Sep 042022
 


Odilon Redon Breton harbor 1879

 

France Says Imposing Price Cap On Russian Oil Will Be Difficult (CNBC)
Mass Anti-Government Protest Hits Prague (RT)
One In Six Italians Faces Energy Poverty (RT)
The West Wants To Disarm The ‘Powder Keg’ Of Europe, Risks Igniting It (Norin)
Gazprom Discloses Major Challenge For Nord Stream (RT)
Sweden, Austria Bail Out Energy Companies, Trigger Europe’s Minsky Moment (ZH)
Russia Wants UN To Pressure US On Visas (RT)
Bill Barr Slams Trump’s Special Master Request As ‘Red Herring’ (Fox)
Prosecuting Trump In The Shadow Of Hillary’s Emails (Turley)
Biden Admin Held Weekly Censorship Meetings With Social Media Giants (PM)
The Terrifying Vacuity of Klaus Schwab (Eugyp)
Fauci’s Red Guards (Michael P. Senger)
1st Peer-Reviewed Study on Pfizer, Moderna Vaccines Confirms ‘Excess Risk’ (BN)
Vaccine Vultures (Todd Hayen)
Ivermectin Reduces Covid Death Risk By 92% (Blaze)

 

 


MAGA kids

 

 

Putin dollar

 

 

 

 

Biden day after

 

 

Rallies

 

 

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
– Mark Twain

 

 

 

 

Ha ha ha! That’s one big gaping barn door he’s opening here:

“It should not be a Western measure against Russia, it should be a global measure against war..”

France Says Imposing Price Cap On Russian Oil Will Be Difficult (CNBC)

French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said on Saturday that efforts by G-7 nations to introduce a price cap on Russian oil would require commitment from the wider international community to be successful. The G-7 economic powers announced Friday that they had agreed on a plan to impose a set price on Russian oil. The initiative is the latest attempt to apply economic pressure on Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine. But aside from cutting Russia’s oil revenues — a key source of funding for President Vladimir Putin’s war chest — Le Maire said the policy should be implemented as a “global measure against war.” “You need an outreach because we don’t want this measure to be only a Western measure,” Le Maire told CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy.

“It should not be a Western measure against Russia, it should be a global measure against war,” he added. The G-7 — which consists of the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, the U.K., Italy and Japan — is yet to finalize how the price cap will be implemented, a process that Le Maire acknowledged will be “quite difficult.” However, it is expected to be ready before early December when EU sanctions on seaborne imports of Russian crude kick in. “We know that we need the unity from all the 27 member states if you want to get the green light for introducing that cap,” he said, referring to the EU bloc of nations, a non-enumerated member of the G-7. More than that, however, Le Maire said the policy would require participation by other major global economies.


It follows comments from Kadri Simson, the EU’s energy chief, who urged involvement from China and India, both of which have increased their purchases of Russian oil this year, benefiting from discounted rates. “If we want to be efficient in these sanctions, we need to reduce the revenues that Russia is gaining from oil and gas selling,” Le Maire said.

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First step. “The protesters demanded the Czech Republic to take a neutral military stance, as well as to secure direct contracts with gas suppliers, including Russia.”

“They require direct gas supplies from Russia and food and energy guarantees for the Czech Republic. They hold the EU solely responsible for the European economic disaster and the rise in energy bills.”

Mass Anti-Government Protest Hits Prague (RT)

Tens of thousands hit central Prague on Saturday, taking part in a protest dubbed ‘Czech Republic First.’ The protesters urged the government to resign over soaring energy prices, inflation and the international policies they believe have brought the country to that state. According to police estimates, some 70,000 took part in the rally, with the organizers putting the mark even higher at 100,000. The event brought together people of polar political views, with the Communist party and right-wing Freedom and Direct Democracy Party alike taking part in the protest. “The aim of our demonstration is to demand change, mainly in solving the issue of energy prices, especially electricity and gas, which will destroy our economy this autumn,” one of the event’s co-organizers, social democrat Jiri Havel, told local media.

The protesters demanded the Czech Republic to take a neutral military stance, as well as to secure direct contracts with gas suppliers, including Russia. They have also condemned the government for supporting the EU’s sanctions against Moscow, adopted in multiple waves in wake of the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. “The best for the Ukrainians and two sweaters for us,” one of the banners displayed at the event read, referring to the rising heating costs and potential energy cuts in winter. The protest came a day after the government survived a no-confidence vote over the same issues, with the opposition blaming it for inaction in wake of the soaring energy prices and inflation.


Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, leading the ruling five-party, center-right coalition, was quick to accuse the protesters of acting against the country’s best interests, implying the Kremlin might have had a hand in staging the protest. “The protest on Wenceslas Square was called by forces that are pro-Russian, are close to extreme positions and are against the interests of the Czech Republic,” he told CTK broadcaster. “It is clear that Russian propaganda and disinformation campaigns are present on our territory and some people simply listen to them.”

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The protests won’t be long now.

One In Six Italians Faces Energy Poverty (RT)

One in six Italians, or up to nine million people, could sink into energy poverty due to soaring bills across the EU, Italy’s ANSA news agency reported on Saturday, citing the Italian General Confederation of Crafts. Households are considered to be in energy poverty if they cannot afford to regularly heat their homes in winter or use air conditioning in summer, and are forced to stop using high-energy household appliances, or severely limit their use. Southern regions of the country are reportedly the worst-hit. In Campania, between 519,000 and 779,000 households are using electricity or gas on an irregular basis. In Sicily the figure is between 481,000 and 722,000, and in Calabria there are 287,000 such households.


Earlier this week, local media reported that Italy’s Ecological Transition Minister Roberto Cingolani planned to ask the entire population to turn the heating down, starting from October. Italy has already introduced some limits on the use of central heating in public buildings and apartment blocks, and these are expected to be tightened under the new measures. On Friday, Italy’s Serie A football league announced plans to put a four-hour limit on the use of floodlights in stadiums on match days, as part of energy-saving measures. The new rule is expected to cut floodlight electricity consumption by about 25%.

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Evgeny Norin is a Russian historian focused on conflicts and international politics.

“The US diplomat offered Serbs a brighter future in exchange for giving up their historic lands.”

The West Wants To Disarm The ‘Powder Keg’ Of Europe, Risks Igniting It (Norin)

Just a day before the agreement was struck between Serbia and Kosovo, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Gabriel Escobar made an infuriating statement, “It’s time to forget the narrative ‘Kosovo is Serbia’ and move to the one that says ‘Kosovo and Serbia are actually Europe.’” The US diplomat offered Serbs a brighter future in exchange for giving up their historic lands. His words, however, sparked protest among the Serbian public and politicians. “The line between terrorists and freedom fighters is very thin for them. This is US policy. What can you expect from Mr. Escobar? Why do we keep pretending we don’t know what it is about?” said an outraged Serbian president, Alexandar Vucic, in an address to the nation.


Escobar’s rhetoric didn’t go unnoticed in Russia either. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova reminded her American colleague that “UN Security Council Resolution 1244 <…> is still the legal framework for the Kosovo settlement, clearly reaffirming the territorial integrity of Serbia.” There are two sides to this story, but history definitely favors the Serbian and Russian perspectives. Kosovo is located in the south-west of Serbia, near the Albanian border. In the 12th century, it became part of the nascent Serbian state, gaining prominence during the Middle Ages. The head of the Serbian Orthodox Church resided in Kosovo’s Peja. Kosovo also played an important role in the building of the Serbian nation. The Battle of Kosovo, when the Turkish army fought the Serbs and won, became one of the bloodiest battles in Serbia’s history and a symbol of heroic defeat. A large portion of Serbian poetry is dedicated to those events.

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Siemens denies.

Gazprom Discloses Major Challenge For Nord Stream (RT)

Germany’s Siemens Energy is ready to correct a turbine fault in the Nord Stream 1 natural gas pipeline, but there is currently nowhere to service the failed equipment, Russian energy major Gazprom said on Saturday. “Siemens is taking part in the repair works under the terms of the current contract [with Gazprom], has detected faults and signed an act on diagnosing of oil leaks, and is ready to fix them,” the Russian company said via its Telegram channel. “There is just no place to carry out the repair works,” Gazprom added, providing no further details. Earlier this week, the company [said] an engine oil leak was found in the turbine during a joint inspection with manufacturer Siemens Energy at the Portovaya compressor station near St.Petersburg. Natural gas supplies via Nord Stream, a major gas route from Russia to Europe, have been terminated for an indefinite period due to the leakage. The pipeline had been due to restart early on Saturday after a three-day maintenance break.

