Mar 182019
 


Albert Gleizes The football players 1912-13

 

How Boeing, FAA Certified The Suspect 737 MAX Flight Control System (ST)
Boeing’s Doomed 737 Max’s (Margolis)
The EU Has Never Had More Power Over Britain (G.)
Dutch PM Compares Theresa May To Monty Python Limbless Knight (G.)
100,000 Children in UK ‘Could Become Undocumented’ Overnight After Brexit (G.)
‘Pupil Poverty’ Pressure On School Cash (BBC)
With Brexit Approaching UK’s Voice In Brussels Grows Quiet (G.)
Smartphone Shipments In China Collapse To Six Year Low (ZH)
Apartment Values Tipped To Plunge As Much As 50% In Some Sydney Areas (DM)
Ultra Low Wage Growth The Intended Outcome Of Government Policies (Quiggin)
Deutsche Bank And Commerzbank Go Public On Merger Talks (R.)
Saudi Crown Prince Allegedly Stripped Of Some Authority (G.)
Dead Whale Washed Up In Philippines Had 40kg Of Plastic Bags In Stomach (G.)

 

 

As I said on March 15: “If I were New Zealand’s government, and Australia’s, I’d say this is not the time for the countries’ white populations to speak. Let the Maori do the talking instead. It’s their land.”

 

 

Maybe not the kind of thing we should want to be swept under the carpet. But don’t underestimate Boeing’s political power. A series of tweets from a pilot and software engineer sheds a lot of light on what happened with the 737-MAX: one corner cut led automatically to the next one being cut. Until there were no more corners left. Dominoes. Zero Hedge has that series here.

Mike -Mish- Shedlock adds this: “If the above analysis by Trevor Sumner is correct, the planes were too complicated to fly because Boeing cut corners to save money, then did not even have the decency to deliver them with needed warning lights and operation instructions. There may be grounds for a criminal investigation here, not just civil. Regardless, Boeing’s decision to appeal to Trump to not ground the planes is morally reprehensible at best. Trump made the right call on this one, grounding the planes, albeit under international pressure. [..] By the way, if the timelines presented are correct, the FAA got in bed with Boeing, under Obama.”

How Boeing, FAA Certified The Suspect 737 MAX Flight Control System (ST)

As Boeing hustled in 2015 to catch up to Airbus and certify its new 737 MAX, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) managers pushed the agency’s safety engineers to delegate safety assessments to Boeing itself, and to speedily approve the resulting analysis. But the original safety analysis that Boeing delivered to the FAA for a new flight control system on the MAX — a report used to certify the plane as safe to fly — had several crucial flaws. That flight control system, called MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System), is now under scrutiny after two crashes of the jet in less than five months resulted in Wednesday’s FAA order to ground the plane.

Current and former engineers directly involved with the evaluations or familiar with the document shared details of Boeing’s “System Safety Analysis” of MCAS, which The Seattle Times confirmed. The safety analysis: • Understated the power of the new flight control system, which was designed to swivel the horizontal tail to push the nose of the plane down to avert a stall. When the planes later entered service, MCAS was capable of moving the tail more than four times farther than was stated in the initial safety analysis document. • Failed to account for how the system could reset itself each time a pilot responded, thereby missing the potential impact of the system repeatedly pushing the airplane’s nose downward. •Assessed a failure of the system as one level below “catastrophic.” But even that “hazardous” danger level should have precluded activation of the system based on input from a single sensor — and yet that’s how it was designed.

The people who spoke to The Seattle Times and shared details of the safety analysis all spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their jobs at the FAA and other aviation organizations. Both Boeing and the FAA were informed of the specifics of this story and were asked for responses 11 days ago, before the second crash of a 737 MAX last Sunday. Late Friday, the FAA said it followed its standard certification process on the MAX. Citing a busy week, a spokesman said the agency was “unable to delve into any detailed inquiries.” Boeing responded Saturday with a statement that “the FAA considered the final configuration and operating parameters of MCAS during MAX certification, and concluded that it met all certification and regulatory requirements.”

Read more …

Nice story, but he seeks to blame Trump instead of the FAA, and that doesn’t go anywhere.

Boeing’s Doomed 737 Max’s (Margolis)

I don’t like flying. I consider it unnatural, unhealthy and fraught with peril. But I do it all the time. For me, it’s either fly or take an ox cart. In fact, I’ve been flying since I was six years old – from New York to Paris on a lumbering Boeing Stratocruiser, a converted, double-decker WWII B-29 heavy bomber. I even had a sleeping berth. So much for progress. Lots can go wrong in the air. Modern aircraft have thousands of obscure parts. If any one of them malfunctions, the aircraft can be crippled or crash. Add pilot error, dangerous weather, air traffic control mistakes, mountains where they are not supposed to be, air to air collisions, sabotage and hijacking.

I vividly recall flying over the snow-capped Alps in the late 1940’s aboard an old Italian three-motor airliner with its port engine burning, and the Italian crew panicking and crossing themselves. Some years ago, I was on my way to Egypt when we were hijacked by a demented Ethiopian. A three day ordeal ensued that included a return flight to New York City from Germany, with the gunman threatening to crash the A-310 jumbo jet into Wall Street – a grim precursor of 9/11. My father, Henry Margolis, got off a British Comet airliner just before it blew up due to faulty windows.

Which brings me to the current Boeing crisis. After a brand new Boeing 737 Max crashed in Indonesia it seemed highly likely that there was a major problem in its new, invisible autopilot system, known as MCAS. All 737 Max’s flying around the world should have been grounded as a precaution. But America’s aviation authority, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), allowed the Max to keep flying. The FAA is half regulator and half aviation business promoter, a clear conflict of interest. The crash of a new Ethiopian 737 Max outside Addis Ababa under very similar circumstances to the Lion Air accident set off alarm bells around the globe.

Scores of airlines rightly grounded their new Max’s. But the US and Canada did not. The FAA continued to insist the aircraft was sound. The problem, it was hinted between the lines, was incompetent third world pilots. It now appears that America’s would-be emperor, Pilot-in–Chief Donald Trump, may have pressed the FAA to keep the 737 Max’s in the air. Canada, always shy when it comes to disagreeing with Washington, kept the 737 Max’s flying until there was a lot of evidence linking the Indonesia and Ethiopian crashes. Trump finally ordered the suspect aircraft grounded. But doing so was not his business. That’s the job of the FAA. But Trump, as usual, wanted to hog the limelight. By now, the 737 Max ban is just about universal.

Read more …

Mess. 11 days left.

The EU Has Never Had More Power Over Britain (G.)

It is easy to assign all the blame to Mrs May, the control freak who lost control. The charge list against her is certainly a lengthy one. She triggered article 50 before her government had an agreed strategy for withdrawal and her senior team then wasted months squabbling with itself rather than advancing the negotiations with the EU. Ignoring advice to the contrary and without advance discussion with her cabinet, she made a prison for herself by laying down red lines that made the negotiations more difficult and set her up for a string of ignominious subsequent reversals. When she threw away her majority at an election she didn’t have to call, she carried on as if nothing had changed rather than trying to reach out to other parties to forge a broad consensus about a way forward.

That made her the hostage of the Democratic Unionist party and the Brexit ultras on the right of her party. Mrs May has one quality that is of value in a political crisis. She has resilience. She lacks all the other ones, such as imagination, advocacy and agility. True, all true, and yet not the whole truth. Any account of this nightmare that holds Mrs May solely culpable is not a complete explanation for how we got here. In a dark corner of what remains of its political brain, the Tory party knows that it is collectively guilty of driving the country it professes to love into this shaming mess. With a few prescient exceptions, the Conservatives all backed David Cameron when he promised a referendum on the cynical basis that he might not have to deliver it and with the arrogant assumption that, if he did have to, he would easily win it.

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“She reminds me occasionally of that character from Monty Python where all the arms and legs are cut off but he then tells the opponent: ‘Let’s call it a draw.’

Dutch PM Compares Theresa May To Monty Python Limbless Knight (G.)

Theresa May is like the knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who loses his arms and legs in a duel and calls it a draw, the Dutch prime minister has said. Mark Rutte, who appeared visibly irritated last week at the failure of MPs to pass the Brexit deal, admitted feeling “angry” at the impasse in Westminster. He said his frustration was focused on the posturing of those seeking to make party political points during a major national crisis but praised May’s “incredible” resilience in the face of repeated knock-backs in the House of Commons. “Look, I have every respect for Theresa May,” Rutte said in an interview with the Dutch broadcaster WNL on Sunday.

“She reminds me occasionally of that character from Monty Python where all the arms and legs are cut off but he then tells the opponent: ‘Let’s call it a draw.’ She’s incredible. She goes on and on. At the same time, I do not blame her, but British politics.” The black knight sketch in the 1975 Monty Python film had John Cleese playing the role of the deluded swordsman who could not admit defeat, even as Graham Chapman’s King Arthur cut off all his limbs. Rutte said of the prime minister’s predicament: “You can see what happens when a country puts everything on the roulette wheel and takes a risk, and the whole thing collapses. That is what is happening. Economic, financial, politically, England is in a very bad position right now.”

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After 40 years of EU membership, the UK stands to plunge into chaos when 1000s of laws and regulations evaporate. Very predictable, but mostly ignored.

100,000 Children in UK ‘Could Become Undocumented’ Overnight After Brexit (G.)

Thousands of children of EU nationals risk becoming a new “Windrush generation”, a children’s legal charity has said. They are concerned that vulnerable children could become undocumented in the same way as the Caribbean children who came to the UK decades ago only to suffer at the hands of the Home Office’s hostile environment decades later. An estimated 900,000 EU national children are in the UK with about 285,000 born in the country. Coram Children’s Legal Centre fears that children in foster care, in care homes, and others from vulnerable families could slip through the net of the new Home Office registration scheme for EU nationals after Brexit.

The Home Office estimates that between 10% and 20% of all applicants will be vulnerable, unable to provide documentary evidence of their time in the UK. “If just 15% of the current population of EU national children fail to ‘regularise’ their status before the cut-off point, 100,000 children would be added to the UK’s undocumented child population overnight, nearly doubling it [the numbers of existing undocumented children],” said Kamena Dorling, group head of policy and public affairs at Coram. About 5,000 children of EU nationals are separated from their parents and are in care and Coram is calling on the government to force local authorities to identify them now in order to get their settled status before the cut-off point in 2020 or 2021.

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Dumb headline from BBC for a very real issue: schools care for poor pupils, and then see their funding cut.

‘Pupil Poverty’ Pressure On School Cash (BBC)

Schools in England are having to “pick up the pieces” for families in poverty, including giving food and clothes to children, head teachers warn. But, they say, that is unsustainable when schools are facing “funding cuts”. Heads will raise their concerns at the Association of School and College Leaders’ (ASCL) annual conference. Education Secretary Damian Hinds will tell the conference he is setting up an expert advisory group to help teachers with “the pressures of the job”. The advisory group, including the mental health charity Mind and teachers’ representatives, will look at ways to improve wellbeing among teachers and to tackle stress. [..]

Edward Conway, head of St Michael’s Catholic High School in Watford, says: “Pupil poverty has increased significantly over the past eight years, with us providing food, clothing, equipment and securing funds from charitable organisations to provide essential items such as beds and fridges.” The head teachers’ union has canvassed the views of school leaders, whose comments include: “When schools have to buy shoes for children to wear to school on a regular basis, we must have a problem.” Another head said: “In 24 years of education, I have not seen the extent of poverty like this. “Children are coming to school hungry, dirty and without the basics to set them up for life. “The gap between those that have and those that do not is rising and is stark.”

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Where Britain is: “sitting in the EU departure lounge.”

With Brexit Approaching UK’s Voice In Brussels Grows Quiet (G.)

For years a British foreign minister has shuttled once a month to Brussels or Luxembourg to meet their European counterparts. The crises of the world have crowded the agenda: from the Arab spring to the annexation of Crimea, coups, stolen elections and intractable wars. Monday, in theory, could be the last time the United Kingdom name plate is on the table. While a Brexit extension is a near-certainty, the official departure date is still 29 March. Uncertainty over exit day requires careful diplomacy. On Monday the British minister will have the chance to weigh in on the EU’s China strategy, ahead of a summit with Beijing on 9 April.

While British officials remain involved in discussions, the UK will hang back on strategic questions about how the EU should approach China. Nobody wants to be seen as lecturing European allies, while sitting in the EU departure lounge. A government spokesperson said: “The UK will continue to take a full part in discussions at the [Foreign Affairs Council], focusing on those issues that matter most to the UK and EU.” Other day-to-day EU business provides a jarring contrast with the government’s Brexit strategy: one of Theresa May’s last acts as an EU leader will be to sign a routine communique on strengthening the single market – the one she insists Britain must leave.

Meanwhile, the UK’s 73 MEPs do not know if they will be out of a job in a fortnight, or in three months. “It is really unsettling, but we are the least people to worry about,” said the Liberal Democrat MEP Catherine Bearder, speaking just outside the chamber in Strasbourg under the strident ring of a voting bell. The uncertainty facing MEPs is nothing, she adds, compared with the unknowns confronting business. “A politician’s life is always uncertain, you never know if you are going to come back for the next mandate.”

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Radiation.

Smartphone Shipments In China Collapse To Six Year Low (ZH)

Months after Apple stunned the market by announcing it would no longer be reporting quarterly iPhone unit sales, we have some insight as to the reason. February saw smartphone shipments in China collapse to their lowest levels in six years, indicating that the super-saturated industry has failed to turn around amidst a global economy that is grinding slower. Shipments to China came in at 14.5 million units for February, down 19.9% from last year, according to Reuters, who cited the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology. It’s the lowest total since February 2013.

February is traditionally a tough month for Chinese consumer purchases, as the Chinese spend a majority of the month celebrating the new year. However, this year’s drop was more concentrated than past years, as a result of both a slowing economy and the ongoing U.S./China trade war. When Apple recently cut sales forecasts this year, it blamed China for weighing on its results. To try and stimulate demand, the company paired with China-based Ant Financial to offer interest-free iPhone financing. Other retailers in China have tried similar promos to try and spur demand. This has some manufacturers, like Huawei, looking to corner the higher margin end of the market instead. Huawei saw its market share of China’s $500 to $800 device segment rise to 26.6% from 8.8% in 2018, according to data from Counterpoint Research. Apple, on the other hand, saw its share fall to 54.6% from 81.2%.

As an added bonus, we recently reported on Chinese smartphones also emitting the most radiation of any smartphones worldwide. The current smartphone creating the highest level of radiation is the Mi A1 from Chinese vendor Xiaomi. Another Chinese phone is in second place – the OnePlus 5T. In fact, the two companies are represented heavily in a list of “Phones Emitting the Most Radiation” that was recently released by Statista. 8 of the top 16 handsets being made by one of these two companies. Premium Apple phones, such as the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 8 are also here to be seen, as are the latest Pixel handsets from Google.

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But there’s no bubble.

Apartment Values Tipped To Plunge As Much As 50% In Some Sydney Areas (DM)

Apartment values in Australia’s big cities are set to plunge, with prices in one suburb to plummet as much as 50 per cent according to one industry observer, as Chinese buyers abandon off-the-plan residential tower projects. Ryde, in Sydney’s north, is Australia’s second-worst performing property market with dwelling values diving by 14.8 per cent during the past year, CoreLogic data showed. Digital Finance Analytics founder Martin North, an economist, feared apartment values there could be sliced in half during the next three years before stagnating for a decade. ‘We’ve got massive oversupply in those areas but you’ve just got no demand,’ he told Daily Mail Australia on Friday.

‘Some of the central high-rise apartments in the inner urban areas, like Ryde, 40 per cent now is certainly feasible. ‘In the worst case, you could see unit prices nearly halve.’ Starr Partners chief executive Doug Driscoll, who specialises in the Sydney real estate market, said Mr North’s forecasts were far fetched. He did, however, blame councils for approving too many developments. ‘We had an influx of foreign investment. We had an environment of record low interest rates, money was easily available – these things don’t last forever,’ he told Daily Mail Australia. ‘In some suburbs, in some pockets, we have seen an oversupply.’

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From Australia, but applicable worldwide.

Ultra Low Wage Growth The Intended Outcome Of Government Policies (Quiggin)

The long debate over the causes of wage stagnation took an unexpected turn last week, when Finance Minister Matthias Cormann described (downward) flexibility in the rate of wage growth as “a deliberate design feature of our economic architecture”. It was a position that was endorsed in a flurry of confusion 16 seconds after it had been rejected by Defence Industry Minister Linda Reynolds. Cormann had said policies aimed at pushing wages up could cause “massive spikes in unemployment”. The ease with which Reynolds was trapped into at first rejecting and then accepting what her ministerial colleague had said flowed from the fact that Cormann had broken one of the standing conventions of politics in Australia, and for that matter, the English-speaking world.

For more than forty years, both the architecture of labour market regulation and the discretionary choices of governments have been designed with the precise objective of holding wages down. These policies have been quite successful, as can be seen from the graph. However, at least until recently, there has been bipartisan agreement on at least one aspect of them – that no one should mention their role in holding back wages. Instead, the decline in the wage share of national income has been variously blamed on • technology • immigration • imports from China and, more recently, • the end of the mining boom. None of these explanations stand up to scrutiny.

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The lame and the blind. Reports should look at the size of Deutsche relative to the German economy, and the nerves that touches in Berlin.

Deutsche Bank And Commerzbank Go Public On Merger Talks (R.)

Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank confirmed on Sunday they were in talks about a merger, prompting labor union concerns about possible job losses and questions from analysts about the merits of a combination. Germany’s two largest banks issued short statements following separate meetings of their management boards, a person with knowledge of the matter said, indicating a quickening of pace in the merger process, although both also warned that a deal was far from certain. “In light of arising opportunities, the management board of Deutsche Bank has decided to review strategic options,” Deutsche said in its statement.

Christian Sewing, Deutsche Bank’s chief executive, told employees that Deutsche still aimed “to remain a global bank with a strong capital markets business… with a global network.”A merged bank would likely be the third largest in Europe after HSBC and BNP Paribas, with roughly 1.8 trillion euros ($2.04 trillion) in assets, such as loans and investments, and a market value of about 25 billion euros. [..] However, skeptics questioned the wisdom of a merger. “We do not see a national champion here, but a shaky zombie bank that could lead to another billion-euro grave for the German state. Why should we take this risk?” said Gerhard Schick, finance activist and ex-member of the German parliament.

