Author: admin

Authored by John Whitehead via Te Rutherford Institute,

“Politicians are more likely than people in the general population to be sociopaths. I think you would find no expert in the field of sociopathy/psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder who would dispute this… That a small minority of human beings literally have no conscience was and is a bitter pill for our society to swallow – but it does explain a great many things, shamelessly deceitful political behavior being one.”

– Dr. Martha Stout, clinical psychologist and former instructor at Harvard Medical School

Twenty years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: “What’s the difference between a politician and a psychopath?”

The answer, then and now, remains the same: None.

There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians.

Nor is there much of a difference between the havoc wreaked on innocent lives by uncaring, unfeeling, selfish, irresponsible, parasitic criminals and elected officials who lie to their constituents, trade political favors for campaign contributions, turn a blind eye to the wishes of the electorate, cheat taxpayers out of hard-earned dollars, favor the corporate elite, entrench the military industrial complex, and spare little thought for the impact their thoughtless actions and hastily passed legislation might have on defenseless citizens.

Psychopaths and politicians both have a tendency to be selfish, callous, remorseless users of others, irresponsible, pathological liars, glib, con artists, lacking in remorse and shallow.

Charismatic politicians, like criminal psychopaths, exhibit a failure to accept responsibility for their actions, have a high sense of self-worth, are chronically unstable, have socially deviant lifestyles, need constant stimulation, have parasitic lifestyles and possess unrealistic goals.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans.

Political psychopaths are all largely cut from the same pathological cloth, brimming with seemingly easy charm and boasting calculating minds. Such leaders eventually create pathocracies: totalitarian societies bent on power, control, and destruction of both freedom in general and those who exercise their freedoms.

Once psychopaths gain power, the result is usually some form of totalitarian government or a pathocracy. “At that point, the government operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups,” author James G. Long notes. “We are currently witnessing deliberate polarizations of American citizens, illegal actions, and massive and needless acquisition of debt. This is typical of psychopathic systems, and very similar things happened in the Soviet Union as it overextended and collapsed.”

In other words, electing a psychopath to public office is tantamount to national hara-kiri, the ritualized act of self-annihilation, self-destruction and suicide. It signals the demise of democratic government and lays the groundwork for a totalitarian regime that is legalistic, militaristic, inflexible, intolerant and inhuman.

Incredibly, despite clear evidence of the damage that has already been inflicted on our nation and its citizens by a psychopathic government, voters continue to elect psychopaths to positions of power and influence.

Indeed, a study from Southern Methodist University found that Washington, DC—our nation’s capital and the seat of power for our so-called representatives—ranks highest on the list of regions that are populated by psychopaths.

According to investigative journalist Zack Beauchamp, “In 2012, a group of psychologists evaluated every President from Washington to Bush II using ‘psychopathy trait estimates derived from personality data completed by historical experts on each president.’ They found that presidents tended to have the psychopath’s characteristic fearlessness and low anxiety levels — traits that appear to help Presidents, but also might cause them to make reckless decisions that hurt other people’s lives.”

The willingness to prioritize power above all else, including the welfare of their fellow human beings, ruthlessness, callousness and an utter lack of conscience are among the defining traits of the sociopath.

When our own government no longer sees us as human beings with dignity and worth but as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police, conned into believing it has our best interests at heart, mistreated, jailed if we dare step out of line, and then punished unjustly without remorse—all the while refusing to own up to its failings—we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic.

Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.”

Worse, psychopathology is not confined to those in high positions of government. It can spread like a virus among the populace. As an academic study into pathocracy concluded, “[T]yranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.”

People don’t simply line up and salute. It is through one’s own personal identification with a given leader, party or social order that they become agents of good or evil.

Much depends on how leaders “cultivate a sense of identification with their followers,” says Professor Alex Haslam. “I mean one pretty obvious thing is that leaders talk about ‘we’ rather than ‘I,’ and actually what leadership is about is cultivating this sense of shared identity about ‘we-ness’ and then getting people to want to act in terms of that ‘we-ness,’ to promote our collective interests. . . . [We] is the single word that has increased in the inaugural addresses over the last century . . . and the other one is ‘America.’”

