The Most (And Least) Trusted Professions In Britain
Trust me, I’m a doctor. So goes the well-worn phrase, and as Statista’s Martin Armstrong reports, a survey by Ipsos MORI reveals, medical practitioners are indeed the most trusted group of professionals in Britain.
67 percent said they think doctors are trustworthy, followed by scientists with 62 percent and teachers with 58 percent.
At the bottom of the pile are advertising executives who enjoy the trust of only 9 percent of the population outdoing even politicians in terms of distrust.
Switzerland’s supreme court has ruled that parents do not have a right to homeschool their children. The ruling came in the case of a woman whose application to homeschool her son was rejected by officials in Basel. The court said the country’s cantons (which are similar to U.S. states) have the authority to regulate or even ban homeschooling. Some cantons require only that parents notify them if they are homeschooling, but others set more stringent requirements.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2mJXwuF
via IFTTT
Switzerland’s supreme court has ruled that parents do not have a right to homeschool their children. The ruling came in the case of a woman whose application to homeschool her son was rejected by officials in Basel. The court said the country’s cantons (which are similar to U.S. states) have the authority to regulate or even ban homeschooling. Some cantons require only that parents notify them if they are homeschooling, but others set more stringent requirements.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2mJXwuF
via IFTTT
Here are some excerpts via Google translate with many of my own modifications. For example, the title itself is my translation, not Google’s.
Google has the title as “Business Model With the Interest is Dead“.
I made an educated guess that Google’s title isn’t quite right.
I picked up the article from this Tweet.
#ECB has ruined business model of German banks, which borrow money short term & lend long term. Banks can no longer earn money w/flat yield curve: maturity transformation business is dead. Commerzbank shares dive in tandem w/2s10s yield spread. https://t.co/xpMlVIc3uj via @weltpic.twitter.com/NXVzWXlDE3
Translation errors below may be Google’s or mine. I took a fair amount of liberty, adding some words, deleting others, or changing the word order so the result makes sense to me.
Apologies to the authors for any of my errors.
Interest Rate Business Model is Dead
The cash cow bank lending model is dead, buried by the European Central Bank (ECB).
The coup de grace came at the recent meeting. As ECB President Mario Draghi squeezed the negative interest rate for banks even deeper.
The ECB will restart its bond purchase program in November. This time, without a time limit. Thus, the monetary authorities have permanently chained the long-term interest rate at a low level and cut the profit opportunities of the financial sector to a level that isn’t sustainable. For a long time, institutions have made good money from the difference between long-term and short-term interest rates.That time is now over.
In 2016, Commerzbank employed more than 50,000 people. CEO Martin Zielke wants to close one-fifth of the 1,000 branches and even wants to part with an important source of income including his Polish subsidiary MBank. The workforce should be reduced to around 38,000 by the end of 2020.
The sale of Mbank is a desperate attempt at salvation.
In terms of stock market value, Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank are now loosely hanged even by more regionally active institutions from Norway and Sweden. [That is a direct translation that reads wrong but I do not know how to fix it].
Even the once proud Landesbanken is a restructuring case. This is a dangerous development.
“With the allowance, the ECB has relieved the German banks in the short term by around 500 million euros. At the same time, banks will be burdened considerably by the continuation of the low interest rates for an indefinite period, “says Peter Barkow, financial expert at Barkow Consulting. “Especially the German banks are very much dependent on income from the long-term investment of customer deposits at higher interest rates, called maturity transformation. This strategy only works very limited, “warns the expert. [The allowance refers to the ECB not charging banks a portion of the negative interest on excess reserves]
However, the corresponding earnings impact on the banks will only be delayed. “Many German banks have to find new sources of income in the medium term. In the short term, a further reduction in costs will probably be necessary, “says Barkow.
For more than a hundred years, banks lived on long-term lending or investing in securities their clients entrusted to them in the short term .
