Month: January 2021

In a historic ruling that some say could help protect press freedoms in the US, a British judge has ruled that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange can’t be extradited to the US.

This is a developing story…
 

About 14 months ago during an interview with Real Vision, investor Kyle Bass – who has been one of the most prominent American critics of the Chinese Communist Party, while also anticipating the political troubles in Hong Kong that inspired the protest movement of 2019 – predicted that retiring Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma would be “disappeared” by Beijing within a year. The gist of Bass’s argument was that Ma had outlived his usefulness, and that Beijing would never tolerate a billionaire with so much power and influence, both at home, and in the West.

Exiled Billionaire Guo Wengui (Miles Kwok) tells @Jkylebass why Jack Ma’s retirement could end with imprisonment or death. Watch the full interview for free now: https://t.co/OrLkRQMEfK pic.twitter.com/zjoUb7OWLT

— Real Vision (@RealVision) September 10, 2019

As it turns out, Bass was off by about 1 month. Because following some rumblings published by the FT on New Year’s Eve, it appears the Western press has just woken up to the fact that nobody has seen Jack Ma in two months. Late last night in New York, Yahoo Finance reported that Jack Ma is officially ‘missing’.

The FT reported a few days ago that Ma had been abruptly replaced by an Alibaba executive for the taping of the finale of his show “Africa’s Business Heroes”.

Mr Ma was replaced as a judge in the final of Africa’s Business Heroes, a television contest for budding entrepreneurs, his photograph was removed from the judging webpage, and he was conspicuously left out of a promotional video.

Now, Yahoo Finance is saying that nobody has seen Ma in public for at least two months.

Unfortunately for Ma, this isn’t exactly a surprise. When the executive offered a light-hearted criticism of certain aspects of China’s regulatory framework, claiming it stifled innovation, it seemed like the CCP used his comments as a pretext to chasten him. Immediately, the IPO for the spin off of Ant Financial, a sister company to Alibaba, which marked the start of an “anti-monopoly” push against Chinese tech giants that has hammered their shares (in mainland markets, and abroad) and inspired serious concerns about a state takeover of the heretofore independent (though certainly subservient) tech sector.

Following the spoiled IPO, the CCP has ordered Ant Financial to step back from some of its businesses as part of some kind of “rectification” plan to prevent the company from growing any larger. Many fear similar measures might be imposed on China’s other tech giants like Tencent and JD.com. Of course, the whole episode mirrors an anti-monopoly push against American tech giants being launched via a series of civil lawsuits in American courts filed by the DoJ and the AGs of many states.

It has been reported that Ma is a member of the Communist Party. That, of course, wouldn’t make him immune to prosecution. In fact, it could be used as an excuse to heighten whatever punishment he might receive.

Right now, only one thing looks certain: Wherever Jack Ma, it’s probably not somewhere that anybody – especially an internationally respected billionaire – would want to be.

Authored by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

Commentary on America’s overvalued stock market can be found pretty much everywhere these days. These arguments are compelling, and are becoming more so as stocks keep rising.

The latest clue that we’re in yet another bubble is margin debt, which is money that investors borrow against their existing stocks to buy even more. A spike in its use means two things:

• First, investors have had some success in the recent past and are now convinced of their own genius.

• Second, they’re growing impatient and (being infallible) are comfortable using leverage to make a fast killing.

Overconfidence and impatience are a bad combination in most situations.  But they’re frequently deadly in equities. Put another way, when margin debt peaks, so, frequently, does the market.

Where is it now? Way up here:

Another sign of the same dangerous attitude is excessive use of leveraged ETFs. As with margin debt, the soaring popularity of these volatile “trading vehicles” reveals an investment community swinging for the fences.

Who exactly are these cocky, impatient people betting the farm on their own awesome judgment? Mostly, they’re retail investors, which explains a lot.

The government has responded to the covid pandemic by sending people free money while using interest rates and other fiscal/monetary tools to elevate financial asset prices. So the young traders who deposited their covid checks in free stock trading apps like Robinhood have only ever experienced a raging bull market in hot stocks, and can’t yet envision anything else.

The result? Huge spikes in stocks that professionals view as overvalued and therefore good short sale candidates. Amateur traders are swamping “the shorts,” pushing stocks like Tesla (where shorts lost $40 billion in 2020) to levels that pretty much guarantee an epic plunge the minute new stimulus money is withheld or even delayed.

The first half of this year, meanwhile, is an ideal candidate for a stimulus delay.

