobody ever finds out, or it’ll be a race between the local government and the local bandits to see which one gets to tie your family up and torture them to death, starting with the children, until somebody breaks and tells them where your stash is located.

It’s about environmental chaos—meaning that you and the people you care about may have many hungry days ahead as crazy weather messes with the harvests, and it’s by no means certain you won’t die early from some tropical microbe that’s been jarred loose from its native habitat to find a new and tasty home in you. It’s about rapid demographic contraction—meaning that you get to have the experience a lot of people in the Rust Belt have already, of walking past one abandoned house after another and remembering the people who used to live there, until they didn’t any more. More than anything else, it’s about loss. Things that you value—things you think of as important, meaningful, even necessary—are going to go away forever in the years immediately ahead of us, and there will be nothing you can do about it.

It really is as simple as that. People who live in an age of decline and fall can’t afford to cultivate a sense of entitlement. Unfortunately, [..] the notion that the universe is somehow obliged to give people what they think they deserve is very deeply engrained in American popular culture these days. That’s a very unwise notion to believe right now, and as we slide further down the slope, it could very readily become fatal—and no, by the way, I don’t mean that last adjective in a metaphorical sense. History recalls how great the fall can be, Roger Hodgson sang. In our case, it’s shaping up to be one for the record books—and those of my readers who have worked themselves up to the screaming point about the comparatively mild events we’ve seen so far may want to save some of their breath for the times ahead when it’s going to get much, much worse.

Greece can not save itself by agreeing to more cuts; it can only doom itself.

• This Could Be Greece’s Last Chance To Save Itself (CNBC)

Despite decisive action proposed by the IMF to ease Greece’s financial burden, more turbulence lies ahead for the debt-ridden European nation, reveals the latest IMF report, which was delivered to the Fund’s board members for consultation. CNBC has received the report through a close source to the IMF. According to IMF deputy spokesman William Murray, the report will be discussed at the IMF’s board meeting on Feb.6. Among the reforms they are pressing are further cuts to pension programs and an increase in income taxes. Without a substantial pace of reforms, Greece will be unable to narrow the gap in its real per-capita income relative to the euro zone and remain prosperous and competitive. This has prompted the euro zone’s finance ministers to demand that Greece proceed with these necessary reforms until Feb. 20 or risk the IMF dissolving support of the Greek financial program.

In the latest report, the IMF claims the Greek banks have a weak capital structure and are exposed to the risk of nonperforming loans. The Greek banks’ current strategies require a reduction in the aggregate nonperforming loans ratio to 48, 42 and 34% by 2017, 2018 and 2019, respectively, but these backloaded NPL reductions “do not appear consistent with the Greek authorities’ ambitious investment and growth assumptions.” Among the measures included in the IMF report is the push to rebalance the policy mix toward growth-friendly and equitable policies and to lower the threshold of tax-free income. “Greece’s revenue yields lag behind peers as high marginal tax rates applied on narrow bases encourage tax evasion, discourage labour participation in the formal economy and provide incentives for firms to relocate to low tax neighbouring countries,” the IMF report said.

In addition, the IMF supports a further reduction to Greece’s pensions, which in recent years have fallen by 40%. The report stresses that “while recent pension reforms have helped address expected long-run pressures from population aging, pensions for current retirees remain unaffordably high.” At this point, the IMF is very critical, claiming that “the Greek authorities did not see a need to reduce pension spending or the income tax credit.” The IMF is hardening its stance not only against Greece but also across the euro zone countries seeking greater debt relief for Greece. Yet even with with full implementation of policies agreed to under the ESM program, a debt sustainability analysis included in the report reveals that Greece’s public debt is “highly unsustainable.” It further emphasizes that Greece’s public debt and financing needs will become “explosive” in the long run if Greece is unable to replace highly subsided official sector financing with market financing at rates consistent with sustainability.

The IMF projects Greek debt will reach 170% of GDP by 2020 and 164% of GDP by 2022 but will rise thereafter, reaching around 275% of GDP by 2060. (This is based on the cost of debt rising over time as market financing replaces highly subsidized official sector financing. It should more than offset the debt-reducing effects of growth and the primary balance surplus. ) The country’s gross financing needs (defined as the sum of budget deficits and funds required to roll over debt that matures in the course of the year) will be higher: a 15% of GDP threshold by 2024 and a 20% of GDP threshold by 2031, reaching around 33% by 2040 and about 62% of GDP by 2060.

