Claude Monet Houses of Parliament, Sunset 1904
Pretty wild. You sure you want your savings go through that?
• Bitcoin Plunges Over $2,500, Bounces Back Somewhat, Bitcoin Cash Surges (MW)
The price of bitcoin plunged about 14% — more than $2,500 — Tuesday night after cryptocurrency trading site Coinbase said it would allow its customers to buy and sell its rival offshoot currency, bitcoin cash. In a matter of hours, the price of bitcoin dropped from $18,125 to as low as $15,578. Bitcoin later rallied somewhat and was trading within a $1,000-range; it was last at $16,875 Tuesday night. Bitcoin futures on the CME Group’s Chicago Mercantile Exchange were last trading at $17,425, off more than $700 from the afternoon. Bitcoin cash, meanwhile, rallied more than 50% to all-time highs above $3,300. It was last trading at $3,303, according to CoinMarketCap. “Sends and receives are available immediately,” Coinbase said in a blog post Tuesday announcing bitcoin-cash trading.
“Buys and sells will be available to all customers once there is sufficient liquidity on GDAX. We anticipate that this will take a few hours.” However, Coinbase and its GDAX exchange late Tuesday suspended bitcoin-cash trading after just four minutes until 9 a.m. Pacific time Wednesday, apparently until traffic settles down and liquidity is established. Bitcoin cash was created by a split from bitcoin on Aug. 1 by a faction of disgruntled developers, and allows virtual miners to process transactions in larger units — 8 megabytes rather than the 1-MB bitcoin blocks. The fledgling cryptocurrency has expanded 10-fold since then, and is now the third-largest by market cap, at $55.6 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.com.
Volatility, liquidity, insider trading.
• Coinbase Enables -Then Disables- Bitcoin Cash Trading: Insider Trading? (BI)
Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency trading platforms, shocked the crypto-world with its announcement Tuesday evening that it would allow users to buy and sell bitcoin cash. The news sent bitcoin cash, the spin-off cryptocurrency of bitcoin launched in August, to an all-time high above $3,609 per data from Markets Insider. On Coinbase’s GDAX platform, the price of the cryptocurrency reached well above $8,000 per coin. Bitcoin cash’s appreciation began slightly before the announcement on some exchanges, raising concerns about the possibility of insider trading by employees with advanced knowledge of the news. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in a post early Wednesday morning that the company was looking into the matter.
“Given the price increase in the hours leading up the announcement, we will be conducting an investigation into this matter”, he said. If we find evidence of any employee or contractor violating our policies- directly or indirectly- I will not hesitate to terminate the employee immediately and take appropriate legal action. The price spike appeared to put pressure on Coinbase. Nearly four hours after the San Francisco-based firm announced it was supporting bitcoin cash trading, it said users wouldn’t be able to buy and sell the cryptocurrency until Wednesday. “An update on Bitcoin Cash for our customers: sends and receives are functional,” the company said in a tweet at 11:15 p.m. ET. “Buys and sells on Coinbase.com and in our mobile apps will be available to all customers once there is sufficient liquidity on GDAX. We anticipate that this will happen tomorrow.”
Ouch. The company said in a blog post it disabled trading because of “significant volatility.” In addition to bitcoin cash spiking by almost $1,000, cryptocurrency trading volumes reached an all-time high above $49 billion, according to data from CoinMarketCap. Coinbase has struggled to fully function under such demand in the past.
Bitcoin this week
Our friend and gold bug Mike has lofty words.
• From Bitcoin To Hashgraph: The Crypto Revolution (Mike Maloney)
Today, mankind stands at a crossroads, and the path that humanity chooses may have a greater impact on our freedom and prosperity than any event in history. In 2008 a new technology was introduced that is so important that its destiny, and the destiny of mankind are inextricably linked. It is so powerful that if captured and controlled, it could enslave all of humanity. But if allowed to remain free and flourish – it could foster unimaginable levels of peace and prosperity. It has the power to replace all financial systems globally, to supplant 90% of Wall St, and to provide some functions of government. It has no agenda. It’s always fair and impartial. It can not be manipulated, subverted, corrupted or cheated.
And – it inverts the power structure and places control of one’s destiny in the hands of the individual. In the future, when we look back at the 2.6 million-year timeline of human development and the major turning points that led to modern civilization – the creation of farming, the domestication of animals, the invention of the wheel, the harnessing of electricity and the splitting of the atom – the sixty year development of computers, the internet and this new technology will be looked upon as a single event…a turning point that will change the course of human history. It’s called Full Consensus Distibuted Ledger Technology, and so far its major use has been for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin….but its potential goes far, far beyond that.
