Monsanto Archives - Page 5 of 12 - The Automatic Earth

‘I think the Fed is making a mistake. It’s so tight, I think the Fed has gone crazy’. That is the view that President Donald Trump shared of the Federal Reserve on Wednesday in the wake of a virtual bloodbath on Wall Street that resulted in the worst daily decline for the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 since both U.S. equity benchmarks tumbled into correction territory back in early February. The Nasdaq, meanwhile, suffered its ugliest day since U.K. voters coalesced around a market-disrupting plan to exit from the European Union’s trade bloc back in June 2016.

In all, it was a withering session for an administration that has closely watched stock-market performance and views it, at least partly, as a gauge of the success of its economic policies, including corporate tax cuts and deregulation. However, those efforts, Trump says, are imperiled by the policies of the Fed, which has raised interest rates three times this year and has signaled its intention to do so a fourth time before year-end. IMF managing director Christine Lagarde dismissed Trump’s comments Thursday. “I would not associate Jay Powell with craziness,” she told CNBC at the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Bali, Indonesia.

Everything’s going down. ‘Investors’ are jittery.

• World Stock Markets Dive As Trump Attacks ‘Crazy’ US Rate Hikes (G.)

A jittery, volatile week on global financial markets has burst into a frenzy of selling, triggered by heavy losses on Wall Street and comments by Donald Trump describing US interest rate hikes as “crazy”. The Nikkei index in Tokyo was down by 4.25% on Thursday afternoon, while in Hong Kong the index was down 3.9% and Shanghai was at its lowest mark for four years after a plunge of 4.15%. In Sydney the benchmark S&P/ASX200 index closed down 2.74%, slipping below the 6,000-point mark for the first time since early June. European markets were braced for more losses with the FTSE100 in London poised to fall almost 2% and close to dropping down below 7,000 points for the first time since March.

The rout was triggered by a fall of more than 800 points in the Dow Jones industrial average on Wall Street on Wednesday. It was the worst drop in eight months and was led by sharp declines in technology stocks. Despite a booming US economy, low inflation and low unemployment, investors are concerned about rising bond yields that have been drawing money out of the stock market, and rising US interest rates. “It’s a bit of a bloodbath,” said Ed Campbell, senior portfolio manager at QMA, the asset management branch of Prudential Financial in New York. “It’s primarily the cumulative effect of interest rate moves over the past five days and news reports about trade impacting companies.”

[..] The Chinese yuan slipped against the dollar again on Thursday as Beijing tries to mitigate the impact of US tariffs. But it was the only currency across the region that was feeling the pressure from higher bond yields as the Australian dollar slipped under US71c. “The yuan has already weakened significantly, to offset the tariffs announced so far,” said Alan Ruskin, Deutsche’s global head of G10 FX strategy in Sydney. “Further weakness could exacerbate concerns of a self-fulfilling flight of capital, and a loss of control.”

Most overvalued sinks fastest.

• Tech Stocks Have Their Worst Day Since August 2011 (CNBC)

Technology stocks got clobbered on Wednesday, suffering their worst day in more than seven years, as concerns over rising interest rates punished the overall market, particularly shares of companies that have been the best performers. The S&P 500 Information Technology Index closed at $1,220.62, down 4.8 percent, marking the biggest decline since August 18, 2011, when the index dropped 5.3 percent. All 65 members of the index fell. The broader S&P 500 dropped by 3.3 percent and the Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled 3.2 percent. The tech sector includes the largest companies by market cap in the U.S. and those that have been the biggest contributors to the extended rally. Shares of Apple, Microsoft and Amazon are up sharply for the year as investors bet they will continue to deliver strong earnings growth and take market share.

“The wider the income gap becomes, the more the government will have to spend in order to support lower-income households.”

• “Rising Inequality” Could Impact America’s AAA Credit Rating (SH)

“Since 1995, the top 10% of US income earners have experienced an overall median net worth increase of close to 200%, while the bottom 40% of income earners have seen a decline. There has been a particularly sharp increase in wealth and income inequality ratios since the global financial crisis,” Moody’s noted in a report released on Monday. “The global financial crisis exacerbated the effects of these trends by disproportionately affecting poorer overleveraged households and by reducing the mobility of households with negative home equity and, oftentimes, negative net wealth as a result,” says Moody’s Vice President William Foster. “Wealthier households with a higher concentration of equity market holdings in retirement savings plans and personal portfolio investments have disproportionately benefited from the significant gains in the US and global stock markets since the global financial crisis.”

In turn, that rising inequality “will exacerbate already material fiscal challenges on the horizon,” Moody’s continued. “Should inequality go unaddressed, social tensions will continue to rise, leading to a more fractious political landscape that increases political risk, and with it a less predictable policy environment.” But it’s not just about taxes, either. Everything from globalization, automation, technological advancements requiring advanced job skills, elevated premium on education and the increasing costs associated with education have played a role in widening inequality. So what does it mean for the U.S.’ AAA rating? According to Moody’s Vice President William Foster, the widening gap between rich and poor is a threat, but the U.S. government, of course, has other aspects supporting the rating—at least in the medium term (2-5 years). Chief among them is the debt denominated in dollars.

Still, Moody’s cites rising inequality as the U.S.’ weakest rating factor. Why? It’s simple math: The wider the income gap becomes, the more the government will have to spend in order to support lower-income households. These costs, Moody’s notes, “are unlikely to be offset by revenue raising measures following recent tax cuts”. At the end of the day, even though the economy is chugging along nicely—nicely enough, in fact, for everyone to ignore rising inequality that will contribute to widening fiscal deficits and a growing debt burden.

Timebomb.

• How Will 6% Mortgage Rates Deal with Housing Bubble 2? (WS)

What many in 2016 thought would never happen again is now reality. It finally happened – a line in the sand has been breached. The average interest rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages with conforming loan balances ($453,100 or less) and a 20% down-payment did what people had thought in 2016 we’d never see again: It breached 5%. It hit 5.05%, to be precise, for the week ending October 5, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) this morning. This is the highest average rate since January 5, 2010 (chart via Investing.com):

This is likely not the pain-threshold for the housing market, though it is already putting pressure on it at the margin, with some potential buyers being scared off and other potential buyers finding the inflated home prices of today with the current mortgage rates outside their range of affordability. As interest rates have risen, some potential buyers have fallen by the wayside – though not a huge number just yet. But 6% will likely be the pain threshold, in my estimates. It will block a considerable number of potential buyers from buying at current prices. Home prices would have to fall first.

If the maximum a household can afford is a mortgage payment of $1,720 a month, they can finance $320,000 over 30 years with a 5% fixed rate mortgage. But if the mortgage rate rises to 6%, they’re maxed out at $287,000. In other words, the price they can afford would drop by about 10% if the rate rises by 1 percentage point. This principle goes for all budget-constrained buyers. And 6% has moved into view. This is still historically low. It would take rates back to December 2008, when the Fed was kicking off its first round of QE to repress long-term rates and inflate asset prices. Beyond that are the now unimaginably high rates of 7% and 8%:

Mortgage rates move more or less in tandem with the 10-year Treasury yield, but are higher. The spread between the MBA’s average 30-year fixed mortgage rate and the 10-year yield runs around 1.5 to 2.0 percentage points over time. With today’s 10-year yield at 3.22%, the spread is 1.83 percentage points.

[..] This new mortgage rate environment is meeting home prices across the US that have surged over the past years. Affordability issues, already tough to deal with at 4% and 4.5% and even tougher to deal with at 5%, are going to be much tougher at 6%.

Barnier knows that the DUP and hardliners won’t accept.

• Brexit Deal Within Reach If May Agrees On Customs Union, Says Barnier (G.)

Michel Barnier has claimed a Brexit deal could be within reach by next Wednesday but warned the prime minister that only by abandoning a key red line and agreeing to a customs union can impediments on trade between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK be avoided. The British government would have to give up on its plans for free-trade deals with China and the US under such an agreement, the EU’s chief negotiator insisted, but otherwise a customs and regulatory border within the territory of the UK will have to be erected.

The EU’s contentious proposal for avoiding a hard border on the island of Ireland after Brexit is for Northern Ireland to, in effect, stay in the customs union and remain under single market regulations, while the rest of the UK withdraws. In a speech in Brussels, Barnier reiterated his rejection of the counter-proposals hammered out by the cabinet at Chequers, which Theresa May insists is the only deal that respects both the referendum result and the constitutional integrity of the UK by ensuring “frictionless” trade and no hard border.

The prime minister’s plan for a common rulebook on goods and a customs arrangement that meant the UK could avoid border checks, while allowing the country to sign its own bespoke trade deals, would give British companies “a huge competitive edge” and be “counter to our very foundations”, Barnier said. He instead encouraged Britain to make a final push in the talks, offering to launch “around 10 negotiations running in parallel” from April 2019 on an EU-UK trade deal, if agreement can be found now on the Irish border issue and the principles of a Canada-style free trade deal.

Why the EU-Italy feud will be fierce.

• Hysteria Over the Italian Budget Is Wrong-Headed (Costantini)

Even the moderate face of the coalition, the Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte, stepped up to question the priorities of the European Commission, the Bank of Italy, and the IMF: He assured that his government remains committed to containing the public debt and maintaining fiscal stability, but claimed that goal is impossible to achieve without economic development. The minister for European affairs, economist Paolo Savona, said that, in fact, a higher deficit-to-GDP ratio than 2.4% would be helpful. The heated reactions to the new fiscal plan are unjustified. In fact, the estimated targets that the new fiscal plan would (minimally) breach are unreliable and based on wrong macroeconomic principles.

Moreover, despite accusations of profligacy, Italy has in fact been running large primary surpluses (the budget balance minus interest payments), and will keep doing so even if the government confirms its plans. If anything should be of “serious concern,” it is the fact that the country continues down the road of austerity, which has proven to be contractionary; it has locked the country into stagnation and exposed its banking system to still more stress. With public investments at historically low levels, unemployment still above the 2008 rate in all regions, and a youth unemployment rate above 30%, it is hard not to see a strong case for fiscal stimulus.

It’s all about Russiagate and Mueller’s indictment of ‘Russian hackers’. All nonsense. Free Assange and let him provide the evidence.

• Trump Campaign Claims Wikileaks Not Liable For Releasing Hacked Emails (G.)

The Trump campaign argued in a legal filing that Wikileaks could not be held liable for publishing emails that were stolen by Russian hackers ahead of the 2016 US election because the website was simply serving as a passive publishing platform on behalf of a third party, in the same way as Google or Facebook. Questions about Wikileaks’ publication of thousands of hacked emails, which it allegedly obtained following a plot by Russian military intelligence to steal the emails from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic party, are at the heart of Robert Mueller’s criminal investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

The campaign also said in a legal filing that any alleged agreement between the Trump campaign and Wikileaks to publish the emails could not have been a “conspiracy” because Wikileaks’ decision to release the stolen emails was not an illegal act. The court filing was written in response to a civil lawsuit brought against the Trump campaign by two of Hillary Clinton’s donors and a former employee of the Democratic party. The Trump campaign’s surprising defence of Wikileaks marks a stark departure from official US policy, which has condemned the website for frequently targeting the US government and for publishing thousands of classified documents about covert policies.

[..] Analysts say the legal filing is also significant because it hints at how officials in the Trump White House or individuals who served on the campaign may eventually seek to defend themselves against any criminal charges alleging that they conspired with Wikileaks to release the emails. The legal arguments suggest the Trump White House would argue Wikileaks was not criminally liable for the release of the emails and that it therefore would not be a criminal conspiracy to work with the website on their release. The filing also makes the case that, under the campaign’s first amendment right to free speech, it had the right to publish information – even if it was stolen – as long as it did not participate in the theft of the emails. The hacked materials were a matter of “significant public concern”, the filing said.

They need to move well beyond one day to get attention. And whoever signed those secret deals (Tsipras, Troika!) needs their day in court.

• Acropolis To Close In One-Day Strike Over Privatisation Fears (G.)

Striking trade unionists in Greece are forcing the shutdown of the country’s prime ancient sites, including the Acropolis, in a one-day protest over privatisation fears. The 24-hour walkout on Thursday is expected to close the majority of Greece’s 275 archaeological sites, monuments and museums, which generate about €100m in revenue, mostly from ticket sales, every year. “We are doing this to protest the prospect of any of these sites being exploited by foreign funds,” said Grigoris Vafiadis, the head of the association of culture ministry employees. “Every day we are discovering that monuments have been transferred to the privatisation fund set up at the request of [bailout] lenders. No country in the world, for whatever reason, has mortgaged its cultural heritage.”

The sites, which protestors say include Knossos on Crete, are believed to have been placed on a list of properties overseen by a superfund established in 2016 with the express purpose of managing state assets for the next 99 years. The body, which also handles state asset sales, was part of the price the debt-burdened country had to pay to keep default at bay and remain in the eurozone. Vafiadis, whose union represents more than 3,000 cultural ministry officials, mostly in the Greater Attica region surrounding Athens and central Greece, said sites were listed in the superfund by code. “It’s a long process to work out what the codes refer to on the land registry. For all we know, they might even include the Acropolis which is not just Greek but a world heritage site and should never be put in the hands of any foreign fund,” he said.

Interesting assessment.

• Trump Will Be The Last ‘Pure Human’ Leader – Scott Adams (Y!)

Scott Adams, the creator of the office-themed comic strip “Dilbert,” isn’t laughing about the future of American democracy. Having expressed his admiration for Donald Trump over the past few years, Adams believes the tech industry poses a threat to the president as well as to the country as a whole. “I think President Trump will be the last pure human leader,” Adams told Grant Burningham, host of the Yahoo News podcast “Bots & Ballots.” “Everything after this will be a human and he will be elected, he or she, but the decisions will really come from the algorithm after that.”

The algorithm, Adams said, was the one unleashed on the world by Silicon Valley tech companies that has the power to shape popular opinion that, in turn, will determine how politicians express themselves. “There are people making decisions at the tech companies — the Googles and Twitters and Facebooks. Those decisions get turned into algorithms, and once they’re turned into algorithms, the humans no longer really understand them,” Adams said. Adams has likened Trump’s off-the-cuff communications approach in the 2016 presidential election to a form of hypnosis that helped insulate him from the powers of the algorithm.

“President Trump is unique in that his persuasion skills are greater than the tech companies’. It’s probably the only reason he got elected,” Adams said. “I can imagine no one else who would have beat Hillary Clinton. So, after him, I think if you get in an ordinary politician, and it doesn’t matter which party they’re in, the algorithm will push the voters and the voters will push the politicians and everybody will think they have free will, they will think they made up their own minds. They will think they did their own research, they came up with independent decisions, but we’re no longer in that world.”

Monsanto will appeal until the next century.

• Judge Moves To Allow Monsanto New Trial After $289m Cancer Verdict (G.)

A California judge has moved to grant the agrochemical company Monsanto a new trial after a landmark jury verdict found its herbicide had caused a man’s terminal cancer. Dewayne “Lee” Johnson, a 46-year-old former groundskeeper, won a $289m award in August in a trial alleging that the popular Roundup weedkiller had made him sick and that Monsanto had failed to warn him of the risks. Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, the German pharmaceutical company, immediately appealed the verdict, which included punitive damages and economic losses and also found that Monsanto had “acted with malice or oppression”.

The San Francisco superior court judge Suzanne Bolanos cited the “insufficiency of the evidence to justify the award for punitive damages” in a tentative written ruling issued before a hearing on Wednesday. She is expected to make a final decision after attorneys submit additional arguments. Monsanto sought to overturn the verdict and has continued to argue that it is safe to use glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide. Glyphosate-based products, including the Roundup and Ranger Pro brands, are now worth billions of dollars in revenues, approved for use on more than 100 crops, and registered in 130 countries. Timothy Litzenburg, one of the attorneys who represented Johnson in the trial, told the Guardian that regardless of the outcome, the original ruling would still have a long-term impact: “There’s been a loud and clear message.”

Precautionary principle? Not for Monsanto, not for Big Pharma.

• HSBC Issues Dire Warning On Antibiotics Resistance (BI)

According to the global research team at HSBC, the use of antibiotics in meat production could have “devastating” consequences for humanity. When farmers feed antibiotics to their animals, they create antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which can lead to antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” in humans. Over time, this could make it difficult to treat even common infections like strep throat. The report’s authors liken the impact of antibiotic resistance to climate change: The causation may not be immediately clear, but the evidence suggests a catastrophic future. Scientific experts now predict that antibiotic resistance could lead to 10 million deaths annually by 2050, exceeding cancer as one of the most common forms of death worldwide.

While some of this is related to the overprescribing of antibiotics by doctors, it also has to do with the antibiotics that are fed to key sources of produce, such as chickens, cows, and pigs. According to the report, more than half of global antibiotics are used in agriculture rather than medicine. Although China accounts for 60% of the world’s agricultural antibiotics, the US also uses antibiotics in around 70% of its agricultural products. Most of these antibiotics are used in meat production, which has risen by 90% per capita globally since the 1960s. In June, an analysis of more than 47,000 US government lab tests found an increase in the number of pork chops and ground beef that were contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Court decides because of “a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights”. If that is true in Holland, it will also be in 26 other countries. Moreover, as Elliot Sherber said in his article in yesterday’s Debt Rattle:

“According to the legal maxim that “the health of the people should be the supreme law” (another type of emergency brake – one cited by jurists, and those contesting coercive power, since antiquity), there is a legal duty to pursue this as well (for, among other things, human health is contingent on the health of its general environment – and freedom from oppression). Indeed, if we are to take this maxim seriously, we must recognize that it implies that conditions that are inimical to health (harmful to the health of the people) must be corrected in order to comply with the “supreme law.”

• Historic Climate Litigation Result Stands After Dutch Court Victory (CE)

Climate litigators are celebrating after a second landmark court victory that will hold the Netherlands government to account for greater action on climate change. The Hague Court of Appeal has upheld a historic win for the Urgenda Foundation on behalf of 886 Dutch citizens in their climate case, rejecting the Dutch government’s arguments. A day after the UN IPCC report outlined the urgent climate action needed to restrict global warming to 1.5 degrees, the Dutch court today affirmed that any less than a 25% reduction in carbon emissions by the Netherlands government before 2020 would be a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. Dutch emissions are currently only 13% lower compared to 1990 levels and have stagnated during the last six years.

The original legal victory by Urgenda inspired a wave of climate lawsuits worldwide, brought by people determined to hold their governments accountable for a lack of climate action. ClientEarth CEO James Thornton said: “Today’s news shows just what a powerful tool climate litigation has become in holding decision-makers to account for their climate inaction. “For a second time now, a Dutch court has ruled that the country’s government has a constitutional duty to protect its citizens from the impacts of climate change and that anything less is a violation of their human rights. “This second victory shows that Dutch judges have been clear about what the government must do now: accept both decisions and refocus its efforts on reducing its carbon emissions by 25% by 2020.

“This is the climate case that started it all, inspiring similar lawsuits worldwide. It has completely changed the debate on climate policy and will inspire people everywhere to use the power of the courts to hold their leaders to account for greater action on climate change.”

Debt Rattle October 8 2018

Oct 082018

October 8, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:18 am Finance Tagged with: austerity, China, climate, EU, FBI, idiots, IMF, inflation, IPCC, migrants, Monsanto, recession, RRR, warming 14 Responses »

Paul Gauguin The Great Buddah 1897

• ACT NOW IDIOTS (BBC)

• World Must Take ‘Unprecedented’ Steps To Avert Worst Of Global Warming (R.)