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Add this to the war tab. All EU countries must follow.

Sweden, Austria Bail Out Energy Companies, Trigger Europe’s Minsky Moment (ZH)

Last weekend, Credit Suisse repo guru Zoltan published what may have been the most insightful snippet of the entire European energy crisis (to date) when he extended the infamous “Minsky Moment” framework to Europe, and specifically Germany, which he said “can’t cover its payments without Russian gas and the government is asking citizens to conserve energy to leave more for industry.” He then elaborated that “Minsky moments are triggered by excessive financial leverage, and in the context of supply chains, leverage means excessive operating leverage: in Germany, $2 trillion of value added depends on $20 billion of gas from Russia… …that’s 100-times leverage – much more than Lehman’s.”

But while Germany still pretends it can somehow avoid a devastating crisis this winter besides bailing out Uniper, one of the country’s biggest utilities (after all, admission would make Trump’s 2018 warning accurate and prescient, and everyone knows that according to Western intellectual snobs Trump can’t possibly ever be correct), other European nations are succumbing to what Zoltan dubbed a “supply-chain Minsky moment.” On Wednesday it was Austria, which announced it would bail out the country’s main energy supplier with a two-billion-euro ($2 billion) loan, the AFP reported. Chancellor Karl Nehammer said the loan to Wien Energie was an “extraordinary rescue measure” to ensure its two million customers – mainly Vienna households – continue to receive electricity. It will run until next April.

Wien Energie asked for a bailout this weekend after suffering financial trouble amid soaring energy prices and speculation the company mismanaged their funds. Nehammer said Wien Energie, which is owned by Vienna, would have to answer questions as to how they got into trouble. “The goal was to help people quickly… It has now been agreed that all of these questions, which are rightly raised, must be answered promptly by Vienna (and) the energy supplier,” he told reporters. The company – almost entirely dependent on Russian gas – said earlier this week that it had been hit by the “price explosion” which it has not yet passed on to customers, assuring it remained solvent. As part of its rescue, the company is expected to pass through soaring costs, which means a historic price shock is coming to Austria next… and soon Sweden.

Following in Austria’s footsteps, on Saturday morning Sweden announced it will give emergency liquidity support to electricity producers after the government said it feared Russia’s decision to halt gas deliveries to Europe could place its financial system under severe strain. Prime minister Magdalena Andersson said the government would offer hundreds of billions of kroner in support to electricity producers, the FT reported. The PM warned that, left unchecked, rising collateral demands for electricity producers could ripple through the main Nasdaq Clearing market in Stockholm and, in the worst case, spark a financial crisis…. just as Zoltan warned almost half a year ago. Her remarks came after Russia said on Friday evening that it would no longer supply gas via the Nordstream 1 pipeline. That announcement came after energy markets had closed for the weekend. s

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Visas for UN diplomats.

1947: “visas shall be granted without charge and as promptly as possible… irrespective of the relations existing between the governments of the persons referred to… and the government of the US.”

Russia Wants UN To Pressure US On Visas (RT)

Russia’s permanent representative at the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, has asked the organization to persuade the US to grant visas for members of Moscow’s delegation to the UN General Assembly. They are heading to New York to attend the high-level general debate that will be held between September 20 and 26. The request was made in a letter that Nebenzia forwarded to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday. The document has been seen by both Russian and the Western media. In his message, the envoy pointed out that, with less than three weeks remaining before the General Assembly, not a single member of Russia’s delegation has received entry visas from the US.

The Russian side, headed by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, had submitted the relevant applications to attend the event to the American embassy in Moscow, the diplomat reportedly added. “This is even more alarming since, for the last several months, the authorities of the US have been constantly refusing to grant entry visas to a number of Russian delegates assigned to take part in the official United Nations events,” the letter read, as quoted by the media. Earlier this week, Nebenzia pointed out that Russian Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev and his delegation could not attend a meeting of UN police chiefs because the US refused to grant them visas.


The Russian envoy cited the 1947 agreement between the UN and the US, which states that “visas shall be granted without charge and as promptly as possible… irrespective of the relations existing between the governments of the persons referred to… and the government of the US.” The already strained relations between Moscow and Washington have deteriorated even further since the launch of the Russian military operation in Ukraine. The US has slapped harsh economic sanctions on Russia while backing Kiev and providing it with billions of dollars in military aid, as well as with intelligence. Nebenzia urged Guterres “to once again emphasize to the authorities of the US that they must promptly issue requested visas for all Russian delegates and accompanying persons,”including the Russian journalists covering Lavrov’s trip to the General Assembly.

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They even searched Barron’s bedroom.

Bill Barr Slams Trump’s Special Master Request As ‘Red Herring’ (Fox)

The legal fight between former President Donald Trump and the Department of Justice escalated Friday morning when the DOJ released a detailed inventory of the documents seized in last month’s Mar-a-Lago raid. The inventory list comes following an order from Florida Federal Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who is deciding whether to appoint a “special master” to the case. On “America Reports” on Friday, former Attorney General Bill Barr criticized Trump’s push for a “special master” as a distraction from the details of the case and argued it is not likely to be granted. “I think the whole idea of a special master is a bit of a red herring,” Barr told hosts Sandra Smith and John Roberts. “I think it’s a waste of time.”


Since the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, the former president has slammed the DOJ for what he argues was a politically motivated witch hunt. Trump recently called for a special master to hold an independent review of the documents. According to details revealed in the warrant, affidavit and the inventory list, dozens of the documents seized from Trump’s property were classified materials. A portion of the items taken were not classified, with several entries labeled “Article of Clothing/Gift Item.” Trump has claimed the documents at his Florida home were documents he had “declassified” prior to leaving office and were protected under executive privilege.

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“With Hillary Clinton selling “But Her Emails” hats at $30 a pop, Merrick Garland will have to explain the prospect of one politician going to jail while the other goes retail.”

Prosecuting Trump In The Shadow Of Hillary’s Emails (Turley)

A criminal charge of obstruction against Trump would offer certain political benefits for Garland. As previously discussed, the government has routinely elected not to prosecute high-ranking officials for improperly removing classified material or has sought mere misdemeanor charges in the most egregious cases. Prosecuting Trump for a misdemeanor for possessing or removing classified documents would seem gratuitous, while prosecuting him for a felony would raise questions of biased or selective prosecution. After all, in 2016, Hillary Clinton had not just 113 documents containing classified material but some documents “classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level” on her private email servers. (In Trump’s case, the government allegedly found roughly 100 documents in the Mar-a-Lago raid in addition to roughly 150 handled over by the Trump team under an earlier subpoena.)

Clinton’s documents were even more vulnerable to being compromised via her unclassified email account and, according to the FBI, “hostile actors gained access” to some of the information. Yet she was never subjected to a raid, let alone a charge. Yet, while less glaring as a contradiction than the charges on the possession or handling of classified information, an obstruction charge would allow up to a 20-year sentence and could be brought with misdemeanor charges on the mishandling or retention of classified information. Thus, an obstruction charge against Trump would be prosecuted in the shadow of Hillary Clinton’s case. In addition to the transfer of top-secret and other classified documents to her private server, Clinton and her staff did not fully cooperate with investigators.


During the investigations of her conduct, some of us marveled at the temerity of the Clinton staff in refusing to turn over her laptop and other evidence to State Department and DOJ investigators. The FBI had to cut deals with her aides to secure their cooperation. Later, more classified material was found on the laptop of former congressman Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), who was married to top Clinton aide Huma Abedin — 49,000 emails potentially relevant to the Clinton investigation. After Congress sought these emails, Clinton’s staff unilaterally destroyed thousands of emails with BleachBit. Clinton was aware that Congress and the State Department were seeking the emails in 2014. Her lawyers turned over about 30,000 work-related emails to the State Department and deleted 33,000 others while insisting they unilaterally deemed them “personal.”

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Democracy is something else.