The goal of the modern corporate state is obvious: to promote, cultivate, and embed a sense of shared identification among its citizens. To this end, “we the people” have become “we the police state.”

We are fast becoming slaves in thrall to a faceless, nameless, bureaucratic totalitarian government machine that relentlessly erodes our freedoms through countless laws, statutes, and prohibitions.

Any resistance to such regimes depends on the strength of opinions in the minds of those who choose to fight back. What this means is that we the citizenry must be very careful that we are not manipulated into marching in lockstep with an oppressive regime.

Writing for ThinkProgress, Beauchamp suggests that “one of the best cures to bad leaders may very well be political democracy.”

But what does this really mean in practical terms?

It means holding politicians accountable for their actions and the actions of their staff using every available means at our disposal: through investigative journalism (what used to be referred to as the Fourth Estate) that enlightens and informs, through whistleblower complaints that expose corruption, through lawsuits that challenge misconduct, and through protests and mass political action that remind the powers-that-be that “we the people” are the ones that call the shots.

Remember, education precedes action. Citizens need to the do the hard work of educating themselves about what the government is doing and how to hold it accountable. Don’t allow yourselves to exist exclusively in an echo chamber that is restricted to views with which you agree. Expose yourself to multiple media sources, independent and mainstream, and think for yourself.

For that matter, no matter what your political leanings might be, don’t allow your partisan bias to trump the principles that serve as the basis for our constitutional republic. As Beauchamp notes, “A system that actually holds people accountable to the broader conscience of society may be one of the best ways to keep conscienceless people in check.”

That said, if we allow the ballot box to become our only means of pushing back against the police state, the battle is already lost.

Resistance will require a citizenry willing to be active at the local level.

Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if you wait to act until the SWAT team is crashing through your door, until your name is placed on a terror watch list, until you are reported for such outlawed activities as collecting rainwater or letting your children play outside unsupervised, then it will be too late.

This much I know: we are not faceless numbers.

We are not cogs in the machine.

We are not slaves.

We are human beings, and for the moment, we have the opportunity to remain free—that is, if we tirelessly advocate for our rights and resist at every turn attempts by the government to place us in chains.

The Founders understood that our freedoms do not flow from the government. They were not given to us only to be taken away by the will of the State. They are inherently ours. In the same way, the government’s appointed purpose is not to threaten or undermine our freedoms, but to safeguard them.

Until we can get back to this way of thinking, until we can remind our fellow Americans what it really means to be free, and until we can stand firm in the face of threats to our freedoms, we will continue to be treated like slaves in thrall to a bureaucratic police state run by political psychopaths.

Earlier this week the National Security Agency released a cybersecurity advisory which focused on attempts of Chinese state-backed hackers to gain access to intellectual property such as coronavirus research or advanced technologies, or political and military information.

Tuesday’s NSA advisory identified “vulnerabilities” in US systems that have been “recently leveraged, or scanned-for, by Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors” — for example bugs in software like Microsoft Windows or Citrix Systems.

But now China’s Foreign Ministry has slammed the NSA report, calling out the spy agency’s ‘hypocrisy’ and shining a light on vast US domestic surveillance exposed years ago by Edward Snowden. Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian on Wednesday slammed the United States as an an “empire of hacking” and specifically cited the 2013 Snowden revelations. 

How ironic that the main actor in PRISM and the largest cybertheft agency in the world is criticizing others for cybertheft. The NSA spies&attacks US allies, uses its advantages and exploits loopholes for espionage. Indeed, it’s “among the worst offenders of mass surveillance”. pic.twitter.com/4bxI6rTa7d

— Spokesperson发言人办公室 (@MFA_China) October 21, 2020

“It is indeed ironic news that the US National Security Agency, as the main implementer of the Prism programme and the world’s largest cyber espionage agency, publicly accuses other countries of cyber espionage,” Zhao said.

Zhao called the US and specifically the NSA as “among the worst offenders of mass surveillance” in his fiery comments.

Recall that the Prism program as revealed by Snowden involved the NSA gaining backdoor access to major internet companies like Microsoft and Google unbeknownst to the public as part of its years-long practice of sweeping up domestic communications with no warrant. 