• Energy Sector’s Carbon Emissions To Grow For Second Year Running (G.)

• Clouds Gather Over The IMF’s Paradise (O.)

• US Inflation Is The World’s Most Important Economic Variable (CNBC)

• Ron Paul: US Barreling Towards A Stock Market Plunge Of At Least 50% (CNBC)

• China Stocks Return From Holiday, Tumble 3% As PBOC Eases Bank Rates (MW)

• FBI’s Smoking Gun: Redactions (Solomon)

• Italy’s Di Maio Predicts ‘Political Earthquake’ For European Union (RT)

• Salvini Resists Germany’s Plans To Send Migrants Back To Italy (RT)

• Austerity Is The Wrong Prescription For The World’s Wellbeing (G.)

• Greece ‘to Claim €280 Billion’ in War Reparations from Germany (GR)

• ‘The World Is Against Them’: New Era Of Cancer Lawsuits Threaten Monsanto (G.)

Sure, but do what? Has anyone defined that?

• ACT NOW IDIOTS (BBC)

It’s the final call, say scientists, the most extensive warning yet on the risks of rising global temperatures. Their dramatic report on keeping that rise under 1.5 degrees C states that the world is now completely off track, heading instead towards 3C. Staying below 1.5C will require “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”. It will be hugely expensive, the report says, but the window of opportunity is not yet closed. After three years of research and a week of haggling between scientists and government officials at a meeting in South Korea, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a special report on the impact of global warming of 1.5C.

The critical 33-page Summary for Policymakers certainly bears the hallmarks of difficult negotiations between climate researchers determined to stick to what their studies have shown and political representatives more concerned with economies and living standards. Despite the inevitable compromises, there are some key messages that come through loud and and clear. “The first is that limiting warming to 1.5C brings a lot of benefits compared with limiting it to 2 degrees. It really reduces the impacts of climate change in very important ways,” said Prof Jim Skea, who is a co-chair of the IPCC.

“The second is the unprecedented nature of the changes that are required if we are to limit warming to 1.5C – changes to energy systems, changes to the way we manage land, changes to the way we move around with transportation.” “Scientists might want to write in capital letters, ‘ACT NOW IDIOTS’, but they need to say that with facts and numbers,” said Kaisa Kosonen, from Greenpeace, who was an observer at the negotiations. “And they have.” The researchers have used these facts and numbers to paint a picture of the world with a dangerous fever, caused by humans. We used to think if we could keep warming below 2 degrees this century then the changes we would experience would be manageable.

The IPCC’s estimates have been off by a large margin. Political pressure?

• World Must Take ‘Unprecedented’ Steps To Avert Worst Of Global Warming (R.)

Society would have to enact “unprecedented” changes to how it consumes energy, travels and builds to meet a lower global warming target or it risks increases in heat waves, flood-causing storms and the chances of drought in some regions as well as the loss of species, a U.N. report said on Monday. Keeping the Earth’s temperature rise to only 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) rather than the 2C target agreed to at the Paris Agreement talks in 2015, would have “clear benefits to people and natural ecosystems,” the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said on Monday in a statement announcing the report’s release.

The IPCC report said at the current rate of warming, the world’s temperatures would likely reach 1.5C between 2030 and 2052 after an increase of 1C above pre-industrial levels since the mid-1800s. Keeping the 1.5C target would keep the global sea level rise 0.1 meter (3.9 inches) lower by 2100 than a 2C target, the report states. That could reduce flooding and give the people that inhabit the world’s coasts, islands and river deltas time to adapt to climate change.

The lower target would also reduce species loss and extinction and the impact on terrestrial, freshwater and coastal ecosystems, the report said. “There were doubts if we would be able to differentiate impacts set at 1.5C and that came so clearly. Even the scientists were surprised to see how much science was already there and how much they could really differentiate and how great are the benefits of limiting global warming at 1.5 compared to 2,” Thelma Krug, vice-chair of the IPCC, told Reuters in an interview. “And now more than ever we know that every bit of warming matters,” Krug said.

And after all the big words, here is reality.

• Energy Sector’s Carbon Emissions To Grow For Second Year Running (G.)

Carbon emissions from the energy sector are on track to grow for the second year running, in a major blow to hopes the world might have turned the corner on tackling climate change. Preliminary analysis by the world’s energy watchdog shows the industry’s emissions have continued to rise in 2018, suggesting that an increase last year was not a one-off. The finding comes as the world’s leading climate scientists issue a landmark report on whether the world can meet a tougher global warming target, of limiting temperature rises to 1.5C.

Dr Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), told the Guardian: “When I look at the first nine months of data, I expect in 2018 carbon emissions will increase once again. This is definitely worrying news for our climate goals. We need to see a steep decline in emissions. We are not seeing even flat emissions.” Emissions largely flatlined in 2014–16 after climbing for decades, raising hopes that global action on climate change was beginning to turn the tide – but in 2017 they grew by 1.4%.

Silliest metaphor ever? “..while it is tempting to sail alone, countries must resist the siren call of self-sufficiency – because as the Greek legends tell us, that leads to shipwreck..”

• Clouds Gather Over The IMF’s Paradise (O.)

On Tuesday, the [IMF] will update its World Economic Outlook and has already warned that the effects of rising debt and trade wars are affecting the global projections. Last week, the IMF’s head, Christine Lagarde, said the outlook “has become less bright”, despite projections during the summer that there would be 3.9% growth for 2018 and 2019. [..] Adding to Lagarde’s comments, there were warnings last week in the IMF’s global financial stability report, which said there was a risk of another financial meltdown because both governments and regulators have failed to put in place needed reforms to protect the system. Lagarde said that while expansion of the global economy was running at its fastest rate in seven years, there were signs of slowdown.

In September, factory activity dropped as a result of changes in trading with the US – and Donald Trump did not escape (admittedly veiled) criticism. The growing use of trade barriers had resulted in a drop in imports and exports, Lagarde said, and investment and manufacturing output had also been hit. Trump has consistently championed unilateral trade deals in an effort to further his “America First” agenda. “History shows that, while it is tempting to sail alone, countries must resist the siren call of self-sufficiency – because as the Greek legends tell us, that leads to shipwreck,” said Lagarde. Also central to the concerns about the future of the global economy are debt levels, currently well above those seen at the time of the 2008 crash. The IMF warned that there was a risk that unregulated parts of the financial system could trigger a panic.

The rise of unregulated “shadow banks” and the lack of restrictions on insurers and asset managers were pinpointed as concerns – as was the growth of global banks to a scale larger than 2008 and the fear that they are again “too big to fail”. Lagarde has said she is concerned that the total value of global debt has risen by 60% in the last 10 years to reach an all-time high of £139tn. As central banks in more advanced economies raised interest rates, attracting investors back to them, she said, developing countries were suffering. “That process could become even more challenging if it were to accelerate suddenly. It could lead to market corrections, sharp exchange rate movements, and further weakening of capital flows.”

I think perhaps it’s that 1.5ºC one?!

• US Inflation Is The World’s Most Important Economic Variable (CNBC)

U.S. inflation is the world’s most important economic variable. That proposition is explained by its corollary: Rising inflation is the only problem the U.S. Federal Reserve cannot solve by increasing its money supply. The Fed can deal with structural problems in credit markets by means of enhanced supervision, regulatory provisions and, all else failing, by open-ended lending in cases of systemic threats to the financial system’s stability. But none of those measures are applicable to situations of accelerating inflation and a deteriorating outlook for the value of fixed-income assets. That is a problem the Fed must address with sustained liquidity withdrawals, increasing credit costs and the ensuing growth recession of the U.S. economy.

[..] U.S. inflation has reached a point in an accelerating economy where the Fed needs to step in with a prompt and credible action to anchor inflation expectations. Markets are signaling that such measures are long overdue. The Fed is now well beyond the stage where it could think of fine tuning the economic activity in an environment of stable costs and prices. The U.S. economy is moving along at twice the rate of its noninflationary growth potential. That is unsustainable. As in the past, the restoration of American price stability will lead to a growth recession of unknown amplitude and duration.

The global reach of the dollar, and of the American financial system, are direct and powerful channels through which the Fed’s rising interest rates will affect demand, output and employment in the rest of the world. Those who think that they can avoid the impact of U.S. monetary policies should think again. The dollar remains an irreplaceable linchpin to the international monetary system. And that’s the way it will be for the foreseeable future. There is simply no viable alternative to the dollar’s global role as a unit of account, a means of payment, a transactions currency and a store of value.

The name is Bonds. Sovereign bonds.

• Ron Paul: US Barreling Towards A Stock Market Plunge Of At Least 50% (CNBC)

Ron Paul believes the bond trading pits are giving investors a dire message about the state of the nation’s economy. According to the former Republican Congressman from Texas, the recent jump in Treasury bond yields suggest the U.S. is barreling towards a potential recession and market meltdown at a faster and faster pace. And, he sees no way to prevent it. “We’re getting awfully close. I’d be surprised if you don’t have everybody agreeing with what I’m saying next year some time,” he said last Thursday on CNBC’s “Futures Now.”

His remarks came as the benchmark 10-Year Treasury yield, which moves inversely to its price, rallied to seven year highs, intensifying fears over rising inflation. It may be beneficial for personal savings accounts, but it could deliver irrevocable damage to those in adjustable mortgages, or for auto buyers looking to finance a new vehicle. “It can be pretty well validated by looking at monetary history that when you inflate the currency, distort interest rates and live beyond your means and spend too much, there has to be an adjustment,” he said. “We have the biggest bubble in the history of mankind.”

The world’s fastest growing economy for years now needs stimulus.

• China Stocks Return From Holiday, Tumble 3% As PBOC Eases Bank Rates (MW)

Chinese stocks led weaker action across Asia markets on Monday, as traders returned to work after a weeklong holiday, brushing aside the latest rate cut by the People’s Bank of China. Chinese stocks returned from the Golden Week holiday with opening declines of 2% after last week’s wide selling in Asia and a U.S.-listed benchmark of mainland companies falling nearly 5%. The major indexes in both Shanghai and Shenzhen were last down around 3%. On Sunday, the PBOC made a one percentage-point cut in banks’ reserve-requirement ratios. The central bank was widely expected to cut the metric again before year-end amid ongoing stimulus efforts.

But Monday was expected to be an up-and-down day as investors try and price in not just what’s happened so far this month but also what continues to lie ahead on the trade front. “This monetary policy tweak is the fourth in 2018 and despite the weakening Yaun and the Feds embarking on a more aggressive rate hike tangent than expected, suggests the Pboc are putting their greatest energies behind stimulating the flagging economy as opposed to the U.S.-China trade wars or Fed policy for that matter,” said Stephen Innes, head of trading APAC, at OANDA. A survey of China’s service sector came in mixed, with the sector expanding at a faster pace in September, but a subindex of employment abruptly contracted, falling to its lowest level since March 2016.

Declassify!

• FBI’s Smoking Gun: Redactions (Solomon)

To declassify or not to declassify? That is the question, when it comes to the FBI’s original evidence in the Russia collusion case. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI have tried to thwart President Trump on releasing the evidence, suggesting it will harm national security, make allies less willing to cooperate, or even leave him vulnerable to accusations that he is trying to obstruct the end of the Russia probe. Before you judge the DOJ’s and FBI’s arguments — which are similar to those offered to stop the release of information in other major episodes of American history, from the Bay of Pigs to 9/11 — consider Footnote 43 on Page 57 of Chapter 3 of the House Intelligence Committee’s report earlier this year on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Until this past week, the footnote really had garnered no public intrigue, in part because the U.S. intelligence community blacked out the vast majority of its verbiage in the name of national security before the report was made public. From the heavy redactions, all one could tell is that FBI general counsel James Baker met with an unnamed person who provided some information in September 2016 about Russia, email hacking and a possible link to the Trump campaign. Not a reporter or policymaker would have batted an eyelash over such a revelation. Then, last Wednesday, I broke the story that Baker admitted to Congress in an unclassified setting — repeat, in an unclassified setting — that he had met with a top lawyer at the firm representing the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and received allegations from that lawyer about Russia, Trump and possible hacking.

It was the same DNC, along with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, that funded the unverified, salacious dossier by a British intel operative, Christopher Steele, that became a central piece of evidence used to justify the FBI surveillance of the Trump campaign in the final days of the election And it was the same law firm that made the payments for the dossier research so those could be disguised in campaign spending reports to avoid the disclosure of the actual beneficiaries of the research, which were Clinton and the DNC. And it was, in turns out, the same meeting that was so heavily censored by the intel agencies from Footnote 43 in the House report — treated, in other words, as some big national security secret.

He might well be right.

• Italy’s Di Maio Predicts ‘Political Earthquake’ For European Union (RT)

The bloc may expect a “political earthquake” after the 2019 European Parliament election, Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio warned. Di Maio said he believes that what happened in Italy after the general election in March 4, when the popular vote brought an unlikely coalition of two anti-establishment parties to power, will happen in the whole Europe. The pro-EU centrist parties shrank significantly as a result of the latest Italian parliamentary elections. With the plebiscite that is scheduled for May next year “there will be a political earthquake at the European level,” Di Maio, who is also the Minister of Economic Development and the head of the Five Star Movement (M5S), stated. “All the rules will change,” the Italian high-ranking politician promised.

The Italian government and the EU authorities are at loggerheads over Rome’s targeted budget deficit at 2.4 percent of the GDP that exceeds the limits set by the EU. Rome believes that the forthcoming elections would favor the opponents of austerity. “The Europe of bankers, founded on mass immigration and economic insecurity, keeps on threatening and insulting Italians and their government? Relax, in six months 500 million voters will fire them. We keep going,” Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said.

“Rome fears that Germany might eventually attempt to send back to Italy as many as 40,000 people..”

• Salvini Resists Germany’s Plans To Send Migrants Back To Italy (RT)

Rome has still not reached an agreement with Berlin on the repatriation of asylum seekers who had first registered in Italy, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said, vowing to close airports to German flights transferring refugees. “If someone in Berlin or Brussels thinks of dumping dozens of migrants in Italy via unauthorized charter flights, they should know that there is not and there will be no airport available,” Salvini said in a statement, adding that Italy will “close the airports” just as it earlier closed its ports to NGO vessels carrying migrants rescued in the Mediterranean. His sharp statement comes in response to the rumors first circulated by the Italian La Repubblica daily that Germany plans to speed up repatriation procedures ahead of the regional elections in the state of Bavaria, the home state of the Interior Minister Horst Seehofer.

The first charter flight carrying asylum seekers from Germany to Italy is reportedly scheduled for Tuesday, October 9, the media reported. Other media reports set the date of the flight on Thursday, October 11. Germany’s refugee and migration agency, the BAMF, allegedly already sent “dozens of letters” to the would-be repatriates informing them about the planned transfers to Italy, according to La Repubblica. Earlier, the German dpa news agency also said that such a flight is scheduled for “the coming days.” This information, however, was neither confirmed nor denied by the German authorities. Rome fears that Germany might eventually attempt to send back to Italy as many as 40,000 people, who arrived there from the southern European country, the Italian media report.

“The country’s death rate had risen by about 5.6% in the decade running up to the first bailout in 2010 but then jumped by 17.6% in the six years that followed.”

• Austerity Is The Wrong Prescription For The World’s Wellbeing (G.)

Greece, which endured a slump longer and deeper than the Great Depression in the US, was forced by the so-called troika of the IMF, the EU and the ECB to cut health expenditure at a time when other European countries were raising theirs. Under Greece’s bailout, health spending fell from 9.8% of GDP in 2008 to 8.1% in 2014, a time when national output was contracting rapidly. The country’s death rate had risen by about 5.6% in the decade running up to the first bailout in 2010 but then jumped by 17.6% in the six years that followed. The rate rose three times faster than the rate in Western Europe overall.

[..] The troika’s austerity programme helped French and German banks avoid losses on their loans but at the expense of a rising Greek death rate. That has resulted in 50% less public hospital funding in 2015 than 2009, hospitals being left without basic supplies, the long-term unemployed stripped of their health insurance and those on low pay finding drugs more expensive because of a 20% cut in the minimum wage. The number of individuals with unmet healthcare needs has nearly doubled since 2010, with a considerable fraction reporting cost as the main reason for not receiving the recommended healthcare services.

Greece is not short of healthcare expertise. It has the second highest number of doctors per 1,000 people in the EU but that medical workforce has been forced to watch impotently as the health system has descended into chaos and people have died when they could have been saved. For the past eight years, Greece has been used in a laboratory experiment to test out a theory. The evidence from the report in the Lancet could hardly be clearer. Austerity kills.

Not a chance, but kudos for trying.

• Greece ‘to Claim €280 Billion’ in War Reparations from Germany (GR)

Greece is about to launch a campaign to claim €280 billion ($323 billion) in war reparations from Germany, reports Der Spiegel. The German magazine notes that as long as Greece was dependent on EU support, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras had avoided raising the issue. But now, after the end of the third bailout program, Athens is ready to take initiatives to claim the money, it says. The issue is resurfacing a few days before the official visit of Germany’s President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to Athens where he will meet the President of the Republic Prokopis Pavlopoulos and Tsipras. Der Spiegel says it is no coincidence that the two highest ranking Greek politicians have both raised the issue in the last few days.

It marks the beginning of a long campaign, which, according to the German magazine, will start in November. The Greek Parliament will endorse an audit report ready since August 2016, according to which Greece is entitled to €269.5 billion of repairs from the Second World War. In addition, Greece demands the repayment of a €10.3 billion occupation loan. The report remained under wraps throughout the last two years, but Tsipras seems ready to bring it back to the surface and start a campaign for war reparations, says Der Spiegel. In the second phase, Greece intends to present its arguments at world organizations such as the European Parliament, the European Council, and the UN.

8,700 plaintiffs.

• ‘The World Is Against Them’: New Era Of Cancer Lawsuits Threaten Monsanto (G.)

[Dewayne Johnson’s] award of $289m, which included $250m in punitive damages, is a game-changer for the 46-year-old, who will leave behind a wife and three children. But Monsanto is fighting to keep it from him. “It’s a big red flag for the company,” said Jean M Eggen, professor emerita at Widener University Delaware Law School: “It brings more people out who might not otherwise sue.” Roughly 8,700 plaintiffs have made similar cases in state courts across the country, alleging that exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides led to various types of cancer. The impact could be huge if Monsanto continues to fight and lose in jury trials, and an accumulation of wins could force the company to consider settling with plaintiffs. “It could become very costly,” said Eggen, comparing the fight to the tobacco industry, which aggressively fought cases in court but eventually decided settlements were the best option. “It’s really a business decision.”

Monsanto may ultimately consider changing the labels to warn consumers about cancer risks and work to settle with consumers who have had high exposures, said Lars Noah, University of Florida law professor: “It’s sort of a wake-up call that their strategy was unrealistic.” Of the thousands of cases, there are more than 10 trials on track to start in 2019 and 2020, with court battles ramping up in California, Montana, Delaware, Kansas City and St Louis (where Monsanto is headquartered). Farmers, gardeners, government employees, landscapers and a wide range of others have alleged that Monsanto’s products sickened them or killed their loved ones. “This is a tremendous number of trials for one year and will allow plaintiffs to get critical evidence in front of juries – evidence not seen before,” said the attorney Aimee Wagstaff.