Of course, as always, Lance has a lot more to say (click the link). I picked out his graph beacuse it is exceptionally strong.
• Is It 1999? 2007? Or Both? (Roberts)
I have combined the three periods below, scaled to 100, so you can see just how far we have currently gone. Sure. This time could be different. It just probably isn’t.
Beijing has been aware of this for a long time. Don’t watch what they say, watch what they do.
• China Is Having Second Thoughts About Cracking Down On Ballooning Debt (CNBC)
China is planning to relax its goal of cutting debt in its economic outline that’s set for release Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. The revised plan will instead clamp down on the rise in borrowing, sources told the WSJ. The move would fly in the face of the Chinese government’s mission to bring down the country’s soaring debt, a goal President Xi Jinping has made a cornerstone to his economic platform. The weakened priority may prove to be a concession by top Communist Party leaders that China’s economy may be more reliant on leveraged growth than the government would like. The Journal added that, by cooling its stance on debt, Beijing is hinting that it would rather fuel growth with higher debt than pursue austerity measures.
Chinese debt levels jumped the most in four years in September, according to Reuters. There’s speculation that the size of China’s debt load may be three times its economy. China may be feeling pressure to keep its economy growing as the U.S. is set to pass its biggest tax overhaul in 30 years this week, which will lower the corporate tax rate to theoretically make more companies competitive with China. To be sure, Xi and the Communist Party have been hard at work to curb borrowing between banks, the Journal noted. But since the crackdown on intrabank lending, smaller banks have scaled risky borrowing.
Don’t think Poland will react very well to being ‘punished’.
• EU Commission May Launch Moves To Punish Poland Over Legal Reforms (R.)
In what would be an unprecedented move, the European Commission could invoke Article 7 of the European Union’s founding Lisbon Treaty to punish Warsaw for breaking its rules on human rights and democratic values. “Unless the Polish government postpones these court reforms, we will have no choice but to trigger Article 7,” said a senior EU official before a Commission meeting on Wednesday, where Poland’s reforms are on the agenda. Poland’s new prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki said in Brussels last week that “the decision has already been made”. The Commission’s deputy head Frans Timmermans warned in July that Poland was “perilously close” to facing sanctions. Such a punishment could still be blocked. Hungary, Poland’s closest ally in the EU, is likely to argue strongly against it.
But the mere threat of it underlines the sharp deterioration in ties between Warsaw and Brussels since the socially conservative Law and Justice (PiS) won power in late 2015. The Commission says Poland’s judicial reforms limit judges’ independence. Polish President Andrzej Duda has until Jan. 5 to sign them into law. If all EU governments agree, Poland could have its voting rights in the EU suspended, and may also see cuts in billions of euros of EU aid. The PiS government rejects accusations of undemocratic behavior and says its reforms are needed because courts are slow, inefficient and steeped in a communist era-mentality.
Cartel Office, no less.
• Facebook’s New Nemesis Is a Besuited German Antitrust Watchdog (BBG)
Andreas Mundt is Facebook’s new nemesis. Mundt, 57, is the president of the Federal Cartel Office, Germany’s competition regulator. For nearly two years, his agency has been probing whether a key part of the Silicon Valley giant’s business model is an abuse of a market dominance. In a case that caused much surprise outside Germany, Mundt unveiled preliminary findings on Tuesday, saying Facebook may take advantage of its popularity to bully users into agreeing to terms and conditions they often don’t understand. The small print allows using the data to generate the targeted ads that make the company so rich. “Competition law would be poorer without somebody like Andreas Mundt,” said Nelson Jung, a lawyer at Clifford Chance in London. “He’s characterized by his willingness to push boundaries and challenge the status quo.”
Facebook took a dim view, saying the report painted an “inaccurate picture” of how it operates, homing in on the criticism that it’s dominant, an important legal term that might curb future behavior. [..] Facebook didn’t hold back in its attempt to rebut Mundt’s report, saying that it’s wrong to label it as “dominant” in Germany. “A dominant company can save the expense of innovating because it doesn’t have to fear someone else developing better features. We must constantly innovate to attract people. If we fail, people will go elsewhere.” According to Mundt, when data is called the new currency of the digital age, then the relationship to competition law is obvious. That’s also why he’s rejecting criticism that the probe blurs the line between privacy and antitrust enforcement.