Zhao also expressly denied widespread allegations that Beijing is involved in the exact same thing which has gotten major firms like Huawei banned in the US and parts of the West, and which has placed particular Chinese apps and software under the spotlight.

“The Chinese government has never asked Chinese companies to install back doors and provide overseas data to the government,” Zhao claimed.

More recently, China as well as other US rivals and enemies like Iran have been accused of hacking and stealing valuable coronavirus research and data from US medical institutions and laboratories amid the international race to be the first to produce a reliable vaccine. 

By Greg Miller of FreightWaves

Chinese water torture is defined as “a painful process in which cold water is slowly dripped onto the scalp, forehead or face for a prolonged period of time, allegedly making the restrained victim insane.” Crude-tanker owners and investors may face their own version of this ancient torment. Today’s agonizingly low rates could be just the beginning.

The massive floating storage volumes that built up earlier this year are unloading. But very, very slowly. In aggregate, they’re dripping out. Meanwhile, oil demand is growing, but again, very slowly. Incremental oil demand is a trickle, not a flood.

First the party, now the hangover

Crude tankers filled up with storage cargoes in April-June after Saudi Arabia opened its spigots despite COVID-weakened demand. Tanker rates hit historic highs of over $250,000 per day but did so by pulling forward demand via storage deals and borrowing from the future.

The best hope for tanker markets was that storage would unwind quickly as global consumption rebounded. This was the so-called “short hangover” or “rip off the Band-Aid” scenario. It would depress rates in the near term as storage tankers unloaded and swiftly reentered the spot-market scrum. But it would hasten a return to normalcy.

Alas, new data provided to FreightWaves by intelligence company Kpler confirms that the Band-Aid is not being ripped off. It also implies that barring a major geopolitical event to supercharge spot rates, the hangover could be long and painful.

Rates sink to multiyear lows

Cratering crude-tanker rates are now well below both breakeven levels and where they normally are at this time of year.

According to Clarksons Platou Securities, rates for very large crude carriers (VLCCs, tankers that carry 2 million barrels of crude oil) averaged $17,000 per day on Wednesday. Rates were $100,000 per day at this time last year, propelled by tankers attacks in the Middle East and U.S. sanctions against China’s COSCO. Looking beyond last year’s anomaly, current VLCC rates are less than a third of their 2015-19 average.

Clarksons estimates that average spot rates for Suezmaxes (tankers that carry 1 million barrels) are $4,000 per day. A year ago, they were $86,600 per day. Current Suezmax rates are about one-tenth of their 2015-19 average.

Clarksons puts spot rates for Aframaxes (tankers that carry 750,000 barrels) at $4,500 per day. A year ago, rates were $55,100 per day. Current rates are about one-sixth of their 2015-19 average.

Floating storage unwind stuck in neutral

Kpler collects data on laden crude- and condensate-tanker capacity for ships stationary for 12 or more days.

This reveals how much crude is in floating storage over time, including intentionally stored cargoes and those suffering lengthy delivery delays. Kpler also breaks out how much of this laden storage is off the shores of China, where port congestion has been particularly acute in recent months.

The data shows that global crude floating storage peaked at 190 million barrels on July 1 and had fallen 31% (or 29.5 VLCC-equivalents) to 131 million barrels as of Sunday.

The negative signal for oil demand is that storage volumes have been hovering around the 130-million-barrel level since late August. Chinese storage has fallen. But non-Chinese storage has risen from around 60 million barrels in late August to 80 million barrels currently. Chinese floating storage accounted for around half of global floating storage in the beginning of September. It’s now down to around a third.

Kpler Global Energy Economist Reid l’Anson told FreightWaves that Kpler has seen the largest gains off the North Sea, on the production side, and on the destination side, off India, Japan, South Korea and in the Malacca Strait. Floating storage off the shores of destination nations is inherently bad for tanker transport demand (the oil has already been transported). And regardless of whether storage is offshore of production centers or consuming nations, it’s a bearish on current oil demand.

Crude-tanker utilization keeps falling

Kpler also provided FreightWaves with data on the percentage of unladen (empty) crude/condensate tankers versus the total fleet, based on deadweight tonnage, regardless of size category.