Historically, banks made money out of time. If time no longer has a price, because there is no more interest, nothing can be earned. Ten-year Bunds yielded around 1.5 percentage points more than two-year issues in historical terms. Currently, the difference is just under 0.2 percentage points.
In the multi-billion loan portfolios, the institutions are losing a lot of money due to ECB policy. Accordingly, the shares of Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank have fallen in sync with the interest rate differential. How dramatic the situation is for the banks, the analysts of JP Morgan have written down.
In a 120-page analysis, JP Morgan analysts calculated what effects the ECB policy will have on the banks. They used Japan as an example. Japan has had negative interest rates for some time now and there institutions have been unable to earn anything for two decades with time. The JP Morgan analysts’ conclusion: Interest margins could continue to shrink and continue to weigh on the earnings side.
“The negative interest rate policy of the ECB is ruining the financial system and is a socio-political poison,” says Frank Kohler, CEO of Sparda-Bank Berlin. The financial system is absurd if we have to explain to the children that money has a negative value – and thus debt is good, because you may not have to repay everything.
Socio-Political Poison
Bingo.
Thanks to Anne Kunz and Holger Zschäpitz for an excellent article and apologies again for any translation errors I may have made.
‘Work Less, Make More’: Labour Party Introduces Plan For 4-Day Work Week
As Labour’s 2019 party conference started yesterday, the party’s leadership was busy selling their slate of far-left policies.
In addition to support for a ‘Green New Deal’ (not dissimilar to the one from the US) and the abolition of private schools, the Labour Party is pushing a plan for a four day work week.But don’t worry: workers will still earn the same amount of money, they’ll just need to work less for the money.
By Labour’s reasoning, since the link between increasing productivity and expanding free time has been broken, it’s time for the government to step in and set the trend right. After all, increasing automation was supposed to allow Britons to work less, not more.
But with the next general election expected in the coming months, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell pledged during a speech on Monday that Labour would implement the 32-hour-work-week within 10 years if votes deliver a majority.
McDonnell’s pledge stopped short of making a 32 hour week compulsory, saying that only “average” hours worked would be cut. But he insisted that lower in the number of hours worked by most Britons is the right course of policy: “millions are exhausted from overwork,” McDonnell said to the audience at Labour’s Party conference in Brighton. And that must end.
“As society got richer, we could spend fewer hours at work.But in recent decades progress has stalled,” McDonnell added. “People in our country today work some of the longest hours in Europe.”
That’s actually not true, according to official EU data, which found that Greeks put in the longest work weeks (at an average 42.3 hours per week), followed by Bulgaria and Poland. The only western European nation that made the top ten was Portugal.
Before the conference, a report commissioned by crossbench peer Robert Skidelsky found that working fewer hours would be good for Briton’s wellbeing but that “a rigid four-day week was not realistic or desirable.”
But Labour clearly can’t resist the headline: A 32 hour work week! With no loss in pay!
Unsurprisingly, McDonnell received a standing ovation when he finished his speech. But just wait until this crosses the pond.
Biden: I promise a 4 day work week
Harris: I promise a 3 day work week
Warren: I promise a 2 day work week
Bernie: I promise a 1 day work week
Yang: I will pay you to never work again https://t.co/dnx73yM9Tj
Back in April I told you that Germany was a “Dead Economy Walking.” Today, I get to tell you that it’s legs are gone.
Yesterday morning’s manufacturing PMI print was the worst news Angela Merkel could have imagined, 41.4. A figure so awful dogs will want to roll on it.
Overall, Germany’s economy at the purchasing manager’s level is contracting. And with Merkel masking a massive tax increase as a political cave to the rising Greens the future for Germany’s economic growth looks as bad as the following chart.
Aside from the obvious, the big takeaway from this chart is the consistency with which analysts who are paid a lot more than me over-estimate this number. It’s a brilliant depiction of confirmation bias.