Biden Admin Held Weekly Censorship Meetings With Social Media Giants (PM)

Federal officials in the Biden administration secretly conspired and communicated with social media companies to censor and suppress Americans’ private speech. This is revealed in a new lawsuit brought in a joint effort by The New Civil Liberties Alliance, the Attorney General of Missouri, and the Attorney General of Louisiana against the President of the United States. The suit is brought under the first amendment right to freedom of speech. The lawsuit seeks to identify among other things “all meetings with any Social-Media Platform relating to Content Modulation and/or Misinformation.” The discovery shows that there was “A recurring meeting usually entitled USG – Industry meeting, which has generally had a monthly cadence, and is between government agencies and private industry.

Government participants have included CISA’s Election Security and Resilience team, DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, the FBI’s foreign influence task force, the Justice Department’s national security division, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Industry participants have included Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Microsoft, Verizon Media, Pinterest, LinkedIn and the Wikimedia Foundation. The topics discussed include, but are not limited to: information sharing around elections risk, briefs from industry, threat updates, and highlights and upcoming watch outs.” Communications across 11 federal agencies reveal that the federal government, under the Biden administration, “has exerted tremendous pressure on social-media companies—pressure to which companies have repeatedly bowed,” the New Civil Liberties Alliance details in a new release.


The social media companies that were part of this Partner Support Portal include Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. The CDC invited “all tech platforms” in to their meeting to discuss how to suppress free speech about Covid online. Those agencies involved include the White House, HHS, DHS, CISA, the CDC, NIAID, the Office of the Surgeon General, the Census Bureau, the FDA, the FBI, the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. The NCLA notes further that, during the discovery process of this lawsuit, “the government has been uncooperative and has resisted complying with the discovery order every step of the way—especially with regard to Anthony Fauci’s communications.”

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Eugyppius has read The Great Reset, so you don’t have to.

The Terrifying Vacuity of Klaus Schwab (Eugyp)

Like many bad books, The Great Reset lapses into occasional inadvertent autobiography. In the final pages especially, where Klaus Schwab writes of his hopes for a “Personal Reset” through state repression, we catch a glimpse of the man during the first-wave lockdown at his house in Cologny. At first he enjoyed the break with routine and the opportunity to commune with nature, but before long he began to feel a nagging unease. He’d spent most of his years prior to 2020 flogging “stakeholder capitalism”, his umbrella term for various schemes to disarm criticism of the globalist corporate borg and co-opt leftist opposition.

Schwab succeeded in parlaying his simplistic ideas into an international conference circuit, known today as the World Economic Forum, where he could hobnob with corporate and political celebrities and burnish his Bond-villain reputation among political dissidents. But the pandemic had thrown Schwab off balance. For once his reprocessed nostrums about environmental, social and corporate governance issues were no longer in demand; virologists and epidemiologists and exponential growth curves filled the news instead. His powerful celebrity clients were suddenly listening to other people. Obscurity loomed.


Thus Schwab enlisted his sidekick research-assistant Thierry Malleret, booted up his laptop, and spent a few months decanting the cloud of buzzwords, talking points and half-remembered powerpoint presentations plaguing his brain into a meandering and thoroughly pointless document. When he had finished, he sent the whole thing to Malleret’s wife for a proof-read, and then he ordered his own Forum Press to print off a few thousand copies. Thus did yet another lamentable exercise in self-publishing come to pass.

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“..forced preference falsification..”

Fauci’s Red Guards (Michael P. Senger)

One aspect of dictatorships that citizens of democratic nations often find puzzling is how the population can be convinced to support such dystopian policies. How do they get people to run those concentration camps? How do they find people to take food from starving villagers? How can they get so many people to support policies that, to any outsider, are so needlessly destructive, cruel, and dumb? The answer lies in forced preference falsification. When those who speak up in principled opposition to a dictator’s policies are punished and forced into silence, those with similar opinions are forced into silence as well, or even forced to pretend they support policies in which they do not actually believe. Emboldened by this facade of unanimity, supporters of the regime’s policies, or even those who did not previously have strong opinions, become convinced that the regime’s policies are just and good – regardless of what those policies actually are—and that those critical of them are even more deserving of punishment.

One of history’s great masters of forced preference falsification was Chairman Mao Zedong. As László Ladány recalled, Mao’s decades-long campaign to remould the people of China in his own image began as soon as he took power after the Chinese Civil War. By the fall of 1951, 80 percent of all Chinese had had to take part in mass accusation meetings, or to watch organised lynchings and public executions. [..] This decades-long campaign of forced preference falsification reached its apex during the Cultural Revolution, in which Mao deputized radical youths across China, called Red Guards, to purge all vestiges of capitalism and traditional society and impose Mao Zedong Thought as China’s dominant ideology. Red Guards attacked anyone they perceived as Mao’s enemies, burned books, persecuted intellectuals, and engaged in the systematic destruction of their country’s own history, demolishing China’s relics en masse.

Through this method of forced preference falsification, any mass of people can be made to support virtually any policy, no matter how destructive or inimical to the interests of the people. Avoiding this spiral of preference falsification is therefore why freedom of speech is such a central tenet of the Enlightenment, and why it is given such primacy in the First Amendment of the US Constitution. No regime in American history has ever previously had the power to force preference falsification by systematically and clandestinely silencing those critical of its policies. Until now. As it turns out, an astonishing new release of discovery documents in Missouri v. Biden – in which NCLA Legal (New Civil Liberties Alliance) is representing plaintiffs including Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Aaron Kheriaty against the Biden administration for violations of free speech during Covid – reveal a vast federal censorship army, with more than 50 federal officials across at least 11 federal agencies having secretly coordinated with social media companies to censor private speech.

“Secretary Mayorkas of DHS commented that the federal Government’s efforts to police private speech on social media are occurring “across the federal enterprise.” It turns out that this statement is true, on a scale beyond what Plaintiffs could ever have anticipated. The limited discovery produced so far provides a tantalising snapshot into a massive, sprawling federal “Censorship Enterprise,” which includes dozens of federal officials across at least eleven federal agencies and components identified so far, who communicate with social-media platforms about misinformation, disinformation, and the suppression of private speech on social media—all with the intent and effect of pressuring social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech that federal officials disfavour.” The scale of this federal censorship enterprise appears to be far beyond what anyone imagined, involving even senior White House officials. The government is protecting Anthony Fauci and other high level officials by refusing to reveal documents related to their involvement.

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8 mice.

1st Peer-Reviewed Study on Pfizer, Moderna Vaccines Confirms ‘Excess Risk’ (BN)

A landmark peer-reviewed study appears to be the first of its kind to provide hard data on the “excess risk” of adverse side effects of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines in an independent “randomized clinical trial.” The results of the accepted scientific study confirm that the concerns that many patients had about the mRNA vaccines were well-founded. “In the Moderna trial, the excess risk of serious AESIs (15.1 per 10,000 participants) was higher than the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group (6.4 per 10,000 participants),” the study found. “In the Pfizer trial, the excess risk of serious AESIs (10.1 per 10,000) was higher than the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization relative to the placebo group (2.3 per 10,000 participants),” the study added.

The study was published on ScienceDirect on August 31, 2022. The authors include researchers from Stanford University, the University of Maryland, and UCLA. The study provides the following list of confirmed adverse events (or side effects) of the respective mRNA vaccines. It also provides the risk ratios versus Covid-19 (over 1 is a factor increase, under 1 is a factor decrease). The study also provided known complications for Covid-19. “Although the randomized trials offer high level evidence for evaluating causal effects, the sparsity of their data necessitates that harm-benefit analyses also consider observational studies,” the authors state. “Since their emergency authorization in December 2020, hundreds of millions of doses of Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines have been administered and post-authorization observational data offer a complementary opportunity to study AESIs. Post-authorization observational safety studies include cohort studies (which make use of medical claims or electronic health records) and disproportionality analyses (which use spontaneous adverse event reporting systems).”

“In July 2021, the FDA reported detecting four potential adverse events of interest: pulmonary embolism, acute myocardial infarction, immune thrombocytopenia, and disseminated intravascular coagulation following Pfizer’s vaccine based on medical claims data in older Americans.” the researchers add. “Three of these four serious adverse event types would be categorized as coagulation disorders, which is the Brighton AESI category that exhibited the largest excess risk in the vaccine group in both the Pfizer and Moderna trials. FDA stated it would further investigate the findings but at the time of our writing has not issued an update.”