The just-completed bill was both paltry (below $1 trillion — chump change in today’s hyperinflationary world) and hard to cobble together. The next one will be even harder since legislators will want to give the latest stimulus time to work. This means the government will require some kind of crisis before acting again. Stocks, now the most fragile of a long list of fragile sectors, are likely to provide that crisis. Cue the crash of 2021.

Later this year, the ECB will meet for a grand strategy review. Expected to be one of the most consequential policy reviews for years to come, the central bank could opt for changes to its inflation target (some doves have proposed following in the footsteps of the Fed by loosening the ECB’s inflation target) as some have insisted. But one change that appears virtually certain, is that the central bank will adopt language addressing matters like climate change, economic equality, etc.

From the minute the ECB selected Christine Lagarde to succeed Mario Draghi, it seemed almost like a forgone conclusion. But more than a year later, Joe Biden’s decision to nominate Janet Yellen to lead the Treasury Department showed that across the Atlantic, central bankers are focusing on a similar agenda.

During a recent interview with International Man, Doug Casey rebutted demands for the Fed to take on inequality by doling out ‘reparations’. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has repeatedly called on the central bank to address inequality…but the irony is, the Fed is one of the progenitors of economic inequality.

He also pointed out that central banks in Asia don’t spend time virtue-signaling.

International Man: Fed chairman Powell has made countless remarks about the need for the US central bank to address climate change.

What is going on here?

Doug Casey: It’s a good question.

How can they address the so-called problem of climate change? Climate change has been going on since the Earth came together 4.5 billion years ago, and it will continue on its own path, primarily influenced by the sun and secondarily by things like volcanism, cosmic rays, and peculiarities of the planets orbit, long after mankind has gone.

But destroying the economy by printing up more money certainly isn’t an answer to climate change. However, I’m sure that what’s on Powell’s mind is making money easier to get for things like windmills and solar panels. This is more state direction of investment. It was a disaster for the USSR and every other socialist and state-directed economy and will be for us as well.

You’ll notice that the Chinese and other Asian economies don’t indulge in this kind of politically correct investing. It’s a major reason why they’re on the way up, and we’re on the way down.

Janet and Jerome’s excellent adventure in climate engineering won’t end well.

Climate activists led by Greta Thunberg have fostered the specious claim that solving climate change is an essential part of the battle to end “inequality” for good (even though the two phenomena have little to do with one another). And now, with central banks around the world signing up to enforce the Paris accords, ECB chief Christine Lagarde is reportedly planning on striking a blow against the fossil fuel industry by forcing the ECB to slash purchases of bonds issued by energy giants like Exxon.

Christine Lagarde is expected to make the European Central Bank a pioneer in fighting climate change by slashing its purchases of bonds issued by fossil fuel companies and other heavy carbon emitters, according to a Financial Times poll of economists. The ECB president has pledged to make tackling climate change a major part of the central bank’s strategic review of its remit and tools, which is due to be completed by the second half of 2021.

Two-thirds of the 33 economists polled by the FT believe the review will result in the ECB deciding to break with its long-held principle of “market neutrality”, which requires it to buy bonds in proportion to the overall market. Environmental campaigners have criticised the ECB’s €248bn corporate bond purchases for reinforcing the market’s bias in favour of heavy carbon emitters such as oil and gas companies, utilities and airlines because these sectors issue more bonds than most others.

One economist who spoke to the FT about Lagarde’s plans defended them by arguing that “market neutrality” was always a facade…

“Market neutrality was always a pretence because it still involved choices of what to buy and what not to buy – so why not make those choices consistent with [policy] preferences?” said Paul Diggle, senior economist at Aberdeen Standard Investments.

…and that choosing which companies to support, and which not to support, is actually consistent with the central bank’s price-stability mandate.

But Mr Diggle said that “achieving climate objectives actually helps deliver on the [ECB’s] price stability objective, given the long-term risks involved in climate change”.

Another argued that the plan was simply “a bad idea”.

Stefan Kooths, research director at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, said he thought the ECB was “very likely” to adapt its monetary policy to meet climate policy targets, even though he thought this was “a bad idea.”

Of course, assuming this becomes policy reality, it would open the door to the central bank openly buying shares of ‘green’ companies, while their ‘brown’ rivals are left to languish in price-discovery hell.

Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Russia’s federal prison authorities were right to jolt Alexei Navalny this week by warning him to return immediately from Germany or else face a suspended sentence being made into jail time.

The “professional” opposition activist claims to be convalescing in Germany after he was allegedly poisoned by a Soviet-era nerve agent in August. Western news media dutifully repeat the claim that Navalny is “recuperating” in Germany after having survived an assassination plot by Kremlin agents. Navalny has personally accused Russia’s President Vladimir Putin of ordering the alleged hit.