And you can see why this happens. Conventional wisdom tells us that an accommodative central bank, and the ECB’s negative interest rates are the height of accommodation, should support continued manufacturing growth because credit is cheap.
But, it doesn’t if there’s no capacity for the buyers of German goods to take on more debt. Negative interest rates are supposed to increase currency flow because who wants to lose money on their savings, right?
Paging Larry Summers (you incompetent halfwit!) that’s not what they actually signal to the markets. They signal that things suck and the central bank has no confidence in the economy.
It should be no surprise to anyone that the ECB became dovish the minute they got the data that Germany’s economy was shrinking. Because without Germany expanding exports there can be no support for a stable euro, regardless of Brexit.
And as the Remainiacs continue to play games to scuttle Brexit their arguments look weak as it is obvious to all that Europe needs the U.K. more than the other way around.
But, hey, don’t let facts get in the way of some people’s religion.
In fact, every time they try to create a headline to blame things on Brexit uncertainty, it further highlights just how much it is they who are creating it by dragging out the process.
Though Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zavir ruled out a meeting with Trump, the Iranians prepped the stage with Johnson by releasing the U.K. tanker Stena Impero.
Though I suspect nothing will come of that while Johnson is embroiled in Brexit.
The Euro lost $1.10 and gold resumed its rise in all currencies, including the U.S. dollar.
With the rising pressure outside the USA to eliminate cash in order to confiscate money from their citizens to support the broadening collapse of socialism, there has been a MAJOR panic pushing into the dollar.
Despite the fact that early in 2019 the headlines were that foreign governments were dumping US debt spinning this into stories that the dollar would crash. In reality, selling of US debt at that point in time was an effort to stop the dollar’s rise.
Martin has always been right that falling confidence in Europe and the Euro are what’s driving the current dynamic of strong U.S. asset prices.
The primary dealer banks have to be flush enough with cash to ensure they could take down their part of the issuance because any tailing in the yield will be bad.
The dollar funding crisis is real and accelerating as is the implosion of the German economy. And it’s not just Germany anymore. The French PMI print was terrible and the whole of the composite PMI for the Eurozone teeters on contraction.
What everyone needs to worry about now is the reversal against the huge move into European sovereign debt. These bond yields have defied gravity all year and cannot be sustained against a falling euro.
The German yield curve is beginning to rise at the short end. The inversion is worsening. U.S. Treasury demand is still rising.
Is it any wonder that the European Council is finally beginning to change its tune about a potential deal with Boris Johnson on Brexit?
Germany is in trouble and with it the entire European Project. Good.
* * *
Join my Patreon if you want to stay up on the collapse of the Euro-zone Install Brave if you want to keep Google from letting you talk about it.
The IAEA first ignored the reports about Iran’s undeclared clandestine nuclear facilities. This should not come as a surprise: the IAEA has a long history of misreporting the Islamic Republic’s compliance with the deal and declining to follow up on credible reports about Iran’s illicit nuclear activities.
New evidence shows that Iran’s theocratic establishment was most likely violating the nuclear agreement since the day that Obama’s administration and Tehran struck the deal in 2015.
The international community would truly do itself a great service to recognize that the nuclear deal was nothing more than a pro-mullah agreement which provided Iran’s ruling clerics with billions of dollars to pursue their anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Iranian people and pro-terror activities, while simultaneously providing cover for Iran to pursue its nuclear ambitions.
The Iranian government is advancing its nuclear program at a faster pace. Recently, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) declared that Tehran took the third step in increasing its nuclear activities by activating advanced centrifuges: 20 IR-4 and 20 IR-6 centrifuges.
The previous two steps that Tehran took included: increasing the enriched uranium stockpile beyond the 300kg cap, which was set by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and enriching uranium to levels beyond the limit of 3.67 percent.