Joseph Fraiman announced the study results on Twitter: “Our study examining mRNA vaccine serious adverse events study is now peer-reviewed in the Journal Vaccine,” Fraiman wrote. “Serious adverse events of special interest following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in randomized trials in adults.” Thus, the objection to Americans’ concerns that the mRNA vaccines may have adverse side effects has come to a close, despite the initial advertisements that the vaccines were “100% safe and effective,” prevented infection and transmission, and had no known serious side effects.

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“We have been brainwashed to believe anything other than the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, or other puppets of the system, is pure hogwash. It is now the other way around.”

Vaccine Vultures (Todd Hayen)

Vultures are birds that seek out wounded animals about to die and then swoop down on them when they are dead (or close to death) and devour them—apocryphally starting with gouging out the eyes. Vultures are typically not classed in the “warm and fuzzy” anthropomorphic grouping, although they accomplish a great service to the ecology of the planet, such as other animals thrown in the “yuck” bucket of human perception such as flies, spiders, laughing hyenas, and carrion beetles (who knows what a carrion beetle is?—they ARE pretty, so before you know what they do for a living, you might like them). So are we human vultures when we swoop down on dead or dying people we have heard about to see if they are vaxxed or not and if what they are suffering or dying from is due to the jab? Two? Three, god forbid four?

At the beginning of the vaccine madness, I was quite brazen and would unashamedly blurt out when hearing of someone’s misfortune, “were they vaccinated???!!!” I never got brazen enough to ask this to the person suffering (obviously if dead), but did to their friends, or whoever was explaining what was happening. I eventually backed off of the personal incidents I was experiencing as it did seem a bit too vulture-like, but I still would ask sheep in my company what they thought of dozens of athletes dropping in the fields, now extended out to just average Joe’s not waking up or doctors way too young to be experiencing such severe cardiac issues. Now I don’t even do that. I just listen. It seems this particular vulture just enjoys the shock of seeing no one (sheep) realizing the secret. “You’ll see,” I say to myself, in my evil vulture voice. “You’ll see.”

Now, isn’t that sick? Maybe. But what else is this experience going to drive us to if not un-empathetic lunacy. Think of Lord of the Rings’ Gollum. Isn’t that what did him in? We have been put into this untenable position of finding “joy” or at least “satisfaction” in the trauma of another. At its worse it is a form of schadenfreude, pleasure derived from another’s misfortune. But I would argue this is not really the case. I do not think what we are feeling (assuming others are fellow vaccine vultures) is “pleasure” and whatever it is that we are feeling is not due to someone else’s health misfortune. Of course the definition does include “self satisfaction from another’s failures”—maybe that is the closest schadenfreude comes to defining vaccine vultures.

[..] I have recently decided that the number one culprit for keeping sheep asleep is the media. The media has always played the role of the unbiased family member that will let you in on any corruption it saw in our leaders or other groups trying to get our attention. I think that is still true (that people rely on media for that reason) but the corruption is now in the media, at least the mainstream media. We have been brainwashed to believe anything other than the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, or other puppets of the system, is pure hogwash. It is now the other way around. I do believe that if any of these “gods of media” ran a story like we see day in and day out in the alternate media, many sheep heads would turn regardless what the venerated talking heads of government and power had to say.

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“An observational study with the size and level of analysis as ours is hardly achieved and infeasible to be conducted as a randomised clinical trial. Conclusions are hard to be refuted. Data is data, regardless of your beliefs.”

Ivermectin Reduces Covid Death Risk By 92% (Blaze)

A new peer-reviewed study found that regular use of ivermectin reduced the risk of dying from COVID-19 by 92%. The large study was conducted by Flávio A. Cadegiani, MD, MSc, PhD. Cadegiani is a board-certified endocrinologist with a master’s degree and doctorate degree in clinical endocrinology. The peer-reviewed study was published on Wednesday by the online medical journal Cureus. The study was conducted on a strictly controlled population of 88,012 people from the city of Itajaí in Brazil. Individuals who used ivermectin as prophylaxis or took the medication before being infected by COVID experienced significant reductions in death and hospitalization.

According to the study, those who took ivermectin regularly had a 92% reduction in their COVID death risk compared to non-users and 84% less than irregular users. “The hospitalization rate was reduced by 100% in regular users compared to both irregular users and non-users,” the study stated. The impressive reduction for regular ivermectin users was evident despite the regular users being at a higher risk for COVID deaths. The regular users were older and had a higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes and hypertension than irregular and non-users. Irregular users of ivermectin had a 37% lower mortality rate reduction than non-users. The study defined regular users as those who used more than 30 tablets of ivermectin over five months.


The dosage of ivermectin was determined by body weight, but “most of the population used between two and three tablets daily for two days, every 15 days.” “Non-use of ivermectin was associated with a 12.5-fold increase in mortality rate and a seven-fold increased risk of dying from COVID-19 compared to the regular use of ivermectin,” the study read. “This dose-response efficacy reinforces the prophylactic effects of ivermectin against COVID-19.” Cadegiani believes the study showed a “dose-response effect” – which means that increasing levels of ivermectin decreased the risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19. Cadegiani wrote on Twitter, “An observational study with the size and level of analysis as ours is hardly achieved and infeasible to be conducted as a randomised clinical trial. Conclusions are hard to be refuted. Data is data, regardless of your beliefs.”

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Sanctions make Russia rich

 

 

 

 

Buttigieg
https://twitter.com/i/status/1565941643869577217

 

 

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Dec 052014
 
 December 5, 2014  Posted by at 12:20 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  1 Response »


William Henry Jackson Hand cart carry, Adirondacks, New York 1902

This Is Oil’s ‘Minsky Moment’: Marc Chandler (CNBC)
Cheap Oil’s Economic Benefits May Be A Big Myth (MarketWatch)
Brent Drops From 4-Year Low as Saudi Discounts Deepen Price War (Bloomberg)
Oil Drop Gives U.S. Drillers Argument to End Export Ban (Bloomberg)
Canada-U.S. LNG Rivalry Draws Focus After Petronas Delay (Bloomberg)
ECB Paralyzed By Split As Irreversible Deflation Trap Draws Closer (AEP)
Greenspan Says He Would Pre-Empt Asset Bubbles Financed by Debt (Bloomberg)
US Economy Still Bigger, But China’s More Crucial (MarketWatch)
Wage Growth Stuck Below Pre-Crisis Levels (CNBC)
British Workers Suffer Biggest Real-Wage Fall Of Major G20 Countries (Guardian)
‘Colossal’ Cuts To Come, Warns UK Institute For Fiscal Studies (BBC)
North Sea Oil Exploration To Be Allocated UK Taxpayers’ Money (Guardian)
Poland More Worried About Europe Than Russia (CNBC)
Eurozone Mulls Longer Greek Bailout, But Athens Refuses (Reuters)
Japan Pension Fund Head Calls for $389 Billion Stock Revamp (Bloomberg)
The Japanese Government Bond Market Is Dead. And the Yen? (Wolfstreet)
Companies Don’t Need Banks for Bank Loans (Bloomberg)
Putin Warns Russians Of Hard Times Ahead (BBC)
Finns Who Can’t Be Fired Show Debt Trap at Work (Bloomberg)
Vatican Finds Hundreds Of Millions Of Euros ‘Tucked Away’ (Reuters)

Marc Chandler says what I have said: it’s not about the energy, it’s about the financing. Which is vanishing from the shale patch. “The big risk now to our shale is not going to be that the price of oil drops so far that it’s not going to be profitable,” he said. “The weakness, the Achilles’ heel, is that they don’t get the cheap funding anymore.”

This Is Oil’s ‘Minsky Moment’: Marc Chandler (CNBC)

Six years ago, the theories of economist Hyman Minsky were used to make sense of the collapse in housing prices, and its attendant effects on the economy. Today, Marc Chandler says the energy sector has just suffered its own Minsky moment. And while he doesn’t expect it to take down the stock market, the slide in oil could have a serious impact on the high-yield bond market. Minsky moment is a term coined by Pimco economist Paul McCulley in 1998, and it refers to a point when a period of rapid growth and risk-taking leads to a sudden turn lower and a crisis. Chandler, global head of markets strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman, says that is precisely what is happening in crude oil. “Many people a couple years ago, a year ago, were saying that oil prices could only go up—’we’re in peak oil’—meaning that we’re running out of the stuff. So a lot of things were leveraged based on oil prices that can only go up. Sort of like house prices—’they can only go up.’ So what happened is, because people held this as a deep conviction, they leveraged up,” Chandler said.”