“It can only be an antitrust issue if a customer can’t avoid the company because it’s dominating the market. Of course that has a privacy angle but it certainly also has an antitrust angle.” Mundt calls the Facebook investigation a “pioneer case” since “for the first time we’re looking into the relation between market power and big data.” For him, it’s as important as the European Union’s clampdown on Alphabet’s Google, which in July was fined 2.4 billion-euros for skewing shopping search results. “I like the Google decision, it set out some markers for the future,” Mundt said. “That’s what we’re trying with the Facebook case as well, regardless of what the result will now be.”
Well, Toys ‘R’ Us is already dying. Our economies run on overspending.
• Un-Merry Christmas: Perverse Incentives to Over-Consume and Over-Spend (CHS)
Few topics are off-limits nowadays: the personal and private are now splashed everywhere for all to see. One topic is still taboo: the holiday’s perverse incentives to over-consume and over-spend,lest our economy implode. This topic is taboo because it strikes at the very heart of our socio-economic system, which is fundamentally based on permanent growth, the faster the better, as if unlimited expansion on a finite planet is not just possible, but desirable. In the current Mode of Production, the solution to every social and economic ill is to “grow our way out of it.” The solution to unemployment: jump-start growth by expanding consumption, spending and borrowing. The solution to stagnant wages: jump-start growth. The solution to declining profits: jump-start growth. The solution to government deficit spending: jump-start growth. And so on.
So what happens when most people have not just the basics of life, but a surplus of stuff? Where is the growth going to come from if people already have everything? The answer is three-fold: 1. Replace a perfectly good product with a new product and dump the old one in the landfill. 2. Buy duplicates and put the surplus products in the closet or storage facility. 3. Buy gimmicks (Pet Rocks, etc.) that are tossed in the dump shortly after the holiday gift-giving season ends. But does this Landfill Economy make sense? The cheap oil is about gone, and so does it make any rational sense to burn the last of the cheap fossil fuels on assembling stuff nobody needs in China, shipping it thousands of miles to retailers or Amazon warehouses, adding it to the immense piles of stuff most households already own, and then shipping the old but still functional products to the landfill, just to keep the economy humming?
This is of course insane. Decisions aren’t being made as if scarcity matters; the goals and incentives are set to encourage perverse and destructive overconsumption and overspending: not only are we squandering resources in the sacrifice to the false gods of “growth,” we’re indebting households to do so, stripping income that could have been saved and invested in productive uses. In the lunatic asylum of the current economic model, media anchors sport grins of delirious joy when reporting increases in holiday spending, as if a bump higher from $680 billion to $700 billion is a gargantuan win for the flailing economy.
There are no Britons ready to fill the roles at either the high end -academics- or the low end -fruit pickers-.
• Too Late, Theresa – Brexit Offer To EU Citizens Leaves Many Cold (R.)
Back from Brussels with a hard-fought Brexit deal, Prime Minister Theresa May wrote an open letter to the three million citizens of other European Union states living in Britain. “I know our country would be poorer if you left and I want you to stay,” she wrote after striking the initial agreement, which promises to secure their British residency rights after Brexit and allows the negotiations to move onto trade relations. But for some EU nationals – who have endured uncertainty over their rights since the Brexit vote in June 2016, not to mention an unpleasant feeling that many Britons do not want them around – May’s Dec. 8 deal is too little, too late. It’s too late to keep German nurse Daniela Jones in the chronically short-staffed National Health Service (NHS), where she worked for 35 years.
It’s too late for French psychotherapist Baya Salmon-Hawk, who after 40 years in Britain has moved to Ireland to remain in the EU. It’s too late for French accountant Nathalie Duran, who is planning early retirement in France because after 31 years as a taxpayer in Britain she objects to being told she has to pay a fee and fill in forms to be granted a new “settled status”. “I will have to regretfully decline your generous offer for settled status and oblige your lovely countrymen’s wishes and go home,” she wrote on Facebook in a response to May laden with irony. Duran told Reuters that the prime minister’s “late outpouring of love” for EU citizens, after years of tough talk on the need to cut immigration, could not mask negative attitudes towards immigrants unleashed by the Brexit vote. “I think it’s turning ugly,” said 56-year-old Duran. “It’s now OK to say ‘go home foreigners’.”
It’s whack-a-mole thing. New issues keep popping up.