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 25 2018

Sep 252018

September 25, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:18 am Finance Tagged with: Axios, Brexit, China, defamation, glyphosate, grizzlies, Kavanaugh, Monsanto, Rosenstein, Stormy Daniels, Trump, virgin 3 Responses »

René Magritte Memory of a journey 1955

• Axios Issues Critical “Clarification” To Rosenstein Resignation Report (ZH)

• Kavanaugh: “I’m Not Going Anywhere”… And I Was A Virgin In High School (ZH)

• Going Full Porn (Kunstler)

• China Says US Putting ‘Knife To Its Neck’, Hard To Proceed On Trade (R.)

• US Judge Suggests He May Dismiss Stormy Daniels Lawsuit Against Trump (R.)

• UK-EU Flights To Be Grounded In Case Of No-Deal Brexit (Ind.)

• Labour Confirms Remain Can Be Party’s Choice In New Brexit Referendum (Ind.)

• US Judge Orders Federal Protection Restored To Yellowstone Grizzlies (R.)

• Aquarius Cannot Disembark Migrants In Marseille – French Minister (G.)

• Monsanto’s Glyphosate Weedkiller Harms Honeybees, Research Finds (G.)

• Glyphosate Industry Fails to Stop US Funding for Global Cancer Agency (SP)

Axios reported yesterday that Rod Rosenstein was on his way to the White House to resign. Zero Hedge ran with the story. It turned out to be false. Now Zero Hedge has no less than 5 updates to the story. It keeps changing. But are you now going to go to Axios for your news?

• Axios Issues Critical “Clarification” To Rosenstein Resignation Report (ZH)

Update 5: Jonathan Swan, the Axios reporter who initially broke the news this morning that Rod Rosenstein had “verbally resigned” and subsequently triggered a drop in the Dow that erased billions of dollars in value, has issued an important “clarification” that – as fate would have it – changes the story from a major news-cycle-dominating revelation to a barely noteworthy tidbit. After sparring with Vanity Fair reporter Gabriel Sherman, who suggested that Swan “got played” by a White House insider looking to distract from the second Kavanaugh revelation, Swan has admitted that the phrasing of his initial report was a little off.

Instead of reporting that Rosenstein had “verbally resigned”, Swan said he meant to say that Rosenstein had verbally offered his resignation to Chief of Staff John Kelly. “Note for readers: I regret the way I wrote this morning’s version of the story. By saying Rosenstein had “verbally resigned” to Kelly rather than “offered his resignation,” I conveyed a certainty that this fluid situation didn’t deserve. It’s an important nuance, and I regret the wording.”

We’re sure all of those algos that sold on the headline also “regret” their error, too.

Update 4: Speaking to reporters at the United Nations, President Trump finally commented on the political event du jour, saying he’s looking forward to meeting with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Thursday to discuss his future and “determining what’s going on”, after Axios reported earlier that Rosenstein told Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly that he was resigning. “We’ll be determining what’s going on,” Trump told reporters at the United Nations on Monday. “We want to have transparency, we want to have openness and I’m looking forward to meeting with Rod at that time.” Trump didn’t answer a question about what may happen to Rosenstein. “I spoke with Rod today and we’re going to have a meeting on Thursday when I get back to the White House,” he said.

Another gone out of hand tale. Kavanaugh’s claim is bold. If he did have sex while in school, that should be easy to prove.

• Kavanaugh: “I’m Not Going Anywhere”… And I Was A Virgin In High School (ZH)

Breaking his public silence for first time since the hearings last month, Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh, appeared alongside his wife, on Fox News Channel’s “The Story with Martha MacCallum” tonight to address the sexual misconduct allegations that have put his confirmation at risk of unraveling. As we detailed earlier, Brett Kavanaugh defied his accusers on Monday when he said, in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), that he will “not be intimidated into withdrawing” his Supreme Court nomination and staunchly denied the accusations, calling them a “grotesque and obvious character assassination” and “a coordinated effort” to drive him out on the nomination.

Ahead of tonight’s interview, President Trump tweeted about the interview and reiterated that “this is an outstanding family who must be treated fairly!” And in tonight’s first interview since the allegation, Kavanaugh began assertively, saying: “I’m not going anywhere… “I want a fair process where I can defend my integrity, and I know I’m telling the truth,” the judge said. “I know my lifelong record and I’m not going to let false accusations drive me out of this process… I have faith in God and I have faith in the fairness of the American people.” In the interview, Kavanaugh emphatically denied Ford’s claim against him, telling McCallum that he was a virgin through high school and for “many years after.” “I did not have sexual intercourse in high school or for many years thereafter. The girls from the schools I went to and I were friends.”

[..] Kavanaugh added that he was “not questioning and have not questioned that perhaps Dr. Ford at some point in her life was sexually assaulted by someone at some place but what I know is I’ve never sexually assaulted anyone.” Additionally, Judge Kavanaugh’s wife, Ashley Estes Kavanaugh, spoke publicly for the first time about the allegations that her husband is facing, and how their two daughters are dealing with the accusations against their father. “It’s very difficult to have these conversations with your children, which we’ve had to have.” “They know Brett and they know the truth and we told them at the very beginning of this process that this will be not fun sometimes, just remember, you know your dad.”

“I would take the Ramirez accusation as tantamount to a declaration of war by the Resistance. And as the old saying goes, all’s fair in love and war.”

• Going Full Porn (Kunstler)

The part that I find interesting in the New Deborah Ramirez accusation is this: “After six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney, Ramirez said that she felt confident enough of her recollections to say that she remembers Kavanaugh had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away.” Six days of meditation, prayer, memory-wracking, attorney-prompting, and — no doubt — earnest and heartfelt coaching by Resistance memory-recovery shamans, overcame the effects of 35 years and, say, seven Jello-shots to retrieve the details of that long-ago encounter.

(No one mentioned bong-hits, at least not yet, but how could there not have been, on top of the drinking games?) But the real gold in the story comes in this revelation: “Ramirez, who was raised a devout Catholic, in Connecticut, said that she was shaken. “I wasn’t going to touch a penis until I was married.” Really? Maybe she should have gone to the weekly meeting of the Yale Freshman Women’s Math and Physics Circle instead of an apparently mostly male dorm party convened for the purpose of getting shitfaced drunk with the greatest possible efficiency. Did she not know what was going on there? Was she forced to stick around? Did the boys make her down those shots?

Now that all American womanhood has been faced, shall we say, with the image of the looming universal horrifying penis, all bets on the Kavanaugh nomination are off. But the gambit does raise the possibility that it will be answered by some rough justice from the conservative side of the field. It will be interesting to see in the weeks and months ahead how many Democratic house and senate members will be revealed as would-be rapists and sluts. I can’t imagine that none of them have secrets to hide. In fact, I would take the Ramirez accusation as tantamount to a declaration of war by the Resistance. And as the old saying goes, all’s fair in love and war.

With all the domestic squabbles, we’d almost forget China.

• China Says US Putting ‘Knife To Its Neck’, Hard To Proceed On Trade (R.)

A senior Chinese official said on Tuesday it is difficult to proceed with trade talks with the United States while Washington is putting “a knife to China’s neck”, a day after both sides heaped fresh tariffs on each other’s goods. When the talks can restart would depend on the “will” of the United States, Vice Commerce Minister Wang Shouwen said at a news conference in Beijing.U.S. tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods and retaliatory taxes by Beijing on $60 billion worth of U.S. products including liquefied natural gas (LNG) kicked in on Monday, unnerving global financial markets.

“Now that the United States has adopted such a huge trade restriction measure … how can the negotiations proceed? It’s not an equal negotiation,” Wang said, stressing the United States has abandoned its mutual understanding with China. China’s top diplomat also told business people at a meeting in New York that talks could not take place against the backdrop of “threats and pressure”, the Foreign Ministry said. Certain forces in the United States have been making groundless criticisms against China about trade and security issues, which has poisoned the atmosphere for Sino-U.S. ties and is highly irresponsible, State Councillor Wang Yi was quoted as saying, without naming anyone.

Only the defamation lawsuit. There’s much more to come.

• US Judge Suggests He May Dismiss Stormy Daniels Lawsuit Against Trump (R.)

President Donald Trump likely had a free-speech right to make a Twitter comment disputing allegations by adult film actress Stormy Daniels, a federal judge said on Monday, indicating he was inclined to dismiss her defamation lawsuit against Trump. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford and who has said she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006, sued the president for defamation in April in federal court over the tweet. The lawsuit centers on Daniels’ assertion that a man approached her in 2011 in a Las Vegas parking lot and made a veiled threat after she agreed to talk about her alleged encounter with Trump to In Touch magazine.

Soon after Daniels released a sketch of the man she said threatened her, Trump, who has denied having an affair with Daniels, disputed her account on Twitter, saying: “A sketch years later about a nonexistent man. A total con job, playing the Fake News Media for Fools (but they know it)!” Daniels’ attorneys said the tweet portrayed her as a liar, but attorneys for Trump asked a federal judge in Los Angeles to dismiss the defamation lawsuit. “The question is whether the tweet by the president is protected communication or political hyperbole and non-defamatory on its face,” U.S. District Judge James Otero said at a hearing on Monday.

Otero cited certain protections from defamation Trump would have under the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of free-speech rights. “He’s a public official, he’s president of the United States, so it doesn’t get much higher than that,” Otero said. “It’s free speech by a public official on a matter of public concern.” Otero stopped short of issuing a formal ruling on the request to dismiss the lawsuit.

For better or for worse, tthe single market is a complex thing.

• UK-EU Flights To Be Grounded In Case Of No-Deal Brexit (Ind.)

Flights will be grounded if Britain crashes out of the EU next March unless an emergency aviation deal can be struck, the government has admitted. The latest batch of advice papers also warned food producers that pre-packaged products “would no longer be valid for the EU market”, without a separate EU business address. Ministers also told motorists that they would need to apply for a green card as proof of third party motor insurance cover when driving in the EU. And pet owners who want to take their dogs and cats abroad would face the significant inconvenience of having to register three months in advance.

Meanwhile, UK hauliers were warned they could be banned from the continent, because they could “no longer rely on automatic recognition by the EU of UK-issued community licences”. The Food and Drink Federation reacted with horror to the technical notices, warning they “lay bare the grisly prospect of a no-deal Brexit”. It urged Theresa May to stop “lecturing the EU” and seek to delay Brexit, by extending the Article 50 deadline, if it could not secure a withdrawal deal “imminently”. Layla Moran, a Liberal Democrat supporter of the anti-Brexit Best for Britain, said the threat to flights was “a bureaucratic nightmare and a farce”.

They’ve had two years to have unity on this. They’re as bad as the other side.

• Labour Confirms Remain Can Be Party’s Choice In New Brexit Referendum (Ind.)

Labour is embroiled in a row over the party’s approach to a Final Say Brexit referendum, following a split between two of the shadow cabinet’s most senior figures. Sir Keir Starmer, the party’s Brexit spokesman, was forced to confirm that remaining in the EU will be a potential option in a future referendum backed by Labour after John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, ruled the idea out. Amid a backlash Mr McDonnell rowed back on his comments, and later conceded at a meeting at the party’s conference in Liverpool that Labour could still back a new vote that would see the party stay in the EU.

It comes as Sir Keir will tell Labour conference on Tuesday that the party is set to oppose the deal Theresa May brings back from Brussels, having determined that it cannot meet his “six tests”. Another shadow cabinet minister, Barry Gardiner, also broke ranks to say that the idea the party will be able to secure a general election if Ms May’s plans fall apart was “looney tunes territory”. If the prime minister’s Brexit plans are rejected by parliament, and no election is forthcoming, then Labour’s new policy – arduously negotiated by Mr Starmer this week and to be approved on Tuesday – would see the party committed to a new Brexit referendum.

If you want to Make America Great Again, start with its natural world. It would be a lot less great without grizzlies and eagles and all the other riches.

• US Judge Orders Federal Protection Restored To Yellowstone Grizzlies (R.)

A federal judge on Monday ordered Endangered Species Act protections restored to grizzlies in and around Yellowstone National Park, halting plans for the first licensed trophy hunts of the bears in the region in more than 40 years. U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen in Missoula, Montana, sided with environmentalists and native American groups by overruling the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decision to strip the grizzlies of their status as a threatened species. The outcome caps one of the most high-profile legal battles over the Endangered Species Act in many years, rivaling previous disputes surrounding the gray wolf and northern spotted owl. The ruling came as the Trump administration is seeking to rewrite Endangered Species Act regulations that scientists say would erode wildlife protection for the benefit of commercial interests.

The Trump administration’s decision in June of last year to “de-list” the grizzly, formally proposed in 2016 during the Obama era, was based on agency findings that the bears’ numbers had rebounded enough in recent decades that federal safeguards were no longer necessary. The de-listing, welcomed by big-game hunters and cattlemen, had applied to about 700 Yellowstone-area grizzlies in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. Environmentalists countered that treating those bears separately from other grizzly populations in Montana and elsewhere in the Lower 48 states was biologically unsound and illegal under the Endangered Species Act, and the judge agreed.

Grizzlies, which are slow to reproduce, number fewer than 2,000 bears across the Lower 48. That is far below an historic high of 100,000 before widespread shooting, poisoning and trapping reduced the bears’ population to just several hundred by 1975, when they were placed under federal protection.

REUTERS/Jim Urquhart/File Photo

We’re waiting for the first hundreds of people to drown because no ships are left to save them and no ports open.

• Aquarius Cannot Disembark Migrants In Marseille – French Minister (G.)

France is not ready to allow the Mediterranean rescue ship Aquarius to dock and disembark dozens of migrants at the port of Marseille, France’s finance minister has said. “For the moment it’s ‘no’,” Bruno Le Maire said when asked during an interview on BFM news TV channel if Paris was ready to respond positively to a request from charities for permission to dock with 58 people onboard in the southern French port. Under European rules, ships were supposed to get docking access at the nearest port, said Le Maire, adding that Marseille was not the nearest port.

Just ban the stuff alright.

• Monsanto’s Glyphosate Weedkiller Harms Honeybees, Research Finds (G.)

The world’s most used weedkiller damages the beneficial bacteria in the guts of honeybees and makes them more prone to deadly infections, new research has found. Previous studies have shown that pesticides such as neonicotinoids cause harm to bees, whose pollination is vital to about three-quarters of all food crops. Glyphosate, manufactured by Monsanto, targets an enzyme only found in plants and bacteria. However, the new study shows that glyphosate damages the microbiota that honeybees need to grow and to fight off pathogens. The findings show glyphosate, the most used agricultural chemical ever, may be contributing to the global decline in bees, along with the loss of habitat.

“We demonstrated that the abundances of dominant gut microbiota species are decreased in bees exposed to glyphosate at concentrations documented in the environment,” said Erick Motta and colleagues from University of Texas at Austin in their new paper. They found that young worker bees exposed to glyphosate exposure died more often when later exposed to a common bacterium. Other research, from China and published in July, showed that honeybee larvae grew more slowly and died more often when exposed to glyphosate. An earlier study, in 2015, showed the exposure of adult bees to the herbicide at levels found in fields “impairs the cognitive capacities needed for a successful return to the hive”.

A small win.

• Glyphosate Industry Fails to Stop US Funding for Global Cancer Agency (SP)

In a massive victory for independent science, it was announced Sunday that the U.S. Senate and Congress appropriations committees have deleted text from a controversial Bill, which would have cut all the U.S. funding to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), after they challenged the chemical industry by classifying the world’s most used herbicide, glyphosate, as a probable human carcinogen in 2015. The ‘IARC rider’ text on page 110 (sec.229) of the draft Labor Health and Human Services FY19 Appropriations Bill was removed after negotiations. Currently, 25 Nations contribute to IARC’s total budget of about USD $50 million (about EUR 44 million), with 7.5% (USD $3.8 million) coming from the U.S..

Following IARC’s classification of glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen in 2015, Monsanto and the American Chemistry Council launched a full-throttle attack on the international scientific body. IARC is an arm of the World Health Organization and funded by 24 governments, and predominantly by the NIH National Cancer Institute. [..] Enter glyphosate. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Monsanto’s best-selling weedkiller, Roundup, and is used on the majority of commodity crops in the United States because it is effective at controlling a variety of weed types. Any change in the safety determination of this chemical would shake up the messaging that the company has used for years.

Debt Rattle September 20 2018

Sep 202018

September 20, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:02 am Finance Tagged with: Amazon, Brexit, declassification, dicamba, DOJ, Facebook, FBI, Monsanto, social media, Steve Keen, Trump, Turkey 1 Response »

M. C. Escher Still life and street 1937

• FBI, DOJ To Defy Trump Declassification Order (ZH)

• Louisiana AG Jeff Landry Wants To Break Up Social Media Giants (Advocate)

• Amazon Hit By EU Antitrust Probe (CNBC)

• Facebook Building A ‘War Room’ To Battle Election Meddling (AFP)

• Leave No Dark Corner: China Is Building A Digital Dictatorship (ABC.au)

• Steve Keen Says U.S. Heading for 2020 Recession (BBG)

• Digging into Wealth and Income Inequality (CHS)

• Theresa May Tells EU27 She Won’t Delay Brexit Despite Lack Of A Deal (G.)

• ‘Seven In 10’ EU Workers In UK Would Be Barred Under Brexit Proposals (G.)

• The Forgotten History of the Financial Crisis (Tooze)

• Turkish Treasury Borrows $347 Million At 25% Interest Rate (Hu.)

• US Officials Face Growing Pressure Over Dicamba Herbicide Use (AFP)

We’re getting real close to core constitutional issues now.

• FBI, DOJ To Defy Trump Declassification Order (ZH)

Despite President Trump’s Monday order for the “immediate declassification” of sensitive materials related to the Russia investigation, “without redaction,” the agencies involved are planning to do so anyway, according to Bloomberg, citing three people familiar with the matter. “The Justice Department, FBI and Office of the Director of National Intelligence are going through a methodical review and can’t offer a timeline for finishing, said the people, who weren’t authorized to speak publicly about the sensitive matter.” -Bloomberg. Trump ordered the DOJ to release the text messages of former FBI Director James Comey, his deputy Andrew McCabe, now-fired special agent Peter Strzok, former FBI attorney Lisa Page and twice-demoted DOJ official Bruce Ohr.

Also ordered released are specific pages from the FBI’s FISA surveillance warrant application on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page, as well as interviews with Ohr. The DOJ and the FBI are expected to submit proposed redactions to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence – which will prepare a package for Trump to sign off on. “When the president issues such an order, it triggers a declassification review process that is conducted by various agencies within the intelligence community, in conjunction with the White House counsel, to seek to ensure the safety of America’s national security interests,” a Justice Department spokesman said in a statement. “The department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are already working with the Director of National Intelligence to comply with the president’s order.”

Ahead of a meeting with Jeff Sessions.

• Louisiana AG Jeff Landry Wants To Break Up Social Media Giants (Advocate)

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry would like to see Google, Facebook and other major social media behemoths broken up like the federal government did to Standard Oil more than a century ago. Landry says the internet giants are suppressing conservative agendas, stifling competition, and infringing on antitrust laws. “This can’t be fixed legislatively,” Landry told The Advocate Tuesday. “We need to go to court with an antitrust suit.” Landry – or Chief Deputy Attorney General Bill Stiles – will go to Washington, D.C. next week to push that solution to U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions, who is considering an investigation against the social media companies, set a Sept. 25 meeting with about a half dozen Republican state attorney generals.