In fact, the energy sector has borrowed $90 billion in the high-yield market since 2008, Chandler said, making energy producers “a large component of the high-yield market itself.” The problem is that “a lot of the loans, like loans on houses, were made not so much on a person’s ability to repay the loan as on the value of the house. Similarly, the banks and investors bought high-yield bonds or leveraged loans on the energy sector not on the basis of their ability to repay it, but on the value of the oil in the ground.” And so what happens now that crude oil has fallen nearly 40% from its June highs? Chandler foresees both further consolidation (along the lines of Halliburton’s acquisition of Baker Hughes) and failures ahead as the cheap financing dries up. “The big risk now to our shale is not going to be that the price of oil drops so far that it’s not going to be profitable,” he said. “The weakness, the Achilles’ heel, is that they don’t get the cheap funding anymore.” Or, to use a more modern metaphor: “This is sort of when Wile E. Coyote runs off the cliff.”

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“[When] an individual fills up their automobile, there is not an extra $10 bill that shows up in their wallet, therefore, the incentive to spend really is not recognized and the ‘savings’ get washed within already tight consumer budgets ..”

Cheap Oil’s Economic Benefits May Be A Big Myth (MarketWatch)

Cheap oil is awesome, right? Most economists describe it as a sort of tax cut for Americans at the gas pump. Even Larry Fink, a hot-shot Wall Street money manager, declared oil’s decline “spectacular.” “This is an incredible tax cut for Americans and everywhere else around the world,” Fink told CNBC Wednesday, referring to the startling plunge oil has seen in recent weeks. The cheap oil argument goes like this: consumers and businesses save in heating costs and in fueling their cars and those savings will be spent on discretionary items, fueling consumption. A recent article in the Washington Post indicated that Americans would pocket a $230 billion windfall, if prices stay at their current levels, compared to where they were in June.

However, some financial experts argue that a decline in oil isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. In fact, it could be a bad omen for the U.S. economy. Lance Roberts, Strategist for STA Wealth Management, said the idea that declining energy prices are good for the economy is wrong. “[When] an individual fills up their automobile, there is not an extra $10 bill that shows up in their wallet, therefore, the incentive to spend really is not recognized and the ‘savings’ get washed within already tight consumer budgets,” Roberts argued. It’s often noted that consumer spending accounts for about two-thirds of gross domestic product. But Roberts pointed out that history does not seem to support the idea that lower gasoline prices, and other cheaper energy costs, lead to higher consumer spending, as the following chart shows:

In fact, as Roberts attempted to illustrate in the chart below, sharp declines in energy prices have actually “been coincident with lower economic growth rates,” as he termed it. In other words, falling oil prices have typically been a harbinger of difficult economic times to come. Think of oil prices as a measure of the global economy’s blood pressure. While there has been a production glut, the strengthening dollar has also contributed to the dramatic drop in oil prices — and that rapidly rising dollar is a function of weakness elsewhere, particularly in Europe and Asia.

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Everything’s on hold for US job numbers later today, but oil is at multi-year lows and slowly falling further this morning.

Brent Drops From 4-Year Low as Saudi Discounts Deepen Price War (Bloomberg)

Brent extended losses from a four-year low as Saudi Arabia offered customers in Asia record discounts on its crude, bolstering speculation it’s defending market share. West Texas Intermediate dropped in New York. Futures fell as much as 0.8% in London and are headed for a second weekly decline. State-run Saudi Arabian Oil Co. cut its differential for Arab Light sales to Asia next month to $2 a barrel below a regional benchmark, according to a company statement. That’s the lowest in at least 14 years. The kingdom doesn’t want to subsidize Iran, Iraq and Venezuela and is willing to let the market decide prices, said Daniel Yergin, an energy analyst and Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

Crude slumped 18% last month as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries maintained its output quota, letting prices decrease to a level that may slow U.S. production. Saudi Arabia has no price target and will let the market decide at what level oil should trade for now, said a person familiar with its policy. “It seems what the Saudis want, the Saudis are going to get,” Phil Flynn, a senior market analyst at Price Futures Group in Chicago, said by e-mail today. “We’re going to see prices continue to be under pressure. It is still game on.”

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Great idea to add US oil to an already overloaded global market.

Oil Drop Gives U.S. Drillers Argument to End Export Ban (Bloomberg)

Collapsing crude prices have given oil producers a new argument for ending a 39-year-old U.S. ban on exports. With U.S. output at a 31-year high and imports at the lowest level since 1995, producers seeking the best possible price for crude are straining at having to keep sales at home. Removing the ban could erase an imbalance between U.S. and foreign crude prices by expanding the market for shale oil. A 38% decline in crude prices since June, “will weigh into the debate” and help make the case to lift the export ban, said Senator Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican poised to take over as head of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee next year. Lawmakers in Washington are set to hold a hearing next week on dropping the ban. Murkowski hasn’t decided yet whether she’ll introduce a bill to allow exports.

Republicans, who are slated to take control of both houses of Congress next year, have yet to reach consensus on what to do. The top House and Senate Republicans haven’t yet taken a position on the matter and some rank-and-file members, including Senator Susan Collins of Maine, say they are wary of action because of fears it may lead to higher gasoline and heating-oil prices. President Barack Obama’s former top economic adviser Lawrence Summers called for ending the ban in September after the Brookings Institution, a Washington policy group, released an analysis showing that exports would lower gasoline prices. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest declined to say yesterday whether lifting the ban was being discussed or considered by the administration.

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With falling oil prices, these projects loook ever more megalomaniacal. “Backers of LNG projects in British Columbia face higher costs than Gulf Coast proponents such as Sempra Energy because of the pipelines required across two Canadian mountain ranges, the lack of existing infrastructure on the Pacific Coast and negotiations with aboriginals.”

Canada-U.S. LNG Rivalry Draws Focus After Petronas Delay (Bloomberg)

Petroliam Nasional’s deferred decision on a C$36 billion ($32 billion) liquefied natural gas project in British Columbia is bringing to the fore Canada’s struggle to compete with the U.S. on costs. Petronas, as the Malaysian state-owned producer is known, is pushing contractors to bring costs closer in line with U.S. rivals as it tries to keep the first exports to Asia on track to start by 2019, Michael Culbert, chief executive officer of the Pacific NorthWest LNG project, said. “We’ve got real competition that is coming out of the Gulf Coast projects,” Culbert said by phone yesterday, estimating U.S. suppliers can deliver LNG to Asia for $1 to $2 less per million British thermal units than Canadian projects. “With the changing oil prices, contractors may not be as busy as they thought they would be.” While U.S. terminals are already being built, none of the proponents in Canada have decided to proceed. Pacific NorthWest LNG would be the country’s first large project to come online among a handful put forward by Shell to Chevron.

Petronas joined BG Group in pushing back a decision on its plans in Canada as oil trades close to five-year lows. BG cited competition from U.S. supplies when it deferred its decision in October. Backers of LNG projects in British Columbia face higher costs than Gulf Coast proponents such as Sempra Energy because of the pipelines required across two Canadian mountain ranges, the lack of existing infrastructure on the Pacific Coast and negotiations with aboriginals. U.S. projects have caught up to Canadian rivals that received export approvals to start lining up buyers earlier and are now passing them by. Gulf Coast proponents adding export capabilities to existing LNG import terminals need less new equipment and have access to a network of pipelines already linked to vast supplies of gas in shale formations, as well as a larger labor pool.

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Ambrose is right. All the speculation on ECB QE is more or less pointless, because Germany (re: the Bundesbank) is not likely to change its mind.