The numbers are ugly and confirm why rates are so low. There are too many empty ships chasing too few cargoes. And it’s getting worse.

The laden/unladen mix was roughly evenly split at the beginning of the year, until the Saudi production decision. That caused a surge in crude-tanker rates in March and April. That rate spike — and the ships chartered for floating storage — brought the unladen percentage down to 40%-42% in May.

But then the unladen percentage began rising. The scope of unemployed ships in the spot market increased in June even as floating storage rose. As ships have been released from floating storage starting in July, the percentage has increased further.

The higher the unladen crude-tanker percentage, the more bearish the signal for crude-oil demand (particularly in light of static floating-storage levels in late August through today). On Wednesday, the unladen share hit a year-to-date high of 52.5%.

Air-travel fears chop tanker demand

Listed companies heavily exposed to crude-tanker spot rates include Euronav, DHT, International Seaways, Frontline, Nordic American Tankers Diamond S Shipping and Teekay Tankers.

As recent history has shown, tanker rates can go from bust to boom overnight as the result of major geopolitical events. But barring such an occurrence, rate prospects rely on oil demand, a topic highlighted by panelists at last week’s virtual Capital Link New York Maritime Forum.

According to International Seaways CEO Lois Zabrocky, “In the fourth quarter, we’re at 92-93 million barrels of [global oil] consumption versus 101 million barrels a year ago. COVID is still not really letting go of its grasp on a lot of the world’s population. That’s part of it. In addition, we’ve got [floating storage] destocking and OPEC is holding back [on production].

“I think there’s a structural problem in the market,” maintained Bob Burke, CEO of Ridgebury Tankers.

“I don’t think anyone on this [panel] has experienced an 8% decline in demand that seems semi-permanent. We are down about 8 million barrels a day and there’s one answer for why this is: airlines.

“The barrel-per-day [loss] seems very highly correlated to airline travel, especially long-haul travel. And because of the psychology of the consumer, there’s going to be a lot more pain in that sector,” opined Burke.

Seasonal upside vs structural downside

Higher seasonal demand in the Northern Hemisphere should bump up crude-tanker rates in the coming months. However, a combination of tepid underlying consumer demand and a languid storage unwind that slowly drips out more tankers into the spot market could create dual headwinds well into next year.

Jon Chappell of Evercore ISI, who was just named the top shipping analyst of 2020 by Institutional Investor, told FreightWaves: “The mismatch in supply and demand is not likely to ease anytime soon.

“Although there will be traditional seasonal patterns, we expect the upside to be severely capped this year until global inventories normalize — which may take until late 2021.

“I think the VLCCs have held in better on a relative basis owing to congestion in China ports and still-elevated floating storage,” he continued. “As these issues unwind — and they are, just more slowly than many hoped — the relative performance of VLCCs and midsized asset classes should ‘normalize,’ meaning that Aframaxes and Suezmaxes will rise from above sub-OPEX [operating expense] levels, but VLCCs will likely remain under pressure.”

On the plus side, the crude-tanker orderbook is extremely low and owners should scrap older tankers if rates stay this bad. “Fortunately, we’re in a business where about 5% of the ships on average go away [via scrapping],” said Burke.

Scrapping activity has been minimal, but could increase. COVID temporarily restricted scrapping but those restrictions should ease. In addition, there has been very little scrapping of VLCCs in 2019 and 2020 because until recently, rates have been unusually strong.

As Burke put it, “If you have a pocketful of cash, you’re inclined to take another bet. So, there’s resistance to scrapping even when it would be the natural choice with rates so low.”

Scrapping and low orderbook to the rescue?

“If you look at history, it usually takes at least six months of a depressed environment to really see vessels get recycled,” added Zabrocky. “At the [rate] levels we’re at, I think we should start to see more vessels getting taken out of the market.”

Burke also pointed out that the very oldest VLCCs were inordinately placed into floating-storage duty and once those cargoes unload, these ships are prime scrapping candidates — which should temper the spot-rate headwind of the storage unwind. “A lot of the older ships that went into storage will probably go right to the scrapyard,” he said.

But can tanker rates recover in 2021 due to reductions on the vessel-supply side? Or does it ultimately hinge on reversing the cargo-demand shortfall highlighted by the new Kpler data?