Last week, a team of medics from the Berlin hospital where Navalny had been staying published a paper in The Lancet medical journal in which they claimed he had been poisoned with Novichok nerve agent. Their findings are dubious because the medics acknowledged the involvement of German military intelligence laboratories in conducting their analysis.

But one thing the German doctors did let slip was that a 55-day follow-up check on Navalny ascertained that he had made a “near-complete recovery”.

The Russian dissident figure was flown to Berlin on August 22, two days after he was treated in a hospital in Omsk, Russia. Thus, the German medical team are indicating – no doubt inadvertently – that Navalny’s health recovered nearly two months ago, if not before that.

That means there is no medical reason why he should remain at large in Germany. His claims of “convalescing” and the Western media’s indulgence of those claims are false, if the German doctors are correct about his “recovery”.

Despite Navalny’s arrogant disdain for Russian state laws, he is nevertheless answerable to those authorities as a citizen. While in Germany he was on probation for a suspended jail sentence concerning a fraud conviction in 2014. His so-called Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) has a checkered history of shady financing, from allegations of foreign funding by the U.S. State Department to charges of embezzling millions of dollars. Ironically, the blogger and media activist produces slick programs accusing the Russian government of corruption.

In any case, under the laws of the Russian Federation, the 44-year-old Navalny was on probation during the past four months of his stay in Germany. For the last two months, he is in good health, according to his German doctors. So there are no grounds for why he should abscond from Russian territory and evade the laws for which he is answerable.

Not only is Navalny living as if he above the law, he has also shown flagrant contempt for the Russian authorities.

Last week, he published a video on his website claiming that he had pranked a named member of Russia’s security service, the FSB, into admitting that agents had poisoned him while he was visiting the Siberian city of Tomsk on August 20. He was later flown in an emergency to Omsk where he was treated after having apparently fallen ill onboard a flight to Moscow.

The FSB dismissed Navalny’s prank telephone claim as a “deep fake”. The Russian doctors who treated him in Omsk – and who probably saved his life – have repeatedly stated that their tests showed there was no poison in Navalny’s body, and specifically no traces of nerve agent. They said his illness was due to a metabolic disorder. Perhaps self-induced as a ruse to later transfer to Germany?

The transcript of Navalny’s purported prank call to the FSB agent reads like a comic set-up. Posing as a senior member of Russia’s national security council, Navalny affects to bully the supposed agent as if he is a pathetic stooge.

A telling segment is where the self-styled super sleuth fishes for compliments about his own character from the purported FSB man, betraying the narcissism of a megalomaniac.

Again, incredibly, we are expected to believe that someone who had a near-death experience with a lethal nerve poison and who is “convalescing” still in Germany somehow managed to find the energy and mental reserves to pull off a daring 45-minute telephone sting.

If Navalny is fit enough to participate in such practical jokes – regardless of their credibility – then he is surely fit enough to abide by Russian laws and respect his probation terms. As the Russian Federal Prison Service stated this week: “The convicted man is not fulfilling all of the obligations placed on him by the court, and is evading the supervision of the Criminal Inspectorate.”

One gets the unerring impression that Navalny and his foreign handlers have become so self-intoxicated with hubris that they are blind to their own absurd implausibilities.

Why was he permitted to fly by air ambulance to Berlin in the first place if the Russian authorities had evil designs against him?

While there, as a guest of the German government, Navalny has wildly accused President Putin of ordering his alleged assassination. The European governments have subsequently and rashly imposed sanctions on Russia in support of Navalny’s unfounded claims. Then we have the media activist mounting further provocations parlayed into even more outlandish accusations against President Putin and the Kremlin.

All the while there has been no evidence of poisoning presented to support these claims, other than unverifiable assertions by German doctors working with German military intelligence labs, as well as two other NATO laboratories and the Organization for the Prohibition on Chemical Weapons. All of them including the OPCW (the latter compromised over complicity in NATO false-flag provocations in Syria) have refused to share their analytical data and samples with Russia, and yet they are demanding that Moscow launch a criminal investigation into the Navalny case.

The abdication by European governments of due process and of respect for Russian state laws, its government, and its president is astounding. They are indulging a foreign-sponsored gadfly as if he is the sovereign representative of the Russian Federation.

Navalny and his foreign allies have lost the plot in their own telling of an alleged assassination plot.

First things first: he is a convicted felon who is answerable to Russian law. Pushing false flags and slanderous falsehoods from abroad with the intent of damaging Russia’s sovereignty is an abuse of his rights.

Arrogant and overindulged Navalny is patently incapable of even understanding his obligations under law as a Russian citizen. He evidently feels above the law, like many of his Western backers. That’s why Russia is right to tell him to put up or shut up.