ECB Paralyzed By Split As Irreversible Deflation Trap Draws Closer (AEP)

The European Central Bank has dashed hopes for quantitative easing this year and acknowledged for the first time that the institution’s elite board is split on plans for a €1 trillion liquidity blitz. Equity markets fell across southern Europe,with Italy’s MIB off 2.77pc, led by sharp falls in bank stocks. Spain’s IBEX dropped 2.35pc. The euro surged by more than 1pc to $1.2455 against the dollar in early trading as speculators rushed to cover short positions. Expectations for immediate stimulus had been riding high after the ECB’s president, Mario Draghi, pledged action “as fast as possible” last month. The bank slashed its forecasts for economic growth to 1pc next year, and admitted that inflation will remain stuck at just 0.7pc, a combination that traps large parts of southern Europe in deflationary slump and corrodes debt dynamics. BNP Paribas said eurozone inflation is likely to average 0pc in 2015, after turning negative this month.

“The ECB’s measures are woefully behind the curve,” said Ashoka Mody, a former EU-IMF bailout chief now at the Bruegel think-tank in Brussels. “For anyone who wants to see it, a debt-deflation cycle is ongoing in the distressed economies. The authorities have very nearly lost control of a process that will become ever harder to manage as it becomes more entrenched,” he said. Mr Mody said the ECB repeatedly asserts that it will act “if needed” but declines to spell out what that means and why it continues to delay when the inflation level – now 0.3pc – is already so far below target. “Cheap talk is a legitimate policy tool. But talk can also create a cognitive bubble,” he said. Mr Draghi denied that the ECB is complacent about the deflation risk or that is succumbing to paralysis. “Let me be absolutely clear. We won’t tolerate prolonged deviation from price stability,” he said.

Yet he pleaded for more time to study the effects of the oil price crash and gave a strong hint that there would be no further decisions on monetary stimulus until after the next meeting in January. The governing council discussed possible purchases of every major asset “other than gold” but has not yet agreed to go beyond the current mix of covered bonds and asset-backed securities. “The credibility of the ECB lies in tatters. It’s now patently clear that Draghi lacks the crucial German support for launching full-blown QE,” said sovereign bond strategist Nicolas Spiro. Mr Draghi insisted that the bank could in principle ram through the QE decision by majority vote but said he was “still confident” that a package of measures could be designed to keep everybody on board.

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The oracle leaks lubricant.

Greenspan Says He Would Pre-Empt Asset Bubbles Financed by Debt (Bloomberg)

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who was blamed by some economists for overheating equity and housing prices in the 1990s and 2000s, said that were he in the job today, he would take pre-emptive action to tackle asset bubbles if they were financed by leverage. Greenspan, who argued in office that it was better to clean up after an asset bubble had burst rather than artificially prick it, told delegates at a conference hosted by Citigroup Inc. in London today that he believed that argument is correct when a speculative boom isn’t financed by debt, mentioning the 1987 stock market crash as an example. If the overheating was caused by leverage, however, “then you’re going to have problems,” he said. “Bubbles are aspects of human nature and you can try as hard as you like, you will not alter the path,” Greenspan told the audience at Citigroup’s European Credit Conference via a video link from Washington.

“I still hold to the general view that unless you have debts supporting the bubble, I would just let it alone because certain things about human nature cannot be changed and I’ve come to the conclusion this is one of them.” The former Fed chairman, who warned against “irrational exuberance” in stock markets as early as 1996, was faulted by some economists for not using higher borrowing costs to prevent equity prices from rising before the bursting of the so-called tech bubble in 2000. He cut interest rates afterwards to “mop up” the damage, which some analysts said led to an overheating in the housing market that partly caused the financial crisis. Greenspan remained unapologetic about the tech bubble, saying in a December 2002 speech that central banks had “little experience” in dealing with market bubbles and that “dealing aggressively with the aftermath of a bubble” was “likely to avert long-term damage.”

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Yeah, that’s a really important topic. Bragging rights in the glue factory.

US Economy Still Bigger, But China’s More Crucial (MarketWatch)

Commentary was ablaze Thursday over new data suggesting China now makes up a larger portion of the world economy than the U.S., or at least when adjusted to reflect purchasing power. The numbers — published by the International Monetary Fund — had folks from Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz to MarketWatch columnist Brett Arends declaring the end of the U.S. as the top economic power, while others such as Harvard professor and former Clinton Administration advisor Jeffrey Frankel, argued that America was still on top. But while most economic analysis would still put the U.S. comfortably atop the world rankings, HSBC economist Frederic Neumann said that the real lesson of the IMF data was that China, and emerging Asia as a whole, has become more crucial to the global economy.

In a report Friday, Neumann noted that if you adjust this year’s gross domestic product data for purchasing parity (smoothing out foreign-exchange differences by making the price of products the same in each country), not only is China bigger than the U.S., but the emerging economies of Asia would be bigger than those of the U.S. and euro zone combined. “But that’s not necessarily the right measure to look at to gauge a market’s importance to the world,” Neumann wrote. “Here, international purchasing power matters, and that is best captured by looking at GDP in U.S. dollars.” In other words, an economy’s influence must be measured by what it’s worth globally, not just in its own currency. So if you look at nominal dollar-denominated GDP, the U.S. makes up 22% of the world’s total, while the euro zone is 17%, and China is 11%. “But that’s not to dismiss the growing importance of Asia,” the HSBC economist wrote. “For one, emerging Asia’s combined U.S.-dollar GDP will pull equal to that of the U.S. for the first time this year.”

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We know. That’s why we call BS on ‘growth’.

Wage Growth Stuck Below Pre-Crisis Levels (CNBC)

Stagnant wage growth in developed countries has pulled average global earnings lower and is in danger of dragging economic performance down, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO). In its latest report published Friday, the ILO said that global wage growth in 2013 slowed to 2%, from 2.2% the year before. As such, pay growth has a significant way to go before it reaches its pre-crisis level of around 3%. The average rate was pulled down by stagnant pay in developed countries, the organization said. Annual wage growth in these economies had been around 1% since 2006, but fell to just 0.1% in 2012, and 0.2% in 2013. Wage growth in developed countries was hit hard by the recent economic crisis, which saw employers become reluctant to increase workers’ pay. Over the past few years, as nascent recoveries took hold in major economies including the U.S. and U.K., pay increases have lagged broader economic growth.

It’s an issue that will be in focus on Friday, when the U.S.’s non-farm payrolls numbers are released. The unemployment rate is expected to be unchanged at 5.8%, according to Reuters, but analysts are hoping for a slight increase in wages – a key measure for the Federal Reserve in considering when to raise interest rates. “Wage growth has slowed to almost zero for the developed economies as a group in the last two years, with actual declines in wages in some,” Sandra Polaski, the ILO’s deputy director-genera for policy, said in a release. “This has weighed on overall economic performance, leading to sluggish household demand in most of these economies and the increasing risk of deflation in the euro zone.” By contrast, pay growth in emerging countries has stormed ahead over the last two years, according to the ILO, coming in at 6.7% and 5.9% in 2012 and 2013 respectively.

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That’s how they get their ‘recovery’.

British Workers Suffer Biggest Real-Wage Fall Of Major G20 Countries (Guardian)

British workers suffered the biggest fall in real wages of all major G20 countries in the three years to 2013, according to the International Labour Organisation (ILO). They fared worse in terms of falling real pay than all of the bailed-out eurozone economies – Portugal, Spain and Ireland – apart from Greece. Wages in Japan and Italy also fell over the period but at a slower rate than in the UK, while real terms pay increased in the US, France, Germany, Canada and Australia. Patrick Belser, senior economist at ILO and author of the report, said: “In the UK in 2008 there was some positive growth of real wages whereas some other countries had stagnant or declining wages – such as Japan. Then what you see subsequently is a continuous fall in wages to 2013. We expect wages to be at best flat this year, and they will most likely decline.”

The biggest fall in UK wages adjusted for inflation came in 2011, when they fell by 3.5%. In Italy, which was one of the countries hit hardest by the eurozone crisis, real pay fell by only 1.9%. Last year real UK pay fell by 0.3% according to the ILO, compared with a 2% increase globally. Real wages in the UK have fallen consistently since 2008, with inflation outpacing pay rises an economic recovery and recent rapid falls in unemployment. In the UK, but also in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan and Spain, average real wages in 2013 remained below their 2007 level. Belser said weak productivity was part of the story in the UK. The Bank of England said in its latest quarterly inflation report last month that recent employment growth had been concentrated among young, lower-skilled and lower-paid workers, which was probably dragging down average wage growth. Weaker-than-expected pay growth in Britain has also generated lower than expected tax revenues for the government, which in turn has slowed deficit reduction.