Burke himself acknowledged that “if you look to the orderbook to save you on the spot market, you’re grasping for straws.”

Diamond S Shipping CEO Craig Stevenson, an industry veteran, addressed the scrapping question back in March 2009. In the midst of the financial crisis, Stevenson told Connecticut Maritime Association conferencegoers: “You’re not going to scrap your way to prosperity. Ever. You’re not going to reduce the orderbook and turn it into a good market. It won’t happen. In the history of shipping, it hasn’t worked that way.

“It’s demand,” emphasized Stephenson. “It starts with demand.”

With an advertising economy worth $239 billion in 2019, it’s safe to say that the U.S. is home to some of the biggest advertising spenders on the planet.

However, as Visual Capitalist’s Katie Jones notes, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the major upheaval of advertising spend, and it is unlikely to recover for some time.

The graphic below uses data from Ad Age’s Leading National Advertisers 2020 which measures U.S. advertising spend each year, and ranks 100 national advertisers by their total spend in 2019.

Let’s take a look at the brands with the biggest budgets.

2019’s Biggest Advertising Spenders

Much of the top 10 biggest advertising spenders are in the telecommunications industry, but it is retail giant Amazon that tops the list with an advertising spend of almost $7 billion.

In fact, Amazon spent an eye-watering $21,000 per minute on advertising and promotion in 2019, making them undeniably the largest advertising spender in America.

Explore the 10 biggest advertisers in 2019 below:

The report offers several ways of looking at this data—for example, when looking at highest spend by medium, Procter & Gamble comes out on top for traditional media spend like broadcast and cable TV.

On the digital front, Expedia Group is the biggest spender on desktop search, while Amazon tops the list for internet display ads.

The Rise and Fall of Advertising Spend

Interestingly, changes in advertising spend tend to fall closely in step with broader economic growth. In fact, for every 1% increase in U.S. GDP, there is a 4.4% rise of advertising that occurs in tandem.

The same phenomenon can be seen among the biggest advertising spenders in the country. Since 2000, spend has seen both promising growth, and drastic declines. Unsurprisingly, the Great Recession resulted in the largest drop in spend ever recorded, and now it looks as though history may be repeating itself.

Total advertising spend in the U.S. is estimated this year to see a brutal decline of almost 13% and is unlikely to return to previous levels for a number of years.

The COVID-19 Gut Punch

To say that the global COVID-19 pandemic has impacted consumer behavior would be an understatement, and perhaps the most notable change is how they now consume content.

With more people staying safe indoors, there is less need for traditional media formats such as out-of-home advertising. As a result, online media is taking its place, as an increase in spend for this format shows.

But despite marketers trying to optimize their media strategy or stripping back their budget entirely, many governments across the world are ramping up their spend on advertising to promote public health messages—or in the case of the U.S., to canvass.

The Saving Grace?

Even though advertising spend is expected to nosedive by almost 13% in 2020, this figure excludes political advertising. When taking that into account, the decline becomes a slightly more manageable 7.6%

Moreover, according to industry research firm Kantar, advertising spend for the 2020 U.S. election is estimated to reach $7 billion—the same as Amazon’s 2019 spend—making it the most expensive election of all time.

Can political advertising be the key to the advertising industry bouncing back again?

 

Authored by Simon Watkins via OilPrice.com,

Following the end on the 18th of October of the 13-year United Nations’ embargo on Iran buying or selling weapons, the roll-out of the military component of the 25-year deal between China and Iran will begin in November, as exclusively revealed by Oil Price.com.

After a series of meetings in China on the 9th and 10th of October between Iran’s Foreign Minister, Mohammad Zarif, and his China counterpart, Wang Yi, this military component may now also feature the deployment in Iran of North Korean weaponry and technology, in exchange for oil, according to sources very close to the Iranian government spoken to by OilPrice.com last week. Most notably this would include Hwasong-12 mobile ballistic missiles, with a range of 4,500 kilometres, and the development of liquid propellant rocket engines suitable for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) or satellite launch vehicles (SLVs). This will all be part of a broader triangular relationship co-ordinated by Beijing and further facilitated by the imminent launch of a new digitised currency system by China.