While the banks had not publicly commented on merger talks until Sunday, Finance Minister Olaf Scholz last Monday confirmed that there were negotiations. On Sunday, the ministry acknowledged the announcement and said it remained in regular contact with all parties. However, there were signs of political opposition. Hans Michelbach, a lawmaker from the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), urged the government to sell its 15 percent stake in Commerzbank before a deal. “There may not be an ownership by the federal government in a merged big bank indirectly through an old stake. We do not need a German State Bank AG,” he told Reuters.

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Hearsay report.

Saudi Crown Prince Allegedly Stripped Of Some Authority (G.)

The heir to the Saudi throne has not attended a series of high-profile ministerial and diplomatic meetings in Saudi Arabia over the last fortnight and is alleged to have been stripped of some of his financial and economic authority, the Guardian has been told. The move to restrict, if only temporarily, the responsibilities of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is understood to have been revealed to a group of senior ministers earlier last week by his father, King Salman. The king is said to have asked Bin Salman to be at this cabinet meeting, but he failed to attend.

While the move has not been declared publicly, the Guardian has been told that one of the king’s trusted advisers, Musaed al-Aiban, who was educated at Harvard and recently named as national security adviser, will informally oversee investment decisions on the king’s behalf. The Saudi embassy in Washington has declined multiple requests for comment since the Guardian approached it on Tuesday. The relationship between the king and his son has been under scrutiny since the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which was alleged to have been ordered by Prince Mohammed and provoked international condemnation of the crown prince. This has been denied by the Saudi government.

Experts on the Middle East are divided over whether the murder, and concern over the kingdom’s role in the conflict in Yemen, have led to tension at the heart of the notoriously secretive royal court. But while most observers expect Prince Mohammed to accede to the thrown, there are some signs that the king is seeking to rein in his controversial son at a time when Saudi Arabia is under the spotlight. The Guardian has been told Prince Mohammed did not attend two of the most recent weekly meetings of cabinet ministers, which are headed by the king. The crown prince has also not attended other high-profile talks with visiting dignitaries, including one last week with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov.

Read more …

And this is just what we see, what washes up on beaches. “16 rice sacks. 4 banana plantation style bags and multiple shopping bags” in the whale’s stomach..”

Dead Whale Washed Up In Philippines Had 40kg Of Plastic Bags In Stomach (G.)

A young whale that washed up in the Philippines died from “gastric shock” after ingesting 40kg of plastic bags. Marine biologists and volunteers from the D’Bone Collector Museum in Davao City, in the Philippine island of Mindanao, were shocked to discover the brutal cause of death for the young curvier beaked whale, which washed ashore on Saturday. In a damning statement on their Facebook page, the museum said they uncovered “40 kilos of plastic bags, including 16 rice sacks. 4 banana plantation style bags and multiple shopping bags” in the whale’s stomach after conducting an autopsy. Images from the autopsy showed endless piles of rubbish being extracted from the inside of the animal, which was said to have died from “gastric shock” after ingesting all the plastic.

[..] The use of single-use plastic is rampant in south-east Asia. A 2017 report by Ocean Conservancy stated that China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam have been dumping more plastic into the ocean than the rest of the world combined. Marine biologist Darrell Blatchley, who also owns the D’Bone Collector Museum, said that in the 10 years they have examined dead whales and dolphins, 57 of them were found to have died due to accumulated rubbish and plastic in their stomachs.

Read more …

Nov 212018
 
 November 21, 2018  Posted by at 10:07 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  7 Responses »


Jack Delano Lower Manhattan 1941

 

Senate Calls On Trump For Saudi Answers (BBC)
Saudi Arabia Tortured Female Right-to-Drive Activists – Amnesty (AP)
Trump Submits Answers To Robert Mueller Questions In Russia Probe (Ind.)
Trump Wanted To Order Justice Dept To Prosecute Clinton, Comey – NYT (R.)
Dow Plunges More Than 500 Points, Erases Gain For 2018 (CNBC)
Stunned Investors Observe The Market Carnage In Shock (ZH)
A Death Cross Is Forming In US Oil (MW)
Bitcoin Plunges As Much As 16% To Below $4,100, A New Low For The Year (CNBC)
Misguided Share Buybacks Are Hollowing Out Companies’ Balance Sheets (MW)
Bank of England Backs Theresa May’s Brexit Deal, Warns Of No-Deal Dangers (G.)
May’s Brussels Trip Only Start Of ‘Endless’ EU Trade Talks (G.)
UK To Be ‘Frozen Out’ Of 182 EU Decisions During Brexit Transition (Ind.)
Interpol Elects South Korean As Its President In Blow To Russia (G.)
Tax ‘Virgin Packaging’ To Tackle Plastics Crisis – Report (G.)
Dead Whale Washes Ashore In Indonesia With 6 Kilos Of Plastic In Stomach (AP)
Julian Assange Deserves A Medal of Freedom, Not A Secret Indictment (USA Today)

 

 

The indignation over Trump’s comments on Saudi Arabia is shifting into overdrive. Perhaps that’s needed to expose the hypocrisy inherent in them. It’s not Trump, it’s America that has condoned torture and murder by the House of Saud for decades. That started actively assisting the Saudi’s in Yemen under Obama. Trump refuses to be set up by the media and Democrats as the fall guy for $150 oil prices. He’s thinking: let Congress do it, now that it’s blue. If that’s immoral, he’s not alone.

Senate Calls On Trump For Saudi Answers (BBC)

US President Donald Trump has been asked to ascertain whether Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman played a role in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. Republican and Democratic leaders of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday sent a letter demanding a second investigation. Mr Trump earlier defended US ties with Saudi Arabia despite international condemnation over the incident. Khashoggi was killed on 2 October inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. In a statement on Tuesday, Mr Trump acknowledged that the crown prince “could very well” have known about Khashoggi’s brutal murder, adding: “Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”

He later stated that the CIA had not made a “100%” determination on the killing. Following the president’s comments, Republican Senator Bob Corker and Democrat Bob Menendez issued a statement on behalf of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In it they called on Mr Trump to focus a second investigation specifically on the crown prince so as to “determine whether a foreign person is responsible for an extrajudicial killing, torture or other gross violation” of human rights. The request, issued under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, requires a response within 120 days.

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OK, CNN, do your job.

Saudi Arabia Tortured Female Right-to-Drive Activists – Amnesty (AP)

Several activists imprisoned in Saudi Arabia since May, including women who campaigned for the right to drive, have been beaten and tortured during interrogation, Amnesty International has said. Saudi Arabia has detained at least 10 women and seven men on vague national security allegations related to their human rights work, the organisation said on Tuesday. Those detained include Loujain al-Hathloul, Eman al-Nafjan and Aziza al-Yousef, who had campaigned for the right to drive before the decades-long ban was lifted in June. Amnesty said that according to three testimonies it obtained, some of the activists were repeatedly given electric shocks and flogged, leaving some unable to walk or stand properly. In one instance, an activist was hung from the ceiling.

Another testimony said one of the detained women was subjected to sexual harassment by interrogators wearing face masks. The kingdom is at the centre of an international firestorm after the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who had written critically about Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s crackdown on dissent, including the arrests of the women activists. Khashoggi was killed and then dismembered by Saudi agents in the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul on 2 October. Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty’s Middle East research director, said: “Only a few weeks after the ruthless killing of Jamal Khashoggi, these shocking reports of torture, sexual harassment and other forms of ill-treatment, if verified, expose further outrageous human rights violations by the Saudi authorities.”

Read more …

What a waste of resources.

Trump Submits Answers To Robert Mueller Questions In Russia Probe (Ind.)

Donald Trump has submitted written answers to questions from Special Counsel Robert Mueller as part of the probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign. “We answered every question they asked that was legitimately pre-election and focused on Russia,” Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani said in an interview. “Nothing post-election. And we’ve told them we’re not going to do that.” Mr Giuliani said Trump did not plan to answer any questions from Mr Mueller on whether he tried to obstruct the investigation once he won office, such as by firing former FBI Director James Comey last year. “It is time to bring this inquiry to a conclusion,” the lawyer said in an earlier statement on the probe, which Mr Trump has repeatedly called a “witch hunt.”

Mr Trump signed the submission on Tuesday before he left Washington to spend the Thanksgiving holiday in Florida, a person familiar with the matter said. Mr Mueller was tasked to probe “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation” into possible collusion between Mr Trump’s campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. [..] Mr Giuliani said in his statement the president had provided “unprecedented cooperation” with the probe over the past year and a half, noting that more than 30 White House-related witnesses had been questioned and 1.4 million pages of material turned over before Mr Trump responded to the pre-election questions in writing. He added that “much of what has been asked raised serious constitutional issues and was beyond the scope of a legitimate inquiry.”

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Not exactly news, is it? Of course there will be an investigation of Hillary, Comey and a whole circus around them. It would be a serious perverson of justice if there isn’t.

Trump Wanted To Order Justice Dept To Prosecute Clinton, Comey – NYT (R.)

U.S. President Donald Trump wanted to order the Justice Department to prosecute two political foes, his one-time presidential opponent Hillary Clinton and former FBI director James Comey, in the spring, but his White House counsel rebuffed him, the New York Times reported on Tuesday. Don McGahn, the White House counsel at the time, wrote a memo to the president outlining consequences for Trump if he did order these prosecutions. The outcomes ranged from the traditionally independent Justice Department refusing to comply, to congressional probes and voter outcry, the Times reported.

The New York Times also reported Trump’s lawyers privately asked the Justice Department to investigate Comey for mishandling sensitive government information and his role investigating Clinton’s use of a private email account and server, but law enforcement officials declined. It was not clear if Trump read the memo or pursued the prosecutions further, the New York Times said. It was also not clear what specific charges Trump wanted the Justice Department to pursue against Comey and Clinton, the Times reported. Trump has publicly railed against Clinton’s private email use during her tenure as U.S. Secretary of State, as well as her role in the Obama administration’s decision to allow a Russian company to buy a uranium mining firm.

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Time to start writing about finance again?!

Dow Plunges More Than 500 Points, Erases Gain For 2018 (CNBC)

The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 fell sharply on Tuesday and turned negative for the year as a decline in Target shares pressured retailers, while some of the most popular tech shares dropped again. The 30-stock Dow dropped 551.80 points to 24,465.64 and the S&P 500 plunged 1.8 percent to close at 2,641.89. The Dow and S&P 500 were up 1.2 percent and 0.6 percent, respectively, for 2018 entering Tuesday. Meanwhile, the Nasdaq Composite also dropped 1.7 percent to 6,908.82 but managed to hang on to a slight gain for 2018. Tuesday’s declines come after the Dow dropped 395 points on Monday.

Stocks hit their lows of the day after Doubleline Capital founder Jeffrey Gundlach said stocks are still too expensive, adding there has not been a “panic low” yet. The Dow was down nearly 650 points at its session low, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq had both dropped more than 2 percent. Target fell 10.5 percent after reporting weaker-than-expected earnings for the previous quarter. The company also posted lighter-than-forecast same-store sales, which is a key metric for retailers.

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Nah, they’re not investors.

Stunned Investors Observe The Market Carnage In Shock (ZH)

After another abysmal day, in which every single sector in the market closed in the red as stocks tumbled 2%, capping a dreadful two-month stretch since the S&P hit its all time highs exactly two months ago, which has seen both the S&P and the Dow turn red for the year with the Nasdaq just barely holding onto green, while oil crashed 6% slumping to a one year low, junk bonds matched a record streak of losses, the overall market just suffered one of its worst sessions in the past three years. But what is most remarkable is the following chart from Bloomberg which shows the year-to-date return of the best performing asset between US and global equities, corporate bonds, Treasuries, gold and real cash, and according to which 2018 is shaping up as what may be the worst year on record for cross-asset investors. Indeed, nothing at all has worked this year!

The inability of any single asset class to escape the dismal black hole supergravity of devastating losses in a brutal post-BTFD catharsis that has mutated into an equal-opportunity rout, crushing returns across all assets, has left investors reeling, shellshocked and paralyzed, and dreading what may come tomorrow let alone next year when both the US economy and corporate earnings are expected to see their supercharged recent growth rates come crashing back down to earth. “While there’s still no ‘panic in the streets,’ most traders are unconvinced that the selling will slow down anytime soon,” said Instinent’s head of trading Larry Weiss. “The flight to quality is now a flight to cash. It’s tough to convince anyone that now is the time to put money to work.”

[..] Hedge funds, who hoped that “buy the dip” would work one last time and who rushed into the traditional “safety” of tech stocks at the end of October, were whipsawed, and turned net sellers this month, with the group accounting for the most selling among major industries according to Goldman Sachs. Meanwhile, as if sensing the coming storm, Goldman writes that hedge fund net exposures steadily declined throughout 2018, including during 2Q and 3Q while the broad equity market rallied, leaving most investors in the cold. Net long exposure calculated based on 13-F filings and publicly-available short interest data registered 49% at the start of 4Q, a decline from 56% at the start of 2018, and one of the lowest in years.

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Potential volatility in oil is huge. Any little shrapnel of news, Saudi, Iran, Russia, shale, can force prices up 50%.

A Death Cross Is Forming In US Oil (MW)

Oil is already in a bear market, but now a fresh, negative pattern is crystallizing in the commodity that has absolutely bludgeoned bulls over the past two months. January West Texas Intermediate crude on its first full session as the front-month contract, was down a whopping 7.5%, to $52.91 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange and that downtrend has propelled the U.S. benchmark to the brink of forming a death cross—a chart formation in an asset that many market technicians believe marks the point that a short-term decline morphs into a longer-term downtrend (see chart below).

Based on the continuous chart for the most-active oil contract, the 50-day moving average at $67.58 a barrel is less than 0.5% shy of falling beneath the long-term 200-day moving average at $67.25, according to FactSet data. At the current rate of decline, a death cross could occur within a week or two. Both the U.S. contract and the global benchmark Brent oil are in bear market, usually characterized as a decline of at least 20% from a recent peak. In fact, U.S. oil is down 31% from its Oct. 3 peak at $76.41 a barrel.

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Miners are ditching their equipment.

Bitcoin Plunges As Much As 16% To Below $4,100, A New Low For The Year (CNBC)

Bitcoin is still struggling to find a bottom this week. The digital currency dropped as much as 16 percent on Tuesday to its lowest level since Sept. 30, 2017, according to data from CoinMarketCap.com. Bitcoin fell as low as $4,076.59, bringing its total losses in seven days to roughly 30 percent. The cryptocurrency briefly pared those losses and was down about 7 percent in afternoon trading. As U.S. stock markets closed though, bitcoin was still down 12 percent over 24 hours, trading near $4,299, according to data from CoinDesk.

The price plunge came after weeks of rare stability for the world’s largest and best-known cryptocurrency. While global markets churned in October, bitcoin traded comfortably in the $6,400 range — a break from volatility earlier this year. Its total losses this year are now more than 65 percent. ts epic rise last year started right after Thanksgiving as it began to gain status as a household name. Since then, the cryptocurrency has fallen more than 40 percent. Bitcoin first topped $10,000 at the end of November and made it to nearly $20,000 a week before Christmas as retail investors poured in and two regulated exchanges prepared to launch futures markets.

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“With share repurchases in these companies being almost three times their actual investment, one must wonder how much actual U.S. economic growth they are expecting.”

Misguided Share Buybacks Are Hollowing Out Companies’ Balance Sheets (MW)

GE was one of Wall Street’s major share buyback operators between 2015 and 2017; it repurchased $40 billion of shares at prices between $20 and $32. The share price is now $8.60, so the company has liquidated between $23 billion and $29 billion of its shareholders’ money on this utterly futile activity alone. Since the highest net income recorded by the company during those years was $8.8 billion in 2016, with 2015 and 2017 recording a loss, it has managed to lose more on its share repurchases during those three years than it made in operations, by a substantial margin. Even more important, GE has now left itself with minus $48 billion in tangible net worth at Sept. 30, with actual genuine tangible debt of close to $100 billion.

As the new CEO Larry Culp told CNBC last Monday: “We have no higher priority right now than bringing those leverage levels down.” The following day, GE announced the sale of 15% of its oil services arm Baker Hughes, for a round $4 billion. Of course, since that sale values Baker Hughes at $26 billion, and GE paid $32 billion for 62% of Baker Hughes as recently as last year, which looks to me like a valuation for the whole company of $52 billion, GE shareholders appears to have lost half the value of their investment in Baker Hughes in about 18 months. [..] A recent Financial Times article outlined how the five tech companies with the most cash (Apple, Alphabet, Cisco, Microsoft and Oracle) have repurchased an astounding $115 billion of stock in the first three quarters of 2018.

By contrast, the total capital spending of the five companies was only $42.6 billion during the same period. The story then congratulated investors for having done so well out of President Trump’s tax reform, which lowered the corporate tax rate, thus encouraging investment in the United States. With share repurchases in these companies being almost three times their actual investment, one must wonder how much actual U.S. economic growth they are expecting. [..] These share repurchases are misguided in so many ways. First, Apple, Alphabet and Microsoft are valued by the stock market at close to $1 trillion, levels no company has ever reached before. If you ignore the current stock price, a company repurchasing its shares is simply giving away its cash and reducing its share count; it creates no value.

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Dangerously close to a political statement.

Bank of England Backs Theresa May’s Brexit Deal, Warns Of No-Deal Dangers (G.)

Mark Carney has thrown his weight behind Theresa May’s Brexit deal, warning that a no-deal scenario would damage the economy, trigger job losses, lead to lower pay for workers and cause inflation to rise. The governor of the Bank of England said May’s draft EU withdrawal agreement would “support economic outcomes” that would be positive for the British economy, primarily because it would give Britain more time to prepare for whatever final Brexit deal is agreed between Westminster and Brussels. “We welcome the transition arrangements in the withdrawal agreement. It’s at the heart [of the deal],” he told MPs on the Treasury select committee, a week after the prime minister agreed the terms of the deal with the EU.