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“One thing is for sure – if we move in anything like this direction, whilst continuing to protect health and pensions, the role and shape of the state will have changed beyond recognition.”

‘Colossal’ Cuts To Come, Warns UK Institute For Fiscal Studies (BBC)

The plans set out by George Osborne in the Autumn Statement on Wednesday will require government spending cuts “on a colossal scale” after the election, an independent forecaster has warned. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said just £35bn of cuts had already happened, with £55bn yet to come. The detail of reductions had not yet been spelled out, IFS director Paul Johnson said. As a result, he said it would be wrong to describe them as “unachievable”. However, voters would be justified in asking whether the chancellor was planning “a fundamental reimagining of the role of the state”, Mr Johnson told a briefing in central London on Thursday.

If reductions in departmental spending were to continue at the same pace after the May 2015 election as they had over the past four years, welfare cuts or tax rises worth about £21bn a year would be needed by 2019-20, at a time when the Conservatives were committed to income tax cuts worth £7bn, according to the IFS. Mr Johnson added: “One thing is for sure – if we move in anything like this direction, whilst continuing to protect health and pensions, the role and shape of the state will have changed beyond recognition.”

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What a great idea with oil moving towards $50. Does that mean they’ll get more of our money?

North Sea Oil Exploration To Be Allocated UK Taxpayers’ Money (Guardian)

Taxpayers’ money could be channelled directly into North Sea oil exploration under a scheme announced to the industry in Aberdeen on Thursday by Danny Alexander, chief secretary to the Treasury. The promise to give financial support for seismic surveys was one of a number of tax and other benefits proposed by the government in an attempt to halt a collapse in exploration and remedy a fall in production. The moves were welcomed by the offshore industry but criticised by environmentalists as “environmental and economic illiteracy of the highest order”. Alexander said it was right to give targeted support to Scotland’s oil and gas industry building on tax reductions and other moves made in the autumn statement on Wednesday.

“We’re incentivising and working with the industry to develop new investment opportunities and support new areas of exploration. This will help ensure that the industry continues to thrive and contribute to the economy,” he explained. Other North Sea countries including Norway and Holland provide seismic incentives but they are new in the UK. Mike Tholen, economics and commercial director at lobby group Oil & Gas UK, said the allocation was expected to be a few millions of pounds rather than billions and to be matched by companies. It would be targeted at areas that would otherwise not be explored. “It is small beer financially but it is important because it is government putting its money where its mouth is,” he said.

Friends of the Earth said it was extraordinary that the government was trying to squeeze as much oil out of the North Sea as it could while the international community was trying to agree a plan during world climate talks in Lima, Peru to head off the threat of catastrophic climate change. Craig Bennett, the organisation’s policy and campaigns director, said: “This is environmental and economic illiteracy of the highest order. Ministers must end their obsession with dirty fossil fuels and build a clean economy for the future based on energy efficiency and the nation’s huge renewable power resources.”

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As the western press tries to make the most out of Poland’s fear of Putin, they have other things on their mind.

Poland More Worried About Europe Than Russia (CNBC)

With Russia and Ukraine for neighbors, Poland’s economy is feeling the heat from the geopolitical crisis but government officials said insist the country was a bright spot in a bad neighborhood and that the euro zone was more of a concern than Russia. “Sanctions are felt across the board, exports to Ukraine are down 25% and to Russia they’re down 10%,” Krzysztof Rybinski, the former deputy governor of the Polish Central Bank, told CNBC Friday. “But I don’t think investors will pull the plug on Poland unless Russia does something really unpredictable.” For Poland the euro zone slowdown was more of a worry. “For the Polish economy it’s much more important what happens in the west, if there is no growth, stagnation and recession in the west it will take us down with the situation.

Russia and Ukraine together are only about 7.5% of Polish exports – that’s significant but not as much as (our exports to) Germany.” Sanctions in Russia and the conflict in Ukraine, coupled with sluggish growth in the euro zone have had a “chilling” effect on Central Eastern Europe, with Poland no exception. Despite credit rating agency Moody’s saying that Poland’s economy had shown “resilience in times of stress” the country’s gross domestic product has declined. The economy grew by 2.0% in 2012, but grew 1.6% last year, according to EU statistics service Eurostat. Rybinski said there had been some positive effects of the sanctions on Russia, however. “We have many Ukrainian young people flowing through the border to Polish universities, this is a positive effect of sanctions. Other positive effects are that the zloty (the Polish currency) is not very strong which is helping Polish exporters,” he said.

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Without that bailout, the markets will attack Greece once again.

Eurozone Mulls Longer Greek Bailout, But Athens Refuses (Reuters)

Euro zone ministers are considering extending Greece’s bailout by six months to mid-2015, according to a document obtained by Reuters, but Athens said it was only willing to consider an extension of a few weeks to the unpopular program. Extending the program beyond a few weeks into the new year would complicate Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’ efforts to secure victory for his preferred candidate in a presidential vote in February. He had depended on exiting the EU/IMF bailout by the end of the year, when funding from the EU is due to end. “Greece has not received any written proposal on an extension,” a government official told Reuters. “In any case, everything that the prime minister and Finance Minister (Gikas) Hardouvelis has said stands – that Greece can discuss only a technical extension, which cannot be longer than a few weeks.”

An extension of the bailout, under which Athens will have received a total of €240 billion ($300 billion) since 2010, is necessary because international lenders and the Greek government are still negotiating what Athens must do to get the remaining €1.8 billion and secure a back-up credit line for after the bailout ends and Greece returns to market financing. Athens needed to wrap up its bailout review by a meeting on Dec. 8 of euro zone ministers to meet the timeline for exiting by the end of the year. But the talks have been held up by a row over a budget shortfall next year, and a senior euro zone official on Wednesday said Greece would have to ask for an extension on its bailout because a credit line to replace the program will not be ready in time. Euro zone officials are now urging the country to reach a deal by Dec. 14, a Greek finance ministry official said.

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Stop pretending already. There is no cure for Japan.

Japan Pension Fund Head Calls for $389 Billion Stock Revamp (Bloomberg)

Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund is considering whether to overhaul its $389 billion of stock investments by loosening rules that restrict managers to domestic or international equities. A month after the $1.1 trillion pool unveiled plans to more than double local and foreign share targets so that each makes up 25% of assets, Takahiro Mitani, its president, said separating the world into Japan and everywhere else may not be the best approach. GPIF should consider letting some of its managers invest both at home and abroad, he said. “More funds are investing without discriminating between domestic and foreign, and I think that’s worth considering,” Mitani, 65, said in an interview in Tokyo on Dec. 3. “If choosing between Toyota and Volkswagen, instead of being limited to just Toyota and Nissan, raises investment performance and efficiency, it’s an option we mustn’t rule out.”

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the biggest U.S. public pension, makes no distinction between local and foreign holdings. Calpers, which oversees about $295 billion, has a 51% target for public equities, according to its website. GPIF’s stock investments were parceled out to managers in 45 different pieces as of March 31, according to the fund’s annual report. The Topix index rallied 8.4% since GPIF announced the investment strategy changes on Oct. 31. The Bank of Japan unexpectedly expanded its bond buying to 80 trillion yen ($666 billion) a year on the same day, as it targets annual inflation of 2%. The extra purchases helped drive yields on benchmark 10-year notes down by 3.5 basis points to 0.435% yesterday, after touching a more than 1 1/2-year low at the end of November. The Topix rose 0.4% at today’s close to extend a seven-year high. The yen fell 0.3% to 120.01 per dollar.

GPIF would have to revise its systems to allow one manager to invest across Japanese and non-domestic shares, Mitani said. Alternatively, it could create a new global stock class on top of the existing ones, he said. The fund is due to review foreign equity managers in about 18 months, according to Mitani, who said he plans to retire when his five-year term finishes at the end of March.

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And this is what you get, Mr. Pension fund head: ” .. 37% of Japan’s yen-denominated wealth has gone up in smoke ..” Abenomics equals desperation.