This sort of co-ordination – between North Korea and Iran and also between North Korea, Iran, and China – is nothing new, although its resumption at such a scale and in such products is. According to a number of defence industry sources – and recorded in various ‘Jane’s Intelligence Reviews’ (JIR) – over the first five-year period from the onset of Iran’s ballistic missile program in 1987, Iran bought up to 300 Scud B missiles from North Korea. Pyongyang, though, did not just sell Iran weapons but it was also instrumental in helping Iran to build-out the infrastructure for what has become an extremely high-level ballistic missile program, beginning with the creation in Iran of a Scud B missile plant that became operational by the end of 1988.

According to JIR and other defence sources, this early-stage co-operation in this area between North Korea and Iran also included Iranian personnel travelling to North Korea for training in the operation and manufacture of these missiles and the stationing of North Korean personnel in Iran during the build-out of missile plants. This model of knowledge and skills transference, of course, has been a key part of the 25-year deal between Iran and China since it was formally agreed back in 2016, including the training of up to 130 young, fast-tracked officers from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) every year at various military institutions across mainland China.

The simple idea of paying North Korea in oil is also far from new, having been a key method by which Iran helped to fund the development of North Korea’s more powerful Nodong series of missiles as early as the 1990s, according to Kenneth Katzman, Middle Eastern affairs specialist at the Congressional Research Service, in Washington. According to sources close to Iran’s Petroleum Ministry spoken to by OilPrice.com last week, oil shipments are the number one suggestion from North Korea to any country that has oil and wants weapons as a means of payment for any weaponry that Pyonyang has available.

The Hwasong-12, first revealed internationally in a military parade on 14 April 2017 celebrating the birthday anniversary of North Korea’s founding President, Kim Il-sung, is being made available to Iran in such a way and, from Tehran’s perspective, fits neatly into the delicate military strategy in which it is currently involved. This is founded on the fact that decades of various sanctions have left the Islamic Republic with a severely constrained ability to defend itself against attacks from hostile aircraft or missiles with its own air force, which leaves a massive standing army as the primary deterrent for land invasion and its own missile defence systems as the primary deterrent for aerial attacks. On the other hand, though, the Islamic Republic is aware that any major long-range missile attack on any foreign power allied with the U.S. will end in absolute disaster for it. As former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once said:  “The threat of committing suicide is a poor deterrent to being murdered.”

Consequently, Iran has consistently stated since 2017 – by order of the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei – that it will limit itself to developing ballistic missiles with a maximum range of 2,000 kilometres. Clearly, the Hwasong-12 has a range of double this but, crucially from Iran’s political impact modelling undertaken over recent months, this is unlikely to make the existing relationship with the U.S. worse.

“The U.S. wanted more specific prohibitions on ballistic missiles in a new JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] to be drawn up at the beginning of 2018 but that did not happen, so it withdrew,” said one of the Iran sources.

“Iran believes that the next U.S. President, be it Trump or Biden, will want to do a deal to get some form of JCPOA back on track, so from that perspective being able to offer the withdrawal of the Hwasong-12s would be a useful negotiating tool,” he said.

“At the same time, though, there is the threat that the Hwasong-12 IRBM [intermediate range ballistic missile] could be upgraded through the addition of an 80-ton thrust engine to either the Hwasong-14 [two-stage, 10,000 km range] or the Hwasong-15 [two rocket engines cluster in first stage, 13,000 km range] ICBMs,” he added.

This ‘upgrade’ would be regarded by the U.S. as a serious proposition, as there have been signals over the years that Iran might already have been working on such a higher-powered rocket booster configuration. According to a New York Times report from December 2011, the previous month had seen the destruction of a supposed development site in Iran for long-range solid-propellant missiles.

“This was the first public indication that Iran was working on such systems, which would need much more energetic – and thus, explosive – propellants than used in Iran’s current Fateh-110-based solid-propellant short range ballistic missiles and Sejil medium range ballistic missiles, and press reports in May 2018 indicate that the program has continued at a new location where ICBM-class solid rocket motor production facilities and evidence of ground testing of ICBM-class motors have been detected in open source imagery,” said Robert Einhorn, senior fellow in the foreign policy program at Brookings Institution in Washington.