Germany is leading Europe toward extending economically devastating lockdowns as Western Europe scrambles to quell a second more deadly wave of COVID-19, potentially exacerbated by “mutant” strains like B.1.1.7, first isolated as a driver of infections in the UK. As Germany prepares to extend a nationwide lockdown until the end of January, other governments in Europe are considering taking similar steps to prolong or strengthen restrictions on movement and businesses.

With these mutant strains available as a convenient boogeyman to justify more draconian measures as winter in the northern hemisphere drags on, leaders from across Europe are considering prolonging or strengthening restrictions to battle highly contagious mutations of coronavirus.

As Germany reported a series of record numbers for cases and deaths over the holiday period, cries for extending the lockdown intensified.

“Premature easing would set us back very far again,” Markus Söder, the premier of Bavaria and leader of the CSU, one of Germany’s governing parties, said on Sunday, after the heads of the country’s 16 states met virtually over the weekend. “The numbers are simply still far too high,” he added. “As annoying as it is, we have to stay consistent and not give up too soon again.”

Europe’s outbreak hasn’t outpaced the US, but it remains a bastion for the pandemic in a world where much of the world continues to struggle with the virus.

Germany’s infection rate currently is at triple the level that policymakers deemed “safe” to start reopening last spring. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is expected to meet with the heads of Germany’s states to discuss plans for the expansion, before making an announcement.

Even Boris Johnson has warmed to the possibility of delaying the return of students to British schools.

The French government moved on Saturday to move a nightly curfew in 15 states in the east and south-east of the country back from 2000 local time to to 1800 as incidence of coronavirus in those areas has been climbing more rapidly than elsewhere in France. France has also delayed the reopening of cinemas and museums, though schools are still expected to resume after the holiday.

Over the last week, Ireland, which embraced strict lockdowns early on, has seen new cases, hospitalizations and deaths accelerate. Deputy PM Leo Varadkar said further restrictions could not be ruled out even after Dublin already ordered new restrictions for the second time in eight days last week. “I think the situation is very alarming. We can see hospitalizations increasing at a rapid rate, numbers in ICU increasing too,” Varadkar said in an interview with reporters. He added that the “explosion” of cases in the days since Christmas has outpaced the modeling.

Some are criticizing European nations (France, in particular) for taking too long to roll out vaccination campaigns. In France, lawmakers are selecting 35 people to form a “collective of citizens” in charge of deciding on vaccine strategy in the country. To the chagrin of public health officials, Europeans are refusing the vaccines in larger numbers than they anticipated.

But if we’ve learned anything, it’s that frantic warnings about lockdowns and overflowing hospital wards is often enough to convince some people to change their minds.

Authored by Tim Kirby via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The biggest overall issue of 2020 by far was the global reaction to Covid-19 and there is a prevailing belief that somehow 2021 will be automatically different because one digit in the year has changed. The world is waiting for this to all be “over”. But, perhaps the big question shouldn’t be when the Coronavirus issue ends but how it ends. This health crisis, just like any other, provides the catalyst for political change and has already left a bureaucratic mark on history. The potentially most interesting (or terrifying depending on your worldview) systemic change brought on by the virus would be the start of some sort of mandatory vaccination for travel. This concept, which was unthought of just a year ago, is being discussed in the Mainstream Media both positively and negatively with some governments already greenlighting the concept verbally. The Overton Window seems to be moving very quickly on this issue. But what will this new form of bureaucracy mean on a grander scale and since numerous different sources are creating a vaccine could a form of “geopolitics” of vaccination arise depending one which is taken?

Image: The vaccine you take could determine your travel future.

As of now the key form of bureaucracy for international travel is a passport based on citizenship. The proposed idea to only allow vaccinated individuals to travel will essentially create a second passport (regardless of what terminology is ascribed to it) based on an individual’s vaccination record. So, because this new vaccination proof documentation will essentially function as a passport we should first take a look at the geopolitical aspects of passports before we can take a look at the geopolitical aspects of vaccination.

The Passport Space We Know

Passports and visa regimes throughout the 20th century became a reflection of national power and created bureaucratic geopolitical spaces of their own. If we look at the “Global Passport Power Rank 2021” then we see that the top nations are not surprisingly in the West. The choice of using the word “power” when describing passports is very relevant. For example, U.S. Citizens can visit Bulgaria and Serbia visa free, while Serbs and Bulgarians must go through the bureaucracy, fees and interviews necessary for the privilege to step on American soil. Although many Bulgarians may feel the U.S. is an ally who saved them from floundering Communism, there are plenty of Serbs alive today who consider Washington to be the murderers of their people and yet they still give Americans 90 days to stay in their nation with zero questions asked. Funny how that works out.