It all falls apart.

• Greece’s Best-Selling Daily To Cease Publication Due To Debts (AFP)

Two historic Greek newspapers, including the country’s best-selling daily, will cease publication, the debt-ridden Lambrakis Press Group announced on Saturday. “‘To Vima’ weekly and ‘Ta Nea’ daily are forced to cease their publication within days due to financial reasons,” the company said in a statement. Lambrakis Press Group (DOL) “is lacking any available resources and as a result it can’t support the printing of its newspapers and, of course, can’t ensure the unhampered operation of the other media outlets it owns,” it added. Besides the two newspapers DOL owns numerous magazines, news sites and the Vima FM radio. DOL failed to pay its €99 million ($106-million) debt obligations in December, Antonis Karakoussis, director of the Vima newspaper and Vima FM radio said on January 11.

He added that this situation was the result of the economic crisis Greece has faced since 2010 which has already led to the closure of many media outlets. In Saturday’s statement DOL accused the creditor banks of putting the press group in a special management regime without providing for the continuation of its publications. DOL says the creditor banks are withholding all its earnings “whether these come from newspaper sales or from advertisements”. Lambrakis Press Group, one of the shareholders of the Mega Channel TV station that is also heavily indebted, has also faced legal turmoil over the past months, with its president, Stavros Psycharis, being prosecuted for tax evasion and money laundering. With its particularly critical stance against Greece’s leftist Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras since his election in 2015, DOL has been, along with other Greek media moguls, the target of the government’s effort to “reestablish transparency” in what it calls a sector “of oligarchs”.

Yes, it’s come to this. Lesbos resident Eric Kempson has more in the video.

• Second Man Dies At Lesbos Refugee Camp Within Days (Kath.)

A 46-year-old Syrian man was found dead in his tent in the Moria refugee camp on Lesvos on Saturday morning. He was the second person to die at the facility last week, after the death of a 22-year-old Egyptian man a few days earlier. The deaths have highlighted the poor conditions that refugees face at camps on the Greek islands, especially during the current cold weather. The government is making efforts to create new facilities and move some migrants to the mainland but the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees accused Athens last week of failing to respond to its proposals about improving conditions at the existing camps.

Debt Rattle November 25 2016

Nov 252016

November 25, 2016 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:53 am Finance Tagged with: debt, deficits, deflation, Erdogan, Lesbos, Merkel, OPEC, refugees, Russia, WMP 10 Responses »

Robert Capa Anti-fascist militia women at Barcelona street barricade 1936

• America’s Trade Advantage: Large Deficits (Pettis)

• All Aboard Post-TPP World (Escobar)

• The Bank of Japan Can’t Keep Stores From Cutting Prices (BBG)

• China Banking Regulator Wrestles With $2.9 Trillion Off-Balance Sheet WMPs (R.)

• China Central Bank Warns Against Outflows Disguised As Investment (R.)

• ECB Says It Can Shield Eurozone From Global Finance Instability (BBG)

• The Snowball of Debt (HowMuch/VC)

• Russia to OPEC: Oil Freeze Is All You Get

• Germany, 15 Other Countries Press For Arms Control Deal With Russia (R.)

• Fillon Calls Hollande’s Hardline Policy On Russia ‘Absurd’ (EuA)

• EU Parliament President Martin Schulz to Step Down, Run Against Merkel (WSJ)

• Increasingly Rapid Ice Melt Could Trigger Uncontrollable Climate Change (G.)

• Erdogan Threatens To Open Borders To Refugees After EU Vote (AFP)

• Refugees Torch Lesbos Camp After Gas Explosion Kills Two (AFP)

Interesting point of view. What Pettis ignores is that the issuer of a global reserve currency MUST always run a deficit, or the world will be starved of money.

• America’s Trade Advantage: Large Deficits (Pettis)

Even China’s official voice, the People’s Daily, pointed out Monday how unlikely it was that China could “overtake the U.S. to lead the world.” This is because China must accommodate high and rising trade surpluses to moderate a stark trade-off between rising debt and rising unemployment. After years of deep imbalances and accelerating credit growth, China this year met its 6.7% GDP-growth target—needed to stabilize employment—only by growing debt in a frightening amount equal to more than 40 percentage points of GDP. Debt limits are a major constraint on China’s difficult adjustment. The country must therefore rely on its trade surplus for crucial breathing space, with each percentage point of surplus substituting for about 10 percentage points of debt.