He added that various sources since 2013 suggest Iran has been receiving cooperation from North Korea in the development of a large, liquid-propellant rocket engine suitable for ICBMs or SLVs and that a U.S. Treasury Department sanctions notice from January 2016 refers to Iranian work on a North Korean ‘80-ton rocket booster.’

China, for its part, has been warned by the U.S. in the past for failing to adhere to the Missile Technology Control Regime in supplying missile equipment and technology to various countries, which is why it has frequently used North Korea as an agent to do so, allowing itself to plead ignorance of any illegal activity. It is obvious, however, that there are many benefits for China in seeking to expedite the movement of such missile technology from North Korea to Iran as part of the 25-year deal’s military component.

• First, as Iran is paying North Korea in oil it takes some pressure off China in its obligations to its neighbour.

• Second, it cements China’s clear position to the U.S. as having influence over not just one but two nuclear and near-nuclear states.

• Third, it further binds Iran (and the rest of the Shia crescent of power, especially Iraq) into China’s geopolitically game-changing ‘One Belt, One Road’ project.

• Fourth, it creates a counterpoint of influence and power in the Middle East akin to the U.S.-Israel axis.

• And fifth, it will shift more of the U.S.’s attention on the Persian Gulf and away from the Asia-Pacific region that China regards as its backyard of power.

All of this is set to be facilitated further by the imminent roll-out of China’s digital currency electronic payments system (DC/EP), on which the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has been working since at least 2014. The DC/EP will operate on a two-tiered system, with the digital currency itself, like cash, being a direct claim on the central bank denominated in renminbi (RMB), Rory Green, Asia analyst for TS Lombard, in London, told OilPrice.com last week. The PBoC will exchange CBDC with chosen banks and financial intermediaries, which, in turn, will make the funds available to users via existing electronic banking platforms, and clients will be able to convert RMB to CBDC (at a rate of 1:1) via their digital wallets.

“The digital RMB could certainly help the integration of Iranian financial companies into the Chinese banking system and avoiding the US$/Swift monopoly,” highlighted Green.

“China could set up an entity completely unconnected to its traditional banking system to receive all the payments via digital RMB, with the payments then sent on via digital RMB,” he added.

“This would be similar to the function currently performed by the Bank of Kunlun, and some of the North Korea trading houses but with fewer of the downside risks for other banks/companies in China to associate with the processing entity,” he concluded.

Less than a year after the Wuhan Coronavirus outbreak began in China, eventually causing a global economic disaster, China is happy to report its automotive sales are back to normal.

How normal? Journalist Yang Jin recently wrote for Automotive News that when you step into a Chinese car dealership, “you can’t help feeling a sense of euphoria”. 

The article pointed out that at dealerships on Wuzhong Road in southwest Shanghai, employees were wearing masks and there were no customers back in February. Now, salesmen could be seen smoking and laughing outside on break, without masks. 

Salespeople at a local Toyota dealer were seen “chatting merrily”. Their dealership has “run out of inventory”. 

Zhang Feng, a sales consultant, said: “A customer has to wait for three months after placing an order for large crossovers like the RAV4, and about one month for other Toyota models.” 

New vehicle sales were up 17% to 2.6 million in September as a result of massive government intervention and spending on infrastructure projects. Sales of commercial vehicles and buses were up 40% as a result. Light vehicle sales were up 8% for September, approaching 2.1 million. 

Toyota was the best performing brand during the month, with sales up 47%. GM also continued to recover, up 12% in the third quarter after plunging 43% in Q1 as a result of the pandemic and ensuing shutdowns. 

We noted back in early September that if China is truly the leading indicator globally, a V-shaped recovery could be in store for the rest of the world in coming months. China’s vehicle sales rose to 2.18 million units in August, according to preliminary data released by the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers and Bloomberg.

This marked a 11.3% year over year gain and follows a 16.4% rise for auto sales in July. Still, passenger vehicles were down 9.7% for the year to 14.5 million units.

Sales of heavy duty cars were also up 75% year over year in August to 128,000 units. This put 2020’s sales at 1.1 million units at the beginning of September, which was – unbelievably – higher than the same period for any year in the past.