As part of its rush to a nuclear breakout capability, the Islamic Republic of Iran is also expanding its research and development work beyond the limitations set by the JCPOA. Iranian nuclear agency spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi told a televised news conference, “We have started lifting limitations on our Research and Development imposed by the deal … It will include development of more rapid and advanced centrifuges.”
The ruling mullahs are claiming that Iran’s recent moves and violations of the nuclear deal are the fault of the US government, because the Trump administration withdrew from the JCPOA, but the claim is a lie. New evidence shows that Iran’s theocratic establishment was most likely violating the nuclear agreement since the day the Obama administration and Tehran struck the deal in 2015.
To clarify: Do you remember when the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Yukiya Amano immediately to inspect an “atomic warehouse” in Iran last year?
Netanyahu stated in his speech to the UN General Assembly that Iran had a “secret atomic warehouse for storing massive amounts of equipment and material from Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program.” Tehran claimed that the warehouse, which is located in a village (Turquz Abad) in the suburbs of Tehran, was a place where carpets were cleaned.
At the same time, two non-partisan organizations based in Washington, DC — the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) — released detailed reports about Iran’s undeclared clandestine nuclear facilities as well.
The IAEA first ignored the reports. This should not come as a surprise: the IAEA has a long history of misreporting the Islamic Republic’s compliance with the deal and declining to follow up on credible reports about Iran’s illicit nuclear activities. Iran’s clandestine nuclear sites in Natanz and Arak were revealed by the opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran.
In any event, after a significant amount of pressure was imposed on the IAEA, and after the IAEA’s chief passed away and Iran was reportedly able to moving the suspected materials out of the secret nuclear facility, inspection of the site was recently implemented.
What was the outcome? Even though the Iranian leaders had cleaned up the facility, the IAEA’s inspectors were able to detect traces of radioactive uranium at the site. Israel’s warning and other reports had proved accurate.
Now, Tehran is declining to answer the IAEA’s questions about the secret facility. More importantly, one of the most basic requirements of the nuclear deal (while it lasted) was that Iran had to reveal its nuclear activities to the IAEA — a condition with it even overtly failed to comply.
In other words, the detection of radioactive particles in Turquz Abad, Iran’s reluctance to answer simple questions about the secret facility and non-partisan evidence about Iran’s nuclear activities at the location, all point to the fact that Tehran was most likely violating the nuclear deal since it was reached.
Where, you may ask, are the strong advocates of the nuclear deal after the new evidence revealed that Iran has long been violating the nuclear deal and pursuing its nuclear ambitions? They are silent.
The international community would truly do itself a great service to recognize that the nuclear deal was nothing more than a pro-mullah agreement which provided Iran’s ruling clerics with billions of dollars to pursue their anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Iranian people and pro-terror activities, while simultaneously providing cover for Iran to pursue its nuclear ambitions.
In Trade-War Win For Trump, Apple Will Make New Desktop At Texas Factory
In what looks like another trade-deal victory for the Trump Administration, Apple announced on Monday that it would manufacture its Mac Pro Desktop at a factory in Austin, Texas.
After the US government approved tariff waivers on 10 key components for the Mac Book Pro that the company sources from China.
“Manufacturing of the new model was made possible after the US government approved on Friday Apple’s request for a waiver on 25% tariffs on 10 key components imported from China.”
Some analysts have warned that key components will still be made in China and exported to the US for final assembly in Austin, but the number of components for the new desktop increased by 2.5 times from the previous model.
In an interesting about-face for Trump, the president had previously signaled that he wouldn’t grant the waivers, but has apparently decided to cave. We imagine the softening in his approach is related to the tit-for-tat pre-trade-talk detente going on new between Washington and Beijing.
Trump had previously signaled that relief from tariffs on the Mac Pro would be rejected, saying in a July 26 tweet that “Apple will not be given Tariff waiver, or relief for.” Mac Pro parts that are made in China. Make them in the USA, no Tariffs!” However, the president later told reporters that the two families “we’ll work it out.”