To see how this affects China’s leadership role, consider how the U.S., only after 50 years as the world’s largest economy and a negligible governance role, finally came to dominate global trade. This occurred over two separate periods. The first ran for roughly five decades beginning with World War I. Two highly destructive world wars left all the world’s major economies acutely short of capital—all except for the U.S., which began the period as the world’s largest surplus nation and its main exporter of savings. This inevitably put America at the center of the emerging economic order. By the 1970s, conditions were very different. The other advanced nations had rebuilt their economies, global savings were abundant and other forms of demand determined the growth rates for most economies.

Rather than receive access to scarce capital, these countries wanted instead to export capital, i.e., to expand demand by increasing exports of tradable goods while constraining imports. With its flexible financial system and the gradual elimination by the 1970s of all capital restrictions, the U.S. quickly adapted and began running large deficits, the costs of which, in the form of unemployment and consumer debt, America was willing to absorb for political advantage. This is the key reason why China cannot replace the U.S. as the leader of global trade.

[..] Opposition to trade, particularly among Americans most vulnerable to unemployment and consumer debt, was therefore inevitable. But rather than other countries reorganizing around the surpluses China requires, it is more likely that over time global trade will become unstable and increasingly contentious. That is in fact closer to the historical norm than the anomalous stability of the four decades before 1914 and the six after 1945. A U.S. retreat from trade would clearly be damaging to global prospects. Many economists argue that it will also damage U.S. prospects. But they are almost certainly wrong. History suggests that intervention usually benefits diversified economies with large, persistent trade deficits, especially when driven at least in part by distortions abroad.

Escobar should read Pettis.

• All Aboard Post-TPP World (Escobar)

A half-hearted near handshake between US President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin before and after they spoke ‘for about four minutes’, standing up, on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Lima, Peru, captured to perfection the melancholic dwindling of the Obama era. A whirlwind flashback of the fractious relationship between Obama and ‘existential threats’ Russia and China would include everything from the Washington-sponsored Maidan in Kiev to Obama’s ‘Assad must go’ in Syria, with special mentions to the oil price war, sanctions, the raid on the ruble, extreme demonization of Putin and all things Russian, provocations in the South China Sea – all down to a finishing flourish; the death of the much vaunted TPP treaty, which was reconfirmed at APEC right after the election of Donald Trump.

It was almost too painful to watch Obama defending his not exactly spectacular legacy at his final international press conference – with, ironically, the backdrop of the South American Pacific coast – just as Chinese President Xi Jinping all but basked in his reiterated geopolitical glow, which he already shares with Putin. As for Trump, though invisible in Lima, he was everywhere. The ritual burial, in Peru’s Pacific waters, of the «NATO on trade» arm of the pivot to Asia (first announced in October 2011 by Hillary Clinton) thus offered Xi the perfect platform to plug the merits of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), amply supported by China. RCEP is an ambitious idea aiming at becoming the world’s biggest free trade agreement; 46% of global population, with a combined GDP of $17 trillion, and 40% of world trade.

RCEP includes the 10 ASEAN nations plus China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand. The RCEP idea was born four years ago at an ASEAN summit in Cambodia – and has been through nine rounds of negotiations so far. Curiously, the initial idea came from Japan – as a mechanism to combine the plethora of bilateral deals ASEAN has struck with its partners. But now China is in the lead. [..] Meanwhile, Putin and Xi met once again – with Putin revealing he’s going to China next spring to deepen Russian involvement in the New Silk Roads, a.k.a. One Belt, One Road (OBOR). The ultimate objective is to merge the Chinese-led OBOR with the development of the Russia-led Eurasia Economic Union (EEU).

That’s the spirit behind 25 intergovernmental agreements in economy, investment and nuclear industry signed by Russian PM Dmitry Medvedev and Chinese PM Li Keqiang in St. Petersburg in early November, as well as the set up of a joint Russia-China Venture Fund. In parallel, almost out of blue, and with a single stroke, Turkey President Tayyip Erdogan, on the way back from a visit to Pakistan and Uzbekistan, confirmed what had been all but evident for the past few months; “Why shouldn’t Turkey be in the Shanghai Five? I said this to Mr. Putin, to (Kazakh President) Nazarbayev, to those who are in the Shanghai Five now… I think if Turkey were to join the Shanghai Five, it will enable it to act with much greater ease”.