The Japanese Government Bond Market Is Dead. And the Yen? (Wolfstreet)

[The BOJ’s] relentless bid has driven yields to near zero, now increasingly for longer-dated maturities as well. In this process, the Bank of Japandemonium, as I’ve come to call it, has tightened its iron grip on the government bond market to where the market ran out of air and died. Takeshi Fujimaki, an opposition lawmaker, explained the phenomenon this way:

The BOJ used consumer prices as an excuse to add stimulus and continues to hide that it’s monetizing government debt. But the truth is that Japan will default unless the BOJ continues to buy JGBs even after inflation accelerates beyond its intended target.

Alas, to monetize ever larger portions of government debt, the BOJ is selling freshly printed yen into a market it can manipulate but not control: the global currency market. Once big players around the world start dumping the yen, and once scared Japanese folks start dumping their yen too, the yen might do what the ruble is doing now: spiraling down uncontrollably. When Abenomics became a noun in late 2012, it took ¥75 to buy $1. Today it takes ¥120. With the effect that 37% of Japan’s yen-denominated wealth has gone up in smoke. But once the BOJ decides that the yen has fallen enough, it might not be able to stop its fall. It would have to sell its international reserves and buy yen – the opposite of QE.

If it decided to buy yen, instead of printing yen, to prop up the currency, it would thereby surrender control over the government bond market. The relentless bid would disappear even as the flood of new JGBs would continue. There would be no other buyers, not with yields at near zero. Chaos would break out instantly. The BOJ might try for a minute or two, and it might try to talk up the yen, but it can’t actually prop up the yen with yen purchases without causing JGBs to spiral out of control, which it would never allow to happen. It would never allow a debt crisis to throw Japan into chaos. Instead, it will continue to guarantee the nominal value of the debt by buying up every JGB that comes on the market, while keeping yields at near zero. And to heck with the yen. Fujimaki sees ¥200 to the dollar.

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Good point.

Companies Don’t Need Banks for Bank Loans (Bloomberg)

A while ago U.S. banking regulators announced guidelines to prevent banks from making loans to companies at more than six times Ebitda, because the regulators thought those loans were too risky. More recently those regulators have announced, roughly once a week, that they intend to enforce those rules, but for real this time. Here is a Wall Street Journal story about how private-equity firms – whose buyouts tend to be funded by leveraged loans – are adapting to those rules. Here is one funny way to adapt:

Private-equity firms have used adjustments in their models that contribute to a company’s earnings, thereby decreasing the leverage ratio and lifting a company’s future cash flow, a measure regulators use to calculate a company’s ability to repay debt. Vista Equity Partners adjusted Tibco Software’s Ebitda for the 12 months to Aug. 31 by 58%, to $378 million, from Tibco’s own calculation of $239 million.

This is an admirable strategy: If you want to borrow 8.5 times as much money as you make in a year, then that’s bad. One way to fix that is to borrow less money, but that is no fun. Another way to fix it is to make more money, but that is hard. A third way to fix it is to cross out the number of dollars that you make in a year and write a different number, and, boom, now you are borrowing 5.3 times Ebita. (Yes yes yes Vista “factored in cost savings” that the buyout would generate.) I don’t know how popular that strategy is.

The more interesting adaptation strategy is direct syndication. The thing is, most leveraged loans don’t come from banks. When a company does a leveraged loan, a bank will normally arrange the loan, and lend some of the money, but typically most of the money will come from other investors: hedge funds, mutual funds, collateralized loan obligations, etc.3 In the modern leveraged-loan market — much like in the stock and bond markets — banks are mostly intermediaries, matching companies that want to borrow with investors who want to lend. Those investors can still lend. The banks can’t. (I mean, they can, but the regulators will make sad faces at them.) But statistically the banks weren’t lending that much anyway. They were calling up the investors who were actually lending, but banks don’t have a monopoly on telephones.

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Everyone seems to be gambling on Russians dumping Putin in hard times, but why should they?

Putin Warns Russians Of Hard Times Ahead (BBC)

President Vladimir Putin has warned Russians of hard times ahead and urged self-reliance, in his annual state-of-the nation address to parliament. Russia has been hit hard by falling oil prices and by Western sanctions imposed in response to its interventions in the crisis in neighbouring Ukraine. The rouble, once a symbol of stability under Mr Putin, suffered its biggest one-day decline since 1998 on Monday. The government has warned that Russia will fall into recession next year. Speaking to both chambers in the Kremlin, Mr Putin also accused Western governments of seeking to raise a new “iron curtain” around Russia. He expressed no regrets for annexing Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula, saying the territory had a “sacred meaning” for Russia.

He insisted the “tragedy” in Ukraine’s south-east had proved that Russian policy had been right but said Russia would respect its neighbour as a brotherly country. Speaking in Basel in Switzerland later, US Secretary of State John Kerry said the West did not seek confrontation with Russia. “No-one gains from this confrontation… It is not our design or desire that we see a Russia isolated through its own actions,” Mr Kerry said. Russia could rebuild trust, he said, by withdrawing support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.

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This has many European countries worried.

Finns Who Can’t Be Fired Show Debt Trap at Work (Bloomberg)

Finland is a nice place to be if you work in the public sector. But laws that protect municipal workers from the hard reality of a faltering economy are adding to the debt burden in a country that had its credit rating cut just two months ago. In some towns, no public-sector staff can be fired until as late as 2022. Meanwhile, Finnish local government debt has tripled to €16.3 billion ($20 billion) since 2000. It will grow by another €10 billion by 2018, the Finance Ministry estimates. “The government and municipalities have the same problem: the income base has collapsed while expenses have continued to grow,” Anssi Rantala, chief economist at Aktia Bank Oyj, said by phone. As more people retire than join the workforce, Finland’s recession shows no sign of easing.

Prime Minister Alexander Stubb has described the country’s plight as a “lost decade” as manufacturing fails to spur growth for a third consecutive year. Adding to the country’s woes is the economic pain spreading through its eastern neighbor as exports to Russia collapse. In October, Standard & Poor’s cut Finland to AA+ from AAA as the state’s debt exceeds the 60% limit to gross domestic product permitted inside the European Union. As the government struggles to squeeze more competitiveness out of its labor force, existing laws are hampering its efforts. Many municipal employees enjoy a five-year immunity in case their town is merged with another. Among Finland’s 320 towns, the smallest ones may merge several times – giving those workers another five years of job protection each time.

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Francis has guts. He fired the head of the Swiss guard as well yesterday. But money is a topic that can draw especially harsh responses, certainly when it’s a lot. And the Vatican has an awful lot.

Vatican Finds Hundreds Of Millions Of Euros ‘Tucked Away’ (Reuters)

The Vatican’s economy minister has said hundreds of millions of euros were found “tucked away” in accounts of various Holy See departments without having appeared in the city-state’s balance sheets. In an article for Britain’s Catholic Herald Magazine to be published on Friday, Australian Cardinal George Pell wrote that the discovery meant overall Vatican finances were in better shape than previously believed. “In fact, we have discovered that the situation is much healthier than it seemed, because some hundreds of millions of euros were tucked away in particular sectional accounts and did not appear on the balance sheet,” he wrote. “It is important to point out that the Vatican is not broke … the Holy See is paying its way, while possessing substantial assets and investments,” Pell said, according to an advance text made available on Thursday.

Pell did not suggest any wrongdoing but said Vatican departments had long had “an almost free hand” with their finances and followed “long-established patterns” in managing their affairs. “Very few were tempted to tell the outside world what was happening, except when they needed extra help,” he said, singling out the once-powerful Secretariat of State as one department that had especially jealously guarded its independence. “It was impossible for anyone to know accurately what was going on overall,” said Pell, head of the new Secretariat for the Economy that is independent of the now downgraded Secretariat of State. Pell is an outsider from the English-speaking world transferred by Pope Francis from Sydney to Rome to oversee the Vatican’s often muddled finances after decades of control by Italians.

Pell’s office sent a letter to all Vatican departments last month about changes in economic ethics and accountability. As of Jan. 1, each department will have to enact “sound and efficient financial management policies” and prepare financial information and reports that meet international accounting standards. Each department’s financial statements will be reviewed by a major international auditing firm, the letter said. Since the pope’s election in March, 2013, the Vatican has enacted major reforms to adhere to international financial standards and prevent money laundering. It has closed many suspicious accounts at its scandal-rocked bank. In his article, Pell said the reforms were “well under way and already past the point where the Vatican could return to the ‘bad old days’.”

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