[..] “The U.S. Department of Justice weighing in absolutely gives us an edge … their participation accelerates the timeline,” Landry said. The federal lawyers have the funding, experience and expertise that states can’t match when handling such complex litigation. “I thought it would be years to get this going,” Landry said. “This moves up the timeline.” He is against the idea, at first blush, of letting the companies settle for some huge sum and promises to behave better in the future – a frequent outcome of anti-trust lawsuits, Landry said. “I’m not prepared to say what the exact remedy would look like,” Landry said. But his gut feel is “that breaking up the monopoly is a good idea.”

“Vestager has the power to fine companies up to 10 percent of their global turnover..”

• Amazon Hit By EU Antitrust Probe (CNBC)

The EU regulators behind a $5 billion fine against Google are turning their attentions to Amazon. European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager has begun questioning merchants on Amazon’s use of their data, Vestager said Wednesday. The issue, she said, is whether Amazon is using data from the merchants it hosts on its site to secure an advantage in selling products against those same retailers. “These are very early days and we haven’t formally opened a case. We are trying to make sure that we get the full picture,” Vestager said during a news conference Wednesday.

The probe comes as the world’s largest online retailer faces growing calls for regulation. Investors and insiders have long cited Amazon’s size and reach as reason to break the company up. President Donald Trump has hinted at antitrust action against Amazon as part of continued attacks against CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was set to meet this month with state officials to discuss antitrust concerns in Silicon Valley, though much of the regulation on Big Tech thus far has come out of Brussels. Vestager has the power to fine companies up to 10 percent of their global turnover for breaching EU antitrust rules. Earlier this year, she levied a record $5 billion fine against Google related to its Android business.

You mean, by the FBI and CIA?

• Facebook Building A ‘War Room’ To Battle Election Meddling (AFP)

Facebook on Wednesday said it will have a “war room” up and running on its Silicon Valley campus to quickly repel efforts to use the social network to meddle in upcoming elections. “We are setting up a war room in Menlo Park for the Brazil and US elections,” Facebook elections and civic engagement director Samidh Chakrabarti said during a conference call. “It is going to serve as a command center so we can make real-time decisions as needed.” He declined to say when the “war room” — currently a conference room with a paper sign taped to the door — would be in operation.

Teams at Facebook have been honing responses to potential scenarios such as floods of bogus news or campaigns to trick people into falsely thinking they can cast ballots by text message, according to executives. “Preventing election interference on Facebook has been one of the biggest cross-team efforts the company has seen,” Chakrabarti said. The conference call was the latest briefing by Facebook regarding efforts to prevent the kinds of voter manipulation or outright deception that took place ahead of the 2016 election the brought US President Donald Trump to office.

What social media tech can lead to. If they do it in China, what would keep them from doing it here?

• Leave No Dark Corner: China Is Building A Digital Dictatorship (ABC.au)

What may sound like a dystopian vision of the future is already happening in China. And it’s making and breaking lives. The Communist Party calls it “social credit” and says it will be fully operational by 2020. Within years, an official Party outline claims, it will “allow the trustworthy to roam freely under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step”. Social credit is like a personal scorecard for each of China’s 1.4 billion citizens. In one pilot program already in place, each citizen has been assigned a score out of 800. In other programs it’s 900. Those, like Dandan, with top “citizen scores” get VIP treatment at hotels and airports, cheap loans and a fast track to the best universities and jobs.

Those at the bottom can be locked out of society and banned from travel, or barred from getting credit or government jobs. The system will be enforced by the latest in high-tech surveillance systems as China pushes to become the world leader in artificial intelligence. Surveillance cameras will be equipped with facial recognition, body scanning and geo-tracking to cast a constant gaze over every citizen. Smartphone apps will also be used to collect data and monitor online behaviour on a day-to-day basis. Then, big data from more traditional sources like government records, including educational and medical, state security assessments and financial records, will be fed into individual scores.

The link doesn’t go to an article about the interview, but it’s what Bloomberg provided on Twitter.

• Steve Keen Says U.S. Heading for 2020 Recession (BBG)

Kingston University Professor Steve Keen says that the Fed has accentuated the financial crisis through quantitative easing https://t.co/CX7SPJsaYd pic.twitter.com/Okj2kP2cD5

— BSurveillance (@bsurveillance) September 19, 2018

Inequality CAN bring down societies.

• Digging into Wealth and Income Inequality (CHS)

The assets of U.S. households recently topped $100 trillion, yet another sign that everything is going swimmingly in the U.S. economy. Let’s take a look at the Federal Reserve’s Household Balance Sheet, which lists the assets and liabilities of all U.S. households in very big buckets (real estate: $25 trillion). (For reasons unknown, the Fed lumps non-profit assets and liabilities with households, but these modest sums are easily subtracted.) If we look at the numbers with a reasonably skeptical view, we start wondering about aspects that might have previously been taken as “facts” that were above questioning. For example, households hold $11.6 trillion in cash (deposits). That’s unambiguous.

So is the $29.3 trillion in stocks (owned directly and indirectly, i.e. retirement funds, etc.). But what about the $16 trillion in “other financial assets”? This isn’t cash, stocks, bonds, retirement funds or noncorporate businesses–then what is it? Offshore banking? That $16 trillion is equal to all homeowners’ equity (real estate minus mortgages). It’s a non-trivial chunk of the $100 trillion in net assets everyone is crowing about. I also wonder about the valuation of noncorporate businesses–small family businesses, LLCs, sole proprietorships, etc.– $11.9 trillion. How do you value a business that’s hanging on by a thread? Or one that’s a tax shelter?

We know from other sources that roughly 85% of all this wealth is held by the top 10% of households. This isn’t included in this balance sheet, but without those statistics, these numbers lack critical context: if household wealth is soaring, that sounds wonderful. But what if 95% the gains are flowing to the top 5%, and within the top 5%, mostly to the top .1%?

Like she’s in a position to issue ultimatums.

• Theresa May Tells EU27 She Won’t Delay Brexit Despite Lack Of A Deal (G.)

Theresa May has tried to threaten EU leaders over dinner at a special summit in Salzburg by telling them the UK would not seek to delay Brexit, prompting European leaders to warn that the two sides remained far apart on trade and the Irish border despite months of negotiations. The prime minister told her counterparts “that the UK will leave on 29 March next year” and as a result “the onus is now on all of us to get this deal done” by the end of an emergency summit that the EU confirmed would happen in mid-November. It was the first time since Chequers that May has had a chance to address the EU’s other 27 heads of government instead of going through their chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, with No 10 hoping that it would inject some urgency into the divorce talks.

“We all recognise that time is short but extending or delaying these negotiations is not an option,” she said. But as the summit started Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European commission, said that a deal remained “far away” while Donald Tusk, the president of the European council, warned that the UK’s proposals for the Irish border and future trade relations with the EU needed to be “reworked and further negotiated”. Tusk added that “various scenarios are still possible” – a clear hint that no deal was still a possibility. Despite the EU leaders’ statements, No 10 is hoping that May’s pitch to EU leaders will eventually prompt some greater flexibility on the part of Brussels in the critical period for the Brexit negotiations between a scheduled European council meeting in October and the decisive summit in November.

No berries for you next summer.

• ‘Seven In 10’ EU Workers In UK Would Be Barred Under Brexit Proposals (G.)

The majority of EU workers in the UK would not be eligible to work in the country following Brexit if they were subject to proposals put forward by the government’s chief migration advisers, analysis by a leading leftwing thinktank shows. EU citizens currently in the UK are expected to be protected under the terms of the UK-EU withdrawal agreement but findings by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) illustrate how proposals by the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) will potentially restrict businesses recruiting migrants from the EU in future.

In its report on EU migration after Brexit, published on Tuesday, the committee recommended lifting the cap on highly skilled workers applying to take up jobs in the UK but also backed maintaining the salary threshold of £30,000. The committee also recommended only allowing in individuals at level three or above on the nine-level regulated qualifications framework (RQF). Comparing this criteria to data from the labour force survey, the IPPR estimates that around 75% of the UK’s current EU workforce would not be eligible were they subject to the proposals. The findings will likely enflame concerns from business leaders over proposals they have already branded “ignorant and elitist”.

Long overview by Adam Tooze.

• The Forgotten History of the Financial Crisis (Tooze)

Although more banks failed during the Depression, these failures were scattered between 1929 and 1933 and involved far smaller balance sheets. In 2008, both the scale and the speed of the implosion were breathtaking. According to data from the Bank for International Settlements, gross capital flows around the world plunged by 90 percent between 2007 and 2008. As capital flows dried up, the crisis soon morphed into a crushing recession in the real economy. The “great trade collapse” of 2008 was the most severe synchronized contraction in international trade ever recorded.

Within nine months of their pre-crisis peak, in April 2008, global exports were down by 22 percent. (During the Great Depression, it took nearly two years for trade to slump by a similar amount.) In the United States between late 2008 and early 2009, 800,000 people were losing their jobs every month. By 2015, over nine million American families would lose their homes to foreclosure—the largest forced population movement in the United States since the Dust Bowl. In Europe, meanwhile, failing banks and fragile public finances created a crisis that nearly split the eurozone.

[..] bankers on both sides of the Atlantic created the system that imploded in 2008. The collapse could easily have devastated both the U.S. and the European economies had it not been for improvisation on the part of U.S. officials at the Federal Reserve, who leveraged trans-atlantic connections they had inherited from the twentieth century to stop the global bank run. That this reality has been obscured speaks both to the contentious politics of managing global finances and to the growing distance between the United States and Europe. More important, it forces a question about the future of financial globalization: How will a multipolar world that has moved beyond the transatlantic structures of the last century cope with the next crisis?

Wow.

• Turkish Treasury Borrows $347 Million At 25% Interest Rate (Hu.)

The Turkish Treasury borrowed some 2.2 billion Turkish liras (around $347 million) from domestic markets, the Treasury and Finance Ministry announced on Sept. 18. The auction was held for 12-month zero coupon bonds – new issuance – to be settled on Sept. 19 and mature on Sept. 18, 2019, according to an official statement. The average annual simple and compound interest rates of the 364-day bonds were 25.05 percent, the ministry added. According to the domestic borrowing strategy, the ministry has projected 21.9 billion liras (around $3.4 billion) of borrowing from the market through auctions in the September-November period. Sept. 18’s auction was second out of a total 11 planned auctions on the ministry’s issuance calendar for the three-month period.

“Controversial pesticide pits farmer vs farmer in US.” Can we perhaps just stop using poison to produce food?

• US Officials Face Growing Pressure Over Dicamba Herbicide Use (AFP)

US environmental regulators are under increasing pressure over a controversial pesticide known for laying waste to nearby crops as well as the harmful weeds it is meant to control. Critics worried about the harm are calling for increased restrictions, following the example of many states, while producers and some farmers want fewer obstacles to use of a chemical they view as one of their last options. Much like Roundup, another much-criticized herbicide marketed by Monsanto, dicamba has been on the market a long time. But use of the chemical has jumped since Monsanto – which was bought by Germany’s Bayer in June – introduced seeds that can resist the weed-killer.

Dicamba has been a boon for farmers at a time when they have seen other leading herbicides lose their effectiveness and the battle against damaging weeds. Use of seeds resistant to dicamba doubled over the last year, reaching 20 million hectares (50 million acres) this summer. But the product has been blamed for polluting around four percent of US soybean fields in 2017. A common complaint is that the herbicide is volatile, meaning it spreads to nearby areas. It is only meant for use during the growing season for plants resistant to the chemical, and the US Environmental Protection Agency last year received reports of “significant crop damage from off-field movement of dicamba.” The EPA authorized use of the weed-killer for two years, through November, so it will soon need to announce any changes to the rules on when and how it can be used.

Debt Rattle September 19 2018

Sep 192018

September 19, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:55 am Finance Tagged with: Amazon, Bernie Sanders, Brexit, Corbyn, FBI, junk, Korea, Monsanto, Syria, tariffs, Tesla, Trump, Walmart 7 Responses »

Salvador Dali Landscape with butterflies 1956

• Trump: Exposing ‘Corrupt’ FBI Probe Could Be Crowning Achievement (Hill)

• Trump: Expect Decision On US Role In Syria Soon (ZH)

• China Hits Back At US With $60 Billion Of New Tariffs (G.)

• Just How Wildly Exuberant is the Junk-Credit Market?” (WS)

• Bernie Sanders’ Anti-Amazon Bill Is an Indictment of the Media, Too (Taibbi)

• North And South Korea Sign Joint Agreement In ‘Leap Forward’ For Peace (Ind.)

• Michel Barnier Rebuffs UK Calls For Flexibility On Irish Border (G.)

• Keir Starmer Clashed With Corbyn On Brexit ‘To Brink Of Resignation’ (G.)

• Rightwing Thinktanks Unveil Radical Plan For US-UK Brexit Trade Deal (G.)

• Tesla To Be Investigated By US DOJ Over Elon Musk Tweets (Ind.)

• Monsanto Asks US Court To Toss $289 Million Glyphosate Verdict (R.)

Let’s see what the declassified files have to say.

• Trump: Exposing ‘Corrupt’ FBI Probe Could Be Crowning Achievement (Hill)

President Trump in an exclusive interview with Hill.TV said Tuesday he ordered the release of classified documents in the Russia collusion case to show the public the FBI probe started as a “hoax,” and that exposing it could become one of the “crowning achievements” of his presidency. “What we’ve done is a great service to the country, really,” Trump said in a 45-minute, wide-ranging interview in the Oval Office. “I hope to be able to call this, along with tax cuts and regulation and all the things I’ve done… in its own way this might be the most important thing because this was corrupt,” he said. Trump also said he regretted not firing former FBI Director James Comey immediately instead of waiting until May 2017 [..]

“If I did one mistake with Comey, I should have fired him before I got here. I should have fired him the day I won the primaries,” Trump said. “I should have fired him right after the convention, say I don’t want that guy. Or at least fired him the first day on the job. … I would have been better off firing him or putting out a statement that I don’t want him there when I get there.” [..] He criticizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court’s approval of the warrant that authorized surveillance of Carter Page, a low-level Trump campaign aide, toward the end of the 2016 election, suggesting the FBI misled the court.

“They know this is one of the great scandals in the history of our country because basically what they did is, they used Carter Page, who nobody even knew, who I feel very badly for, I think he’s been treated very badly. They used Carter Page as a foil in order to surveil a candidate for the presidency of the United States.” [..] The president spared no words in criticizing Comey, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok, lawyer Lisa Page and other FBI officials who started the probe. He recited specific text messages Page and Strzok traded while having an affair and investigating his campaign, arguing the texts showed they condoned leaks and conducted a bogus probe. Those texts are to be released as a result of Trump’s announcement on Monday. “It’s a hoax, beyond a witch hunt,” he said.

If only that could be true:“Is it possible that Trump will take the window of opportunity to get out of Syria, and walk back from prior US threats?”

Putin’s deal with Turkey has made US threats empty: civilians and terrorists will be separated. Israel has no reason to bomb anything either.

• Trump: Expect Decision On US Role In Syria Soon (ZH)

President Trump indicated that a decision on the future of US policy in Syria is coming soon in remarks made at a press conference with his Polish counterpart. Speaking alongside President Andrzej Duda, Trump said the Monday night downing of a Russian maritime surveillance plane by accidental Syrian friendly fire was “a very sad thing”. Trump’s remarks did not include criticism of Putin, and seemed to signal regret over Monday night’s dramatic escalation over Syria after a massive Israeli attack. Earlier in the day Tuesday, Russia had pointed the finger at Israel for purposefully provoking the mishap, something Israel has since denied in a military statement that ultimately put blame on Assad, Iran, and Hezbollah.

Trump also said that the US fight against ISIS in Syria could end soon: “We’re very close to being finished with that job,” he said of the Pentagon mission against ISIS. He followed with: “And then we’re going to make a determination as to what we’re going to do.” [..] Only months ago the president expressed a desire “to get out” and pull the over 2,000 publicly acknowledged American military personnel from the country; but the new report said that Trump has approved “an indefinite military and diplomatic effort in Syria”. The report revealed that “the administration has redefined its goals to include the exit of all Iranian military and proxy forces from Syria, and establishment of a stable, nonthreatening government acceptable to all Syrians and the international community.”

But is it possible that Monday’s attack involving missiles flying over the Mediterranean and an “accidental” downing of a Russian plane and 15 dead Russian crew members might have jolted Trump back to his prior position of wanting to withdraw from the Syrian quagmire? [..] Monday’s events also came just after Russian President Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that a demilitarized zone in Idlib will be formed by October 15. [..] The Russia-Turkey deal over Idlib has at least temporarily deflated US threats that it could intervene should Syria launch a brutal assault on the province —something the US promised to do especially if chemical weapons are used. Is it possible that Trump will take the window of opportunity to get out of Syria, and walk back from prior US threats?

Go sit around a table, all of you, including EU and japan.

• China Hits Back At US With $60 Billion Of New Tariffs (G.)

China is to slap tariffs on an additional $60bn of imports from the US in retaliation against $200bn of new trade sanctions on Chinese goods announced by Donald Trump. The latest moves represent a new step towards a full-scale trade war between the world’s two biggest economies. Further escalation is deemed likely because Trump is facing low approval ratings ahead of the US midterm elections in November, while China will not want to be seen to back down. Trump announced his latest escalation of the bitter trade standoff late on Monday, promising to introduce the additional border taxes of 10% on Chinese goods from next week.

The tariffs – designed to make US domestic products more competitive against foreign imports – apply to almost 6,000 items, including consumer goods such as luggage and electronics, housewares and food. The US president threatened further tariffs on an additional $276bn of goods if Beijing unveils retaliatory measures – a step that would mean tariffs on all Chinese imports to the US and equate to 4% of world trade. Early on Tuesday he tweeted to accuse China of “actively trying to impact and change our election by attacking our farmers, ranchers and industrial workers because of their loyalty to me”. The US president added: “What China does not understand is that these people are great patriots and fully understand that China has been taking advantage of the United States on trade for many years.

‘Buying’ a company and loading it up with lousy debt. Business 101.

• Just How Wildly Exuberant is the Junk-Credit Market?” (WS)

This is considered a door-opener Leveraged Buyout (LBO): If it flies and investors buy this $13.5 billion pile of deeply junk-rated debt today, even riskier and bigger LBOs may fly. It’s the fourth largest LBO since the Financial Crisis and the ninth largest of all times in the US and Europe: Thomson Reuters Corporation is separating its largest division, the financial information, analysis, and risk businesses, now called “Refinitiv,” to sell a 55% stake to a group of investors led by private equity firm Blackstone Group. This being a “leveraged” buyout, the Blackstone consortium is making the target company, Refinitiv, borrow in total $13.5 billion to fund most of its own buyout. This consist of $9.25 billion in “leveraged loans” and $4.25 billion in secured and unsecured bonds.