“[The deal] improves our ability to discharge our function relative to having no deal,” he added. The timing of the governor’s comments could help to support May as she faces tough opposition from across the political divide, following cabinet resignations and Labour’s promise to vote it down in parliament. Carney warned that failure to agree a Brexit deal with Brussels before the March 2019 deadline would deliver a “large negative shock” to the UK economy that would have a persistent effect, lowering growth and causing job losses. He said such an outcome would deliver an “unprecedented supply shock” to the UK economy with few historical or international comparisons. “It wouldn’t be a happy situation to be in,” he said.

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These talks should have started two years ago. And even then.

May’s Brussels Trip Only Start Of ‘Endless’ EU Trade Talks (G.)

When Theresa May goes to Brussels for tea with Jean Claude Juncker on Wednesday afternoon, the two leaders will have in front of them a metaphorical Christmas tree of a political declaration. “And every member state has put a bauble on it”, an EU diplomat said. A seven-page document published last week, offering some heads of terms on the future relationship, is set to more than double to some 20 pages. Calls for more ambitious language around the trade elements have been made. Demands for a Spanish veto over any deal covering Gibraltar have been tabled. And an array of asks on so called “level playing field” commitments in any future trade deal are in the mix.

There is even talk of side-declarations to the political declaration emerging at the special Brexit summit next Sunday to allow member states to feel that they have drawn a line in the sand about the real trade talks to come. “It’s all getting very confusing,” admitted a second EU diplomat. Not to Sir Andrew Cahn, the former chief executive of the government’s UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) department, who was also an aide to Neil Kinnock when vice president of the European commission in the late 1990s. This is, he said, likely to be a mere amuse-bouche to the “continuous endless” talks that will open on the UK’s trading relationship with Brussels after 29 March 2019 as the UK finds its way around the EU’s orbit.

“It is a classic EU negotiation and the member states are performing their normal way,” Cahn said. “The French always come in late to toughen their negotiating position towards the end, and that’s when they can get some additional things. “The Spanish are copying with Gibraltar – although that is partly a function of domestic Spanish politics with Pedro Sánchez [the Spanish prime minister] being vulnerable at home.”

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What, she didn’t tell you?

UK To Be ‘Frozen Out’ Of 182 EU Decisions During Brexit Transition (Ind.)

The UK will be “frozen out” of EU decisions on no fewer than 182 new rules in the months after Brexit, a new analysis says, including over budget spending, road signs and drinking water. The full scale of fresh regulations in the pipeline – during Theresa May’s planned 21-month transition period – exposes the blunder of making Britain “a rule-taker, not a rule-maker”, it warns. During that transition, the UK will be bound by Brussels’ decisions but without any ministers in the EU council, or MEPs in the European parliament, to influence them. Now the campaign for a People’s Vote on the Brexit outcome has examined the decisions expected before 2020, which also include alcohol-taxing and rules for UK investment funds.

“This analysis sets out for the first time the full scale of the UK’s capitulation under this so-called deal,” said Chris Bryant, a Labour supporter of People’s Vote. “The prime minister’s deal would weaken our ability to have a say in over 180 crucial decisions that are going to be made in Europe while the UK is in transition – meaning we have to abide by their rulings but have no say and no ability to protect Britain’s interests. “This dodgy deal will leave Britain frozen out of decision making and forced to pay billions of Euros for the privilege.” The argument goes to the heart of criticism – by both pro and anti-Brexit MPs – that the UK will be a “vassal state” during the transition phase.

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Russophobia continues unabated.

Interpol Elects South Korean As Its President In Blow To Russia (G.)

South Korea’s Kim Jong-yang has been elected as Interpol’s next president, edging out a longtime veteran of Russia’s security services who was strongly opposed by the US, Britain and other European nations. The White House and its European partners had lobbied against Alexander Prokopchuk’s attempts to be named the next president of the international police body, saying his election would lead to further Russian abuses of Interpol’s “red notice” system to go after political opponents. Prokopchuk is a general in the Russian interior ministry and serves as an Interpol vice-president. Kim was chosen by Interpol’s 94-member states at a meeting of its annual congress in Dubai.

He will serve until 2020, completing the four-year mandate of his predecessor, Meng Hongwei, who went missing in his native China in September. Beijing later said Meng resigned after being charged with accepting bribes. Critics say that Prokopchuk oversaw a policy of systematically targeting critics and dissidents during his time in charge of the Russian office of Interpol. On Tuesday, the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, threw his weight behind Kim, who is the acting president of the global police body. “We encourage all nations and organisations that are part of Interpol and that respect the rule of law to choose a leader with integrity. We believe Mr Kim will be just that,” Pompeo told reporters.

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If only we move to recycled plastic! Geez, Louise, how about no plastic at all? You can cut at least 50% without changing anything much at all. More recycling is a fake message.

Tax ‘Virgin Packaging’ To Tackle Plastics Crisis – Report (G.)

The government should introduce a new tax on virgin packaging to revolutionise the recycling system in the UK and tackle the plastics crisis, according to a new report. The study, presented to MPs and industry figures at Westminster on Tuesday evening, calls on ministers to impose a fee on packaging materials and offer a rebate for those products that use more recycled material. The WWF and the Resource Association, which commissioned environment consultancy Eunomia to produce the report, said the proposals would transform the UK’s broken recycling system – and drastically reduce the demand for raw materials, including fossil fuels. Dr Lyndsey Dodd, head of marine policy at WWF UK, said: “Our oceans are choking on plastic, 90% of the world’s sea birds have fragments of plastic in their stomach.

Despite the public outcry, more products are being made with virgin, or new, plastic than with recycled plastic.” Last year the Guardian revealed that plastic production is set to increase by 40% over the next 10 years as fossil fuel companies look to use raw materials produced by fracking in the US. The new report follows an announcement in October that the government is launching a consultation on the introduction of a tax on all plastic packaging with a recycled content of less than 30%. [..] Earlier this year the Guardian reported the plastics recycling industry was under investigation for suspected widespread abuse and fraud within the export system. Since China banned the import of plastic waste, the UK has been chasing other markets in Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand, but these countries are also imposing restrictions due to the stockpiling of waste.

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“..115 plastic cups, four plastic bottles, 25 plastic bags, two flip-flops, a nylon sack and more than 1,000 other assorted pieces of plastic..”

Dead Whale Washes Ashore In Indonesia With 6 Kilos Of Plastic In Stomach (AP)

A dead whale that washed ashore in eastern Indonesia had a large lump of plastic waste in its stomach, including drinking cups and flip-flops – causing concern among environmentalists and government officials in one of the world’s largest plastic polluting countries. Rescuers from Wakatobi National Park found the 9.5-metre sperm whale late on Monday in waters near Kapota Island, southeast of Sulawesi, after receiving a report from environmentalists that villagers had surrounded the dead creature and were beginning to butcher its rotting carcass, park chief Heri Santoso said. Researchers from wildlife conservation group WWF and the park’s conservation academy found about 5.9 kilograms of plastic waste in the animal’s stomach – including 115 plastic cups, four plastic bottles, 25 plastic bags, two flip-flops, a nylon sack and more than 1,000 other assorted pieces of plastic.

“Although we have not been able to deduce the cause of death, the facts that we see are truly awful,” said Dwi Suprapti, a marine species conservation coordinator at WWF Indonesia. She said it was not possible to determine if the plastic had caused the whale’s death because of the animal’s advanced state of decay. Indonesia, an archipelago of 260 million people, is the world’s second-largest plastic polluter after China, according to a study published in the journal Science in January. It produces 3.2 million tonnes of mismanaged plastic waste a year, of which 1.29 million tonnes ends up in the ocean, the study said.

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Can we say the MSM wakes up with this USA Today piece?

Julian Assange Deserves A Medal of Freedom, Not A Secret Indictment (USA Today)

On the same day the Assange indictment scored headlines, Trump awarded seven Presidential Medals of Freedom. No controversy greeted posthumous awards to Babe Ruth and Elvis Presley — unlike the ruckus regarding Miriam Adelson, wife of Republican super-donor Sheldon Adelson. Public Citizen, a liberal nonprofit, howled that the Adelson award “is just the latest sign of [Trump’s] ability to corrupt and corrode all aspects of the government.” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman caterwauled that it was “ludicrous” and “and an insult to people who received the medal for genuine service.” In reality, Presidential Medals of Freedom have routinely been exploited to buttress the political establishment, with bevies of awards for political operators, members of Congress, and pliable foreign leaders.

President Lyndon Johnson distributed a bushel of Medals of Freedom to his Vietnam War architects and enablers, perhaps as consolation prizes for losing the war. (The medal awarded to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, whose lies about the war making progress cost thousands of Americans and Vietnamese their lives, fetched $40,625 at an auction a few years ago.) President George W. Bush conferred Medals of Freedom on his Iraq war team, including CIA chief George “Slam Dunk” Tenet, Iraq viceroy Paul Bremer, and ambassador Ryan Crocker, whom Bush called “America’s Lawrence of Arabia.”

Some of the biggest fabulists of the modern era — including Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney — also pocketed the award.The controversies over Assange and Adelson provide a serendipitous opportunity to update the freedom awards. Because few things are more perilous to democracy than permitting politicians to coverup crimes, there should be a new Medal of Freedom category commending individuals who have done the most to expose official lies. This particular award could be differentiated by including a little steam whistle atop the medal — vivifying how leaks can prevent a political system from overheating or exploding.

Assange would deserve such a medal — as would Thomas Drake and Edward Snowden (who revealed NSA’s abuses), John Kiriakou (who revealed CIA torture), and Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked the Pentagon Papers). Admittedly, there may be no way to stop presidents from giving steam whistle freedom awards to political donors’ wives. Organizations like Wikileaks are among the best hopes for rescuing democracy from Leviathan. Unless we presume politicians have a divine right to deceive the governed, America should honor individuals who expose federal crimes.

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Jun 032018
 


Andrew Wyeth Christina’s world 1948

 

Why Italy Had To Say Goodbye To The Dolce Vita (David McWilliams)
An Italian Exit May Be Rome’s Best Option – JPMorgan (ZH)
Angela Merkel Rules Out Debt Relief For Italy (CNBC)
New Italy PM Starts Off In Shadow Of His Powerful Deputies (AFP)
Juncker: EU Won’t ‘Meddle’ In Italy’s Affairs (O.)
Political Bruiser Sánchez Stuns Spain To Become PM (Spain Report)
Europe: Confront Trump or Avoid a Costly Trade War (NYT)
US Wants Structural Changes To China’s Economy: Mnuchin
Uber’s ‘Business Is Finished’ In Turkey, Erdogan Says (R.)
Britain’s Low-Paid Face Decade Of Wage Squeeze (O.)
UK Universal Credit Change To Bar 2.6m Children From Free School Meals (Ind.)
Whale Dies From Eating More Than 80 Plastic Bags (AFP)

 

 

Excellent from David McWilliams on what the euro has done to Italy.

Why Italy Had To Say Goodbye To The Dolce Vita (David McWilliams)

Sometimes it is not appreciated quite how industrial Italy is. It has long been Europe’s second-biggest manufacturing power, beaten only by Germany. Italy is far more industrial than France or the UK. In some areas of design and high-quality manufacturing, Italy is still without peer. However, since it gave up the lira and adopted the euro – in effect Germany’s currency – things have gone pear-shaped. This economic calamity is driving Italian politics, leading many to question the euro and Italy’s membership of it. From 1945 to 1995 there was an understanding that Italy would devalue the lira. This is what Italy did. Traditionally, it devalued the lira every few years. This kept Italian industry competitive.

For example, when Italy joined the European Monetary System, in 1979, the exchange rate was 443 lire per Deutschmark. By 1990, the year of German reunification, the rate was 750 lire to the Deutschmark. By 1995 it was 1,000 lire to the Deutschmark. In the 1992 currency crisis the lira fell to a low of 1,250 against the Deutschmark before recovering a bit. The gradual fall in the value of the lira was a price that the Italians were prepared to pay for industrial success. Contrary to the dogma spouted by Europe’s central bankers, Italian devaluations worked particularly well. From 1979 to 1998, Italian industrial production outpaced that of Germany by more than 10%. Italian equities outperformed German equivalents by 16% – after having taken into account the devaluations.

So not only was Italian industry growing faster than German industry, aided by lira devaluations, but also the return on capital in Italy was higher than in Germany. This is because if the stock market of a country is outperforming another country’s, it implies that the capital that is deployed in the faster-growing country is being deployed more efficiently. Therefore, not only was Italy growing more quickly than Germany, but it was more efficient too. Then came the euro. Since Italy joined the single currency, almost to the day, its industry has gone backwards. Having outperformed German stocks during the period of the lira, Italian stocks have underperformed German stocks by a whopping, bankruptcy-inducing 65%.

During the half-century when Fellini was writing the story of postwar Italian success, the Italian stock market almost always returned more than the German stock market. Once Italy joined the euro that stopped almost overnight. Deep in the economy, the strictures imposed by the euro have destroyed much of Italian industry. For example, having outgrown Germany’s industrial output in the 1980s and 1990s by 10%, Italian factory output since Italy joined the euro has lagged Germany’s by 40%.

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Hard to summarize this long Zero Hedge piece. Depending on where you look, Italy may not be all that weak.

“If you owe the ECB €10 billion, you have no leverage. If you owe the ECB €426 billion, you have all the leverage.”

An Italian Exit May Be Rome’s Best Option – JPMorgan (ZH)

[..] with €426BN, Italy has the highest Target2 deficit with the Eurosystem (Spain is a close second with €377BN) any discussion about an Italian euro exit raises concerns about costs. [..] due to QE induced cross border flows since 2015, Target2 balances have exploded since the launch of the ECB’s QE (and third Greek bailout in 2015), and surpassed the previous extremes from the depths of the euro debt crisis in the summer of 2012.

[..] a euro exit by a debtor country would represent more of a cost to creditor countries such as Germany rather than to the exiting country itself. And, as shown in the chart above, Germany sure has a lot of implicit accumulated costs, roughly €1 trillion to be precise, as a result of preserving a currency union that allowed German exporters to benefit from a euro dragged lower by the periphery, relative to where the Deutsche Mark would be trading today. But here the analysis gets slightly more complex, as Target2 does not provide the full picture of potential costs (or benefits, assuming a scorched earth approach). As JPMorgan writes, the Target2 liabilities of a debtor country give only a partial picture of the cost to creditor nations from that debtor country exiting.

This is because Target2 balances represent only one component of the Net International Investment Position of a country, i.e. the difference between a country’s total external financial assets vs. liabilities. The broader metric that one must use, is of the Net International Investment Position for euro area countries and is shown in the chart below. It shows that contrary to the Target2 imbalance, Italy leaving the euro would inflict a lot less damage to creditor nations than Spain leaving the euro. This is because Spain’s net international investment liabilities stood at close to €1tr as of the end of last year, almost three times as large as its Target2 liabilities. In contrast Italy’s net international investment liabilities were much smaller and stood at only €115bn at the end of last year, around a quarter of its €426bn Target2 liabilities. This, as JPM explains, is because Italy has accumulated over the years more external assets than Spain and should thus be overall more able to repay its external liabilities.

[..] Ironically, the surprisingly low net international investment liabilities of Italy are the result of the persistent current account surpluses the country has been running since the euro debt crisis of 2012, and smaller current account deficits compared to Spain before the crisis. The flipside is that the current account surplus – in theory – also makes it easier for a country like Italy to exit the euro relative to a current account deficit country. This is because the higher the current account deficit of a debtor country, the higher the cost of an exit for this country as the current account deficit would have to be closed abruptly following an exit. Most importantly, this means that as a result of Italy’s decent current account surplus, from a narrow current account adjustment point of view, its own cost of a euro exit should be relatively small.

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Merkel has weakened a lot. Italy knows it.

Angela Merkel Rules Out Debt Relief For Italy (CNBC)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel appeared on Saturday to rule out debt relief for Italy, saying in a newspaper interview that the principle of solidarity among members of the euro zone should not turn the single currency bloc into a debt-sharing union. “I will approach the new Italian government openly and work with it instead of speculating about it intentions,” Merkel told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in an interview to be published on Sunday.

On Friday, Italy swore a populist coalition into power, ending months of political uncertainty that hit global markets in the last week. Newly designated Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte will lead Western Europe’s first anti-establishment government with the aim of cutting taxes, boosting spending on welfare and overhauling EU rules on budgets and immigration. Italy accounts for 23.4 percent of the euro zone’s public debt and 15.4 percent of the bloc’s GDP, according to Eurostat.

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Conte has a full agenda.

New Italy PM Starts Off In Shadow Of His Powerful Deputies (AFP)

Italy’s new prime minister Giuseppe Conte mostly kept quiet on his full first day in office Saturday, while his two powerful deputies took centre stage in setting the tone of the populist government’s policy. Conte, a political novice, was finally sworn in on Friday as the head of a government of ministers from the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the far-right League, ending months of uncertainty since elections in March. But Conte was a compromise candidate between Five Star leader Luigi Di Maio and the League’s Matteo Salvini – both of whom are now his deputy prime ministers – and he will have to walk a delicate line to push through the anti-austerity and pro-security promises their populist parties campaigned on.

The 53-year-old academic also inherited a daunting list of issues from his predecessor Paolo Gentiloni, including the financial travails of companies such as Ilva and Alitalia, a Group of Seven summit in Canada and a key EU summit at the end of the month, as well as the thorny question of immigration. Immigration is the bugbear of Conte’s interior minister, Salvini, the 45-year-old leader of the anti-immigrant, anti-Islam League. Salvini announced Friday that he would visit Sicily to see the situation for himself at one of the main landing points for refugees fleeing war, persecution and famine across North Africa and the Middle East. “The good times for illegals is over – get ready to pack your bags,” Salvini said at a rally in Italy’s north on Saturday, adding however that he wants to economically assist migrants’ countries of origin.

His comments come after more than 150 migrants, including nine children, disembarked from a rescue ship late Friday in Sicily. Conte attended a military parade alongside President Sergio Mattarella on Saturday, marking Republic Day for the foundation of the Italian Republic in 1946. However the new prime minister has issued few public statements since being appointed. On Saturday he did post on Facebook that he had spoken with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron and would meet the two leaders at the G7 summit, where he will be a “spokesman for the interests of Italian citizens”. Conte has also opted to keep the country’s intelligence services under his personal control.