Still, with five other requests pending before the DoC, Apple has plenty of reason to be anxious. So far, Cook has been spared from most duties. But products such as the Apple Watch, AirPods and iMac computers were hit by 15% tariffs earlier this month, while the iPhone, iPad and other major Apple products are set to be impacted later in December.
Apple said construction for the new desktop will begin “soon,” which roughly equates to: “Before the holiday shopping season ends.” Meanwhile, the revamped model was announced in June at the company’s annual conference for developers, with a starting price of $6,000. Compared with the previous version, the new model is far more customizable and integrates with a new high-resolution external monitor.
The devastating attack on Saudi oil facilities by drones and missiles not only transforms the balance of military power in the Middle East, but marks a change in the nature of warfare globally.
On the morning of 14 September, 18 drones and seven cruise missiles – all cheap and unsophisticated compared to modern military aircraft – disabled half of Saudi Arabia’s crude oil production and raised the world price of oil by 20 per cent.
This happened despite the Saudis spending $67.6bn (£54bn) on their defence budget last year, much of it on vastly expensive aircraft and air defence systems, which notably failed to stop the attack. The US defence budget stands at $750bn (£600.2bn), and its intelligence budget at $85bn (£68bn), but the US forces in the Gulf did not know what was happening until it was all over.
Excuses advanced for this failure include the drones flying too low to be detected and unfairly coming from a direction different from the one that might have been expected. Such explanations sound pathetic when set against the proud boasts of the arms manufacturers and military commanders about the effectiveness of their weapons systems.
Debate is ongoing about whether it was the Iranians or the Houthis who carried out the attack, the likely answer being a combination of the two, but perhaps with Iranorchestrating the operation and supplying the equipment. But over-focus on responsibility diverts attention from a much more important development: a middle ranking power like Iran, under sanctions and with limited resources and expertise, acting alone or through allies, has inflicted crippling damage on theoretically much better-armed Saudi Arabia which is supposedly defended by the US, the world’s greatest military super-power.
If the US and Saudi Arabia are particularly hesitant to retaliate against Iran it is because they know now, contrary to what they might have believed a year ago, that a counter-attack will not be a cost-free exercise. What happened before can happen again: not for nothing has Iran been called a “drone superpower”. Oil production facilities and the desalination plants providing much of the fresh water in Saudi Arabia are conveniently concentrated targets for drones and small missiles.
In other words, the military playing field will be a lot more level in future in a conflict between a country with a sophisticated air force and air defence system and one without. The trump card for the US, Nato powers and Israel has long been their overwhelming superiority in airpower over any likely enemy. Suddenly this calculus has been undermined because almost anybody can be a player on the cheap when it comes to airpower.
Anthony Cordesman, a military expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, succinctly sums up the importance of this change, writing that “the strikes on Saudi Arabia provide a clear strategic warning that the US era of air supremacy in the Gulf, and the near US monopoly on precision strike capability, is rapidly fading.” He explains that a new generation of drones, cruise missiles, and precision strike ballistic missiles are entering the Iranian inventories and have begun to spread to the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Similar turning points in military history have occurred when the deployment of an easily produced weapon suddenly checkmates the use of a more complicated one.
A good example of this was the attack on 11 November 1940, on five Italian battleships, moored at their base at Taranto by 20 slow moving but sturdy British Swordfish biplanes, armed with torpedoes and launched from an aircraft carrier. At the end of the day, three of the battleships had been sunk or badly damaged while only two of the British planes were missing. The enormity of the victory achieved at such minimal cost ended the era when battleships ruled the sea and replaced them with one in which aircraft carriers with torpedo/bomber were supreme. It was a lesson noted by the Japanese navy which attacked Pearl Harbour in similar fashion a year after Taranto.