Some pieces are denominated in dollars, others in euros. This debt sale is being completed today. The Blackstone Consortium will infuse $3.025 billion in cash equity. Thomson Reuters will retain a 45% stake and will receive a special dividend from Refinitiv of approximately $17 billion, according to Moody’s. And there are some other details involved. Alas, Moody’s gives Refinitiv a corporate credit rating of B3, six steps into junk, considered “highly speculative.” [..] This deal is “reminiscent of the kind of deal I would have seen in 2006 and 2007,” Scott Roberts, head of high-yield investments at Invesco, told the Wall Street Journal. In addition to the large amount of debt being issued, “you have a covenant package that’s extremely weak.”

OK, but weak covenants have become a pandemic. Companies issuing leveraged loans love weak covenants, and creditors will rue the day, but for now everything flies. The share of these so-called “covenant-lite” (“cov-lite”) loans compared to all leveraged loans outstanding keeps setting new records. LCD of S&P Global Market Intelligence reported today that cov-lite loans in August accounted for 78.6% of outstanding leveraged loans, and up from 55% in mid-2014:

Globalism hollows out economies. And societies.

• Bernie Sanders’ Anti-Amazon Bill Is an Indictment of the Media, Too (Taibbi)

[..] it’s become increasingly clear that [Bernie Sanders] lost patience waiting for the news media to pay attention to this particularly loathsome problem of CEOs using public subsidies to pad their bottom lines. The issue in his campaigns against companies like Disney, Walmart, Burger King and Amazon is simple: our biggest and most successful companies use a business model that involves giant workforces earning beneath-subsistence wages, if not worse (particularly abroad). This business model would not work without the active cooperation of governments around the world.

Amazon and Walmart are particular villains on this score. On the supply end, they gobble up super-cheap products assembled in unfree labor zones like China, where workers are treated so badly that some have threatened mass suicides to improve conditions. Then, on the distribution end, in wealthy consumer countries like the U.S., these same companies pay many workers such low wages that they end up on public assistance. One study showed that in Arizona, for instance, 1 in 3 Amazon workers are on food stamps. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos is worth $160 billion, and, according to one infuriating study, earns the median salary of an Amazon employee every nine seconds.

If you go by net worth in stock holdings, Bezos earns about $277 million a day. This set of circumstances is a profound comment on how the modern global economy functions. Misguided policies like the establishment of Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) with China long ago committed us to a world in which the industrial democracies of the West would be increasingly reliant upon human rights abusers in places like China to serve as mercantile suppliers. As manufacturing headed to the third world, domestic distributors became concentrated and de-unionized.

They really want peace. Don’t stand in their way.

• North And South Korea Sign Joint Agreement In ‘Leap Forward’ For Peace (Ind.)

The North and South Korean leaders presented a joint agreement during their summit in Pyongyang on Wednesday that Kim Jong-un said represented a “leap forward” for peace on the peninsula. At a joint press conference after the signing, South Korea’s Moon Jae-in said North Korea had agreed to “permanently” shut down all of its nuclear and missile testing facilities, in the presence of international experts, as long as the US takes reciprocal measures. The two sides agreed that Mr Kim would visit Seoul, in what would be a first for a North Korean leader. And the two leaders agreed a number of wide-ranging measures designed to increase cooperation and reduce the risk of armed clashes on the border.

Mr Kim said the pair had agreed to turn the Korean peninsula into a “land of peace without nuclear weapons and nuclear threats”. The US had called for concrete developments regarding denuclearisation during Mr Moon’s three-day visit to Pyongyang, and Donald Trump suggested the joint agreement did not disappoint. “Very exciting!” was his response to the news on Twitter. “Kim Jong-un has agreed to allow nuclear inspections, subject to final negotiations, and to permanently dismantle a test site and launch pad in the presence of international experts. In the meantime there will be no Rocket or Nuclear testing,” Mr Trump said.

Trying to paint the picture that if only the EU wanted to, it could give the UK whatever it desires.

• Michel Barnier Rebuffs UK Calls For Flexibility On Irish Border (G.)

Michel Barnier has rebuffed British calls for the EU to change its stance on the contested issue of the Irish border, and said a “moment of truth” was fast approaching on a Brexit deal. The EU’s chief negotiator said the bloc was ready “to improve” its proposal on avoiding a hard border on the island of Ireland, but stopped short of accepting British ideas for compromise, after the Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab, called on the EU to show flexibility. “The European Council in October will be the moment of truth, it is the moment when we shall see if we have an agreement,” Barnier said. The Irish border has emerged as the biggest stumbling block to the Brexit deal that Theresa May hopes to strike with the EU this autumn.

While the EU and UK have agreed there should be no hard border to prevent any return to violence, they are deadlocked over how to manage what will become a 310-mile frontier between the UK and EU. Both sides have proposed fallback plans, known as backstops, that would kick into place if trade talks fail to settle the question. The EU’s involves Northern Ireland following EU law on customs and goods, a plan May has said no British prime minister could ever accept. Barnier said the EU was working to improve its proposal, adding that the problem had been caused by “the UK’s decision to leave the EU, its single market and the customs union”. Seeking to counter British criticism that the EU plan eroded UK sovereignty, he said: “What we talking about here is not a land border, not a sea border, it is a set of technical checks and controls. We respect the territorial integrity of the UK and we respect the constitutional order of the UK.”

I include this to show how the Guardian shapes the discussion. After running over 100 headlines aimed at connecting Corbyn and anti-semitism in less than a year, they seamlessly move into internal divisions in Labour. All of this stuff comes from the Blairite neo-liberal side of the party.

• Keir Starmer Clashed With Corbyn On Brexit ‘To Brink Of Resignation’ (G.)

Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, was pushed to the brink of resignation early this year after Jeremy Corbyn and his allies tried to kick his customs union plan into the long grass, senior Labour sources have told the Guardian. Labour’s Brexit policy has evolved over the past 18 months through a series of painstaking negotiations between key players at the top of the party, the most fraught of which came at a stormy meeting of the “Brexit subcommittee” early this year. Corbyn’s close allies ambushed Starmer with a paper which shelved the decision on joining a customs union, a policy he had been pushing privately for weeks.

Several people present at the meeting told the Guardian the general feeling in the room was that Starmer was willing to resign rather than accept the proposals, numbered copies of which were handed out at the start of the meeting and retrieved at the end. “He looked close to telling them to shove it – and I think that did count for something,” said one MP present. “I think Jeremy was slightly surprised at how angry Keir was, and how pissed off he was.” Another witness to the confrontation said: “Jeremy started speaking, and Keir just said, enough, this was just completely outrageous. He did lose his temper. I think they were genuinely shocked at his reaction. They tried to bounce him and it completely backfired.”

The ultimate plan all along in some circles.

• Rightwing Thinktanks Unveil Radical Plan For US-UK Brexit Trade Deal (G.)

A radical blueprint for a free trade deal between the UK and the US that would see the NHS opened to foreign competition, a bonfire of consumer and environmental regulations and freedom of movement between the two countries for workers, is to be launched by prominent Brexiters. The blueprint will be seen as significant because of the close links between the organisations behind it and the UK secretary for international trade, Liam Fox, and the US president, Donald Trump. Its publication follows a week of policy launches by the European Research Group of Conservative MPs designed to pressurise the prime minister into “chucking Chequers”, her softer Brexit proposal, in favour of a harder, clean break from the European Union.

The text of the new trade deal has been prepared by the Initiative for Free Trade (IFT) – a thinktank founded by the longtime Eurosceptic MEP Daniel Hannan, one of the leaders of Vote Leave – and the Cato Institute, a rightwing libertarian thinktank in the US founded and funded by the fossil fuel magnates and major political donors the Koch family. The “ideal UK-US free trade deal” was due to be launched later on Tuesday in both London and Washington but the Cato Institute appears to have accidentally posted it online early. The policy initiative was shaped in consultation with a group of other conservative libertarian thinktanks on both sides of the Atlantic, the blueprint explains. These include UK organisations whose funding is opaque, such as the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) and the Adam Smith Institute among others in the UK, and others in the US including the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

“In the US, the number 420 is associated with April 20, when annual marijuana celebrations take place.”

• Tesla To Be Investigated By US DOJ Over Elon Musk Tweets (Ind.)

The Department of Justice has launched an investigation looking at whether Tesla CEO Elon Musk broke the law by musing on Twitter about taking the company private. The firm was contacted by the Department of Justice after Mr Musk made the comments on Twitter last month in a tweet that spurred theories the tech CEO was trying to communicate he was smoking marijuana because he suggested he would take his company private once shares had reached $420 a share. In the US, the number 420 is associated with April 20, when annual marijuana celebrations take place.

“Last month, following Elon’s announcement that he was considering taking the company private, Tesla received a voluntary request for documents from the DOJ and has been cooperative in responding to it,” a Tesla spokesperson told The Independent in an emailed statement. The spokesperson continued: “We have not received a subpoena, a request for testimony, or any other formal process. We respect the DOJ’s desire to get information about this and believe that the matter should be quickly resolved as they review the information they have received.”

They have limitless legal budgets.

• Monsanto Asks US Court To Toss $289 Million Glyphosate Verdict (R.)

Bayer unit Monsanto on Tuesday asked a California judge to throw out a $289 million jury verdict awarded to a man who alleged the company’s glyphosate-based weed-killers, including Roundup, gave him cancer. The company said in motions filed in San Francisco’s Superior Court of California that the jury’s decision was insufficiently supported by the evidence presented at trial by school groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson. Johnson’s case, filed in 2016, was fast-tracked for trial due to the severity of his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph system, that he alleged was caused by years of exposure to Roundup and Ranger Pro, another Monsanto herbicide that contains glyphosate.

Monsanto asked Superior Court Judge Suzanne Bolanos, who oversaw the trial, to set aside the verdict or, in the alternative, reduce the award or grant a new trial. A hearing on the motions is set for Oct. 10. The company, which denies the allegations, has previously said it would appeal the verdict if necessary. Johnson’s case was the first to go to trial over allegations that glyphosate causes cancer. Monsanto is facing some 8,000 similar lawsuits across the United States. Shares in Bayer, which bought Monsanto this year for $63 billion, slid following the Aug. 10 jury decision and the stock was still trading some 20 percent below its pre-verdict value of 73.30 euros ($85.45) on Tuesday.

“The jury’s decision is wholly at odds with over 40 years of real-world use, an extensive body of scientific data and analysis … which support the conclusion that glyphosate-based herbicides are safe for use and do not cause cancer in humans,” Bayer said in a statement on Tuesday. Bayer said Johnson failed to prove glyphosate caused his cancer and the scientific evidence he presented at trial “fell well below the causation standard required under California law.”

Debt Rattle September 12 2018

Sep 122018

September 12, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:14 am Finance Tagged with: Armageddon, Brexit, censorship, constitution, copyright, deficit, Florence, Mangkhut, Monsanto, Putin, Skripal 16 Responses »

Vincent van Gogh Mountainous Landscape Behind Saint-Rémy 1888

• US Federal Deficit Soars 32% To $895 Billion (Hill)

• The Fed’s Lost Opportunity to Return to Normal (Rickards)

• China ‘National Team’ Bought Billions In Stocks in Q2 – Goldman (CNBC)

• Putin Bashes Protectionism, ‘Sanctions, Bans And Political Bias’ (CNBC)

• Skripal Poisoning Suspects Are Civilians, Not Criminals, Says Putin (G.)

• UK Police Prepares For Disorder At Ports If UK Crashes Out Of EU (Ind.)

• Barnier Confronts Raab Over Discovery Of Brexit No-Deal Letters To EU27 (G.)

• Europe Is Voting On Controversial Internet Copyright Law (CNBC)

• Americans Need Social Media Guided by the US Constitution (Krieger)

• Internet Industry Group Backs ‘National’ Data Privacy Approach (R.)

• Armageddon Rides In The Balance (PCR)

• Tsipras Warns “Europe Has No Future If It Doesn’t Admit Mistakes” (KTG)

• Monsanto-Bayer Merger Hurts Farmers and Consumers (CP)

• ‘Monster’ Hurricane Florence To Pummel US Southeast For Days (R.)

Steady as she goes.

• US Federal Deficit Soars 32% To $895 Billion (Hill)

The federal deficit hit $895 billion in the first 11 months of fiscal 2018, an increase of $222 billion, or 32 percent, over the same period the previous year, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The nonpartisan CBO reported that the central drivers of the increasing deficit were the Republican tax law and the bipartisan agreement to increase spending. As a result, revenue only rose 1 percent, failing to keep up with a 7 percent surge in spending, it added. Revenue from individual and payroll taxes was up some $105 billion, or 4 percent, while corporate taxes fell $71 billion, or 30 percent.

The August statistics were somewhat inflated, however, due to a timing shift for certain payments, putting the deficit measure through August slightly out of sync with the previous year, the CBO noted. Had it not been for the timing shift, the deficit would have increased $154 billion instead of $222 billion. Earlier analysis from CBO projected that deficits would near $1 trillion in 2019 and surpass that amount the following year.

With 10 years of such market manipulation that there is no market left, what exactly is normal?

• The Fed’s Lost Opportunity to Return to Normal (Rickards)

Current Fed policy will push the U.S. economy to the brink of recession, possibly by later this year. When that happens, the Fed will have to reverse course and ease monetary policy. Meanwhile, the economic cheerleaders recite recent GDP figures and the stimulative effects of the Trump tax cuts. There’s one problem with the happy talk about 3–4% growth. We’ve seen this movie before. In 2009, almost every economic forecaster and commentator was talking about “green shoots.” In 2010, then-Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner forecast the “recovery summer.” In 2017, the global monetary elites were praising the arrival (at last) of “synchronized global growth.”

None of this wishful thinking panned out. The green shoots turned brown, the recovery summer never came and the synchronized global growth was over almost as soon as it began. Strong quarters have been followed by much weaker quarters within six months on six separate occasions in the past nine years. There’s no reason to believe this time will be any different. This expansion has been extraordinarily long — over 30% longer than average — indicating that a recession should be expected sooner rather than later. Into this mix of weak growth comes the Federal Reserve, which is tightening monetary policy, reducing the base money supply and supporting a strong dollar. All of these policies are associated with slower growth ahead and a high probability of recession.

Plunge protection. Imitating ECB.

• China ‘National Team’ Bought Billions In Stocks in Q2 – Goldman (CNBC)

As the mainland Chinese stock market dropped in the second quarter, groups with government ties bought shares, according to a Goldman Sachs analysis. The “national team” of entities related to or influenced by the state was formed in 2015 to help support stocks during that summer’s market turmoil. The Shanghai composite crashed more than 40 percent that year, and has struggled to recover since. The index’s losses accelerated in June, when it fell 20 percent from a recent high, or into a bear market. Beijing’s efforts to reduce the economy’s reliance on debt has led to tighter financial conditions, while rising U.S.-China trade tensions have added to pressure on growth. In all, the Shanghai composite lost 10 percent in the second quarter.

During that time, the national team bought an estimated net 116 billion yuan — or nearly $17 billion — worth of local stocks known as A shares, Goldman Sachs’ Chief China Equity Strategist Kinger Lau said in a Friday report.The second-quarter purchases account for about 0.2 percent of market capitalization and follow sales of 71 billion yuan in the first quarter, Lau said. Overall, his team estimated the national team holds 1.5 trillion yuan worth of A shares, or about 2.9 percent of the listed market capitalization. The findings are based on analysis of required quarterly disclosures of the top 10 shareholders in A share companies.

Source: Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research

Trump unites China and Russia.

• Putin Bashes Protectionism, ‘Sanctions, Bans And Political Bias’ (CNBC)

President Vladimir Putin appeared to take another thinly veiled swipe at Trump’s economic policies on Wednesday, a day after Russia and China vowed to stand together to fight protectionism. “The world and global economy are coming up against new forms of protectionism today with different kinds of barriers which are increasing,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told a plenary session at the Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) in Vladivostok, Russia. “Basic principles of trade — competition and mutual economic benefit — are depreciated and unfortunately undermined, they’re becoming hostages of ideological and fleeting political situations, in that we see a serious challenge for all of the global economy, especially for the dynamically-growing Asia-Pacific and its leadership,” he added.

Putin’s comments come as China and Russia appeared united on Tuesday after the leaders of both countries pledged to stand together to fight protectionism. The comments were seen as a thinly veiled attack on U.S. President Donald Trump who has implemented a massive package of tariffs on Chinese imports and threatened further sanctions on Moscow. [..] Putin said Wednesday that Russia and its eastern economic partners should work to keep trade free of barriers. “We’re convinced that in order for our region to continue to achieve high growth rates, and to remain a key participant in the global economy and trade, it should retain the spirit of economic freedom, to be the space of business initiative without sanctions, bans and political bias ,” Putin told delegates.

With a whole series of CCTV images. Because Russian secret agents on murder missions are too stupid to avoid their photos being taken. There is even one where they take time to ‘pose’ by looking into a shop window with a camera, taken AFTER the ‘attack’.

• Skripal Poisoning Suspects Are Civilians, Not Criminals, Says Putin (G.)

The two men accused by the UK of carrying out a nerve agent attack in Salisbury have been identified and are civilians, not criminals, Vladimir Putin has said. “We know who they are, we have found them,” Putin said at an economic forum in the eastern Russian city of Vladivostok, adding that the two men – named by the UK as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov – might soon make appearances in the media to protest their innocence. “These are civilians,” Putin said in remarks reported by Russian news agencies. “There is nothing criminal here.” British officials have said the men were agents of Russian military intelligence dispatched to kill Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy who had given information to British intelligence. He was imprisoned in Russia before being released in a spy swap in 2010.

Putin’s remarks appeared to be a denial that the men worked for Russia’s military intelligence service the Main Directorate, commonly called the GRU. British officials this month charged the two men in absentia with the attempted murder with novichok of Sergei Skripal, his daughter, Yulia, and a police officer who investigated the scene. Scotland Yard released CCTV images of the two suspects at Salisbury train station on the day of the attack. [..] Putin called on the two men to appear in the media to protest their innocence, saying he “wanted to address them directly”. The Russian’s president’s words marked a departure from his country’s earlier position, which was to disregard the evidence released by Scotland Yard as a fabrication.

And the military too. And this is just what you’re allowed to know.

• UK Police Prepares For Disorder At Ports If UK Crashes Out Of EU (Ind.)

Police are preparing for disorder at British ports in the event of a no-deal Brexit, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick has revealed. The head of Scotland Yard said her force was also bracing for the loss of key European data systems that are “very important” for keeping London safe. She said that the police were conducting careful, calm and sober contingency planning for eventualities, particularly relating to ports in Kent as well as in other parts of the UK. “Is there going to be protests, is there going to be disorder?” she asked, while addressing delegates at the Police Superintendents’ Association conference in Leicester. “At the moment in planning terms it’s a long-way off because there are so many uncertainties that could happen.”

Her comments came after a leaked document prepared by the National Police Coordination Centre revealed the “real possibility” of police calling on the military to help with civil disorder caused by a no-deal Brexit. It warned of traffic queues at ports and said concerns around medical supplies could “feed civil disorder”, while a rise in the price of goods could also lead to “widespread protest” and trigger crimes such as theft. Ms Dick raised additional concerns over the potential loss of access to EU systems including the European Arrest Warrant, Europol and databases containing information on criminals and terrorists entering the UK. “At any one time in my custody suites I will have 35, 40 per cent foreign nationals, over half EU citizens and a huge chunk would have travelled through Europe,” she explained.

The UK still thinks they can make separate deals. It doesn’t understand the EU.