Deputy premier Di Maio, who is serving as economic development minister, also took to Facebook, calling for “entrepreneurs to be left alone”. “Employers and employees in Italy must not be enemies,” he said, promising “I will not disappoint you”. On Saturday evening Five Star held a rally in the centre of Rome with thousands of supporters and all its ministers to celebrate “the government of change”. Di Maio told the crowd that “from today, the state is us”. Five Star’s founder, former comic Beppe Grillo, rang a bell in front of the crowd, saying the sound “marks the fracture between a world that is going away and a new one that is arriving”.

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Right. Sure.

Juncker: EU Won’t ‘Meddle’ In Italy’s Affairs (O.)

Italy, the third-largest economy in the eurozone, has a public debt second only to Greece’s and there was a negative reaction from the financial markets to the League-M5S coalition, which plans to significantly raise public spending. Juncker offered a more placatory tone, suggesting that Brussels and Berlin had learned the lessons of the Greek crisis. He also denied that the eurozone was set on a course for another economic downturn: “The Italians cannot really complain about austerity measures from Brussels. However, I do not now want to lecture Rome. We must treat Italy with respect. Too many lectures were given to Greece in the past, in particular from German-speaking countries. This dealt a blow to the dignity of the Greek people. The same thing must not be allowed to happen to Italy.”

Juncker said that the financial markets’ reaction was “irrational”: “People should not draw political conclusions from every fluctuation in the stock market. Investors have been wrong on so many occasions.” Neither of the coalition parties in the new Italian government campaigned on leaving the euro or the EU, but both have backed such calls in the past and are scathing about the rules that underpin the eurozone. Mujtaba Rahman, a former European commission and UK Treasury official who now works for consultancy the Eurasia Group, warned that as the cornerstone of the coalition government’s platform was fiscal expansion, it was liable to clash with the commission this autumn.

“Though no official estimates have been produced, independent estimates suggest the proposed measures would cost, combined, upwards of €100bn per annum, around 6% of GDP.“If the government were to propose a very expansionary budget, the commission – which provides its opinions and recommendations on member states’ draft budgetary plans – would have to reject it in September. This would be a first, and would set the stage for a real confrontation with Rome,” he said. “A significant deviation from EU-mandated fiscal targets may prompt the commission to open a new Excessive Deficit Procedure, a process designed to give the EU more power to enforce austerity on Rome. Yet the symbolism of this move would only strengthen the Italian government’s domestic standing.”

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Poker player?!

Political Bruiser Sánchez Stuns Spain To Become PM (Spain Report)

Forget about what the new socialist government’s policies are going to be, because no one really knows yet. Forget about who the new ministers are going to be, because no one really knows yet. And forget about how long this government is going to last. No one has a clue right now. What is worthy of note is how Pedro Sánchez has just crushed all of his political opponents in a week. Last Friday, the PSOE had slowly slumped to less than 20% in the polls and he was being written off by columnists and commentators. This Saturday, he will be driven to Zarzuela Palace to be sworn in as the new socialist Prime Minister of Spain [..]

Mr. Rajoy is likely not the only political leader who needs a stiff drink this weekend. Pedro Sánchez has just left Pablo Iglesias—who nine days ago thought his biggest problem was an absurd internal ballot about his new luxury home—sitting in the dust in the fight for the Spanish left. Two years ago, with the sudden appearance and meteoric rise of Podemos, Mr. Iglesias’s stated strategic goal was not to win the election but to dominate the Spanish left. He just lost that race. Pedro Sánchez has just left Ciudadanos leader Albert Rivera rabbiting on incessantly about wanting a new general election instead of the socialists “unfairly” grabbing power, because Mr. Rivera is—or was—doing rather better in the polls than the rest.

But rabbit on is all he can do for now because, just like nine days ago, in the real world Ciudadanos still only has 32 seats in Congress. And Pedro Sánchez has just left the powerful leader of the Socialist Party in Andalusia, Susana Diaz, well, in Andalusia. This might be the sweetest victory of all for the new Prime Minister, because it was she who wielded her considerable internal and establishment influence in October 2016 to oust Mr. Sánchez as leader of the PSOE, allowing Mariano Rajoy to be reappointed Prime Minister after a year of national stalemate unbroken by two general elections.

Again: Pedro Sánchez, written off by some as being too handsome to have any interesting ideas, has, somewhere along the way, learnt to execute political hit jobs that have left all of his major political opponents staggering, and sent what was a confident conservative party that had only just passed a new budget—two days previously—scurrying into opposition, wounded. In a week. Whatever happens next in Spanish politics, do not underestimate Pedro Sánchez.

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More division.

Europe: Confront Trump or Avoid a Costly Trade War (NYT)

Despite its name, the European Union is not generally a model of unity. If Mr. Trump was banking on internal division stymieing the European response, he picked an opportune moment. Britain is consumed with domestic sniping over its pending departure from the European Union, making it a bit player in these proceedings. Italy has been immersed in the operatic political drama at which it excels, only Friday swearing in a new government after inconclusive elections in March. The incoming government presents a coalition of two populist parties that have expressed disdain for the European Union and the shared euro currency, stoking fears that the bloc will be presented with a new challenge to its cohesion.

Spain just swapped governments. Germany is headed by a chastened chancellor Angela Merkel following her own lengthy struggles to form a government after elections last fall. The French president has been frustrated in his attempts to forge greater political unity within the bloc. “Europe is in disarray,” said Nicola Borri, a finance professor at Luiss, a university in Rome. “It’s even difficult to understand who is in power in Europe.” In deliberating how to respond to Mr. Trump’s tariffs, the key schism appears to run between Germany and the rest of the bloc. “I don’t think there is a unified consensus for how to deal with the Americans,” said Meredith Crowley, an expert on international trade at the University of Cambridge in England. “The Germans benefit from open markets globally, so they don’t want to throw up more barriers to free trade.”

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That’s quite the statement. What if Beijing said the same about the US?

US Wants Structural Changes To China’s Economy: Mnuchin

The United States wants trade talks in Beijing this weekend to result in structural changes to China’s economy, in addition to increased Chinese purchases of American goods, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Saturday. U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross arrived in Beijing on Saturday with an interagency team of U.S. officials for talks on long-term purchases of U.S. farm and energy commodities, just days after Washington renewed its threats to impose tariffs on Chinese goods.

The purchases are partly aimed at shrinking the $375 billion U.S. goods trade deficit with China. Mnuchin, speaking at a G7 finance leaders meeting in Canada where he was the target of U.S. allies’ anger over steel and aluminum tariffs, said the China talks would cover other issues, including the Trump administration’s desire to eliminate Chinese joint venture requirements and other policies that effectively force technology transfers.

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It’s election time.

Uber’s ‘Business Is Finished’ In Turkey, Erdogan Says (R.)

Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan has said ride hailing app Uber is finished in Turkey, following pressure from Istanbul taxi drivers who said it was providing an illegal service and called for it to be banned. About 17,400 taxis operate in Istanbul, home to about a fifth of Turkey’s population of 81 million people, and since Uber entered the country in 2014 tensions have risen sharply. Erdogan’s statement came after new regulations were announced in recent weeks tightening transport licensing requirements, making it more difficult for drivers to register with Uber and threatening a two-year ban for violations.

“This thing called Uber emerged. That business is finished. That does not exist anymore,” he said in a speech in Istanbul late on Friday. “We have our taxi system. Where does this (Uber) come from? It is used in Europe, I do not care about that. We will decide by ourselves,” added Erdogan, who is running for re-election in three weeks. [..] Uber said that about 2,000 yellow cab drivers use its app to find customers, while another 5,000 work for UberXL, using large vans to transport groups to parties, or take people with bulky luggage to Istanbul’s airports.

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The Tories can’t wait to return to Dickens.

Britain’s Low-Paid Face Decade Of Wage Squeeze (O.)

The wages of 10 million low-paid workers have stalled for two decades and face pressure for a decade to come, according to a bleak assessment of Britain’s future jobs market. Global economic competition, automation, the shift to the gig economy and a widening regional divide will see further pressure placed on the incomes of those earning between £10,000 and £15,000, it warns. The analysis by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) thinktank, which is on the political right and chaired by the former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, also blamed a chronic national failure to boost skills and education. It will be seen as another warning to Theresa May from Conservative figures to kickstart her domestic agenda.

There have been concerns within the party that the focus on Brexit has led to inaction in other crucial areas that could hold Britain back after its exit from the European Union. The analysis, co-written by Boris Johnson’s former economic adviser and Brexit supporter Gerard Lyons, concludes that wages of those on the lowest salaries stalled long before the 2008 financial crash. It warns that the current evidence shows that most never escape a life on low pay. The centre’s support for action on low pay shows that it is now an issue of concern across the political spectrum, with automation expected to place further pressure on jobs in some low-paid sectors unless new skills and opportunities are developed.

The CSJ report states that 20% of Britain’s 33 million workers earn £15,000 a year or less, and that 50% earn no more than £23,200. Only 10% of employees, or about 3 million people, earn above £53,000 a year. Britain does not compare well with other developed nations when it comes to low pay, it states. Taking data from manufacturing, and giving the US a score of 100, Switzerland topped the table with a pay rate of 155, followed by Norway on 126, Germany on 111 and France on 97. However, the UK was much further behind, on 73.

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These people would be better off moving to Poland.

UK Universal Credit Change To Bar 2.6m Children From Free School Meals (Ind.)

Up to 2.6 million children whose parents are on benefits could be missing out on free school meals by 2022, the shadow education minister will warn. Angela Rayner will tell a GMB union conference on Sunday that the Government’s claims on school meals are “falling apart” after changes to eligibility under Universal Credit (UC). When the system was first introduced in 2013, all children of recipients – who were all unemployed – were eligible for free school meals (FSM), as they would have been under the old system. But in April the criteria was tightened based on income. In England, the net earnings threshold will be £7,400 whereas in Northern Ireland it will be £14,000.

A government technical note published in May said that if the change had not been made, “around half of all (state school) children would become eligible for FSM and the meals would no longer be targeted at those who need them the most”. It said that in 2017 around 1.1 million disadvantaged children were eligible and received a free school meal, some 14 per cent of all state-school pupils. But if the change had not been made the number of additional children who would have been eligible was between 2,300,000 and 2,600,000 by 2022.

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And that’s just one animal that we could see.

Whale Dies From Eating More Than 80 Plastic Bags (AFP)

A whale has died in southern Thailand after swallowing more than 80 plastic bags, with rescuers failing to nurse the mammal back to health. The small male pilot whale was found barely alive in a canal near the border with Malaysia, the country’s department of marine and coastal resources said. A veterinary team tried “to help stabilise its illness but finally the whale died” on Friday afternoon. An autopsy revealed 80 plastic bags weighing up to 8kg (18lb) in the creature’s stomach, the department added. People used buoys to keep the whale afloat after it was first spotted on Monday and an umbrella to shield it from the sun. The whale vomited up five bags during the rescue attempt.

Thon Thamrongnawasawat, a marine biologist and lecturer at Kasetsart University, said the bags had made it impossible for the whale to eat any nutritional food. “If you have 80 plastic bags in your stomach, you die,” he said. Thailand is one of the world’s largest users of plastic bags. Thon said at least 300 marine animals including pilot whales, sea turtles and dolphins, perished each year in Thai waters after ingesting plastic. “It’s a huge problem,” he said. “We use a lot of plastic.” The pilot whale’s plight generated sympathy and anger among Thai netizens. “I feel sorry for the animal that didn’t do anything wrong, but has to bear the brunt of human actions,” wrote one Twitter user.

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Apr 182018
 
 April 18, 2018  Posted by at 9:25 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  2 Responses »


Franco Fontana Prague 1967

 

Junk Bond Market Still in Total Denial, Fighting the Fed (WS)
World Trade System In Danger Of Being Torn Apart, Warns IMF (G.)
Eurozone Engine Sputters as German Downturn Risk Sharpens (BBG)
Bitcoin Tumbles After Mystery “Whale” Dumps $50 Million In One Trade (ZH)
Japan Asks Rusal To Stop Aluminum Shipments (ZH)
The Deep State And The Big Lie – Douma (Stockman)
Theresa May’s Husband Made A Killing From The Bombing Of Syria (EP)
Trump Tweets Support For American Pastor On Trial In Turkey (R.)
New Refugees In Greece Can Move Freely, Says Court (K.)
Recycling Is Not The Answer (G.)
30 KIlos Of Plastic Bags Killed Whale Washed Ashore On Santorini (KTG)

 

 

The wonderful world of junk.

Junk Bond Market Still in Total Denial, Fighting the Fed (WS)

The Fed’s efforts to raise interest rates across the spectrum have borne fruit only in limited fashion. In the Treasury market, yields of longer-dated securities have not risen (prices fall when yields rise) as sharply as they have with Treasuries of shorter maturities. The two-year yield has surged to 2.41% on Tuesday, the highest since July 2008. But the 10-year yield, at 2.82%, while double from two years ago, is only back where it had been in 2014. So the difference (the “spread”) between the two has narrowed to just 0.41 percentage points, the narrowest since before the Financial Crisis:

This disconnect is typical during the earlier stages of the rate-hike cycle because the Fed, through its market operations, targets the federal funds rate. Short-term Treasury yields follow with some will of their own. But the long end doesn’t rise at the same pace, or doesn’t rise at all because there is a lot of demand for these securities at those yields. Investors are “fighting the Fed”— doing the opposite of what the Fed wants them to do – and the difference between the shorter and longer maturities dwindles, and it dwindles, and it causes a lot of gray hairs, and it dwindles further, until it stops making sense to investors and they open their eyes and get out of the chase, and suddenly long-term yield surge higher, as bond prices drop sharply.

That’s why short sellers have taken record positions against the 10-year Treasury recently: they’re waiting for yields to spike to the next level. But this disconnect – this symptom of investors fighting the Fed – in the Treasury market is mild compared to the disconnect in the junk bond market. There, investors have completely blown off the Fed. At least in the Treasury market, 10-year yields have risen since the Fed started getting serious about rate increases in December 2016. In the junk bond market, yields have since fallen. In other words, despite the Fed’s tightening, the junk bond bubble has gotten bigger. And investors are not yet showing any signs of second thoughts.

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Because the IMF made sure it would be skewed towards the rich.

World Trade System In Danger Of Being Torn Apart, Warns IMF (G.)

The postwar global trading system risks being torn apart, the International Monetary Fund has warned, amid concern over the tariff showdown between the US and China. In a sign of its growing concern that protectionism is being stimulated by voter scepticism, the IMF used its half-yearly health check for the world economy to tell policymakers they needed to address the public’s concerns before a better-than-expected period of growth came to an end. Maurice Obstfeld, the IMF’s economic counsellor, said: “The first shots in a potential trade war have now been fired.” He said Donald Trump’s tax cuts would suck imports into the US and increase the size of the trade deficit 2019 by $150bn – a trend that could exacerbate trade tensions.

“The multilateral rules-based trade system that evolved after world war two and that nurtured unprecedented growth in the world economy needs strengthening. Instead, it is in danger of being torn apart.” Obstfeld said there was more of a “phoney war” between the US and China than a return to the widespread use of tariffs in the Great Depression, but that there were signs that even the threat of protectionism was already harming growth. “That major economies are flirting with trade war at a time of widespread economic expansion may seem paradoxical – especially when the expansion is so reliant on investment and trade,” Obstfeld added.

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Too much surplus?

Eurozone Engine Sputters as German Downturn Risk Sharpens (BBG)

The euro area’s economic expansion is standing on increasingly shaky ground after reports showed German investor confidence tumbling to its lowest level since late 2012 and the risk of a recession in the nation jumping. The sentiment gauge from ZEW showed more investors now see a worsening in Europe’s largest economy than forecast an improvement, a mood swing that ZEW President Achim Wambach blamed on the U.S. trade dispute combined with weak domestic retail and production numbers. The drop in confidence came as the Dusseldorf-based Macroeconomic Policy Institute (IMK) said the probability of a recession in Germany over the next three months has jumped to 32%.

While that outcome remains unlikely, the gauge is up sharply from 6.8% in March. It follows U.S. attempts to rewrite international trade rules by imposing import tariffs, triggering a tit-for-tat response by China. Even though the European Union has temporarily been exempted from the metal levies, risks of far-reaching retaliatory measures could still hurt Germany’s export-driven economy – feeding into signs that growth in the euro area is coming off its peak. At the IMK, the recession gauge, which uses data that have signaled downturns in the past is now orange – the middle of its traffic-light warning system – for the first time since March 2016. That was just as the German economy was entering a mild slowdown.

“Volatility in financial markets, which has been evident for several months, is now accompanied by a noticeable deterioration in sentiment and subdued production,” according to IMK. “This has recently become a typical constellation for the end phase of a cycle.”

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For now, still a casino.

Bitcoin Tumbles After Mystery “Whale” Dumps $50 Million In One Trade (ZH)

The price of several cryptocurrencies took a sudden hit Tuesday over the course of 20 minutes, which some suspect may be the result of a single Bitcoin whale who unloaded over $50 million worth of the digital currency in one Bitfinex trade. The drop comes one day after the third largest bitcoin wallet also unloaded around $50 million of the digital currency. As Marketwatch first noted , “the balance of wallet 3D2oetdNuZUqQHPJmcMDDHYoqkyNVsFk9r — an anonymous digital account which is valued at $1.49 billion — fell by 6,500 bitcoin Tuesday, with the average sale price sale being $8,146.70, a total value of just over $50 million, according to bitinfocharts.”

The sale comes a day after the third-largest wallet, which famously purchased over $400 million in bitcoin in February, let go of 6,600 bitcoin at an average price of $8,026. Combined, the two whales unloaded over $100 million of bitcoin within 24 hours. As there was no immediate news or catalyst, some attributed the sale to Tuesday’s report that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had launched an investigation into 13 cryptocurrency exchanges including Coinbase, Gemini and Bit Trust. The probe seeks information on fees, volume data and procedures governing margin trading among other things. However, the news hit some 4 hours prior to the sale.

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Unintended sanctions consequences?! Aluminum much more expensive for US firms too.

Japan Asks Rusal To Stop Aluminum Shipments (ZH)

One week ago, when the Trump administration unveiled the most draconian Russian sanctions yet which among others targeted Putin-ally Oleg Deripaska and the Russian oligarch’s aluminum giant, Rusal, we said that aluminum prices are going higher, much higher, for one reason: excluding China’s zombie producers, Rusal is the world’s largest producer of aluminum. Well, prices have since surged, largely as expected, and one week later we also learned just how “radioactive’ Rusal’s products have become as a result of the US sanctions: overnight Reuters reported that major Japanese trading houses asked the Russian aluminum producer to stop shipping refined aluminum and other products in light of U.S. sanctions on the world’s No.2 producer and are scrambling to secure metal elsewhere, according to industry sources.