The Saudis showed off the wreckage of the drones and missiles to assembled diplomats and journalists this week in a bid to convince them that the Iranians were behind the air raid. But the most significant feature of the broken drone and missile parts was that, in full working order, the weapons that had just rocked the world economy would not have cost a lot. By way of contrast, the US-made Patriot anti-aircraft missiles, the main air defence of Saudi Arabia that were so useless last Saturday, cost $3m (£2.4bn) apiece.
Cost and simplicity are important because they mean that Iran, the Houthis, Hezbollah and almost any country can produce drones and missiles in numbers large enough to overwhelm any defences they are likely to meet.
Compare the cost of the drone which would be in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to the $122m (£97.6m) price of a single F-35 fighter, so expensive that it can only be purchased in limited numbers. As they take on board the meaning of what happened at Abqaiq and Khurais oil facilities, governments around the world will be demanding that their air force chiefs explain why they need to spend so much money when cheap but effective alternatives are available. Going by past precedent, the air chiefs and arms manufacturers will fight to their last breath for grossly inflated budgets to purchase weapons of dubious utility in a real war.
The attack on Saudi Arabia reinforces a trend in warfare in which inexpensive easily acquired weapons come out on top. Consider the track record of the Improvised Explosive Device (IED), usually made out of easily available fertiliser, detonated by a command wire, and planted in or beside a road. These were used with devastating effect by the IRA in South Armagh, forcing the British Army off the roads and into helicopters.
IEDs were used in great numbers and with great effect against US-led coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Immense resources were deployed by the US military into finding a counter to this deadly device, which included spending no less than $40bn (£32bn) on 27,000 heavily armoured vehicles called MRAPs. A subsequent army study revealed that that the number of US servicemen killed and wounded in an attack on an MRAP was exactly the same as in the vehicles which they had replaced.
It is unthinkable that American, British and Saudi military chiefs will accept that they command expensive, technically advanced forces that are obsolete in practice. This means they are stuck with arms that suck up resources but are, in practical terms, out of date. The Japanese, soon after they had demonstrated at Pearl Harbour the vulnerability of battleships, commissioned the world’s largest battleship, the Yamato, which fired its guns only once and was sunk in 1945 by US torpedo aircraft and bombers operating from aircraft carriers.
General Dynamics Unveils ‘Light Weight’ Tank That Could Be Deployed By 2025
The Department of Defense (DoD) is anticipating the next-generation of main-battle tanks to hit the modern battlefield by 2025.
In the meantime, General Dynamics showed off its next-generation of main-battle tanks during the 2019 Modern Day Marine expo in Quantico, Virginia, over the weekend, reported Defense Blog.
General Dynamics Land Systems, a segment within General Dynamics, unveiled the advanced, ‘light tank,’ called the Griffin II.
The DoD/Army is currently searching for new tracked armored vehicles able to defend infantry squads on the modern battlefield.
Griffin II is part of a more significant effort by the DoD to develop weapons that can be quickly deployed around the world. The new tank is light enough that it can be airlifted into battle.
The Army is shifting focus from counterinsurgency to high-intensity war-fighting against China and Russia, and will need a new lightweight tank for the next conflict.
Griffin II has a 120mm main gun and weighs around 38-tons. It will “provide soldiers with speed, protection, lethality and the ability to wage a multi-domain battle, working in concert with other ground forces to overwhelm the enemy with multiple simultaneous challenges,” said Defense Blog. It has a scaled-down version of the M1 Abrams turret with a similar overall design.
The new tank is expected to have a higher rating of survivability than the M1 Abrams, a tank that entered service in 1980, and has been used in all US involved Middle Eastern wars since the Gulf War (1990-1991).
The new tank will feature advanced armor, more lightweight than ever before, along with intelligent sensors that are integrated with the hardware, software, and effectors to create an overarching, layered system of passive and active self-defense measures, Defense Blog said.
Griffin II could enter service by 2025, and be flown to any battlefield in the world via a Boeing C-17 Globemaster III transport aircraft.