• Barnier Confronts Raab Over Discovery Of Brexit No-Deal Letters To EU27 (G.)

Dominic Raab has been reprimanded by Michel Barnier after the EU’s chief negotiator discovered the British government had written to the 27 other member states asking for side negotiations on transport in the event of a no-deal Brexit. The Brexit secretary was confronted by Barnier during their most recent meeting in Brussels over correspondence sent in recent days to EU capitals by the Department for Transport. The letters had asked the member states to prepare to engage with the British government in side deals on aviation and haulage, to allow key trade flows to continue in the event of the UK and the EU failing to come to an agreement on leaving the union by 29 March 2019.

The transport secretary, Chris Grayling, had ordered the letters to be sent despite being told less than two weeks ago by the European commission’s most senior trade official, Violeta Bulc, that without a deal this autumn, there would be no other agreements made to protect the UK economy. Barnier is said to have reiterated that message to Raab, telling the cabinet minister: “If there is no deal, there is no trust.” The bruising exchange came on the same day that Theresa May told cabinet members the UK should remain “the EU’s closest ally” after Brexit, amid a growing belief in Downing Street that progress was gradually being made in the long-running divorce talks.

A few of them may understand the issues, but the majority sure don’t.

• Europe Is Voting On Controversial Internet Copyright Law (CNBC)

European parliamentarians are set to vote on a controversial copyright law that some critics believe could stop people from sharing memes and articles online. Lawmakers in Strasbourg, France, will cast their votes on the European Union’s new copyright directive on Wednesday. The result of that vote could determine whether large tech companies including Facebook, Twitter and Google are forced to use filtering systems that block copyrighted content. Two particular parts of the directive have attracted the most criticism from pro-internet freedom activists. One is Article 13. This section calls on internet giants to take “appropriate and proportionate” measures to prevent user-generated content that infringes a rightsholder’s copyright.

This part of the law has come under heavy criticism over concerns that tech giants could end up using automated content filtering systems. The law states that “effective content recognition systems” should be put in place by digital companies to prevent copyrighted materials from being distributed on their platforms. Campaigners have scrutinized this part of the legislation over concerns that it could amount to censorship, and argue that the use of copyright-protected material by way of commentary or parody should be permitted under the doctrine of “fair use.” Particular attention has been paid to the status of “memes,” which often rely on copyright protected images or pieces of video, and whether they could be censored as a result.

Echoing a point I’ve been making.

• Americans Need Social Media Guided by the US Constitution (Krieger)

This past Friday, Alex Jones was de-platformed from the last couple of third party tools he had been using to publicly communicate his message after Twitter and Apple permanently banned him and his website Infowars. This means an American citizen with a very large audience who played a meaningful role in the 2016 election, has been banned from all of the most widely used products of communication of our age: Twitter, Facebook, Google’s YouTube and Apple’s iTunes. You can point out he still has his radio show and website, and this is unquestionably true, but when it comes to the everyday tools most people interact with to receive information and communicate in 2018, Alex Jones has been thrown down the memory hole. Not because he was convicted of a crime or broke any laws, but because corporate executives decided he crossed an arbitrary line of their own creation.

It’s not against the law to be crazy or say crazy things in this country. It’s also not against the law to say hateful things. It’s pretty obvious the main reason Alex Jones was deleted from public discourse by Silicon Valley executives relates to his impact and popularity. [..] unabashed bigots like David Duke and Louis Farrakhan continue to have active presences across social media, and rightly so. The difference is neither David Duke nor Louis Farrakhan played a major role in the election of Donald Trump, whereas Alex Jones did. Jones and Infowars were having an outsized impact on the U.S. political discourse in a manner tech giant executives found threatening and offensive, so they collectively found excuses to silence him.

When the outrage mob consisting of politicians, corporate media outlets like CNN, and even his own employees, complained to Twitter’s Jack Dorsey on the issue of Alex Jones, he couldn’t hold the line on free speech because his company’s own policies are junk. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube should have a clear policy when it comes to speech, and it should be this: If it isn’t breaking the law – in other words, if it’s protected speech under the First Amendment – it stays up. Period. When you have corporate rules against “hate speech,” you’re relying on a concept that doesn’t really have any sort of legal standing when it comes to free speech in this country. There is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment of the U.S Constitution.

They want to regulate themselves. Don’t let them.

• Internet Industry Group Backs ‘National’ Data Privacy Approach (R.)

A group representing major internet companies including Facebook, Amazon.com and Alphabet said on Tuesday it backed modernizing U.S. data privacy rules but wants a national approach that would preempt California’s new regulations that take effect in 2020. The Internet Association, a group representing more than 40 major internet and technology firms including Netflix, Microsoft and Twitter, said “internet companies support an economy-wide, national approach to regulation that protects the privacy of all Americans.” The group said it backed principles that would ensure consumers should have “meaningful controls over how personal information they provide” is used and should be able to know who it is being shared with.

Consumers should also be able to seek deletion of data or request corrections or take personal information to another company that provides similar services and have reasonable access to the personal information they provide, it said. The group also told policymakers they should give companies flexibility in notifying individuals, set a “performance standard” on privacy and data security protections that avoids a prescriptive approach and set national data breach notification rules. Michael Beckerman, president and chief executive officer of the Internet Association, said in an interview the proposals were “very forward looking and very aggressive” and would push to ensure the new rules apply “economy wide.” He said the group “would be very active working with both the administration and Congress on putting pen to paper.”

Leftwing and intelligence.

• Armageddon Rides In The Balance (PCR)

For some time I have pointed out the paradox of the American liberal/progressive/left being allied with the CIA, FBI, military/security complex and deep state. Now leftist Ann Garrison has noticed the paradox of this alliance. She concludes that the left has lost its mind. Indeed, it has. Out of its hatred of Trump the left has united with the forces of evil and war that are leading to conflict with Russia. The left’s hatred of Trump shows that the American left has totally seperated from the interests of the working class, which elected Trump. The American left has abandoned the working class for the group victimizations and hatreds of Identity Politics. As Hillary put it, the working class comprises the “Trump deplorables.” The Democratic Party, like the Republicans, represents the ruling oligarchy.

I have explained that the leftwing lost its bearings when the Soviet Union collapsed and socialism gave way to neoliberal privatizations. The moral fury of the leftwing movement had to go somewhere, and it found its home in Identity Politics in which the white heterosexual male takes the place of the capitalist, and his victim groups—blacks, women, homosexuals, illegal immigrants—take the place of the working class. The consequences of the leftwing’s alliance with warmongers and liars is the leftwing’s loss of veracity. The left has endorsed a CIA orchestration—“Russiagate”—for which there is no known evidence, but which the left supports as proven truth. The purpose of “Russiagate” is to prevent President Trump from normalizing relations with Russia.

In these times when so many Americans are hard pressed, normal relations could adversely impact the budget and power of the military/security complex by reducing the “Russian threat.” If there is no real Russian threat, only an orchestrated perceived one, the question arises: why does the military/security complex have a taxpayer-supported annual budget of $1,000 billion dollars? The presstitutes have kept the truth from emerging that the “Russiagate” investigation has found no sign of a Trump/Putin plot to steal the 2016 presidential election from Hillary. Indeed, it has been proven beyond all questioning that the Hillary emails were not hacked but were downloaded on a thumb drive. This proof collapses the entire premise of “Russiagate.” Nevertheless, the hoax continues.

He might as well be talking about himself.

• Tsipras Warns “Europe Has No Future If It Doesn’t Admit Mistakes” (KTG)

Europe will have no future if the bloc does not admit mistakes in handling the financial and the migration crisis, Prime Minister warned the European Parliament on Tuesday. Alexis Tsipras said Europe could face an existential crisis over nationalism unless the bloc admits mistakes and its failure to handle a fiscal crisis and the deal with an influx of migrants effectively. The Greek Prime Minister said economic austerity pushed by European governments has fostered fear, racism and the emergence of the far right.“ The economic austerity pursued by European governments had fostered fear, racism and the emergence of the far right, he told lawmakers in the European parliament.

“The EU’s failure to give democratic and effective responses to modern challenges will lead irrevocably to the triumph of chauvinism and will rekindle nationalistic rivalry,” he said. “It will turn it into a fragmented continent, a continent without cohesion, without an international role, and without a future,” he said. Tsipras also criticised Europe’s handling of security and said this could have helped bolster support for far right parties. Several European countries including France and Belgium have seen attacks by Islamist militants in recent years. “The issue at stake is existential for Europe,” said Tsipras. “The handling so far of the financial crisis, the refugee crisis and a security crisis, has exposed huge deficiencies and contradictions.”

“93% of farmers expressed concern that the merger will harm independent farmers and farming communities.”

• Monsanto-Bayer Merger Hurts Farmers and Consumers (CP)

The U.S. Department of Justice issued a stern warning in its lawsuit against the conditionally-approved mega-merger between Bayer and Monsanto in June. The anti-competitive price effects of the merger would, according to the DOJ, “likely result in hundreds of millions of dollars per year in harm, raising costs to farmers and consumers.” The Justice Department warned that the combining of Bayer and Monsanto would reduce competition for vegetable seeds, likely driving up prices. Further, farmers might see prices for GMO cotton, canola, corn and soybean seeds increase, as well as price increases for herbicide and seed treatments. After imposing some limited divestments on Monsanto, the DOJ approved this merger, enabling Monsanto to hide its controversial name brand while giving Bayer anti-competitive control over seeds, pesticides, farmers and consumers worldwide.

But the harm to consumers and farmers will still exist. The DOJ is on the brink of essentially authorizing a monopoly. This is bad news for nearly everyone on the planet except Bayer and Monsanto executives and shareholders. Aside from a combined Bayer-Monsanto, only three other seed companies will be in the market manufacture and sell these products. Farmers overwhelmingly object to the merger. 93% of farmers expressed concern that the merger will harm independent farmers and farming communities. Farmers’ top three concerns were that Bayer/Monsanto “would use its dominance in one product to push sales of other products;” “control data about farm practices;” and that the merger will create “increased pressure for chemically dependent farming.”

Meanwhile, super typhoon Mangkhut is heading straight for Hong Kong.

• ‘Monster’ Hurricane Florence To Pummel US Southeast For Days (R.)

Hurricane Florence, on track to become the first Category 4 storm to make a direct hit on North Carolina in six decades, howled closer to shore on Tuesday, threatening to unleash deadly pounding surf, days of torrential rain and severe flooding. Fierce winds and massive waves are expected to lash the coasts of North and South Carolina and Virginia even before Florence makes landfall by early Friday, bringing a storm surge as much as 13 feet (4 meters), the National Hurricane Center in Miami warned. Catastrophic floods could follow if the storm stalls inland, it said. Although Florence was still days from arrival, authorities took extraordinary measures to move people out of harm’s way. More than 1 million residents have been ordered to evacuate from the coastline of the three states, while university campuses, schools and factories were being shuttered.

The U.S. Coast Guard closed ports in Wilmington and Morehead City, North Carolina and Hampton Roads, Virginia to inbound vessels greater than 500 tons and was requiring vessels of that size to leave if they did not have permission to be in the ports. Packing maximum sustained winds of 140 miles per hour (225 km per hour), the storm ranked as a Category 4 on the five-step Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale and was expected to grow stronger and larger over the next few days, the NHC said. “This storm is a monster,” North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper said. “Even if you’ve ridden out storms before, this one is different. Don’t bet your life on riding out a monster.” He cited forecasts showing Florence was likely to stall over North Carolina, “bringing days and days of rain.”

Graph: weather.com

Debt Rattle September 4 2018

Sep 042018

September 4, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:04 am Finance Tagged with: Africa, Brexit, China, content, DHS, EM, glyphosate, hacking, housing bubble, Monsanto, Russia 8 Responses »

Edward S. Curtis Lucille, Dakota Sioux 1907

• Department of Homeland Security Lied About Russia Hacking US Voter Sites (CN)

• Housing Bubble Pops in Sydney & Melbourne

• Sydney, Melbourne Have Zero Cashflow Positive Suburbs Left (News.com.au)

• Europe’s News Agencies Blast Google, Facebook For ‘Plundering’ Content (AFP)

• The Emerging Market Crisis Is Back. And This Time It’s Serious (CNBC)

• Bringing Up The Bodies in Emerging Markets (Napier)

• Brexit Is The Wrong Diagnosis Of A Real Crisis (LSE)

• China Says It Is Helping Africa Develop, Not Accumulate Debt (R.)

• The Uncomfortable Hiatus (Kunstler)

• Brazil Court Lifts Ban On Monsanto’s Glyphosate Weedkiller (AFP)

Read this excellent piece by Gareth Porter and you’ll never believe another single word about meddling. DHS made it all up, because it wanted to be the no. 1 cybersecurity unit in the US.

• Department of Homeland Security Lied About Russia Hacking US Voter Sites (CN)

The narrative of Russian intelligence attacking state and local election boards and threatening the integrity of U.S. elections has achieved near-universal acceptance by media and political elites. And now it has been accepted by the Trump administration’s intelligence chief, Dan Coats, as well. But the real story behind that narrative, recounted here for the first time, reveals that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) created and nurtured an account that was grossly and deliberately deceptive. DHS compiled an intelligence report suggesting hackers linked to the Russian government could have targeted voter-related websites in many states and then leaked a sensational story of Russian attacks on those sites without the qualifications that would have revealed a different story.

When state election officials began asking questions, they discovered that the DHS claims were false and, in at least one case, laughable. The National Security Agency and special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigating team have also claimed evidence that Russian military intelligence was behind election infrastructure hacking, but on closer examination, those claims turn out to be speculative and misleading as well. Mueller’s indictment of 12 GRU military intelligence officers does not cite any violations of U.S. election laws though it claims Russia interfered with the 2016 election.

“With impeccable timing, there is a flood of new condos expected to be completed over the next two years..”

• Housing Bubble Pops in Sydney & Melbourne

In Sydney, breeding ground for one of the world’s biggest housing bubbles, prices of single-family houses dropped 7.3% in August, compared to a year earlier. Prices of “units” — condos in US lingo — fell 2.2% year-over-year. Price declines were the sharpest at the high end, with prices down 8.1% in the most expensive quarter of home sales. Prices of all types of homes combined fell 5.6%, according to CoreLogic’s Daily Home Value Index. The index is down 5.8% from its peak last September:

Melbourne, where the inflection point has been lagging a few months behind Sydney’s, is in the process of catching up. Over the three month-period, June-August, prices fell 2.0%, making Melbourne the weakest housing market among the capital cities. By segment, house prices fell 2.7% from a year ago while condo prices still inched up 1.5%. At the most expensive quarter of sales, prices fell 5.2% from a year ago. For all types of dwellings combined, prices declined 1.7% year-over-year, to the lowest level since early June 2017, according to CoreLogic. Prices are down 3.6% from their peak at the end of November 2017:

[..] With impeccable timing, there is a flood of new condos expected to be completed over the next two years, something avid crane-counters in Sydney and Melbourne have been swearing for a while. Here are some of these astounding numbers that CoreLogic estimates based on data it collected from the industry: Greater Sydney: In 2019: 31,500 new condos are scheduled to be completed. In 2020, another 45,500 condos are expected to be completed. This brings the two-year total of new condos to 77,000 units, which will increase the total stock of condos by 9.3%! Greater Melbourne: The oncoming flood of new condos is expected to reach 29,000 units in 2019 and nearly 50,000 units in 2020. Over the two years, this will increase the total stock of condos by nearly 79,000 units, or by 11.5%!

“Even property investors have been priced out of the market.”

• Sydney, Melbourne Have Zero Cashflow Positive Suburbs Left (News.com.au)

Even property investors have been priced out of the market. There are “currently no suburbs” in Sydney, Melbourne or Canberra where an investor can buy a detached house and expect it to be cashflow positive with a deposit of 20 per cent or less, according to an analysis by Propertyology. Releasing a list of the country’s “best capital city cash cow suburbs”, the research firm said buyers would have to travel to the Central Coast, 100km from the Sydney CBD, before finding an investment property with decent cashflow. Even then, a median-priced $490,000 house in Lake Munmorah — the least worst “Sydney” suburb identified in Propertyology’s list — will leave the investor $3093 out of pocket.

“Victoria paints a similar picture, with greater Melbourne’s best locations for cash flow investors within the municipality of Melton — 40km northwest of the CBD,” Propertyology head of research Simon Pressley said in a statement. It comes as CoreLogic figures showed national dwelling values fell for the 11th consecutive month in August, led by weakness in the two major capitals that comprise about 60 per cent of Australia’s housing market by value. Negatively geared properties — when the rental return is less than the interest payments and other costs — are “okay when you’re getting 10 per cent capital growth year in, year out”, said AMP Capital chief economist Dr Shane Oliver.

But investors now face falling house prices, rising interest rates, tighter lending conditions and the possibility of a future Labor government cracking down on negative gearing and capital gains tax breaks. “The equation gets more complicated,” Dr Oliver said.

Getting rich off of other people’s work.

• Europe’s News Agencies Blast Google, Facebook For ‘Plundering’ Content (AFP)

Europe’s biggest news agencies accused Google and Facebook of “plundering” news for free on Tuesday in a joint statement that called on the internet giants to share more of their revenues with the media. In a column signed by the CEOs of around 20 agencies including France’s Agence France-Presse, Britain’s Press Association and Germany’s Deutsche Presse-Agentur they called on the European Parliament to update copyright law in the EU to help address a “grotesque imbalance”. “The internet giants’ plundering of the news media’s content and of their advertising revenue poses a threat both to consumers and to democracy,” the column said.

European Parliament lawmakers are to set to debate a new copyright law this month that would force the internet giants to pay more for creative content used on their platforms such as news, music or movies. A first draft of the law was rejected in July and the plans have been firmly opposed by US tech firms, as well as advocates of internet freedom who fear that the regulations could lead to higher costs for consumers. “Can the titans of the internet compensate the media without asking people to pay for access to the internet, as they claim they would be forced to? The answer is clearly ‘yes’,” the column said. The joint statement from the agencies, which are major suppliers of news, photos and video, said Facebook reported revenues of $40 billion (34 billion euros) in 2017 and profits of $16 billion, while Google made $12.7 billion on sales of $110 billion.

Been here before. This time is wider and deeper.

• The Emerging Market Crisis Is Back. And This Time It’s Serious (CNBC)

Markets have a very short attention span. Like babies, they move on quickly from one toy, or in this case an event, to another. For instance, markets seem to have moved on from the formation of the “Fragile Five,” a group of countries that suffered heavily when the U.S. Federal Reserve started to roll back its bond-buying program in 2013. Made up of Brazil, India, Indonesia, Turkey and South Africa, this group was marked by heavy currency depreciation, high current account deficits and political instability at home. The slump in commodity prices and fears of a Chinese slowdown kept the pressure on these economies. However, they have started to see a comeback; in India and Indonesia, for example, a change in government has led to political and economic reforms.

Investors started crowding this space and inflows into funds with exposure to these markets increased. But markets are feeling a sense of deja vu. Blame it on a stronger dollar, escalating tensions since President Donald Trump came to power, worries over a full-fledged trade war with China or rising interest rates in the U.S., this time around the crisis seems to have entered a new phase. The damage is far more widespread. The crisis has engulfed countries across the globe — from economies in South America, to Turkey, South Africa and some of the bigger economies in Asia, such as India and China. A number of these countries are seeing their currency fall to record levels, high inflation and unemployment, and in some cases, escalating tensions with the United States.