“We have requested Rusal stop shipments of aluminum for our term contracts as we can’t make payment in U.S. dollars and we don’t want to take the risk of becoming a secondary sanction target by the United States,” said a source at a trading house [..] It is unclear how and where Japan can find alternative sources of aluminum: Japan buys about 300,000 tonnes of refined aluminum from Russia, about 16% of the nation’s total import, according to the Japan Aluminium Association. “Everyone has been on a search for substitutes and that pushed local spot premiums to around $200-$250 per tonne by last Friday,” he said. That’s sharply higher than Japan term premiums for April-June quarter shipments at $129 per tonne.

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Pearson Sharp and Robert Fisk were both on the ground in Douma. Both say the same.

The Deep State And The Big Lie – Douma (Stockman)

The contra-narrative about Assad’s alleged gas attack is gaining traction as the evidence comes in. It increasingly seems probable that some folks suffocated or were overcome with smoke inhalation and hypoxia (oxygen deprivation) when buildings, tunnels and underground bunkers collapsed into clouds of dust during the final battle for Douma last Saturday. Then the desperate remnant of the jihadist Army of Islam (Jaysh al-Islam) holed up there piled the bodies in a basement, spread shaving cream on their lips and proceeded to videotape furiously. Thereafter, they charged into a nearby hospital (which was treating hypoxia victims) with their video cameras in hand, yelling “chemical attack” while water-hosing one and all, thereby setting off the pandemonium seen on social media around the world.

We haven’t gotten to Douma yet to check out this contra-narrative, but an intrepid young reporter named Pearson Sharp did. Along with his camera crew, he visited the site of the attack, the hospital and the nearby rebel weapons dump – and interviewed dozens of people in the immediate vicinity. According to Sharp, none of them witnessed the alleged gas attack or believed it happened, and several personnel at the Douma hospital corroborated the phony water-dousing melee. Indeed, the head surgeon insisted to him that no one had died at the hospital from chemical agents. And he also saw and videoed room after room stacked with rockets, mortars and other military gear and filmed the debris and dilapidated remnants of buildings in the town.

[..] Self-evidently, a visiting Martian might have an altogether different interpretation of which nation had ventured down the “dark path” and which one was a “force for stability and peace”. And that would especially be the case with just a few more reports like the new missive from veteran war correspondent, Robert Fisk of the Independent (UK). Unlike young Mr. Pearson Sharp, Fisk has been a war correspondent in the Middle East for four decades and has won endless awards for reporting from the front lines. But his chops were earned when he became one of the few reporters in history to conduct face-to-face interviews with Osama bin Laden on three separate occasions during the 1990s.

Fisk’s dispatch filed Monday night speaks for itself and merits quoting at length because it not only skewers Washington’s narrative about Assad’s gas attack, but also provides vivid context: Whatever happened last Saturday erupted in the fog of war and could not possibly have been instantly assessed objectively or correctly by officials 6,000 miles away, who admit to having no “assets” on the ground in Damascus.

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Yes, this is pretty crazy.

Theresa May’s Husband Made A Killing From The Bombing Of Syria (EP)

The fact that Philip May is both a Senior Executive of a hugely powerful investment firm, and privy to reams of insider information from the Prime Minister – knowledge which, when it becomes public, hugely affects the share prices of the companies his firm invests in – makes Mr May’s official employment a staggering conflict of interest for the husband of a sitting Prime Minister. However, aside from the ease at which he is able to glean insider information from his wife about potential decisions which could go on to make huge profits for his firm, there is a far darker conflict of interest that has so far gone undiscussed.

Philip May is a Senior Executive of Capital Group, an Investment Firm who buy shares in all sorts of companies across the globe – including thousands of shares in the world’s biggest Defence Firm, Lockheed Martin. According to Investopedia, Philip May’s Capital Group owned around 7.09% of Lockheed Martin in March 2018 – a stake said to be worth more than £7Bn at this time. Whilst other sources say Capital Group’s shareholding of Lockheed Martin may actually be closer to 10%. On the 14th April 2018, the Prime Minister Theresa May sanctioned British military action on Syria in response to an apparent chemical attack on the city of Douma – air strikes that saw the debut of a new type of Cruise Missile, the JASSM, produced exclusively by the Lockheed Martin Corporation.

The debut of this new – and incredibly expensive – weapon was exactly what US President Donald Trump was referring to when he tweeted that the weapons being fired on Syria would be “nice and new and ‘smart!’” Every single JASSM used in the recent bombing of Syria costs more than $1,000,000, and as a result of their widespread use during the recent bombing of Syria by Western forces, the share price of Lockheed Martin soared.

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Now let them tell Erdogan about it.

Trump Tweets Support For American Pastor On Trial In Turkey (R.)

U.S. President Donald Trump voiced his support on Tuesday for Pastor Andrew Brunson, who is on trial in Turkey on charges he was linked to a group accused of orchestrating a failed 2016 military coup, in a case that has compounded strains in U.S.-Turkish relations. “Pastor Andrew Brunson, a fine gentleman and Christian leader in the United States, is on trial and being persecuted in Turkey for no reason,” Trump tweeted. “They call him a spy, but I am more a spy than he is. Hopefully he will be allowed to come home to his beautiful family where he belongs!” Brunson, a Christian pastor from North Carolina who has lived in Turkey for more than two decades, was indicted on charges of helping the group that Ankara holds responsible for the failed 2016 coup against President Tayyip Erdogan.

He faces up to 35 years in prison. Brunson has been the pastor of Izmir Resurrection Church, serving a small Protestant congregation in Turkey’s third largest city. Brunson’s trial is one of several legal cases roiling U.S.-Turkish relations. The two countries are also at odds over U.S. support for a Kurdish militia in northern Syria that Turkey considers a terrorist organization. Washington has called for Brunson’s release while Erdogan suggested last year his fate could be linked to that of U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whose extradition Ankara has repeatedly sought to face charges over the coup attempt.

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It’s the EU that demanded refugees would be confined to the islands.

New Refugees In Greece Can Move Freely, Says Court (K.)

New refugee and migrant arrivals in Greece will soon be able to move around the country freely without being restricted to the islands of the eastern Aegean where they arrive from neighboring Turkey, according to a Council of State ruling that emerged on Tuesday and upends a 2016 decision by the Greek asylum service that forced them to remain in so-called hotspots until their asylum application was processed. According to the leaked ruling by the country’s highest administrative court, there are no reasons of public interest or migration policy to justify their geographical restriction to the islands of Lesvos, Chios, Samos, Leros, Kos and Rhodes.

Migration Policy Minister Dimitris Vitsas said he would comment on the ruling once he is informed of it officially. Once the ruling is published, new refugees who apply for asylum will be allowed to reside in any part of the country they choose. The asylum service’s May 2016 decision restricting migrants to the Aegean islands was challenged by the Greek Council for Refugees, an NGO which filed an appeal for its cancellation. “The imposition of restrictions on movement blocked the distribution of those people throughout Greek territory and resulted in their unequal concentration in specific regions and the significant burdening and decline of those regions,” the court said in its reasoning.

However, taking into account the large number of arrivals, the court said the ruling does not have a retroactive effect, which means it will not relate to the refugees who are already languishing in reception centers. The so-called hotspots have been operating beyond capacity and the country is now witnessing a fresh spike in arrivals of often flimsy boats carrying desperate passengers from Turkey.

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Indeed. But plastics are a huge industry.

Recycling Is Not The Answer (G.)

We all know, in theory, that we ought to use less plastic. We’ve all been distressed by the sight of Blue Planet II’s hawksbill turtle entangled in a plastic sack, and felt chastened as we’ve totted up our weekly tally of disposable coffee cups. But still, UK annual plastic waste is now close to 5m tonnes, including enough single-use plastic to fill 1,000 Royal Albert Halls; the government’s planned elimination of “avoidable” plastic waste by 2042 seems a quite dazzling task. It was reported this week that scientists at the University of Portsmouth have accidentally developed a plastic-eating mutant enzyme, and while we wait to see if that will save us all, for one individual the realisation of just how much plastic we use has become an intensely personal matter.

One early evening in mid-2016, Daniel Webb, 36, took a run along the coast near his home in Margate. “It was one of those evenings where the current had brought in lots of debris,” he recalls, because as Webb looked down at the beach from his route along the promenade he noticed a mass of seaweed, tangled with many pieces of plastic. “Old toys, probably 20 years old, bottles that must have been from overseas because they had all kinds of different languages on them, bread tags, which I don’t think had been used for years …” he says. “It was very nostalgic, almost archaeological. And it made me think, as a mid-30s guy, is any of my plastic out there? Had I once dropped a toy in a stream near Wolverhampton, where I’m from, and now it was out in the sea?”

Webb decided that he would start a project to keep all the plastic he used in the course of an entire year. He would not modify his plastic consumption in that time (although he had already given up buying bottled water), and each item would be carefully washed and stored in his spare room.


Daniel Webb in front of his Mural-by-the-Sea. Photo: Ollie Harrop 2018/Everyday Plastic

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Where your plastic ends up. Never again can you say you didn’t know. From now on it’s you didn’t care.

30 Kilos Of Plastic Bags Killed Whale Washed Ashore On Santorini (KTG)

More than 30 kg of plastic, mainly plastic bags, were found in the stomach of the whale that was washed out on the island of Santorini last week. The conducted autopsy showed that the huge mammal died of a gastric shock. The whale was unable to digest or excrete the rubbish through its digestive system. The problem caused peritonitis inflammation in its intestines that led to the animal’s death, local media report. The dead whale brings back to the spotlight the problem of tonnes of plastic landing into the waters, polluting the environment and leading to death of marine life. The body of the 9-meter long sperm whale – or Physeter macrocephalus as the scientific name is – was washed ashore on Akrotiri area on the island of Santorini in the Aegean island group of Cyclades on April 10th. The body weighting more than 7 tones was in condition of advanced sepsis.

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Feb 072017
 
 February 7, 2017  Posted by at 11:08 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  1 Response »


Russell Lee Sharecropper mother teaching children in home, Transylvania, LA. 1939

Trump To Be Barred From UK Parliament Over ‘Racism and Sexism’ (BBG)
Trump’s Wall Street Deregulation ‘The Last Thing We Need’ – Draghi (Ind.)
Meet The Men Who Could Topple Donald Trump (G.)
California Is Not ‘Out Of Control,’ Leaders Tell Trump (R.)
Our Part In The Darkness (Alameddine)
The New York Times Just Doesn’t Understand This Economics Stuff (Worstall)
The Fed’s Mortage-Bond Whale (BBG)
When The Money Supply Dries Up (IM)
Army Corps Of Engineers May Decide On DAPL By Week’s End (BBG)
New Bill Would Block EPA From Regulating Greenhouse Gases
Too Late For Couples Therapy? (DiEM25)
Varoufakis: Tsipras Should Prepare To Break Deal With Greece’s Creditors (FR)
Rare Split On IMF Board Puts Greek Bailout At Risk (MW)
Greece Won’t Meet Fiscal Surplus Targets Set By Europe, IMF Says (BBG)
Third Quake Over 5-Richter Magnitude Rattles Lesbos (K.)

 

 

Really dumb stuff. If only because Trump loves it.

Trump To Be Barred From UK Parliament Over ‘Racism and Sexism’ (BBG)

U.S. President Donald Trump must not be allowed to address the U.K. Parliament during a state visit to Britain, House of Commons Speaker John Bercow said. Prime Minister Theresa May invited Trump to visit the U.K., but there have been calls by lawmakers not to give the president the honor of addressing both houses of Parliament after he introduced a ban on people from some majority-Muslim countries traveling to the U.S. “Before the imposition of the migrant ban I would myself have been strongly opposed to an address by President Trump in Westminster Hall; after the imposition of the migrant ban by President Trump I’m even more strongly opposed,” Bercow told lawmakers on Monday.

He added, “I feel very strongly our opposition to racism and to sexism and our support for equality before the law and an independent judiciary are hugely important considerations in the House of Commons.” Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, and world leaders including Nelson Mandela, Angela Merkel and Pope Benedict XVI have all been invited to speak to members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords. [..] The announcement was greeted with cheers and – a rare event in the House of Commons – applause from the opposition benches. A motion arguing that Trump shouldn’t be invited to speak has been signed by 163 out of Parliament’s 650 members.

Bercow said he has a veto over a speech in Westminster Hall, the oldest part of the Houses of Parliament, and would block one. It would also be a breach with tradition if Trump spoke in the Royal Gallery behind the Lords without his name on the invitation, he said. “An address by a foreign leader to both houses of Parliament is not an automatic right, it is an earned honor,” Bercow said. “There are many precedents for state visits to take place to our country that do not include an address to both houses of Parliament.”

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Meet Mario the kettle.

Trump’s Wall Street Deregulation ‘The Last Thing We Need’ – Draghi (Ind.)

Donald Trump’s roll-back of Wall Street regulation is “very worrisome” and “the last thing we need” the President of the ECB, Mario Draghi, has warned. Giving evidence to the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs on Monday, Mr Draghi was asked about the American President’s assault on the US post-crisis Dodd-Frank legislation, which had curbed the risk-taking of US banks, raised their capital requirements and introduced more safeguards for consumers. “The last thing we need is a relaxation of regulation,” Mr Draghi said. “The fact that we are not seeing….significant financial stability risk is the reward of the action of supervisors…. Nowadays financial intermediaries are strong. The idea of repeating the conditions of before the crisis is very worrisome.”

Mr Draghi added: “If we were to look at historical experience and ask what are the main reasons for the financial crisis starting in 2007 onwards, well, one can disagree [over] whether it was too expansive monetary policy or the dismantling of financial regulation in previous years – but surely we can agree it was a combination”. Last week President Trump signed an executive order to relax Dodd-Frank, prompting warnings that he is preparing the ground for another financial crisis. Phil Angelides, who served as chair of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, branded President Trump’s decision “insane”. “In the wake of the financial crisis, millions of families lost their homes. Millions of people lost their jobs. The economy was wrecked and communities across the country were devastated. Big Wall Street banks admitted wrongdoing and paid tens of billions of dollars in fines. And now, with bankers at his side, President Trump begins to rip apart protections put in place to protect America’s families and our economy,” he said.

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As I said a few dats ago: “More interesting right now is how strongly this is dividing the White House team. Kelly refused to enact some of Bannon’s demands. Tillerson and Mattis are not sitting comfortable either.”

Meet The Men Who Could Topple Donald Trump (G.)

When Trump began putting together his cabinet, liberals and some in the media expressed concern over the number of retired generals he was appointing to top positions. “Trump hires third general, raising concerns about heavy military influence,” blared a headline in the Washington Post during the presidential transition. “I am concerned that so many of the president-elect’s nominees thus far come from the ranks of recently retired military officers,” the Democratic representative Steny Hoyer told the Washington Examiner in December. The fretting over Trump’s generals was always misplaced, not least because the number of retired generals Trump has appointed to top positions in his administration is hardly unprecedented.

Trump nominated the retired Marine generals James Mattis and John Kelly to lead the Department of Defense and Homeland Security, respectively, and tapped the retired army general Mike Flynn to be his national security adviser. When entering office after winning the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama also appointed three retired generals to top positions and few batted an eyelid. But those concerned about Trump’s presidency should be thankful that the generals are there, particularly Mattis and Kelly. By all accounts, they are men of great honor and courage with strong backbones. Kelly led men into battle and lost a son fighting in Afghanistan. Mattis may be the most distinguished and respected Marine officer of his generation, revered for his dedication to his troops and his intellect. I had the honor of spending an hour with him one-on-one last May when he was a fellow at the Hoover Institution. Our conversation was off the record, but make no mistake, this is not a man to be trifled with.

Trump may have actually boxed himself in by picking highly respected generals such as Kelly and Mattis to helm top posts in his administration. Even conservatives who publicly stand by the president latch on to the appointments of Mattis and Kelly as their best evidence that Trump’s presidency will not be as problematic as his temperament and actions sometimes suggest, or some of his more troubling White House advisers portend. But if Mattis or Kelly were to resign in protest, that might change everything. There have already been reports that Mattis and Kelly are less than happy with some of what has gone on in the White House. During the transition, Mattis reportedly clashed with the Trump transition team over key appointments to the defense department. Tensions boiled over when Mattis and Kelly weren’t given sufficient consultation over the recent immigration executive order.

The Democratic representative Seth Moulton, a retired Marine who served under Mattis during the Iraq war, says insiders have informed him that after the executive order fiasco, some top appointments like Mattis began thinking about what would make them leave the administration. “What I’ve heard from behind the scenes,’’ Moulton told the Boston Globe: “What will make you resign? What’s your red line?”

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This is the kind of confrontation the country badly needs. Where everyone has to argue and define their viewpoints.

California Is Not ‘Out Of Control,’ Leaders Tell Trump (R.)

California leaders pushed back on Monday against President Donald Trump’s claim that the state is “out of control,” pointing to its balanced budget and high jobs numbers in the latest dustup between the populist Republican and the progressive state. The state’s top Democrats called Trump cruel and his proposals unconstitutional after the businessman-turned-politician threatened to withhold federal funding from the most populous U.S. state if lawmakers passed a so-called sanctuary bill aimed at protecting undocumented immigrants. “President Trump’s threat to weaponize federal funding is not only unconstitutional but emblematic of the cruelty he seeks to impose on our most vulnerable communities,” state Senate Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, a Democrat from Los Angeles, said in a statement on Monday.

State Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, an L.A.-area Democrat, said the state has the most manufacturing jobs in the nation, and produces a quarter of the country’s food. “If this is what Donald Trump thinks is ‘out of control,’ I’d suggest other states should be more like us,” Rendon said. The latest war of words between Trump and Democratic leaders in California, where voters chose his opponent, Hillary Clinton, two-to-one in November’s election, began Sunday, in an interview between Trump and Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. During the interview, O’Reilly asked Trump about a bill in the state legislature, authored by de Leon, to ban law enforcement agencies in the state from cooperating with immigration officials in most circumstances. Cities who have enacted similar bans are known as sanctuary cities, and de Leon’s bill, if passed and signed into law by Democratic Governor Jerry Brown, would effectively extend such rules to the entire state.