Map: Visa free travel for U.S. citizens reflects where American foreign policy/influence dominates.

In contrast, and unlike many European nations, the Serbs give eternal ally Russia 30 days for business and/or vacation. Very often traditional allies of a given nation are granted visa free entrance. Speaking of Russia, it is no surprise that many tiny nations that Russia recognizes but America does not (South Ossetia, Abkhazia etc.) allow Russian citizens to enter visa free. Furthermore, as Russia’s influence has grown since its utter defeat in the Cold War its passport has steadily increased in “power”.

Visas and passports can reflect the strength of a nation or its proximity to power (high level vassal status) when its citizens can go almost everywhere while at the same time blocking lessers from entering their nation.

In some ways when smaller nations demand visas from more powerful actors this show of bureaucratic force definitely makes a statement and is a form of proof of independence. It is unknown how many people actually want to go to North Korea for a summer holiday but the fact they can and do enforce/deny visas provides some level of protection from carpet baggers, foreign agents and other questionable figures, but most importantly it sends a message to other nations that they have “no right to be here”.

So we can see that Western passport geopolitical spaces are very broad reaching covering almost the whole globe except for certain uppity hermit nations while in turn rejecting free entry to many poorer/weaker nations. The West’s businessmen and influencers can go out, but no one is coming back so easily in turn. International travel is a symbol of at least middle class status, but what is really key is where those 8 men in the business class seats can and cannot go.

Image: Migrant labour is not only affected by real geography, but often by the geopolitics of passports and visas.

When it comes to the poor of the world we can see that there is a reason why every London bartender is Polish, and every street sweeper in Moscow is Tajik – they have visa free entry to these respective countries to work as migrant labour. The Tajiks in Moscow would surely prefer to do the same job for U.S. dollars or British pounds, but that is simply not an option as their passports do not allow it. There are simply different migrant worker exploitation spaces available to those with Polish and Tajik citizenship.

The Vaccination Space That Could Be Coming

If we are going to live in a world where vaccines are mandatory for travel, who is to say that every nation on Earth is going to acknowledge the validity of every other vaccine. The Mainstream Media makes it seem as though just getting any vaccine with some sort of paperwork to back it up should be good enough, but this is unlikely to be true.

The BBC has already written about Russia’s Sputnik V Coronavirus vaccine with some skepticism. When we consider the fact that this news giant basically writes the entire cultural narrative of the UK, then it is safe to believe that many of their politicians may choose to not recognize the validity of the Russian vaccine out of fear, spite and/or ignorance.

In contrast, like it or not, Russian citizens are going to have access to only the Russian made vaccine. You have the option to take it or not, but getting the American type from Pfizer will require effort, patience and a much bigger personal expense. Thus, it is not forbidden per say, but will be very rare for Russian citizens to get a competing foreign vaccine, putting them all into the Sputnik V camp from a bureaucratic perspective. In fact there seems to be almost a vaccination race as nations race to develop and export their vaccine first. Perhaps this is out of national pride or humanitarian interests, but their rush may also be connected with the desire to get as many nations as possible onto your national vaccine. In the same sense that all Russian citizens with a Russian passport are in one big group, then if there will be a vaccination passport then all people who took Sputnik V or Pfizer’s shot would be placed into one similar category for travel. If this is actually happening, then surely the race is on to take as much of this new intangible geopolitical space as possible.

Map: The “geopolitical vaccination space” of Russia’s Sputnik V. Dark green has ordered millions, light green is considering.

If we follow bureaucratic logic, that “if the Russian vaccine is bad, then no travel to England”, this would also extend to individuals/countries that have predominantly taken the Post Soviet edition of the antivirus injection. What is important to understand is that many of the countries getting Sputnik V are not just small ignorable former Communist nations bordering Russia. These are major economic players like China, India, South Korea, and America’s neighbor to the south Mexico, all of which are all placing orders in the tens of millions.

If push comes to shove and this concept of travel papers based on vaccination (immunization passports) comes to pass then it is very likely that non-Western versions will “not count” at border crossings. Although with enough time and money one can probably get any type of vaccine anywhere, for the overwhelming majority this could create a new invisible Iron Curtain – the Western Vaccines on one side with the Russian one (with other possible outlier versions) on the other.

This may sound like a stretch of the imagination but the madness of Russophobic conspiracy theories seems to have no bounds. And most importantly governmental reactions to the Covid-19 Pandemic have been harsh, dubious in effect, and very short sighted. There is a real chance that in 2021 we will see the rise of the geopolitics of vaccination.