How is it possible that this is still allowed to continue?

• The Bank of Japan Can’t Keep Stores From Cutting Prices (BBG)

While Governor Haruhiko Kuroda’s vow to overshoot the Bank of Japan’s 2% inflation target caused a stir among monetary policy watchers in September, it’s yet to have an impact among retailers. Stores as diverse as supermarket operator Aeon, Mister Donut and Wal-Mart have all announced price cuts since Kuroda’s pledge, underscoring the weakness in Japanese consumer spending and the difficulty of overcoming the “deflationary mindset” that the BOJ set out to eradicate. Consumer prices fell for an eighth straight month in October, a government report showed Friday. “Companies are just being practical,” said Masamichi Adachi at JPMorgan. “No one is buying the BOJ’s new commitment. There is strong doubt that the BOJ can even achieve the 2% target and the name ‘overshooting commitment’ itself is hard to understand for ordinary people.”

Falling prices and expectations for more of the same could also drag on annual wage talks, which start soon. Kuroda said last week that he’s “paying close attention” to these, as weak growth in pay has been hampering efforts to generate inflation. It’s essential for Japanese companies to set salaries based on the premise of 2% inflation, he said. Base salaries, which exclude bonuses and overtime, will rise this year by less than last year, Dai-ichi Life Research Institute forecast in a report this month. This reinforces frugality among shoppers and encourages retailers to compete by discounting.

Beijing does not control its own economy. It’s hostage to the shadow banks.

• China Banking Regulator Wrestles With $2.9 Trillion Off-Balance Sheet WMPs (R.)

China’s banking regulator may be getting serious about how lenders provision for the more than 20 trillion yuan ($2.9 trillion) of wealth management products (WMPs) that have been issued as non-guaranteed off-balance sheet liabilities. The China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC), in new draft rules released on Wednesday, demanded banks apply a more “comprehensive” approach to cover “substantive risks” related to off-balance sheet activities, or shadow banking. The guidelines, which would replace 2011 regulations and are awaiting comment, proposed such measures as adding impairment loss allowances and properly calculating risk-weighted assets for off-balance sheet activity.

It was the latest measure announced by CBRC to curb shadow banking risks and address the rapid growth of WMPs, which amounted to 26.28 trillion yuan ($3.8 trillion) by end-June, data from the Banking Sector Wealth Management Product Registration and Custodian Centre showed. That amounts to around 39% of China’s GDP in 2015. About 77%, or 20.18 trillion yuan, of the products are non-guaranteed bank WMPs, a major component of shadow banking activity, the data showed. CBRC Chairman Shang Fulin warned banks in September the rampant growth of their off-balance sheet operations must be curtailed, and represented a “hidden credit risk that potentially threatens financial safety”.

[..] China’s mid-tier and small lenders, which have raised a greater proportion of their funding using WMPs, are more vulnerable to off-balance sheet liquidity risks. One important obstacle is capital. A very strict interpretation of the draft regulations, requiring banks to hold reserves against all off-balance sheet issuance, would require banks to raise as much as 1.7 trillion yuan to maintain current capital levels, said Jack Yuan, a banking analyst at Fitch. “The incentives for banks to issue more off-balance sheet WMPs still exists,” said Yuan. “There’s nothing in these rules that disincentivizes banks from continuing on with more off-balance sheet activity.” “It’s like driving a car,” said a risk manager at another mid-size lender. “If you don’t follow the rules, there’s a mess. But if you follow the rules, that doesn’t mean you have to slow down.”

How do you tell them apart though?

• China Central Bank Warns Against Outflows Disguised As Investment (R.)

China’s central bank has urged commercial banks in Shanghai to guard against money outflows via the Shanghai Free Trade Zone (FTZ) disguised as foreign investment, two sources with knowledge of the instructions said on Friday. The Shanghai headquarters of the People’s Bank of China asked for particular vigilance against money originating in other provinces or cities in China that flowed into the FTZ en route abroad, the banking industry sources said. The guidance from the PBOC’s was the latest in a string of measures to stem surging capital outflows as the yuan currency plumbs 8-1/2 year lows against the surging U.S. dollar.