• Centuries-Old Gibraltar Dispute Threatens Brexit Progress (BBG)
A 300-year-old argument between Britain and Spain over a small piece of land is threatening to derail Theresa May’s plans to help businesses navigate Brexit. U.K. officials fear Spain will threaten to veto a Brexit transition phase if the British prime minister refuses to negotiate a separate deal with the government in Madrid that covers the disputed territory of Gibraltar. While the peninsula has been in British hands since 1713, Spain maintains a claim over the 2.6 square miles (6.7 square kilometers) of land. Fears are growing among ministers in London that a new framework for the next phase of Brexit talks, due to be outlined by the European Union on Wednesday, might reignite the centuries-old arguments, a U.K. official said.
May faces pressure to quickly strike a deal on transitional terms to assure U.K.-based businesses that trade rules won’t change suddenly on Brexit day in March 2019. May wants an agreement on the transition – or “implementation” – phase by March 2018 in order to shift talks on to the long-term future trade agreement. She hopes the two-year period of stability immediately after Brexit will help encourage businesses to stay based in the U.K. Last week, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy suggested his government would need to give its explicit consent to any transitional deal affecting Gibraltar. The measure would require separate negotiations between London and Madrid, he said. [..] One U.K. official who asked not to be identified said British overseas territories must be included within the EU’s guidelines for negotiating an overall transitional period. To do anything else would be a contradiction in the EU’s own position, the official said.
So does Labour stand up for them? really? How do they do that?
• UK Government Condemned Over ‘Abject Failure’ To Tackle Homelessness (Ind.)
The Government has been condemned for taking an “unacceptably complacent” attitude towards tackling homelessness, as soaring numbers of people are forced to live on the streets or in temporary accommodation. A damning report by the cross-party Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said ministerial attempts to solve the “national crisis” had ended in “abject failure”. Figures show more than 9,000 people are sleeping rough on the streets of England at any one time – up 134% since 2011. Over 79,000 households, including 120,000 children, are meanwhile homeless and living in temporary accommodation – a rise of 65% since 2010.
Recent research by charity Shelter revealed that child homelessness has reached a 10-year high, with nearly 130,000 children in Britain set to wake up homeless and in temporary accommodation this Christmas. But the Government’s commitment to eliminate rough sleeping by 2027 will only address the “tip of the iceberg”, according to the PAC report, which found there to be an “unacceptable shortage” of realistic housing options for the homeless or those at risk of homelessness.
Which cuts consumer spending, which cuts jobs, which cuts consumer spending, rinse and repeat.
• Salaries Continue To Decline In Greece
Salaries have declined considerably and the number of workers on low wages has expanded, explaining the increase in jobs recorded by the Labor Ministry’s hirings database Ergani this year. A direct comparison of the first three weeks of October 2017 with the same period last year changes the rosy image of the local labor market that the government is attempting to present. The figures for this year show that more than six in 10 (64.27%) of the total 1,824,437 workers employed at 247,236 enterprises were on salaries of up to 1,000 euros per month gross. Fewer than two-thirds of them, accounting for 759,326 in absolute figures or 41.62% of all workers, were employed full-time, while the rest (22.65%) appeared to have part-time jobs that earned less than 500 euros a month.
Data also show the number of self-employed increased by 121,913 from October 2016, but this was not accompanied by an increase in salaries. The average salary in October 2017 dropped to 1,024.90 euros from 1,060.30 a year earlier. Across the labor market, full-time workers accounted for 68.44% of the total, virtually unchanged from the 68.28% rate in October 2016. However, the number of enterprises rose by 14,085, or 6.04%, from 233,151 in October last year. Over the 12-month period, flexible employment (part-time and shift work) grew by 30,556 jobs or 7.98%.
A growing trend has been recorded toward jobs paying between 500 and 600 euros per month: One in nine workers (11% or 200,759) fall into this revenue category, up by a remarkable 13.9% from October 2016 – a rise that is far greater than the overall increase in jobs. Eurostat data showed on Tuesday that while the hourly cost of labor in Greece rose 0.8% in the third quarter of 2017, salary costs fell 1.8% and non-salary costs (social security contributions etc) increased 8.6%.
It’ll be a bitter winter.
• Footage Emerges From Lesbos Refugee Camp Showing Shocking Conditions (K.)