Trump disparaged the bill as ridiculous, saying that sanctuary cities “breed crime.” “We’ll have to, well, de-fund,” Trump said. “We give tremendous amounts of money to California.” Trump went on to say he viewed funding as a weapon. “California in many ways is out of control,” Trump said to O’Reilly. “Obviously the voters agree or otherwise they wouldn’t have voted for me.” Last week, Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from the University of California at Berkeley, where violent protests led to the cancellation of a speech by an editor for the right-wing Breitbart News. But experts said it would be difficult for the President to withhold funds from either the university or the state. Court rulings have limited the power of the president to punish states by withholding funds, and most appropriations come from the Congress and not the executive branch.

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Really excellent. Don’t miss.

Our Part In The Darkness (Alameddine)

Right after the election, my Twitter feed exploded with shock and moans. It seemed that everyone’s favorite phrase was “We are better than this.” I considered the statement so obviously wrong. I understood the convoluted logic of it, the jolt and hurt that would lead someone to type this, but it was not true. We are not better than this. We are this. The man was elected President. Ipso facto, America is this, we are this. I say this not to suggest that we must be blamed, or that someone who did not vote for Donald Trump is just as culpable as one who did. What I keep trying to point out, to friends, to anyone who will listen, is that too few of us are willing to acknowledge responsibility—not necessarily to accept blame, but to stand up and say, “This thing of darkness, I acknowledge mine.”

I remember when the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib came to light. The response was similar. This is not us. Those soldiers were rotten. It began at the top, with George W. Bush, and it filtered down. But we would never do such a thing. Of course, we did do those things, and we kept on doing them over and over, and doing worse. Some objected, but most of us simply moved on, chose to forget. “No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible,” the Polish poet Stanislaw Jerzy Lec once wrote. Trump bans Muslims and we claim that this is un-American, that we are not this. I don’t have to talk up “ancient” history to show that we are. I won’t bring up settler colonialism, genocide, and land theft, or harp on slavery, or internment camps for Japanese-Americans.

I won’t refer to the Page Act banning those deemed “undesirable,” the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, or the Emergency Quota Act. I don’t have to mention the hundreds of thousands of Mexicans deported in the nineteen-thirties, or the thousands of Jews escaping Nazi violence who were turned away. It was F.D.R., not Trump, who claimed that Jewish immigrants could threaten national security. I won’t mention any of this, because this happened so long ago. We can always delude ourselves by saying that America was this but now we are better. Let me just say that in 2010 and 2011, state legislatures passed a hundred and sixty-four anti-immigration laws.

Many were upset when Trump campaigned on a Muslim registry, but I was surprised to find out how few knew that we’d already had one: the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or nseers, implemented on September 11, 2002. From the Atlantic: “It consisted of two ‘special registration’ programs: one that required foreign nationals from certain countries to check in with the government before entering and leaving the country, and another that obliged some foreigners living in the United States to report regularly to immigration officials.” Obama did not suspend the program until 2011. He dismantled it right before he left office.

[..] I was in Lesbos a year ago, helping Syrian refugees. At Moria, the biggest camp on the island, thousands of refugees were being processed every day. The crisis had been ongoing for more than six months. I’d heard that every big N.G.O. had taken a turn at leading the camp, but each one failed because of mismanagement, backstabbing, interagency bickering, governmental interference, what have you. But, as horrid as the situation was in the camp, I thought that it was being well managed, as well as it could be with so many people in and out. I met this unassuming man, a retired Mormon from Utah, who had been volunteering at the camp since the first boats arrived. He spoke no Arabic or Farsi, had no medical training of any kind, none of the identifiable skills, yet both volunteers and refugees sought him out with every conceivable question about what to do. It seems that he had arrived to offer whatever help he could. He slowly began to fill in wherever he was needed. As the N.G.O.s began to wash their hands of the camp, he was needed more and more. When I was there, he was running the damn place. We are this. We can be better.

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“That is just a howling error, to talk about the number of jobs and wages as if they are different things.”

The New York Times Just Doesn’t Understand This Economics Stuff (Worstall)

The Editorial Board of the New York Times tells us all that repealing parts of or all of Dodd Frank will damage the economic recovery. It’s possible to see the glimmerings of a point there, no one does think that if half the banks fall over again then all will be toodle dandy. However, they do manage to betray a terrible ignorance of the basics of economics and wages in the same editorial. Really, this is such a basic point that even Karl Marx was able to understand it: Mr. Trump may believe that ending Dodd-Frank will lead to more jobs by making it easier for businesses to get loans. But even if looser credit would help hiring — a very big if — the main problem in the job market today is not too few jobs, but wages that have been too low for too long. A rollback of Dodd Frank will not help that, and will hurt by forfeiting the stability that has helped the economy come this far.

That is just a howling error, to talk about the number of jobs and wages as if they are different things. They are the same thing–it is full employment which lifts the workers’ wages, nothing more and nothing less. As I say this is such a fundamental concept that even Karl Marx was able to get it right. If we have unemployment, that reserve army of the unemployed, then a capitalist can increase his labour force just by hiring some more of those unemployed. He doesn’t have to tempt anyone in with higher wages, he doesn’t need to pay his own workforce more as profits rise. For anyone gets bolshie he can just hire more of those unemployed people. However, the moment that reserve army is exhausted, the moment that there are no unemployed to hire it all changes. Suddenly, to gain access to more labour temptation must be employed.

It is necessary to tempt labour away from the jobs they are already doing. The capitalists, therefore, are in competition with each other for the profits that can be made by employment. At which point of course wages have to rise. To tempt labour into factory B away from factory A then B must pay more than A (in some form, could be shorter hours, better scheduling, more pay, whatever).And factory B had better raise its own wages for the extant workforce to stop A tempting it away. This is how wages rise over time. The capitalists compete for the profits that can be made by employing labour. And in the absence of unemployment they can only do this by raising wages as productivity rises. This process has been going on some 200 years by now, ever since productivity rises became a general feature of the economy.

And there’s no reason to think that it has stopped nor that it will. That is, contrary to the editorial board f the New York Times, it’s not that wages and jobs are different issues. It’s that wages haven’t risen because there haven’t been enough jobs. And seriously, if your understanding of capitalist and market economics is behind even that of Karl Marx are we sure that you should be writing newspaper articles on the subject of economics?

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If you create an artificial recovery, there will be a price to be eventually.

The Fed’s Mortage-Bond Whale (BBG)

Almost a decade after it all began, the Federal Reserve is finally talking about unwinding its grand experiment in monetary policy. And when it happens, the knock-on effects in the bond market could pose a threat to the U.S. housing recovery. Just how big is hard to quantify. But over the past month, a number of Fed officials have openly discussed the need for the central bank to reduce its bond holdings, which it amassed as part of its unprecedented quantitative easing during and after the financial crisis. The talk has prompted some on Wall Street to suggest the Fed will start its drawdown as soon as this year, which has refocused attention on its $1.75 trillion stash of mortgage-backed securities.

While the Fed also owns Treasuries as part of its $4.45 trillion of assets, its MBS holdings have long been a contentious issue, with some lawmakers criticizing the investments as beyond what’s needed to achieve the central bank’s mandate. Yet because the Fed is now the biggest source of demand for U.S. government-backed mortgage debt and owns a third of the market, any move is likely to boost costs for home buyers. In the past year alone, the Fed bought $387 billion of mortgage bonds just to maintain its holdings. Getting out of the bond-buying business as the economy strengthens could help lift 30-year mortgage rates past 6% within three years, according to Moody’s. Unwinding QE “will be a massive and long-lasting hit” for the mortgage market, said Michael Cloherty at RBC Capital Markets. He expects the Fed to start paring its investments in the fourth quarter and ultimately dispose of all its MBS holdings.

Unlike Treasuries, the Fed rarely owned mortgage-backed securities before the financial crisis. Over the years, its purchases have been key in getting the housing market back on its feet. Along with near-zero interest rates, the demand from the Fed reduced the cost of mortgage debt relative to Treasuries and encouraged banks to extend more loans to consumers. In a roughly two-year span that ended in 2014, the Fed increased its MBS holdings by about $1 trillion, which it has maintained by reinvesting its maturing debt. Since then, 30-year bonds composed of Fannie Mae-backed mortgages have only been about a percentage point higher than the average yield for five- and 10-year Treasuries, data compiled by Bloomberg show. That’s less than the spread during housing boom in 2005 and 2006.

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Don’t know if it’s money supply drying up or debts becoming overwhelming. Not the same thing. But the last paragraphs of the piece are interesting:

When The Money Supply Dries Up (IM)

Whenever the ability to enforce draconian legislation goes into decline, the people of a nation suddenly realise that they’ve been living in fear of a paper tiger. It doesn’t take long before some people choose to defy the system. When they’re seen to succeed, others follow in droves. So, what does this say of the US and its power? Well, as Doug Casey has been known to say, “Countries fall from grace with remarkable speed.” Quite so. On an international level, this means that international leaders will be watching the economic decline of the US closely. Countries such as China and Russia have been loading up on precious metals in preparation for a collapse in fiat currency. In addition, they’ve created their own version of the World Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and have been hard at work inking deals with other nations for international settlement in currencies other than the dollar.

Most people in the world today cannot remember a time before Bretton Woods, yet they may soon witness the Bretton Woods agreement becoming a dead duck. But, if we extend this premise, we also should be questioning the other constructs of the postwar period that have become dinosaurs. What of the United Nations? This organisation was once meant to be a body for arbitration and world planning, but has in latter decades become a quagmire of bickering and gainsaying—with its decisions rarely being adopted by the nations in question. And yet the US alone pays some $8 billion annually to keep the UN afloat. Surely, when the world at large ceases its willingness to carry further US debt, the US government will jettison the expense for the UN before it cuts either its military spending or its entitlement programmes.

Similarly, NATO, which requires $2.8 billion annually (with only five of its 28 members currently meeting the recommended payments) would experience a similar fate. With the above entities heading south, the Wolfowitz Doctrine, which has since 1992 been the basis of US aggression policy, would become unachievable. In addition to the decline or cessation of the above international adventurism, enforcement of revenue pursuit in the guise of FATCA and OECD schemes would equally suffer from a loss of funding. It would not be a question of whether the empire still wished to squeeze the lemon more than ever before—it would. But once the funds to do so dried up, the US and EU would find themselves in the situation that we currently observe in Venezuela: The money to pay for the enforcement is simply not there anymore.

The decline would begin with bounced cheques, followed by massive layoffs in the enforcement departments, followed by a decline in receipts, necessitating further layoffs, and continuing in a downward spiral. At present, countless people live in fear of the present empires and their ever-increasing efforts at usurpation. However, as history shows, once debt has reached its nadir and begins its rapid fall, so does the empire’s ability to enforce draconian confiscations.

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Army vs veterans?!

Army Corps Of Engineers May Decide On DAPL By Week’s End (BBG)

The U.S. Army may decide by week’s end whether to approve construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline across North Dakota’s Lake Oahe and lands claimed sacred by Sioux Indian tribes. Justice Department lawyer Matthew Marinelli outlined the planned timeline for the Army’s decision to a federal judge in Washington hearing a three-way dispute over the planned path of the Energy Transfer Partners LP-led project. Marinelli didn’t say which way the decision might go. President Donald Trump last month issued a memorandum urging the Army Corps of Engineers to expedite its review of the conduit’s path after the federal agency put the brakes on ETP’s nearly complete $3.8 billion, 1,172-mile conduit for shunting crude from northwestern North Dakota to a Patoka, Illinois, distribution center last year amid protests raised by environmental groups and the Sioux.

[..] While U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, and then a federal appeals court, declined to grant the tribes’ request for an order halting the project, the corps stopped construction anyway, stating it was reconsidering whether to issue easements required for tunneling under the lake bed. Jan Hasselman, lead lawyer for the suing Sioux tribes, told the judge that because the Army Corps had already committed to an environmental impact review of the lake crossing, any easement granted before that analysis is complete “would be unlawful.” The Corps turned the decision to the U.S. Army. The tribes will likely file a second bid to halt the project, citing environmental impact concerns, if the pipeline project gets a U.S. government go-ahead, Hasselman said.

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Now use that to get a deal that actually achieves something.

New Bill Would Block EPA From Regulating Greenhouse Gases (EW)

Republican lawmakers have proposed a bill to curtail the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to address climate change. The “Stopping EPA Overreach Act of 2017” (HR637) would amend the Clean Air Act so that: “The term ‘air pollutant’ does not include carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, or sulfur hexafluoride.” The bill was introduced by Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) and has already racked up 114 Republican co-sponsors. Palmer is a climate denier who once said that temperature data used to measure global climate change have been “falsified” and manipulated.

Palmer’s latest proposal would nullify the EPA’s regulation of carbon pollution, stating that “no federal agency has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under current law” and “no attempt to regulate greenhouse gases should be undertaken without further Congressional action.” Liz Perera, climate policy director at the Sierra Club, told Huffington Post that the resolution would make it nearly impossible for the federal government to fight climate change. “This is the legislative equivalent of trying to ban fire trucks while your house is burning,” she said, adding its sponsors “should be embarrassed for so blatantly ignoring reality and ashamed of themselves for so recklessly endangering our communities.”

[..] Fortunately, the bill does not seem to have any legs. David Doniger, a senior attorney for Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate and clean air program told The Guardian that HR637 does not have much of a chance breaking through a Senate filibuster as Democrats would have near-universal opposition to it and even some moderate Republican Senators would vote against it as well.

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Yes. Annul the wedding. Before someone gets hurt.

Too Late For Couples Therapy? (DiEM25)

For the past seven years, Greece has been stuck in an abusive marriage with its European partners. Of course, she has not been the perfect partner, but who has? No one deserves violence. No one deserves abuse. Everyone deserves hope, and not the delusional “you will be done by 2060, if you can maintain the hilariously unsustainable 3.5% primary budget surplus” kind of hope offered by Mr Schäuble. The hypocrisy and pseudo-morality of European lenders and the IMF is painful. Germany’s “no debt-reduction” stance is particularly exasperating, when that very same country has experienced both the economic, social and political disaster that vindictive, self-righteous hardheadedness can lead to after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, as well as the miraculous quality of debt-reduction when its own debt was cut by half (!) at the London Debt Agreement of 1953.

The more years pass, the closer Greece and the rest of Europe edge from a post-modern 1919 to a post-modern 1933. And now, with news of Greece’s three-week window to resolve its next instalment before economically imploding – a piece of news which some media outlets appeared surprised about, bless them – many of us cannot help but wonder: when will we get serious about resolving this? The obvious answer is: when there is political will for a resolution. The only place where this seems to be the case is the nation-patient itself. Two summers ago, under remarkable socio-economic pressure, amid capital-controls and an overwhelmingly pro-EU media landscape, 62% of Greeks came out and refused the terms of a third bailout. Anyone with half-an-understanding of economics and finance seems to agree that the current approach to Greek debt is unsustainable economically, socially and politically: all in all, a disaster.

Even the master chef of the entire travesty, the IMF, has come out and admitted that neo-liberalism and austerity simply do not work. So what are we waiting for? Why are millions of Europeans still suffering under utterly misguided political and economic dogmas? Quite simply because to admit defeat at this point would mark the end of a number of powerful careers. Having poisoned European voters against the lazy PIIGS, it would be nothing short of political suicide to turn around and give in to Greek demands. When would be the next electoral victory in Europe for austerity’s architects if it was revealed that the years of financial and social suffering was a pointless self-inflicted wound with only negative economic results?

So it is becoming increasingly obvious that Greece has to work its own way out of this mess. At this stage, that means an immediate halt of repayments to lenders; a stance that will either force its partners to a vital debt-reduction, or will lead the country to an exit from the Euro. With Germany (in clear breach of EU rules) stubbornly maintaining its 9% budget surplus and refusing to increase imports, Europe is at an impasse, and no one is hurt more by this than Greece. Although the former outcome would be preferred – avoiding to rock the European boat at a time of major global instability is a major plus – the latter is still preferable to the status quo.

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Translation of Greek article by Varoufakis I posted about earlier.

Varoufakis: Tsipras Should Prepare To Break Deal With Greece’s Creditors (FR)

Through a recent article at the Efimerida ton Syntakton (Newspaper of Editors), the former Minister of Finance of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis, referred to Tsipras retreat against Greece’s creditors and called him to prepare seriously this time, to break the destructive continuous agreements. As Varoufakis wrote among other things: The night of the Greek referendum, I tried hard to explain to the Greek PM that the submission of Greece to the third memorandum was Schäuble’s real plan (not Grexit). In reality, there was no hope that the 3rd toxic “program” for Greece would be rationalized progressively through the support of the European Commission to Athens. Meaning, there was no hope that IMF’s austerity and anti-social measures could be softened.

The fact that Moscovici, Juncker, Sapin and others made such promises, is no excuse because the Greek government knew since May 2015 that these people know how to tell lies, or, they are unable to keep their promises when they don’t lie. Suddenly, the Schäuble-IMF-ECB attacked on Greece, demanding exhausting measures, while Merkel-Hollande-Commission didn’t do anything. Tsipras then retreated for one more time in order to “save” Greece. This was Schäuble’s plan. With his stance, Tsipras sank Podemos, made an approach with the collapsing (ethically and politically) Social Democracy, disappointed the progressive Europeans. And all these happened at the same time where nationalism triumphs everywhere.

Tsipras promises, one more time, that he will not retreat (this time!) by legislating new austerity even after 2018. If he means it, I remind him what we had agreed that is necessary and which – even today – is the only thing that may prevent the worst things to come. Prepare for unilateral restructuring of Greek bonds held by the ECB, which must be repaid in July (and after). Prepare the electronic system of transactions through Taxisnet which I had designed, I had started building it and even announced it to the new Minister of Finance, Euclid Tsakalotos, when I delivered the Ministry. Therefore, if indeed the Greek PM means it this time that he will not retreat, he should prepare for breaking the deal with the creditors, so that to prevent it. The design of a parallel system for payments is ready since 2014, as he knows.

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Make it stop!