“The central bank has urged lenders to strengthen due diligence to prevent capital outflows disguised as outbound investment,” said one source, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. On Wednesday it said it would crack down on capital flight and closely monitor abnormal capital flows through the FTZ. In a report on Tuesday, Capital Economics estimated that capital outflows last month were the largest since January, and posed a threat to China’s exchange rate regime. The Shanghai FTZ was launched in 2013 to promote international trade and cross-border investment, but three years later the city government is trying to balance efforts to accelerate financial reforms in the zone while preventing capital outflows.

But of course….

• ECB Says It Can Shield Eurozone From Global Finance Instability (BBG)

The ECB is confident it will be able to continue shielding the euro area from the risk of a sudden correction in asset prices, after political events such as the election of Donald Trump threaten to increase volatility in coming months. “We are certainly seeing a correction coming from the U.S.,” ECB Vice President Vitor Constancio said on Thursday in an interview with Bloomberg TV’s Matt Miller. “The ECB will continue to exert its stabilizing role, so I don’t think there will be significant contagion to Europe.” Constancio spoke on the occasion of the publication of the ECB’s twice-yearly Financial Stability Review.

The report warns that the risk of an abrupt global market correction has intensified on the back of widespread political uncertainty, posing a threat to banks, stability and economic growth. While the policies of incoming President Trump may lead to higher spending and faster inflation in the U.S., their effect on the euro area is difficult to gauge given the possibility of protectionist tit-for-tats and higher chances of populist victories in votes across the continent. “More volatility in the near future is likely and the potential for an abrupt reversal remains significant,” according to the bank. “Elevated geopolitical tensions and heightened political uncertainty amid busy electoral calendars in major advanced economies have the potential to reignite global risk aversion and to trigger a major confidence shock.”

A similar graph of private debt would be more revealing.

• The Snowball of Debt (HowMuch/VC)

With the U.S. National Debt closing in on the $20 trillion mark, there has been a lot of conversation in Washington about debt and its role in government. And most of that conversation right now revolves around President-elect Donald Trump. On one hand, the Trump campaign had early rhetoric in the Presidential campaign that the elimination of the deficit and existing government debt would be paramount if elected. The Trump administration has also been highly critical of the Federal Reserve, saying that the Fed’s policies create a “false economy”. As a result, some see Trump embracing the unique opportunity to put his stamp on how the Federal Reserve does business in early 2017.

On the other hand, even many conservative think tanks are concerned about what Trump policies mean for government debt. Rebuilding infrastructure is not cheap, and widely-cited estimates see the national debt increasing by anywhere from $5.3 trillion to $11.5 trillion over the next 10 years. While giant numbers like $20 trillion sound abstract and meaningless, converting them to debt-per-capita can make things more intuitive. The per-capita amount shows the amount of debt that exists per citizen, and makes things plain and simple. Today’s infographic from HowMuch.net, a cost information site, shows government debt-per-capita in every country in the world, including the United States.

Here are the countries where people owe the most debt per person:
Japan: $85,694.87 per person
Ireland: $67,147.59 per person
Singapore: $56,112.75 per person
Belgium: $44,202.75 per person
United States: $42,503.98 per person
Canada: $42,142.61 per person
Italy: $40,461.11 per person
Iceland: $39,731.65 per person
Australia: $38,769.98 per person
United Kingdom: $36,206.11 per person
Of course, debt-per-capita isn’t the only lens to view government debt.

Manipulating prices with empty words. If they ever sign an agreement, it will be a hollowed out one, and it won’t last more than two weeks.

• Russia to OPEC: Oil Freeze Is All You Get

Facing pressure from OPEC to make a significant output reduction, Russia reiterated its readiness to freeze oil production at current levels, arguing that the offer amounted to a cut compared with next year’s plans. A production cap would mean Russia pumping 200,000 to 300,000 barrels a day less than planned in 2017, Energy Minister Alexander Novak told reporters in Moscow on Thursday. That means a freeze would be “quite a difficult and harsh situation for us as our plans envisioned an output growth next year,” he said. OPEC, which is seeking to finalize its own supply cuts of as much as 1.1 million barrels a day next week, asked non-members to contribute by cutting daily production by about 500,000 barrels, Novak said.