“..the rise of the rule of man begins to squeeze out the rule of law..”

• Bringing Up The Bodies in Emerging Markets (Napier)

Investors brought up in the developed world take for granted the stability and continuation of the rule of law. They expect it to be as available and constant as air. Anyway, what role can a consideration of the rule of law play in trying to obtain index beating quarterly returns? It is this myopia and not the myopia associated with the short-term dumping of assets, because they are labelled ‘emerging markets’, that is particularly dangerous. The history of emerging markets is the history of populism, the real populism that subverts human rights and property rights. On the rise in emerging markets, this populism is resulting in a growing exodus of what are now very large sums, even in global terms, of local savings.

It is the shift in local savings, more so than foreign savings, that is pushing emerging market exchange rates to ever lower levels. It is not the flighty financial capital seeking slightly better interest rate differentials that departs in situations like this. It is the financial capital that funds development and growth that flees, as the rise of the rule of man begins to squeeze out the rule of law. The loss of such capital has profound long-term economic impacts. There is a key reason why the strong men are on the rise and the rule of law on the decline: the world is failing to inflate away its debts. Even before we invented paper money, there was a well recognized method of inflating away debts.

Perhaps most famously Henry VIII’s so-called great debasement (1544-1551) inflated away the excessive debts run up to fund wars with France and Scotland, as well as a bit of lavish spending by the king himself. Your analyst meets investors almost every day who believe that inflation is currently playing a similar role. However, such an assertion ignores the fact that the global non-financial debt to GDP ratio is now 244% up from what seemed a dangerous level of 210% of GDP as the global economy peaked in December 2007.

A nation that hasn’t moved in decades.

• Brexit Is The Wrong Diagnosis Of A Real Crisis (LSE)

The Leave campaign in 2016 had a lot in common with the 1979 Conservative election manifesto. Both evoked the threat of a bureaucratic super-state and something approaching a conspiracy of that state against the public. Both promised to rescue a Greater Britain from the conspiratorial political forces that were holding it back. Both campaigns were a misdiagnosis of the real crisis at hand. This time we face a crisis of ungovernability potentially far more severe than that of the 1970s; but its roots are less in Europe than in the failures of the homegrown neoliberal reforms of the British state.

The last three decades of state reform in Western democracies have aggravated rather than resolved the social divisions that emerged with de-industrialisation. Over the last thirty years, liberal market economies in general and the UK in particular have transformed the character of their states through privatization and outsourcing, through the development of quasi markets in welfare, and the rejection of industrial policies. At the same time, permissive tax and regulatory regimes have encouraged large corporations to opt out of their former social obligations in the name of maximising shareholder value.

The ‘supply-side revolution’ of the last thirty years was driven by the dominant New Right diagnosis of the economic crises of the 1970s and based on the radical public choice economics aligned with the Chicago and Virginia schools. According to this diagnosis it was the state that was primarily responsible for the end of the post-war ‘golden age of growth’ because of its inhibition of the market. Thus, according to the New Right and later New Labour too, it wasn’t technological change, or de-industrialisation in the face of emerging markets, it wasn’t the Nixon shock, or the end of Bretton Woods, nor rising exchange rate instability, it wasn’t stagflation or the oil crises that had confronted the country with a need to re-evaluate its production regime. It was the state. And so it was the state, above all else, that had to be transformed.

But still there’s “A wave of African nations seeking to restructure their debt with China”. Care to explain?

• China Says It Is Helping Africa Develop, Not Accumulate Debt (R.)

China is helping Africa achieve development, not accumulate debt, a top Chinese official said on Tuesday, as the government pushes back against criticism it is loading the continent with an unsustainable burden during a major summit in Beijing. Chinese President Xi Jinping on Monday pledged funds of $60 billion to African nations at the opening of the Forum for China-Africa Cooperation, matching the size of the financing package offered at the last summit in Johannesburg in 2015. A wave of African nations seeking to restructure their debt with China has served as a reality check for Beijing’s relationship with the continent, though most countries still see Chinese lending as the best bet to develop their economies.

“If we take a closer look at these African countries that are heavily in debt, China is not their main creditor,” China’s special envoy for Africa, Xu Jinghu, told a news conference. “It’s senseless and baseless to shift the blame onto China for debt problems.” China would carefully choose projects that avoid causing debt problems when pushing forward with Xi’s pledges to Africa, she added. “When we cooperate with African countries we will conscientiously and fully carry out feasibility studies, to choose which projects can go ahead. These projects will take into account their development prospects so as to help African countries achieve sustainable development and avoid debt or financial problems.”

“The shale oil “miracle” was a stunt enabled by supernaturally low interest rates..”

• The Uncomfortable Hiatus (Kunstler)

Energy: The shale oil “miracle” was a stunt enabled by supernaturally low interest rates, i.e. Federal Reserve policy. Even The New York Times said so yesterday (The Next Financial Crisis Lurks Underground). For all that, the shale oil producers still couldn’t make money at it. If interest rates go up, the industry will choke on the debt it has already accumulated and lose access to new loans. If the Fed reverses its current course — say, to rescue the stock and bond markets — then the shale oil industry has perhaps three more years before it collapses on a geological basis, maybe less. After that, we’re out of tricks. It will affect everything. The perceived solution is to run all our stuff on electricity, with the electricity produced by other means than fossil fuels, so-called alt energy.

This will only happen on the most limited basis and perhaps not at all. (And it is apart from the question of the decrepit electric grid itself.) What’s required is a political conversation about how we inhabit the landscape, how we do business, and what kind of business we do. The prospect of dismantling suburbia — or at least moving out of it — is evidently unthinkable. But it’s going to happen whether we make plans and policies, or we’re dragged kicking and screaming away from it. Corporate tyranny: The nation is groaning under despotic corporate rule. The fragility of these operations is moving toward criticality. As with shale oil, they depend largely on dishonest financial legerdemain. They are also threatened by the crack-up of globalism, and its 12,000-mile supply lines, now well underway. Get ready for business at a much smaller scale.

Hard as this sounds, it presents great opportunities for making Americans useful again, that is, giving them something to do, a meaningful place in society, and livelihoods. The implosion of national chain retail is already underway. Amazon is not the answer, because each Amazon sales item requires a separate truck trip to its destination, and that just doesn’t square with our energy predicament. We’ve got to rebuild main street economies and the layers of local and regional distribution that support them. That’s where many jobs and careers are.

In the most corrupt places on earth, Monsanto can do what it wants.

• Brazil Court Lifts Ban On Monsanto’s Glyphosate Weedkiller (AFP)

An appellate court on Monday lifted a court-ordered suspension of licenses in Brazil for products containing glyphosate, an industrial weedkiller in common use in Latin America’s agricultural powerhouse. Federal appeals court judge Kassio Marques ruled that “nothing justified” the suspension by a lower court, saying it had been abruptly imposed “without previous analysis of the grave impact it would have on the country’s economy and on production in general.” The suspension, which had been ordered August 3 by a federal judge in Brasilia, was supposed to go into effect on Monday until a “toxicological re-evaluation” of all products containing glyphosate could be completed by Brazil’s sanitary authority.

The ban also was to have extended to products containing the chemicals thiram and abamectin. Glyphosate is used in weedkillers like Roundup, made by Monsanto, whose parent company Bayer had urged that the ban be scrapped. Bayer hailed the suspension as “very good news for Brazilian farmers.” It comes just weeks after a jury in California ordered Monsanto to pay $289 million to a dying former school groundskeeper for failing to warn him of the risk that Roundup might cause cancer.

Debt Rattle September 2 2018

Sep 022018

September 2, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:16 am Finance Tagged with: arctic, Bayer, BRI, Dijsselbloem, Ethiopia, EU, Greece, IMF, Monsanto, Pakistan, Pentagon 7 Responses »

Salvador Dali Portrait of Picasso 1947

• Is The US Economic Boom Beginning To Fizzle Out? (Coppola)

• Former Eurogroup Head Dijsselbloem Says Demands On Greeks Were Too Heavy (R.)

• The IMF Abetted The European Union’s Subversion Of Greek Democracy (Mody)

• Ethiopia Debt Woes Curtail China Funding (R.)

• May Vows No Compromise With EU On Brexit Plan (BBC)

• Pentagon Cancels Aid To Pakistan Over Record On Militants (R.)

• Monsanto-Bayer: Eliminating The Name Will Not Erase The Criminal History (CD)

• What’s Happening To Our Weather? The Answers Are Hiding In Arctic Air (G.)

Bit short today. I think because all the focus is one two funerals I don’t care much about. In one, a bishop grabs boobs, in the other the one person not invited gets all the attention.

Is that a surprise?

• Is The US Economic Boom Beginning To Fizzle Out? (Coppola)

President Trump is not going to be too happy with the New York Fed’s latest nowcast for Q3 2018. The staff projection, based upon the latest data, shows annualized quarter-on-quarter GDP growth slowing to 2% per annum. At the end of 2017 it was 4%, and even at the end of Q2 it was 3%.

The Atlanta Fed’s nowcast, which calculates GDP growth in the same way as the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, also shows GDP growth slowing in Q3, though from a higher level. The Atlanta Fed’s growth estimate for Q3 is 4.1%. President Trump will no doubt be happy with this, but not so happy with the fact that at the beginning of August the estimate was 5%.

So what has gone wrong? Why are the nowcasts suggesting that U.S. economic growth is beginning to slow? The indicators that go into the NY Fed’s nowcasts have been gradually turning red for some time now. There appears to be something of a downturn going on in the housing market; both new starts and sales have fallen. Exports have fallen and imports have risen, apparently because of worsening terms of trade, most likely due to the strong dollar. Most recently, manufacturers have drawn down inventories, and there is a fall in orders and shipments for durable goods. There are no dramatic drops, but it all adds up to a gradual economic slowdown.

How long have you realized this, Jeroen, and what have you done to repair it?

• Former Eurogroup Head Dijsselbloem Says Demands On Greeks Were Too Heavy (R.)

Euro zone countries have asked for too much from the Greek people in return for international bailout loans, former Eurogroup chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem said in an interview on Dutch television on Saturday. “On reforms, we have asked a lot from the Greek people, too much,” Dijsselbloem told current affairs program Nieuwsuur. “Reforms are hard enough to accomplish in a society with a well-functioning government, but this was obviously not the case in Greece.” Greece emerged from the biggest bailout in economic history on Aug. 20, after receiving 288 billion euros in financial aid since 2010, with the European Union as its biggest lender.

During the crisis, the Greek economy shrank by a quarter, pushing a third of the population into poverty and driving thousands to move abroad. “Greece is obviously not a success story,” Dijsselbloem said. “Their crisis has been so deep, that you can’t call it a success.” Dijsselbloem chaired the Eurogroup of euro zone finance ministers from 2013 until the beginning of 2018, and led dozens of lengthy emergency meetings during which bailouts for Greece, Cyprus and the Spanish banking sector were grudgingly pieced together.

Sister act.

• The IMF Abetted The European Union’s Subversion Of Greek Democracy (Mody)

European authorities never allowed a conversation around the core imperative of reducing Greece’s debt burden. Syriza formed a government on January 25, 2015. On January 31, Erkki Liikanen, governor of Finland’s central bank and, in that capacity, a member of the ECB’s Governing Council, threatened that the ECB would stop funding Greek banks if the Greek government did not agree to the terms of the creditors. And on February 4, the ECB decided Greece’s fate. In an aggressive move that took everyone by surprise, the ECB cut off funding to Greek banks, preemptively immobilizing the Greek government before it could begin negotiations with its creditors.

The ECB withdrew an earlier arrangement under which Greek banks used their government bonds as collateral (security) to obtain funds for running their day-to-day operations. Although Greek government bonds had a junk rating and normally only higher-rated bonds qualified as collateral, the ECB had waived that requirement to help the banks stay afloat. With its February 4 decision, the ECB revoked that waiver. Greek banks could now borrow only from the Greek central bank under an Emergency Liquidity Arrangement (ELA); ELA funds carried a higher interest rate and, moreover, could be turned off at any time, thus choking the Greek financial system.

Stock prices of Greek banks fell sharply, and two days later, the rating agency S&P pushed the government bonds’ rating further into junk territory. With continuing deposit flight from Greek banks and the threat of a financial meltdown, the Syriza government rapidly lost all leverage before it could use its economic argument in a political negotiation.

More Belt and Road.

• Ethiopia Debt Woes Curtail China Funding (R.)

Ethiopia has been lauded by experts from China’s ruling Communist Party as a “model country” in Beijing’s $126 billion Belt and Road initiative to build rail, road and sea links tying China to Eurasia and Africa. But as the Horn of Africa nation of 100 million people faces debt distress, there are signs that China, a major creditor, is slowing financing to Ethiopia as doubts grow over the profitability of some infrastructure projects there. “The intensifying repayment risks from the Ethiopian government’s debt reaching 59 percent of GDP is worrying investors,” China’s mission to the African Union in Addis Ababa said on its website in July.

It said that Chinese investment in the country was cooling and that the China Export and Credit Insurance Corp was reducing the scale of its investment there. Against a backdrop of rising worry over African indebtedness to China, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed will visit Beijing for the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), which starts on Monday. He is due to meet Chinese Prime Minister Li Keqiang and is expected to court investment from Chinese firms into Ethiopia’s agro-industrial and pharmaceutical businesses, China’s Xinhua news agency said. Ethiopia has been a top destination for Chinese loans in Africa, despite its lack of natural resources, with state policy banks extending it more than $12.1 billion since 2000, according to the China Africa Research Initiative (CARI) at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington (SAIS).

Not your call, Theresa.

• May Vows No Compromise With EU On Brexit Plan (BBC)

Theresa May has insisted she will not be forced into watering down her Brexit plan during negotiations with the EU. Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, the prime minister says she will “not be pushed” into compromises on her Chequers agreement that are not in the “national interest”. But Mrs May also warns she will not “give in” to those calling for a second referendum on the withdrawal agreement. She says it would be a “gross betrayal of our democracy and… trust”. The People’s Vote, a cross-party group including some MPs, is calling for a public vote on the final Brexit deal. The UK is on course to leave the EU on 29 March and the government had previously ruled out another referendum.

The prime minister writes that the coming months are “critical in shaping the future of our country”, but that she is “clear” about her mission in fulfilling “the democratic decision of the British people”. She adds that following the Chequers agreement in July – which led to the resignation of two cabinet ministers – “real progress” has been made in Brexit negotiations. While there is more negotiating to be done, Mrs May writes: “We want to leave with a good deal and we are confident we can reach one.” The government has been preparing for a no-deal scenario, even though this would create “real challenges for both the UK and the EU” in some sectors, she says. But the PM adds: “We would get through it and go on to thrive.”

Just as they’ve voted in Imran Khan, who once suggested he might order the shooting down of U.S. drones if they entered Pakistani airspace, [and] has opposed the United States’ open-ended presence in Afghanistan.

• Pentagon Cancels Aid To Pakistan Over Record On Militants (R.)

The U.S. military said it has made a final decision to cancel $300 million in aid to Pakistan that had been suspended over Islamabad’s perceived failure to take decisive action against militants, in a new blow to deteriorating ties. The so-called Coalition Support Funds were part of a broader suspension in aid to Pakistan announced by President Donald Trump at the start of the year, when he accused Pakistan of rewarding past assistance with “nothing but lies & deceit.” The Trump administration says Islamabad is granting safe haven to insurgents who are waging a 17-year-old war in neighboring Afghanistan, a charge Pakistan denies. But U.S. officials had held out the possibility that Pakistan could win back that support if it changed its behavior.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, in particular, had an opportunity to authorize $300 million in CSF funds through this summer – if he saw concrete Pakistani actions to go after insurgents. Mattis chose not to, a U.S. official told Reuters. “Due to a lack of Pakistani decisive actions in support of the South Asia Strategy the remaining $300 (million) was reprogrammed,” Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Kone Faulkner said. Faulkner said the Pentagon aimed to spend the $300 million on “other urgent priorities” if approved by Congress. He said another $500 million in CSF was stripped by Congress from Pakistan earlier this year, to bring the total withheld to $800 million. The disclosure came ahead of an expected visit by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the top U.S. military officer, General Joseph Dunford, to Islamabad. Mattis told reporters on Tuesday that combating militants would be a “primary part of the discussion.”

8,000 lawsuits. And Bayer is not a US company, big difference.

• Monsanto-Bayer: Eliminating The Name Will Not Erase The Criminal History (CD)

Cancelling out Monsanto’s name and keeping only that of Bayer, does not mean forgetting the wrongdoings of a company which, according to the verdict of the Monsanto Tribunal of The Hague, is stained with crimes of ecocide. With Bayer’s official takeover of Monsanto, the giant multinational also inherits its liabilities. On the eve of the start of the integration process, Monsanto has been held liable for causing cancer through the use of its glyphosate-based weedkiller Roundup and ordered to pay $289 million of damages to the plaintiff Dewayne Lee Johnson in the first landmark case, settled in California in mid August 2018. The jury also found that Monsanto “acted with malice or oppression.”

According to Reuters, the number of lawsuits brought against Bayer’s newly acquired Monsanto is approximately 8000 in the US alone. UN experts Ms Hilal Elver, Special Rapporteur on the right to food and Mr. Dainius Puras, Special Rapporteur on the right to physical and mental health, defined the ruling “a significant recognition of the human rights of victims, and the responsibilities of chemical companies.” Revelations in reports published last year, most notably the “Monsanto Papers” and the “Poison Papers“, have shed light on strategies of big agrochemical groups to expand their empires: from lobbying, interference in government agencies’ proceedings, attacks in collusion with institutions on independent science, to mega mergers and acquisitions.

For the first time part of these documents were shown to a jury, which were able, among other things to also see that, “at least starting 20 years ago, Monsanto has known that their product can cause cancer, and has gone out of its way to ignore it and/or fight any science that suggests a link”, as declared to Democracy Now by Brent Wisner, the lead trial counsel for Dewayne Lee Johnson in his lawsuit against Monsanto. Added to this, in the same week, California’s Supreme Court rejected a challenge by Monsanto to the state’s decision to include glyphosate in its Proposition 65 list of carcinogens.

How clean is the air?

• What’s Happening To Our Weather? The Answers Are Hiding In Arctic Air (G.)

I am standing on the ocean. Ahead of me, the world is split into two perfect halves: blue sky above, white sea ice below. The view is clean and simple, but a continuous waltz of swirling and shunting is hidden inside those two colours: the inner workings of the Arctic engine. This place is special for many reasons, and to appreciate one of the most unusual all I need to do is to live; to breathe. The air is -2C, but the air coming from my lungs is invisible. The familiar wisps of cold breath that I associate with crisp winter air in Britain are absent. They cannot form here. And that anomaly is connected in a fundamental way to our presence here, on a scientific expedition to study this environment. For two months, the Swedish icebreaker Oden is home to 74 of us, living and working at the top of the world to tap into the stories that the blue and the white have to tell.