Rare Split On IMF Board Puts Greek Bailout At Risk (MW)

Some members of the IMF are growing concerned with the terms of Greece’s bailout program, fueling fears the fund might pull out of the much-needed rescue plan for the country. The IMF’s annual review of the Greek economy published on Tuesday revealed a rare split among its board members, showing they are in disagreement over the austerity measures imposed on Athens and over the country’s huge debt burden. The report said that “most” of the 24 IMF executive directors agreed Greece is on track to reach a fiscal surplus of 1.5% of GDP. It said Athens does “not require further fiscal consolidation at this time, given the impressive adjustment to date.” However, some of the board members argued that Greece still needs to bring the surplus up to 3.5%, as agreed in the last bailout in 2015.

“Most Executive Directors agreed with the thrust of the staff appraisal, while some Directors had different views on the fiscal path and debt sustainability,” the IMF said in the assessment. The IMF usually keeps its deliberations confidential, so any differences on the board are rarely exposed to the public. The yield on 10-year Greek government debt surged 26 basis points after the report on Tuesday to 7.925%, according to electronic trading platform Tradeweb. Economists consider borrowing costs above 7% unsustainable in the long term.

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This is getting sadistic.

Greece Won’t Meet Fiscal Surplus Targets Set By Europe, IMF Says (BBG)

Greece is on track to fall short of budget-surplus targets set under a bailout by the nation’s euro-zone creditors, the IMF said. Greece’s primary budget surplus will rise to 1.5% over the long run from about 1% last year, amid a modest recovery, the IMF said Monday after executive directors met to discuss the fund’s annual assessment of the nation’s economy. Still, the projected surplus falls short of the 3.1% forecast by the country’s European creditors. The fund reiterated its view that Greece’s debt is unsustainable. Most of the executive directors don’t believe the economy needs more fiscal consolidation, the IMF said. The IMF has said it would consider giving Greece a new loan to supplement the 86 billion euros ($92 billion) it’s receiving from euro-area countries, but only if the nation’s debt-reduction plans are credible.

Greece’s European creditors also want the IMF to sign off before disbursing the next tranche of the euro-zone bailout. Greece’s government debt will reach 275% of its gross domestic product by 2060, when its financing needs will represent 62% of GDP, the IMF said in a draft staff report obtained by Bloomberg last month. Public debt will reach 181% of GDP this year, the IMF projected Monday. Greece’s economy is expected to grow 2.7% this year, up from 0.4% in 2016, the fund said. However, long-run growth is expected to slip to about 1%, the IMF predicts. The IMF’s assumptions aren’t based in reality and don’t take into account the reform of Greece’s public finances, according to a European Union official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions are sensitive.

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Yeah, sure, add some more crap. For some reason this makes me think of George Clinton: “Do Fries Come With That Shake?”

Third Quake Over 5-Richter Magnitude Rattles Lesbos (K.)

Seismologists in Greece are keeping a close eye on activity in the eastern Aegean, as a third quake in 24 hours measuring above 5 Richter rattled the area in the early hours of Tuesday. The tremor hit at 4.24 a.m. and measured 5.3 on the Richter scale, according to the Geodynamic Institute in Athens, with the epicenter located 15 kilometers north of Lesvos. With a depth of just 10 kilometers, the quake was felt quite strongly on the Greek islands of Lesvos and Chios. Seismologist Efthimios Lekkas on Monday said two tremors – with a magnitude of 5.1 and 5.3 respectively – were not linked to the North Anatolian Fault Line, the source of powerful quakes in the past.

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Apr 052016
 


DPC Surf Avenue, Coney Island, NY 1903

Panama Bombshell Spells Demise Of Shadow Finance, And Privacy (AEP)
Tax Havens Don’t Need To Be Reformed. They Should Be Outlawed (Brooks)
Thousands Protest Demanding Icelandic PM’s Resignation (AFP)
German Banks Enmeshed In Panama Papers Leak (DW)
Data From Panama Law Firm Came From Employee, Not Hackers (Rijock)
Panama Papers Cause Guardian to Collapse into Self-Parody (OG)
China State Paper Sees ‘Powerful Force’ Behind Panama Leak (BBG)
The Forces of Globalization Are Sputtering (WSJ)
China Hard Landing Could Trigger Global Market Bloodbath: IMF (Tel.)
Lagarde Says Risks to Weak Global Recovery Are Increasing (BBG)
Subprime Housing Risks Raise Red Flags In China (WSJ)
Bond Market ‘Exhausted’ as Kuroda Stimulus Enters Fourth Year (BBG)
Sperm Whales Found Full of Car Parts and Plastics (NatGeo)
Turkey: The Business Of Refugee Smuggling & Sex Trafficking (ZH)
Italy Pleads For Greek-Style Push To Return Its Migrants (FT)
So The Greece Deportations Are Going ‘Smoothly’? Take A Closer Look (G.)

Ambrose bets on a substantial fall-out.

Panama Bombshell Spells Demise Of Shadow Finance, And Privacy (AEP)

The secret world of offshore banks and money-laundering has been under the microscope ever since the financial crisis. Now it is the turn of lawyers, registrars, and the hidden network of facilitators. The treasure trove of 11.5m documents leaked – or more precisely stolen – from the Panama law firm Mossack Fonseca lifts the lid on the extraordinary practices of the global elites, and on the alleged services of off-shore legal cabinets for terrorist organisations, drug cartels, sanctions busting, and front companies of all kinds. The files on 213,000 firms first slipped to the Suddeutsche Zeitung and then shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) is the biggest data leak in history. It will have long-lasting ramifications. The avalanche of allegations has barely begun.

The red-hot dossier on US citizens has not even been released. Yet the scandal has already triggered a string of criminal investigations around the world, kicking off in Australia and New Zealand within hours. Germany’s vice-chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said the files go far beyond issues of tax evasion, touching on vital national interests and the rule of law. “It is about organized crime, evasion of UN sanctions, and terrorist finance,” he said. “This shadow economy is a risk for global security. We must ban the anonymous letterbox companies. The international community must ostracize any country that allows these dirty dealings,” said Mr Gabriel. Mossack Fonseca’s clients include 23 people under sanctions for helping North Korea, Russia, Iran, Syria, and Zimbabwe. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that 33 of those named are on the US black list for terrorism.

Panama has cornered the trade in anonymous shell companies that allow owners to disguise their identity and carry out global operations secretly. While this may be a legitimate for those in the limelight trying to protect their privacy or to safeguard sensitive corporate dealings, many use it to avoid detection for money-laundering, tax avoidance, or predatory behaviour. The country has pushed through reforms in a bid to clear its name and to get off the OECD’s ‘grey list’ of uncooperative tax havens, but has clearly not yet done enough. “Panama has an extremely aggressive and obstructive attitude. Dialogue has broken down,” said Pascal Saint-Amans, the OECD’s tax chief. “It is the last financial centre that has refused to implement global standards of fiscal transparency. There has been very strong pressure from the law firms on the Panamanian government.”

Mr Saint-Amans said offshore secrecy in on the wane in most of the world, but becoming more concentrated in Panama. “The majority of undeclared clients are coming clean in other locations, but those who don’t are going to Panama,” he said.

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Thing is, that’s been obvious for ages.

Tax Havens Don’t Need To Be Reformed. They Should Be Outlawed (Brooks)

The Panama Papers are not really about a central American state. They are a glimpse through a Panamanian keyhole of an orgy of tax evasion, money laundering and kleptocracy – amid the legitimate financial planning – hosted by the world’s tax havens. Seven years after world leaders came together at a post-financial crisis G20 summit in London and committed to end tax haven abuse, it is clear from these papers that no such end is in sight. The good intentions have translated into a blizzard of international agreements on sharing information, amnesties through which tax evaders can come clean, and prosecution drives of variable quality to nail the cheats. All are demonstrably inadequate. Information will not, and cannot, be exchanged to any meaningful extent by countries and territories whose “offer” is that they don’t ask for it or will turn a blind eye to being deceived.

Amnesties teach rich tax evaders that, even if they are caught, they will get off far more lightly than somebody overclaiming a few pounds in social security benefits. Criminal pursuit of offenders, certainly in the UK, is little more than a joke. One prosecution from 1,000 tax evaders using HSBC’s Swiss accounts is the now infamously poor punchline. Here, the Panama Papers lay bare another national disgrace: Britain’s longstanding role at the centre of the offshore web. More than half of the 200,000 secret companies set up by the Panama lawyers Mossack Fonseca were registered in the British Virgin Islands, where details of company ownership don’t have to be filed with the authorities, never mind be made public. While this week’s leak is on an unprecedented scale, it exposes a historic as well as current failing.

As the British empire faded away after the second world war and territories such as the British Virgin Islands drifted into the constitutional limbo of semi-independence, they were encouraged to develop financial services as a way of sustaining precarious economies. If this meant a few of the world’s wealthier people paid a little less tax, thought successive British governments, it was a price worth paying for not having to support the territories. Late 20th-century financial liberalisation turned this already complacent calculation into something more lethal. With fortunes sloshing freely across borders, tax havens became voracious parasites on the world economy, most seriously sucking the life out of some of its poorer parts. All the great national robbers of recent decades, such as Nigeria’s Sani Abacha, have used tax haven companies, including British Virgin Islands ones, as the getaway cars.

Despite this long trail of evidence, leading economies refuse to address the problem at its source. The UK has great leverage over its 17 overseas territories and crown dependencies, all of which depend on the mother country for security and happily trade off its legal system. At a stroke our government could shut down the British Virgin Islands corporate system, for example. But under influence from a banking system that thrives on the legal benefits of offshore centres such as the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands, it takes a more relaxed view. Asked recently about whether Britain’s overseas territories should publish registers of beneficial owners of their companies, foreign office minister James Duddridge replied that these were a “direction, rather than an ultimate destination”. The Panama Papers should expose this indifference for the great scandal that it is.

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Gone tomorrow.

Thousands Protest Demanding Icelandic PM’s Resignation (AFP)

Thousands of Icelanders took to the streets late Monday calling for their prime minister’s resignation after leaked tax documents dubbed the “Panama Papers” prompted allegations that he and his wife used an offshore firm to hide million-dollar investments. Protesters filled the square outside Iceland’s parliament in Reykjavik, footage on public television RUV showed, answering a call from opposition parties to demonstrate against Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson. Police provided no estimate of the size of the crowd, but said the demonstrators outnumbered the thousands who in 2009 brought down the right-wing government over its responsibility in Iceland’s 2008 banking collapse.

“Take responsibility” and “Where is the new constitution?” read some of the signs carried by demonstrators on Monday, referring to the country’s new charter drawn up after the 2009 political crisis and which has since been held up in parliament. Financial records published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists showed that Gunnlaugsson, 41, and his wife Anna Sigurlaug Palsdottir bought the offshore company Wintris Inc. in the British Virgin Islands in December 2007. The company was intended to manage Palsdottir’s inheritance from her wealthy businessman father, the amount of which has not been disclosed. Gunnlaugsson transferred his 50% stake to his wife at the end of 2009, for the symbolic sum of one dollar.

But when he was elected a member of parliament for the first time in April 2009 as a member of the centre-right Progressive Party, he neglected to mention the stake in his declaration of shareholdings, as required by law. Gunnlaugsson has meanwhile denied any wrongdoing or tax evasion and insisted Monday he would not step down. He said he never hid any money abroad and that his wife paid all her taxes on the company in Iceland. A motion of no-confidence was presented to parliament by the opposition, and will be submitted to a vote at an as yet undetermined date. Almost 28,000 Icelanders, in a country of just 320,000 inhabitants, have also signed a petition demanding his resignation.

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All global banks are involved.

German Banks Enmeshed In Panama Papers Leak (DW)

The two German financial institutions specifically mentioned in media reports as having helped high-ranking politicians, celebrities and sports stars hide their money abroad were Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest lender, and the Hamburg-based Berenberg bank. The allegations were part of the so-called Panama Papers, a massive trove of leaked emails, PDFs and other records that expose a world of letterbox companies and business arrangements that until recently had been largely hidden from public view. The Panama Papers were first obtained by reporters at the German daily “Süddeutsche Zeitung,” and on Sunday, the head of the paper’s investigative unit suggested to a German TV host that every bank in Germany was somehow implicated.

“If you were to ask me which German bank hadn’t helped its customers go to Mossack Fonseca, I would have to think long and hard to see if a single one came to mind,” said Georg Mascolo, referring to the Panama-based law firm that is at the center of the leaks because it’s where the documents originated. Mascolo proceeded to single out Deutsche Bank and Berenberg bank, the latter of which he said had “especially distinguished itself.” Both institutions promptly denied any wrongdoing. Speaking to the news agency DPA, a spokesman for Berenberg’s Swiss subsidiary insisted there was nothing inherently illegal about dealing with offshore companies. “This is, of course, done in line with legal regulations, but it does require greater due diligence on the part of the banks,” he said, noting that such accounts were “permanently monitored.”

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Sort of funny. Note that this story had been playing out for a few years already.

Data From Panama Law Firm Came From Employee, Not Hackers (Rijock)

Now it’s Panama Leaks: massive amounts of customer data stored on the computers of the country’s principal provider of corporations, Mossack Fonseca, have been stolen and delivered to foreign journalists, who reportedly are planning on releasing it as early as Monday. The data is believed to contain information on Panama companies, and bank accounts, held by foreign government officials, other politically exposed persons (PEPs) and organized crime syndicates. The public release of this information could result in widespread criminal charges against corrupt heads of state and other officials who have banked the proceeds of illegal bribes and kickbacks they have received.

There will be special attention paid to individuals who accepted money from American and British firms to allow them to participate in lucrative business arrangements, as the US and UK both strictly enforce their foreign corruption laws. Mossack Fonseca, already reeling being implicated in a major corruption case in Brazil, in which present or former government officials at the highest level are under criminal investigation, has also been in the news lately due to allegations that senior officials in Malta hold secret banks accounts in Panama, facilitated by the Mossack firm. Investigative reporters are allegedly already to publish the names, and sordid details, of a large number of corrupt PEPs. Some television media are reportedly planning on running stories early this week.

Panama insiders have said that the source of the information was not, as Mossack is reporting, an intrusion by hackers, but an inside job. A former female employee, with access to the data, was allegedly involved in an intimate relationship with a Mossack name partner. The relationship ended badly some time ago, and the employee exacted her revenge by going public with Mossack client lists and related data. The impact of this leak cannot be underestimated; it will seriously undermine global confidence in the ability of Panamanian financial service providers to assist corrupt government officials, and career criminals in hiding their ill-gotten gains, which is the major segment of the client base in such firms. It is too early to know whether dirty money will now seek a different opaque haven to be hidden.

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To further illustrate the point I made yesterday.

Panama Papers Cause Guardian to Collapse into Self-Parody (OG)

You’d be forgiven for thinking, given the above picture, that the Panama Papers had something to do with Vladimir Putin. Maybe he was a kingpin of the whole thing. Maybe he was, at least, among the 12 world leaders implicated in various shady financial practices – along with Petro Poroshenko, the saviour of Ukrainian democracy, and the King of Saudi Arabia (dad of the recent Légion d’Honneur winner). Luke Harding, a bastion of ethical journalism (and not at all a paranoid lunatic), has churned out 2 articles totaling over 5000 words, each using the word “Putin”, almost as often as they use the phrases “allegedly”, “speculation suggests”, “has been described as” and “may have been”.

Neither of his articles mentions by name any of the 12 world leaders, past and present, actually identified in the documents, nor do they mention David Cameron’s dad, who is also in there. No, they focus on a cellist friend of Putin’s, talk about his daughter’s marriage, and include an awful lot of diagrams with big arrows that point at pictures of…Vladimir Putin. This is, apparently, all evidence of…something …I’m not sure what, but it will probably be discussed at length in the “book” Luke Harding is probably planning to publish in a couple of weeks. That’s if the NSA don’t delete it all while he’s typing. The only important, or even true, phrase Harding uses appears at the very top of this article:

…the president’s name does not appear in any of the records…

That’s a minor detail of course, I mean, they have a video: “How to hide $1 billion”. The title screen is, you guessed it, a photo of Putin. Presumably because he is SO GOOD at hiding his billions that, unlike Petro Poroshenko and David Cameron’s dad:

…the president’s name does not appear in any of the records…

So there you go. The Guardian falls into self parody, pasting up a massive picture, a misleading headline and 5000 words (that Harding presumably copied from someone else), at the merest suggestion of a tenuous connection to the Russian president. It’s a bit odd, really.

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While scrambling to delete any and all references. But still, they do have a point. It’s not as if something financed by Soros is even remotely neutral.

China State Paper Sees ‘Powerful Force’ Behind Panama Leak (BBG)

A “powerful force is behind” the leak of more than 11 million documents detailing the offshore accounts of some of the world’s wealthiest people, and the U.S. government stands to gain the most from the revelations, a state-run Chinese newspaper said. An editorial published by the Global Times newspaper Tuesday provided China’s first official reaction to investigations by more than 100 news organizations, detailing overseas holdings of about 140 politicians, public officials and family members, including President Xi Jinping’s brother-in-law. The editorial, which focused on Russian President Vladimir Putin and didn’t mention any of the Chinese examples, assessed the “eye-catching” revelations as a salvo in an East-West ideological struggle, echoing the Kremlin’s response.

“The Western media has taken control of the interpretation each time there has been such a document dump, and Washington has demonstrated particular influence in it,” said the Global Times, which is published by the Communist Party’s flagship People’s Daily. “Information that is negative to the U.S. can always be minimized, while exposure of non-Western leaders, such as Putin, can get extra spin.” The release of the so-called Panama Papers come at an embarrassing time for Xi, who’s requiring party members to give authorities more information about their family wealth to institutionalize his more than three-year-old war on graft. Mentions of the documents were widely scrubbed from China’s heavily censored Internet and news outlets, which have come under increased pressure from Xi to toe the party line.

Links shared on Tencent Holdings’s WeChat messaging service said the “page could not be found.” Attempts to search “Panama Papers” on Baidu’s Google-like search engine returned only a one-line warning that “search results may not comply with relevant laws or regulations.” The Global Times editorial was published only in English.

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Those forces are waiting for TTP and TTiP to be ratified.