OPEC reached a preliminary deal in September to reduce collective output to 32.5 million to 33 million barrels a day, compared with the group’s estimate of 33.6 million in October. Talks on individual production quotas continued this week with the aim of securing a final pact by the ministerial meeting in Vienna on Nov. 30. The group will meet lower-level OPEC officials to discuss cooperation on Nov. 28, followed by a Nov. 30 breakfast meeting between ministers and non-members, including Russia, before the ministerial summit, according to people familiar with the matter.

Merkel’s anti-Putin stance will be used against her. Germany and Russia should always try to talk. They are too close to not talk.

• Germany, 15 Other Countries Press For Arms Control Deal With Russia (R.)

Fifteen European countries have joined Germany in its push for a new arms control agreement with Moscow, saying more dialogue is needed to prevent an arms race in Europe after Russia’s actions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, a German newspaper said. “Europe’s security is in danger,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told Die Welt newspaper in an interview published on Friday. “As difficult as ties to Russia may currently be, we need more dialogue, not less.” Steinmeier, a Social Democrat who has been nominated to become German president next year, first called for a new arms control deal with Russia in August to avoid an escalation of tensions in Europe.

Fifteen other countries – all belonging to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe – have since joined Steinmeier’s initiative: France, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Spain, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Sweden, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Portugal. The group plans to issue a joint statement on Friday and will meet again on the sidelines of a Dec. 8-9 ministerial level OSCE meeting in Hamburg that will be hosted by Germany, which now holds the rotating presidency of the OSCE. Steinmeier condemned Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, saying such acts undermined delicate bonds of trust built up over decades and threatened to unleashed a new arms race.

U.S. officials are skeptical about the initiative, citing Russia’s failure to abide by existing agreements and treaties. Steinmeier also drew criticism from U.S. and NATO officials in June after warning that Western military maneuvers in eastern Europe amounted to “saber-rattling and shrill war cries” that could worsen tensions with Russia.

I’ve said it before: it’s never a good feeling when the looses cannons make most sense. But that’s 2016 for you.

• Fillon Calls Hollande’s Hardline Policy On Russia ‘Absurd’ (EuA)

In a televised debate last night (24 November) French conservative frontrunner François Fillon said Russia must be anchored to Europe, or else Moscow would couple with China, to the detriment of the continent. The debate was largely seen as the last chance for Alain Juppé, who came second in the first round of the primary elections of the conservatives last Sunday, to impress the conservative electorate and catch up on Fillon ahead of the 27 November run-off. The one-and-a-half hour debate was generally uncontroversial. One of the rare contentious exchanges was when Juppé questioned Fillon’s perceived closeness to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin knew Fillon when they were both prime ministers.

In an unusual televised appearance the Russian president praised him Wednesday as a “great professional” and a “very principled person”. “This must be the first presidential election in which the Russian president chooses his candidate,” Juppé said. Fillon brushed off Putin’s comments but said the West must work more closely with Russia at a time when relations are at their worst since the Cold War. “Russia is a dangerous country if we treat it as we have treated it for the last five years,” Fillon said. He said the real danger to Europe was not Russia but the economic threat of “the Asian continent”. Fillon argued that Russia should be anchored to Europe geopolitically or risk seeing Moscow forge alliances with China instead.

He called “absurd” the hardline policy of French President François Hollande with regard to Russia, saying it only made Moscow harden its positions and exacerbate its nationalist reflexes. The French conservative frontrunner said the EU would not change alliances and would not abandon its transatlantic link, but added that Paris didn’t need the permission from Washington to talk to Moscow. “What I am asking is that we sit down at a table with the Russians without asking for the agreement of the United States and that we re-establish a link, if not a relation based on confidence, which will make it possible to anchor Russia to Europe.”

His EU pension for life will be stunning. And now he can add a German one.

• EU Parliament President Martin Schulz to Step Down, Run Against Merkel (WSJ)

European Parliament President Martin Schulz said on Thursday that he would stand down in January and run in next year’s elections in Germany, where he is seen as a potential rival to Chancellor Angela Merkel. The 60-year-old, who has been a member of the European Union’s legislature for the past 22 years, said it was “not an easy decision” to quit. Mr. Schulz’s return to German politics after more than 20 years in Brussels is fueling speculation that he could lead his Social Democratic Party’s ticket at next year’s general election, to run against Ms. Merkel’s conservatives. “My commitment to the European project is unwavering. From now on I will be fighting for this project from the national level, but my values don’t change,” Mr. Schulz said.