The Arctic has held on to its mystique for centuries. Many western explorers have pitted their wits, strength, and endurance against this environment, while traditional Arctic communities have learned to work with the complexities of the ice rather than against them. Those of us who live well south of the Arctic circle hear a lot about how the white in the north is changing, but less about how it is. It’s hard to construct a secondhand mental image of what it’s like here. There are no landmarks and you cannot step in the footprints of the past. This is an ocean with an icy shell that cracks and shifts as it’s pushed by the wind, breaking apart into separate floes or piling up to form ridges.

Debt Rattle August 24 2018

Aug 242018

August 24, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 7:57 am Finance Tagged with: Aramco, Australia, Bayer, Big Oil, Brexit, bull market, China, gold, Italy, Korea, Libya, Monsanto, refugees 12 Responses »

Vincent van Gogh Café, le soir, Arles 1888

• Thoughts On The ‘Longest Bull Market Ever’ (Black)

• New Reality of China’s Failing Economy Is Coming Soon (Rickards)

• UK Tells Drug Companies To Stockpile Medicine In Case Of No-Deal Brexit (Ind.)

• Big Oil Asks Government To Protect It From Climate Change (AP)

• Scott Morrison New Australian PM As Turnbull Denounces ‘Insurgency’ (G.)

• Saudi Modernisation Drive Is Reflected In Aramco’s Faltering Sale (G.)

• Libya Refuses To Take Migrants Rejected By Italy (AFP)

• Italy Threatens To Stop EU Funding Unless Other States Accept Refugees (ZH)

• Inflation Adjusted Gold Is At Historical Lows (von Greyerz)

• Monsanto Faces A Surge In Lawsuits Following Cancer Ruling (BBC)

• ‘Monsanto’s History Is One Full of Vast Lies’ (Spiegel)

• After 70 Years, Korean Father, Son Share A Drink For First, Last? Time (H.)

“..a full SIXTY PERCENT of corporate debt issued by companies in the Russell 2000 is rated as JUNK..”

• Thoughts On The ‘Longest Bull Market Ever’ (Black)

Well, it happened. Yesterday the US stock market broke the all-time record for the longest bull market ever. This means that the US stock market has been generally rising for nearly a decade straight… or even more specifically, that the market has gone 3,453 days without a 20% correction. That’s a pretty big milestone. And there’s no end in sight. So it’s possible this market continues marching higher for the foreseeable future. But if you step back and really look at the big picture, there are a lot of things that might make a rational person scratch his/her head. For example– the Russell 2000 index (which is comprised of smaller companies whose shares are listed on various US stock exchanges) is currently right at its all-time high.

Yet simultaneously, according to the Wall Street Journal, a full SIXTY PERCENT of corporate debt issued by companies in the Russell 2000 is rated as JUNK. How is that even possible– a junk debt rating coupled with an all-time high? It’s as if investors are saying, “Well, there’s very little chance these companies will be able to pay their debts… but screw it, I’ll pay a record high price to buy the stock anyhow.” It just doesn’t make any sense. Looking at the larger companies in the Land of the Free (which make up the S&P 500 index), the current ‘CAPE ratio’ is now the second highest on record. ‘CAPE’ stands for ‘cyclically-adjusted price/earnings ratio’. Essentially it refers to how much investors are willing to pay for shares of a company, relative to the company’s long-term average earnings.

And right now investors are willing to pay 33x long-term average earnings for the typical company in the S&P 500. The median CAPE ratio based on data that goes back to the 1800s is about 15.6. So at 33, investors are literally paying more than TWICE as much for every dollar of a company’s long-term average earnings than they have throughout all of US market history. And it’s only been higher ONE other time– just before the 2000 stock market crash (when the dot-com bubble burst). 33 is higher than right before the 2008 crisis. It’s even higher than it was before the Great Depression.

Building zombies for the future.

• New Reality of China’s Failing Economy Is Coming Soon (Rickards)

There’s no denying China’s remarkable economic progress over the past thirty years. Hundreds of millions have escaped poverty and found useful employment in manufacturing or services in the major cities. Infrastructure gains have been historic, including some of the best trains in the world, state-of-the-art transportation hubs, cutting edge telecommunications systems, and a rapidly improving military. Yet, that’s only half the story. The other half is pure waste, fraud and theft. About 45% of Chinese GDP is in the category of “investment.” A developed economy GDP such as the U.S. is about 70% consumption and 20% investment. There’s nothing wrong with 45% investment in a fast-growing developing economy assuming the investment is highly productive and intelligently allocated.

That’s not the case in China. At least half of the investment there is pure waste. It takes the form of “ghost cities” that are fully-built with skyscrapers, apartments, hotels, clubs, and transportation networks – and are completely empty. This is not just western propaganda; I’ve seen the ghost cities first hand and walked around the empty offices and hotels. Chinese officials try to defend the ghost cities by claiming they are built for the future. That’s nonsense. Modern construction is impressive, but it’s also high maintenance. Those shiny new buildings require occupants, rents and continual maintenance to remain shiny and functional. The ghost cities will be obsolete long before they are ever occupied.

Other examples of investment waste include over-the-top white elephant public structures such as train stations with marble facades, 128 escalators (mostly empty), 100-foot ceilings, digital advertising and few passengers. The list can be extended to include airports, canals, highways, and ports, some of which are needed and many of which are pure waste. Communist party leaders endorse these wasteful projects because they have positive effects in terms of job creation, steel fabrication, glass installation, and construction. However, those effects are purely temporary until the project is completed. The costs are paid with borrowed money that can never be repaid. China might report 6.8% growth in GDP, but when the waste is stripped out the actual growth is closer to 4.5%. Meanwhile, China’s debts grow faster than the economy and its debt-to-GDP ratio is even worse than the U.S.

It’s beginning to hit home that time has run out. Wait till the days shorten for real.

• UK Tells Drug Companies To Stockpile Medicine In Case Of No-Deal Brexit (Ind.)

Health secretary Matt Hancock has told drug companies to ensure they have six weeks additional supplies of medicines on top of their normal stockpiles to avoid disruption caused by a possible no-deal Brexit. The remarks from Mr Hancock came as Dominic Raab, the Brexit secretary, released the first tranche of technical notes outlining the government’s preparations and warnings to businesses if Britain crashes out of the bloc without a deal. Among the 24 detailed papers it was also revealed that credit card users could be hit with a new “Brexit tax” amounting to £166m, UK citizens living in Europe face the prospect of losing access to pension income and new red tape could delay foreign sperm donations arriving in Britain.

In one of the most stark warnings, Mr Hancock told NHS staff and service providers that the move to increase pharmaceutical companies’ stockpiles was necessary “in case imports from the EU through certain routes” are affected if Theresa May fails to strike a deal with negotiators in Brussels. The request, according to the chief executive of the UK Bioindustry Association, Steve Bates, would be a “massive challenge” for the industry to deliver in less than 200 days. But Mr Hancock also warned that hospitals, GPs and community pharmacies should not hoard or stockpile additional drugs “beyond their business” as usual levels.

Priceless.

• Big Oil Asks Government To Protect It From Climate Change (AP)

As the nation plans new defenses against the more powerful storms and higher tides expected from climate change, one project stands out: an ambitious proposal to build a nearly 60-mile “spine” of concrete seawalls, earthen barriers, floating gates and steel levees on the Texas Gulf Coast. Like other oceanfront projects, this one would protect homes, delicate ecosystems and vital infrastructure, but it also has another priority — to shield some of the crown jewels of the petroleum industry, which is blamed for contributing to global warming and now wants the federal government to build safeguards against the consequences of it.

The plan is focused on a stretch of coastline that runs from the Louisiana border to industrial enclaves south of Houston that are home to one of the world’s largest concentrations of petrochemical facilities, including most of Texas’ 30 refineries, which represent 30 percent of the nation’s refining capacity. Texas is seeking at least $12 billion for the full coastal spine, with nearly all of it coming from public funds. Last month, the government fast-tracked an initial $3.9 billion for three separate, smaller storm barrier projects that would specifically protect oil facilities.

That followed Hurricane Harvey, which roared ashore last Aug. 25 and swamped Houston and parts of the coast, temporarily knocking out a quarter of the area’s oil refining capacity and causing average gasoline prices to jump 28 cents a gallon nationwide. Many Republicans argue that the Texas oil projects belong at the top of Washington’s spending list. “Our overall economy, not only in Texas but in the entire country, is so much at risk from a high storm surge,” said Matt Sebesta, a Republican who as Brazoria County judge oversees a swath of Gulf Coast. But the idea of taxpayers around the country paying to protect refineries worth billions, and in a state where top politicians still dispute climate change’s validity, doesn’t sit well with some.

Another rightwing anti-immigrant yokel. That’s all they have down under.

• Scott Morrison New Australian PM As Turnbull Denounces ‘Insurgency’ (G.)

Australia will have a new prime minister in Scott Morrison – the socially conservative architect of Australia’s hardline anti-asylum seeker policies – after he mounted a late challenge during a drawn-out struggle for power in the governing Liberal party. On Friday, incumbent Malcolm Turnbull failed in his attempt to stare down a challenge from hard right MP Peter Dutton, with insurgents in his party gathering enough signatures to call for a “spill” of the leadership. It led to a three-way challenge that included Morrison, Turnbull’s treasurer, and Julie Bishop, the foreign minister. Turnbull himself stood aside from the contest.

In a party room ballot, Bishop was eliminated in the first round, and Morrison won against former home affairs minister Dutton in a subsequent run-off, 45 votes to 40, suggesting the party is still deeply divided. There appears no end in sight to the civil war consuming the ruling Liberal-led coalition government. The country may be headed to an election, with Turnbull saying he will not stay in parliament. His resignation in between general elections would erase the government’s single-seat majority in the House of Representatives. Australia has now had five prime ministers in just over five years. Since 2010 four prime ministers have lost office not at the ballot box, but torn down by their own parties, earning Canberra the unhappy appellation “the coup capital of the Pacific”.

Selling 5% of Aramco was supposed to finance ‘diversification’.

• Saudi Modernisation Drive Is Reflected In Aramco’s Faltering Sale (G.)

For the Saudis, the implications of the Paris agreement were obvious: the drive to decarbonise the world economy would mean that a considerable part of their oil reserves would have to stay in the ground. This made a warning at the turn of the millennium by the former Saudi energy minister Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, seem suddenly urgent. “Thirty years from now, there will be a huge amount of oil – and no buyers”, Yamani said. “Oil will be left in the ground. The stone age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil.”

It was not long before Saudi’s rulers responded to this twin challenge. In the short term, they sought to persuade fellow oil producing nations to agree production curbs that would limit supply, drive up crude prices and so ease the pressures on the public finances. At the current oil price of around $70 a barrel, the Saudis can make their budget arithmetic stack up. In the longer term, there was a plan to diversify the economy away from oil. Saudi Vision 2030 was announced by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in April 2016, shortly after the oil price reached its trough. The idea was to make Saudi Arabia a global investment giant, to turn the country into a hub linking the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa and to be the heart of the Arab and Islamic worlds.

The proposed sale of part of the state-owned oil company – Saudi Aramco – was a key part of this attempt to transform and modernise the economy. Proceeds were earmarked for the country’s sovereign wealth fund so it could continue investing in companies such as the electric car company Tesla and the ride-hailing app Uber.

Thank you Barack and Hillary.

• Libya Refuses To Take Migrants Rejected By Italy (AFP)

Libya has refused to take in a group of 177 migrants stranded on an Italian coastguard boat off a Sicilian port after Rome insisted they would not be allowed to disembark. Italy’s Interior Minister Matteo Salvini threatened earlier this week to return the migrants to the North African country unless other European governments offered to take some of them in. But Mohamed Siala, foreign minister of the UN-backed Libyan unity government, said that “Libya does not accept this unjust and illegal measure because it already has more than 700,000 migrants” on its territory.

In a statement late Wednesday, he called on the international community “to put pressure on the countries of departure to repatriate their nationals”, adding that Libya had only served as a transit point. The Italian boat “Diciotti” arrived on Monday night off the Sicilian port of Catania. Plunged into chaos following the fall and killing of longtime dictator Moamer Kadhafi in a 2011 NATO-backed uprising, Libya has become a prime transit point for sub-Saharan African migrants making dangerous clandestine bids to reach Europe. The country takes in migrants whose boats are intercepted in its waters by the Libyan coastguard, but it has repeatedly rejected those rescued by foreign navies or by humanitarian organisations off its coast.

Who’s going to blame them?

• Italy Threatens To Stop EU Funding Unless Other States Accept Refugees (ZH)

On Thursday, out of the blue, Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio threatened to stop financial contributions to the European Union next year unless other states agreed to take in migrants being held on a coastguard ship in Sicily. The Italian’s ultimatum comes less two months after Europe triumphantly announced a “vaguely worded” deal on how to resolve the continent’s migrant influx. “If tomorrow at the meeting of the European Commission nothing is decided on the redistribution of migrants and the Diciotti ship, I and the entire Five Star Movement are not willing to give 20 billion to the European Union,” Di Maio said in a video posted on his Facebook page.

He echoed statements by Interior Minister and Deputy Premier Matteo Salvini, who has refused to allow 177 migrants to leave the Italian coastguard ship Ubaldo Diciotti, which is docked in the Sicilian port of Catania. While Italian prosecutors opened an investigation into the detention of the migrants and 29 children were allowed to disembark, Salvini still won’t allow the rest of the people to come ashore and has attacked the EU for its “cowardly silence.” Salvini described those aboard as “illegal immigrants,” and said they won’t be allowed to step foot on Italian soil. Instead, he insisted fellow European Union nations take in some of the asylum-seekers. “Italy’s no longer Europe’s refugee camp,” he tweeted. “Upon my authorization, no one is disembarking from the Diciotti.”

Salvini, who is also interior minister, was defiant in the face of a criminal probe into possible kidnapping charges for forcing the migrants to remain on the vessel. The chief prosecutor from the Agrigento court, Luigi Patronaggio, on Wednesday boarded the Diciotti and said afterwards he had opened a probe against “unknown” persons for holding the migrants against their will. “There’s a court that is investigating whether those illegally on board the ship have been kidnapped,” Salvini said in a radio interview. “I’m not unknown. My name is Matteo Salvini… I’m the Interior Minister and I think it is my duty to defend the security of this country’s borders.”

Just liked the graph, don’t want to tell anyone to buy anything.

• Inflation Adjusted Gold Is At Historical Lows (von Greyerz)

Gold at $1,220, adjusted for real inflation, is almost as cheap as it was in 1999 at the $250 low. More importantly, inflation adjusted gold is now very near the 300 year low of 1999. So right now gold is again unloved and undervalued and therefore a bargain. On an inflation adjusted basis, the 1980 high of $850 would today be $16,650. Long before we get hyperinflationary gold prices, that $16,600 level should be easily reached. Owning physical gold for wealth protection purposes is the best preserved secret in the West. In this part of the world, virtually nobody holds gold. At the same time, the wise people in the East continue to buy all the gold that is produced annually. China, India, Iran, Turkey, Russia and many more Eastern nations understand history and economics. That is why they are accumulating major gold reserves at these levels.

Bayer really didn’t see this coming.

• Monsanto Faces A Surge In Lawsuits Following Cancer Ruling (BBC)

American agro-chemicals company Monsanto is facing a surge in lawsuits that may cost its new owners, Bayer, billions in damages. Monsanto manufactures glyphosate-based weedkillers which some believe are carcinogenic. Last month it lost a $289m (£225m) court case that alleged its products Roundup and RangerPro had led to a Californian man’s terminal cancer. Bayer said the number of outstanding cases had risen from 5,200 to 8,000. The German firm’s shares have lost 11% of their value since it lost the case in a California court to groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson, who claimed Monsanto herbicides containing glyphosate, had caused his non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

Bayer shares fell another 1.7% on Thursday. Chief executive Werner Baumann said that when it bought Monsanto, Bayer “could not foresee the scope of the current lawsuits.” The $63bn deal was completed earlier this month. “In the course of the acquisition, we carried out due diligence as is standard practice when taking over a listed company. In doing so, we of course also considered the legal risks,” he said in an interview with Germany’s Handelsblatt newspaper. In a conference call on Thursday, Mr Baumann added: “Our view is that the number is not indicative of the merits of the plaintiffs’ cases”.

“..Another program is called “Freedom to Operate.” Its purpose is to eliminate everything that might disrupt sales of their products – laws, scientific articles, they go after everything.”

• ‘Monsanto’s History Is One Full of Vast Lies’ (Spiegel)

On Aug. 10, lawyer Brent Wisner, 34, scored a landmark verdict on behalf of his client, cancer patient Dewayne Johnson. A court in San Francisco ruled that Monsanto was guilty of concealing the potential health risks associated with its weed killer glyphosate, which is sold in the United States under the brand name Round Up. The jury ordered the company to pay $289 million in damages to the plaintiff, who had used Round Up at his job as a janitor for a school district. The court said Monsanto should have labeled the product’s possible dangers for consumers. Monsanto, which was recently acquired by German pharmaceuticals giant Bayer, has denied any link between the product and the disease. Wisner spoke to DER SPIEGEL about the case in an interview.

[..] DER SPIEGEL: How much does Monsanto have to do with the fact that a verdict was reached only now? Wisner: A lot! Monsanto has an internal program called “Let Nothing Go.” The aim of this program is to attack scientists who are critical of Monsanto products. They go after people directly and discredit them. They also pay others to do so. DER SPIEGEL: Are there other such PR strategies? Wisner: Another program is called “Freedom to Operate.” Its purpose is to eliminate everything that might disrupt sales of their products – laws, scientific articles, they go after everything. As part of that effort, they also engage lobbyists – scientists who Monsanto pays for their opportunism. Such programs reflect a corporate culture that shows no interest whatsoever in public health, only in profits.

DER SPIEGEL: Monsanto continues to dispute that it tried to influence scientific research. What was the critical factor for jurors in reaching the verdict? Wisner: I believe it was the scientific findings themselves. The 12 jurors were not lightweights after all. There was a molecular biologist, an environmental engineer, a lawyer. Some colleagues told me: “Be careful Brent, so much intelligence can be an impediment.” But I was certain that the arguments in the critical studies, parts of which were suppressed, were the strongest evidence we had.

Sad and joyful. Why Korea’s really want peace.

• After 70 Years, Korean Father, Son Share A Drink For First, Last? Time (H.)

As soon as 91-year-old Lee Gi-sun got up on the morning of Aug. 22, he pulled out one of the bottles of soju, a potent distilled liquor, that he’d stashed in the bottom of his suitcase. He’d brought this precious liquor to accompany a ceremony for which he’d waited his entire life – a daytime drink with his son! At 10 am on Aug. 22, the final day of the three-day reunion for families divided by the Korean War, family members met in the banquet hall on the second floor of the Mt. Kumgang Hotel to say their goodbyes. A few hours hence, they would return to their respective homes in South and North Korea, with no guarantee of seeing each other again. The father filled a cup with the soju he’d brought.

After taking a sip himself, he silently passed the cup to his son. Gi-sun’s North Korean son, Gang-son (69 years old himself), was also silent as he took the cup and brought it to his lips. This was the first drink shared by the white-haired father and son, and it very well might be their last. It was a heartrending moment when the father’s lifelong dream came true. “We were separated when he was two years old. Two years old,” the father said, letting the last phrase linger in the air. In Jan. 1951, he and his older brother had left their families behind in their home of Yonbaek County, Hwanghae Province, fleeing south with UN troops beaten back by the Chinese onslaught. Gi-sun had assumed he would soon be able to return.

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