US-based internet media company BuzzFeed has published a series of photographs and videos shot by residents inside the government-run Moria refugee and migrant processing center on the eastern Aegean island of Lesvos. The scenes of misery and squalor are also evident in a report on Deutsche Welle on Monday, which was International Migrants Day, showing footage taken by hidden camera inside the same facility. BuzzFeed’s Ryan Broderick said in his report that a 25-year-old man from Iraq named Noor and a 27-year-old man from Syria named Ammar agreed to provide the reporter with videos from inside the fenced-in perimeter of the former army camp, which is run by the Greek military.
The footage, which Broderick also posed on his Twitter account, provides a rare glimpse at conditions inside the camp, which was originally built to accommodate some 2,000 migrants and refugees and is now home to around 6,000 people, including unaccompanied minors, children, pregnant women and disabled or elderly individuals. Images of a shower area show a row of filthy stalls with doors hanging off their hinges, allowing little if any privacy. Many residents collect water in plastic bottles to bathe themselves rather than entering the showers, the witnesses inside the facility are quoted as saying after sending photographs of huge piles of plastic water bottled. The toilets are so unsanitary, they add, that many residents prefer to go to the bathroom in the open air, in a part of an olive tree grove set aside for this purpose.
Streets in the camp flood in the rain and are lined with tents that may accommodate more than one family and have been strengthened to withstand winter conditions with plastic sheets. In another video, two police officers are seen forcibly carrying a man by his arms and leg and shouting abuse at him after breaking up a fight between residents. Several international rights groups have decried conditions at Moria for months, calling on the Greek government to ease overcrowding and improve accommodation and sanitation standards. Squalid and cramped conditions have also led to riots and fights breaking out inside the facility.
“300 to 350 unaccompanied minors and hundreds of children, women and elderly and disabled people.”
• 10 People Injured In Clashes At Moria Refugee Camp On Lesbos (K.)
Around 10 people were rushed to hospital on Lesvos on Tuesday night following violent clashes between rival groups in the Moria refugee and migrant camp. Riot police were called in to quell the unrest, which reportedly broke out between rival groups of Iraqi and Afghan nationals and resulted in several small fires being set. Tension is rife at Moria, where scant resources are being stretched at almost three times the camp’s capacity and conditions are squalid.
Among its 6,000-plus residents there are around 300 to 350 unaccompanied minors and hundreds of children, women and elderly and disabled people. Tuesday night’s clashes came a day after American news outlet BuzzFeed and Germany’s Deutsche Welle published videos of the camp’s interior showing the extent of the filth and squalor to which residents are being subjected. Journalists are not allowed into the military-run camp without the prior agreement of authorities, so the exact extent of Tuesday’s and other similar clashes are not known.
Blind to the species that were already gone when you were born.
• Our Selective Blindness Is Lethal To The Living World (G.)
What you see is not what others see. We inhabit parallel worlds of perception, bounded by our interests and experience. What is obvious to some is invisible to others. I might find myself standing, transfixed, by the roadside, watching a sparrowhawk hunting among the bushes, astonished that other people could ignore it. But they might just as well be wondering how I could have failed to notice the new V6 Pentastar Sahara that just drove past. As the psychologist Richard Wiseman points out: “At any one moment, your eyes and brain only have the processing power to look at a very small part of your surroundings … your brain quickly identifies what it considers to be the most significant aspects of your surroundings, and focuses almost all of its attention on these elements.” Everything else remains unseen.
Our selective blindness is lethal to the living world. Joni Mitchell’s claim that “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” is, sadly, untrue: our collective memory is wiped clean by ecological loss. One of the most important concepts defining our relationship to the natural world is shifting baseline syndrome, coined by the fisheries biologist Daniel Pauly. The people of each generation perceive the state of the ecosystems they encountered in their childhood as normal and natural. When wildlife is depleted, we might notice the loss, but we are unaware that the baseline by which we judge the decline is in fact a state of extreme depletion. So we forget that the default state of almost all ecosystems – on land and at sea – is domination by a megafauna.
We are unaware that there is something deeply weird about British waters; they are not thronged with great whales, vast shoals of bluefin tuna, two-metre cod and halibut the size of doors, as they were until a few centuries ago. We are unaware that the absence of elephants, rhinos, lions, scimitar cats, hyenas and hippos, that lived in this country during the last interglacial period (when the climate was almost identical to today’s), is also an artefact of human activity. And the erosion continues. Few people younger than me know that it was once normal to see fields white with mushrooms, or rivers black with eels at the autumn equinox, or that every patch of nettles was once reamed by caterpillars. I can picture a moment at which the birds stop singing, and people wake up and make breakfast and go to work without noticing that anything has changed.