He noted that as the largest country in the EU, Germany “bears a special responsibility” which he will strive to fulfill, as of next year, from Berlin. Mr. Schulz didn’t comment on the possibility that he could succeed Frank-Walter Steinmeier as Germany’s foreign minister after the latter vacates his post early next year to run for the largely ceremonial office of German president. The SPD has said it would decide in January who would lead it into the general election next fall. SPD officials said Sigmar Gabriel, party chairman and economics minister, had the first shot, and would have to voluntarily yield to Mr. Schulz. The two men are longtime friends.

We play around, very much at our own peril. with systems far too complex for us to understand. We simply deny we don’t understand. And there’s something ironically stupid in the Trump team taking away funding from NASA to be used in … space exploration. That you don’t make up.

• Increasingly Rapid Ice Melt Could Trigger Uncontrollable Climate Change (G.)

Arctic scientists have warned that the increasingly rapid melting of the ice cap risks triggering 19 “tipping points” in the region that could have catastrophic consequences around the globe. The Arctic Resilience Report found that the effects of Arctic warming could be felt as far away as the Indian Ocean, in a stark warning that changes in the region could cause uncontrollable climate change at a global level. Temperatures in the Arctic are currently about 20C above what would be expected for the time of year, which scientists describe as “off the charts”. Sea ice is at the lowest extent ever recorded for the time of year. “The warning signals are getting louder,” said Marcus Carson of the Stockholm Environment Institute and one of the lead authors of the report. “[These developments] also make the potential for triggering [tipping points] and feedback loops much larger.”

Climate tipping points occur when a natural system, such as the polar ice cap, undergoes sudden or overwhelming change that has a profound effect on surrounding ecosystems, often irreversible. In the Arctic, the tipping points identified in the new report, published on Friday, include: growth in vegetation on tundra, which replaces reflective snow and ice with darker vegetation, thus absorbing more heat; higher releases of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from the tundra as it warms; shifts in snow distribution that warm the ocean, resulting in altered climate patterns as far away as Asia, where the monsoon could be effected; and the collapse of some key Arctic fisheries, with knock-on effects on ocean ecosystems around the globe.

The research, compiled by 11 organisations including the Arctic Council and six universities, comes at a critical time, not only because of the current Arctic temperature rises but in political terms. Aides to the US president-elect, Donald Trump, this week unveiled plans to remove the budget for climate change science currently used by Nasa and other US federal agencies for projects such as examining Arctic changes, and to spend it instead on space exploration.

More power away from Merkel.

• Erdogan Threatens To Open Borders To Refugees After EU Vote (AFP)

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday threatened to throw open Turkey’s borders to illegal migrants after the European Parliament voted to back a freeze in membership talks with Ankara. “Listen to me. If you go any further, then the frontiers will be opened, bear that in mind,” Erdogan told the EU in a speech in Istanbul. On March 18, Ankara and Brussels forged a deal for Turkey to halt the flow of migrants to Europe – an accord that has largely been successful in reducing numbers crossing the Aegean Sea.

It’s a miracle we haven’t seen much moe of this kind of thing happen.

• Refugees Torch Lesbos Camp After Gas Explosion Kills Two (AFP)

Angry migrants set fire to a camp on the Greek island of Lesbos after a woman and a six-year-old child died following a gas cylinder explosion, local police said. The explosion occurred while the 66-year-old woman was cooking, police said, adding that the child’s mother and four-year-old sibling were hospitalised with serious injuries. In an apparent act of rage, migrants then set fire to the Moria camp on Lesbos, causing significant damage, police said. Firefighters arrived at the scene to try to put out the flames. Ensuing clashes between migrants and police left six refugees slightly injured. Some migrants fled the camp after the blast but had since returned and calm was being restored, a police source said.

Several fires have erupted in refugee camps on the Greek islands, where some 16,000 people became stranded after the European Union signed a deal that was aimed at stemming the influx of migrants. Moria has a capacity for 3,500 people but currently houses more than 5,000. Part of the camp was badly damaged in a fire on September 19 during clashes between migrants and police, and thousands had to be moved out before returning two days later. Nearly 66,000 refugees and migrants are currently stranded in Greece, according to official figures.

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