The Forces of Globalization Are Sputtering (WSJ)

On the campaign trail, presidential candidates in both parties depict an America under siege from cheap imports, job-stealing globalization or waves of illegal immigration. The reality since the global recession is far more complicated. Across a range of measures, the forces that once pointed to an inexorable internationalization of the world’s economy have slowed, stuttered or swung into reverse. The slowdown points to deeper economic challenges far different from the political alarms. Much of the world is struggling with a sluggishness that is clouding the U.S. outlook, driven by aging demographics, slumping labor productivity and policy makers lacking the tools or the will to pump more life into the global economy. Whatever the causes, signs abound that the forces of globalization have slowed.

Manufacturing jobs in the U.S. declined every year from 1998 to 2009, regardless of whether the overall economy was expanding or in recession. But over the past six years, manufacturing employment has edged up. It’s hardly a renaissance—the U.S. has regained about 1 million manufacturing jobs after losing 8 million since the late 1970s—but it’s a halt to the decline. The U.S. share of global exports fell sharply, especially from 1998 to 2004, but has held steady over the past 12 years at roughly 8.5%. There’s even evidence the trend of illegal immigration in the 1990s and 2000s, when millions of Mexicans crossed the border for the U.S., has stalled or gone into reverse, despite frequent alarms raised by Republican front-runner Donald Trump. The Pew Research Center estimates that since 2007, the flow of illegal immigrants returning to Mexico has been larger than the number entering the U.S.

“The globalization process, which was firing on all cylinders during the 2000s, has stalled over the past six or seven years,” said Benjamin Mandel, global strategist at J.P. Morgan Asset Management and a former New York Fed economist. The trend isn’t specific to the U.S. Globalization has sputtered around the world. From 1992 to 2008, trade climbed to about 30% of total world economic output, from 20%. That climb has halted, and remains at about 30% of GDP in the latest World Bank estimates. If the historical trend between trade growth and GDP growth had continued, global trade would be $1.8 trillion larger, according to estimates from Eric Lascelles, chief U.S. economist of RBC Asset Management. That’s equivalent to an economy the size of Canada or Russia disappearing from global output.

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From the IMF research department.

China Hard Landing Could Trigger Global Market Bloodbath: IMF (Tel.)

Jitters over the health of the Chinese economy could trigger a bloodbath on financial markets if a hard landing materialises, the IMF has warned. The IMF said policy choices in the world’s second largest economy would also have “increasing implications for global financial stability” in the coming years as the country opens up its bond and equity markets. The fund said emerging market economies such as China, India, Brazil and Russia had driven more than half of global growth over the past 15 years. Stronger trade ties and financial linkages meant spillovers from these countries had become “the norm, not the exception”, increasing the risk that future shocks could send powerful reverberations around the globe. The IMF calculated that emerging market spillovers now accounted for a third of the fluctuations seen in equity and currency markets in advanced nations.

Highlighting last summer’s massive stock market sell-off after China devalued its currency, the IMF noted that Chinese growth had an “increasing” and “significant” impact on global equity prices. “The impact of shocks to China’s fundamentals on global financial markets is expected to grow stronger and wider over time,” the Fund said in a pre-released chapter of its Financial Stability report. “Clear and timely communication of its policy decisions, transparency about its policy goals, and strategies consistent with achieving them will, therefore, be essential to ensure against volatile market reactions, which may have broader repercussions.” The IMF also urged policymakers to do more to rein in corporate debt, which it has previously said could see a wave of defaults as the US hikes interest rates.

“Fire sales” of assets by money managers could also amplify emerging market spillovers in a downturn, if mutual funds rushed to sell illiquid assets, the IMF warned. Financial “spillbacks” triggered by policy actions in advanced economies such as tighter monetary policy in the US underscored “the importance of enhanced international macroeconomic and macroprudential policy co-operation”, the IMF said. The Fund issued a separate warning on the $24 trillion life insurance sector. It said herding behaviour created systemic risks that could make firms “too many to fail”. The IMF said the low interest rate environment had encouraged many firms to increase risk taking in order to “resurrect their fortunes”, particularly among smaller and less capitalised firms. “Jointly firms can propagate shocks, if they act similarly,” the IMF said. “They may be ‘too many to fail’,” it warned.

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From the other IMF orifice. She has absolutely nothing. Zilch. Not a word she utters has any meaning.

Lagarde Says Risks to Weak Global Recovery Are Increasing (BBG)

The global recovery is facing growing risks, and frustration with inequality is increasing the lure of protectionism, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said. The world economy’s outlook has dimmed over the last six months, exacerbated by China’s slowdown, lower commodity prices and the risk of financial tightening in many countries, Lagarde said Tuesday in the prepared text of a speech in Frankfurt. The expected passing of the “growth baton” from emerging markets to advanced economies hasn’t occurred, she added. Lagarde, fresh from winning a new five-year term at the fund’s helm, used the opportunity to caution against being drawn to the kinds of forces that have fueled the populism-driven candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election.

While inequality has been declining on a global scale, the perception remains that “the cards are stacked against the common man – and woman – in favor of elites,” said Lagarde, 60. “To some, the answer is to look inward, to somehow unwind these linkages, to close borders and retreat into protectionism,” she said, without naming any politicians. “As history has told us – time and again – this would be a tragic course.” Lagarde’s comments on the global economy add to signs that the IMF will downgrade its growth forecast when it releases its updated World Economic Outlook on April 12. Finance ministers and central bankers from the fund’s 188 member nations will gather later that week in Washington for the IMF’s spring meetings. “The good news is that the recovery continues; we have growth; we are not in a crisis,” Lagarde said. “The not-so-good news is that the recovery remains too slow, too fragile, and risks to its durability are increasing.”

Lagarde said U.S. growth is flat due partly to the strong dollar, while low investment and high unemployment are weighing on growth in the euro zone. Growth and inflation in Japan have been weaker than expected, she added. China’s transition to a more sustainable economic model involves slower growth, Lagarde said, adding that downturns in Brazil and Russia have been worse than expected and Middle Eastern nations have been hit hard by the decline in oil prices. “Certainly, we have made much progress since the great financial crisis,” Lagarde said. “But because growth has been too low for too long, too many people are simply not feeling it.” The persistent low growth can be “self-reinforcing,” because of negative effects on potential output that can be hard to reverse, she said.

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Beijing is deliberately creating an ever bigger housing bubble. Scary.

Subprime Housing Risks Raise Red Flags In China (WSJ)

China’s efforts to tackle a glut of vacant housing by spurring home lending have triggered a bigger problem: A surge in risky subprime-style loans that is generating alarm among regulators. Home buyers in China normally put down a third of the cost of a new property upfront. But a rapid rise in buyers borrowing for their down payments – an echo of the easy credit that cratered the U.S. housing market and sparked the financial crisis – has prompted authorities to clamp down. Peer-to-peer lenders, who raise money from investors and then lend it out at higher interest rates, made 924 million yuan ($143 million) in down-payment loans in January, more than three times the amount made in July, according to Shanghai-based consultancy Yingcan.

A senior banking executive at one of China’s top four state-owned banks said down-payment loans directly contributed to a recent run-up in housing prices in big cities. “It’s a risky practice that should be contained,” he said. Officials at various levels of government are now stepping on the brakes. The central bank and the housing ministry last month started to crack down on loans enticing home-buyers with “zero-down-payment” slogans. [..] Beijing began easing credit in late 2014 to help cities fill empty apartments — a legacy of a housing-construction boom fueled by a decade of urban population growth and cheap credit. As companies and local governments sag under crippling debt, authorities have seen room for more borrowing among households and have tried to widen the pool of home buyers.

But despite a rise in down-payment loans and lower mortgage barriers for groups such as rural migrant workers, it has proven hard to unleash buying in the right places. Instead, the easing measures and new incentives fed a property frenzy in China’s megacities, with buyers driven by fear of being left behind in a market increasingly out of reach. Shenzhen, where housing prices have soared 57% since last year, according to official data, has tightened down-payment requirements. So has Shanghai, where housing loans more than tripled in January compared with a year earlier. Data on loans used to finance down payments is sketchy, as such financing is a relatively new business. In addition, developers sometimes offer such loans, and banks offer mortgage applicants loans for renovations, taxes or travel that can be channeled toward the down payment, according to property agents. Depending on the housing market, agents say, these loans can attract annual interest rates of up to 24%.

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Until there’s nothing left.

Bond Market ‘Exhausted’ as Kuroda Stimulus Enters Fourth Year (BBG)

Three years since Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda embarked on an unprecedented monetary experiment, yields continue to test new lows even as concern grows that his policies will cripple the world’s second-biggest bond market. Yields have tumbled below zero on maturities up to a decade following the central bank’s surprise decision this year to implement negative interest rates, after unleashing two rounds of quantitative easing since April 4, 2013. As the BOJ’s bond holdings have swelled to one-third of total debt outstanding, the market has begun to seize up amid a dearth of liquidity, causing volatility to soar. Even so, inflation – and inflationary expectations – remain far from Kuroda’s 2% target.

That’s why an overwhelming majority of analysts predict the BOJ will expand stimulus again by July, even while some warn that the technical limits to the asset-purchase program are rapidly approaching. In the BOJ’s latest survey of bond market participants, 41% rated market functioning as “low.” Kuroda said Tuesday the central bank can lower the deposit rate from the current minus 0.1% if needed, and he doesn’t think negative rates will make asset purchases difficult. “The bond market is becoming increasingly exhausted, and increasingly volatile,” said Shuichi Ohsaki at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in Tokyo. “It’s not a properly functioning market anymore. This stimulus can’t go on indefinitely.”

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The achievements of the ‘intelligent’ human species.

Sperm Whales Found Full of Car Parts and Plastics (NatGeo)

Fishing gear and an engine cover are just some of the startling contents found inside the stomachs of sperm whales that recently beached themselves on Germany’s North Sea coast. The 13 sperm whales washed up near the German state of Schleswig-Holstein earlier this year, the latest in a series of whale strandings around the North Sea. So far, more than 30 sperm whales have been found beached since the start of the year in the U.K., the Netherlands, France, Denmark, and Germany. After a necropsy of the whales in Germany, researchers found that four of the giant marine animals had large amounts of plastic waste in their stomachs. The garbage included a nearly 43-foot-long shrimp fishing net, a plastic car engine cover, and the remains of a plastic bucket, according to a press release from Wadden Sea National Park in Schleswig-Holstein.

However, “the marine litter did not directly cause the stranding,” says Ursula Siebert at the University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover, whose team examined the sperm whales. Instead, the researchers suspect that the whales died because the animals accidentally ventured into shallow seas. Male sperm whales normally migrate from their tropical or subtropical breeding grounds to colder waters at higher latitudes. The species is one of the deepest diving animals in the cetacean family, known to plummet as far as 3,280 feet (1,000 meters) in search of squid, its favorite food. The beached whales were all young males between the ages of 10 and 15, and the necropsies revealed that they died of heart failure. The team believes this particular group mistakenly swam into the North Sea, a shallower zone in between the U.K. and Norway. There the whales could not support their own body weights, and their internal organs collapsed.

“It is thought that the sperm whales may have got lost and entered the North Sea (possibly chasing squid), where the sea floor is not deep enough, causing the whales to become disorientated and die,” Danny Groves, a spokesperson for the nonprofit Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC), wrote in an email. According to the WDC, whales and dolphins may strand for many reasons, such as excessive noise pollution from ships and drilling surveys or even subtle shifts in Earth’s magnetic field. In addition, pilot whales that beached off the coast of Scotland three years ago showed high levels of toxins from ocean pollution, which scientists linked to stress on their brains that may have caused disorientation.

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The EU-Turket deal is a disgrace on more levels than we can count.

Turkey: The Business Of Refugee Smuggling & Sex Trafficking (ZH)

A detailed report on Syrian women refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants in Turkey, issued as far back as 2014 by the Association for Human Rights and Solidarity with the Oppressed (known in Turkish as Mazlumder), tells of early and forced marriages, polygamy, sexual harassment, human trafficking, prostitution, and rape that criminals inflicted upon Syrians in Turkey. According to the Mazlumder report, Syrians are sexually exploited by those who take advantage of their destitution. Children, especially girls, suffer most. Evidence, both witnessed and forensic, indicates that in every city where Syrian refugees have settled, prostitution has drastically increased. Young women between the ages of 15 and 20 are most commonly prostituted, but girls as young as thirteen are also exploited.

Secil Erpolat, a lawyer with the Women’s Rights Commission of the Bar Association in the Turkish province of Batman, said that many young Syrian girls are offered between 20 and 50 Turkish liras ($7-$18). Sometimes their clients pay them with food or other goods for which they are desperate. Women who have crossed the border illegally and arrive with no passport are at high risk of being kidnapped and sold as prostitutes or sex slaves. Criminal gangs bring refugees to towns along the border or into the local bus terminals where “refugee smuggling” has become a major source of income. Professional criminals convince parents that their daughters are going to a better life in Turkey. The parents are given 2000-5000 Turkish liras ($700-$1700) as a “bride price” – an enormous sum for a poor Syrian family – to smuggle their daughters across the border.

“Many men in Turkey practice polygamy with Syrian girls or women, even though polygamy is illegal in Turkey,” the lawyer Abdulhalim Yilmaz, head of Mazlumder’s Refugee Commission, told Gatestone Institute. “Some men in Turkey take second or third Syrian wives without even officially registering them. These girls therefore have no legal status in Turkey. Economic deprivation is a major factor in this suffering, but it is also a religious and cultural phenomenon, as early marriage is allowed in the religion.” Syrian women and children in Turkey also experience sexual harassment at work. Those who are able to get jobs earn little – perhaps enough to eat, but they work long and hard for that little. They are also subjected to whatever others choose to do to them as they work those long hours.

[..] The organization End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT) has produced a detailed report on the “Status of action against commercial sexual exploitation of children: Turkey.” ECPAT’s report cites, from the 2014 Global Slavery Index, estimates that the incidence of slavery in Turkey is the highest in Europe, due in no small measure to the prevalence of trafficking for sexual exploitation and early marriage.

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The problem merely shifts.

Italy Pleads For Greek-Style Push To Return Its Migrants (FT)

Italy is pleading for EU help to ramp up the deportation of migrants arriving on its southern shores, warning that the bloc’s immigration system is at risk of collapse without a more aggressive policy on so-called returns. In an interview with the FT, Angelino Alfano, Italy’s interior minister, says the EU should move to secure deals with African nations, which are the source of the vast majority of migrants arriving in Italy, offering economic aid in exchange for taking back their citizens and preventing new flows. His comments come as the EU enacts a scheme with Turkey in which thousands of Middle Eastern refugees will be sent back across the Aegean Sea from Greece in exchange for up to €6bn in EU aid for Ankara. A first group of 135 were returned to Turkey on Monday.

“Europe was able to find the resources when it was urgent – I am referring to Turkey. It’s a matter of political leadership,” Mr Alfano said. “If returns don’t work, the whole Juncker migration agenda will fail,” he said. Mr Alfano’s request reflects renewed nervousness in Rome about the migration crisis following an 80 per cent spike in the number of arrivals to Italy across the central Mediterranean Sea in the first quarter of this year compared to 2015. If that increase holds through the warmer spring and summer months, it would smash the record 170,000 migrants who arrived in Italy in 2014, straining resources and creating a political problem for the centre-left government led by Matteo Renzi. As the Greece plan goes into action, there are worries in Rome that it may compound problems by encouraging Middle Eastern migrants to switch routes and attempt to enter the EU through Italy, boosting the numbers even further.

“If Syrians don’t want to stay in Turkey but want to try the trip to Europe, they will go around and try to get here from Libya,” Mr Alfano said. “We still don’t have any evidence that this is happening, but we are monitoring.” Italy has held talks with Albania about containing a possible surge in flows through the Balkan nation. Mr Alfano also expressed hope that the recent, if wobbly, establishment of a national unity government in Libya could lead to a crackdown against migrant smugglers there. For those who do arrive, Italian officials are hoping that an EU plan to relocate thousands of refugees across its 28 member states will relieve some pressure. So far, only about 500 migrants have been moved from Italy under the plan – “apartment building numbers” – says Mr Alfano, derisively.

Italy last year deported 15,000 people, or about 10 per cent of all arrivals. Officials believe higher figures are essential to alleviate the country’s burden, even if mass returns could trigger concerns about possible violations of human rights and international law. “Irregular [migrants] have to be kept in closed camps from where they cannot escape. So how many tens of thousands of people can you keep, year after year? Without returns, either you organise real prisons, or it’s obvious that the system will collapse,” Mr Alfano said. “It doesn’t take a prophet to glimpse the future”.

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Yesterday’s deportations will prove to be mainly symbolic. From here on in the problems start.

So The Greece Deportations Are Going ‘Smoothly’? Take A Closer Look (G.)

Today had been declared the first day that migrants and refugees would be deported from Greece within the framework of the EU-Turkey deal, and European authorities seemed determined not to miss the date. So as of Sunday, Greek police, along with the EU border agency Frontex, organised a large-scale operation to ensure the smooth handling of today’s returns from the islands of Chios and Lesbos. The operation was initially deemed a success, with reports being limited to the boats and their occupants, which offered some digestible photo ops. There is plenty of evidence, though, that suggests that it has been no more than a media-savvy gesture on behalf of the European commission.

Officials from Frontex clarified that the boats carried mostly Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Afghans and Moroccans who were going to be deported to Turkey prior to the deal or didn’t request asylum. There were only two Syrians among them who appear not to have requested international protection. Indeed authorities appear to have rushed to identify such people so they could be available for today’s return. Termed “easy cases” by Frontex spokeswoman Eva Moncure, they are perfect material for today’s photo op. As it turns out, more than 90% of people arriving in Greek islands since 20 March – when the EU-Turkey deal was enacted – have opted for asylum, thus complicating their return under the arrangement. It is no surprise then that no further dates have been announced for future deportations.

The first day of deportations has been met with affirmative statements by credible international organisations, including the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), who confirmed that all procedures were regular and rights of deportees were observed. Everything is smooth and tidy, it seems. But this is one version of the story only. There is a second where things have gone less smoothly. Activist lawyers’ accounts and journalist reports from the islands raise the question of whether refugees have been given sufficient time and access to asylum procedures. It appears that many of them do not yet understand the content of the deal or why they have been restricted, and there has been a last-minute rush for asylum claims among the people who are possible deportees. It is also unclear how Turkey plans to handle returnees, how they will be received, and whether they will be able to receive the protection that was previously offered to them there.

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