The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) published a new report Monday that shows worldwide sales of semiconductors totaled $96.8 billion during 1Q19, a 15.5% plunge over 4Q18 and a 13% drop YoY.
Global sales for March 2019 were $32.3 billion, a 2% decline from February and 13% drop YoY.
“Global semiconductor sales slowed during the first quarter of 2019, falling short of the previous quarter and Q1 of last year by double-digit percentages,” said John Neuffer, SIA president and CEO.
“Sales in March decreased on a year-to-year basis across all major regional markets and semiconductor product categories, consistent with the cyclical trend the global market has experienced recently.”
Regionally, sales increased in March on an MoM basis in China (1.3%) and Europe (0.60%), but declined in the Asia Pacific (-1.9%), Japan (-4.5%), and the Americas (-6.7%). On a YoY basis in March, sales plunged in Europe (-6.8%), Asia Pacific (-9.3%), China (-9.4%), Japan (-11.1%), and the Americas (-26.6%).
In a separate report by ‘Things That Make You Go Hmmm‘ – the YoY percentage growth of global semiconductor revenues has dramatically slowed from 41% in 1994 to less than 4% estimated for 2019. This is a dramatic projected slowdown from last year’s 15.9% print, which tells us that the semiconductor ‘supercycle’ has stalled.
Meritocracy Capital shows that global semiconductor sales have just crashed to a recessionary level.
David Rosenberg, Gluskin Sheff’s Chief Economist & Strategist, recently tweeted that “SOX index has soared 36% this year, doubling the performance of the overall market even with a massive decline in sales, both domestically (-23% YoY) to the lowest level in two years and globally as well (-11%). Whoever said logic had to prevail?”
Fred Hickey, the editor of the monthly publication ‘The High-Tech Strategist’, tweeted that the global semiconductor industry is deteriorating, the probability of a 2H19 rebound in sales is questionable.
Grant Williams from ‘Things That Make You Go Hmmm’ — overlayed the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX) with the Global Manufacturing PMI, the US PMI, Global Export Volume and Taiwanese exports. Showing just how disconnected SOX is from reality.
TD Securities shows Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore electronics exports continue to dive.
Last but not least, Citigroup US Economic Surprise Index against the SOX shows the jaws have opened…
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2GTgG7V Tyler Durden
The death toll from the ongoing war in Yemen will reach a staggering 233,000 if it continues until the end of 2019, a new report from the United Nations said.
According to the UN report, of the 233,000 estimated deaths in Yemen, 102,000 will be combat-related and the remaining 131,000 due to malnutrition, cholera, and other diseases.
2018 photo of aftermath of Saudi coalition airstrike targeting Yemen’s presidential palace in Sana’a, via AFP/Getty.
In another shocking statistic, the U.N. report said that 140,000 children will have been killed since the start of the conflict in March of 2015 (due to direct and indirect war-related causes).
The report said that by the end of the year, one child will death will be reported every 11 minutes and 54 seconds.
Our new research sheds light onto the impact of conflict in Yemen.
The conflict has set back development in Yemen by 21 years.
One child dies because of the conflict every 12 minutes.
These totals are only expected to increase substantially in the next three years, as the U.N. estimates the death toll will reach nearly 500,000 by 2022.
One of the UN researchers, Jonathan D. Moyer, summarized the team’s methodology for calculating direct vs. indirect deaths related to the war:
We estimate that, between 2015 and the end of 2019, that 100,000 people will die directly (this is one of our model assumptions). But indirect deaths exceed direct, with 130,000 people dying due to lack of access to food and infrastructure. 60% of deaths are indirect.
And he continued, outlining the immense toll on Yemeni children, especially due to malnutrition and disease:
And the majority of these deaths are children. Since 2015, the conflict has killed 140,000 children from violence, malnutrition, disease, and reduced family income. In 2019, a child dies every 12 minutes from conflict (both direct and indirect).
Unlike the war in Syria, the conflict in Yemen is rarely discussed in the international media.
Despite the fact that the Yemeni War is now the most violent conflict in the Middle East region, it still receives less coverage than other conflicts.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2GYJZHy Tyler Durden
Rich people are picking up sticks and getting out of dodge, according to Johannesburg-based research firm New World Wealth, which notes that around 108,000 millionaires migrated across borders in 2018 – a 14% increase over 2017 and more than double the level in 2013.
The top destinations? Australia, the United States and Canada, reports Bloomberg. Around 3,000 of the millionaires left the UK last year – with Brexit and taxes cited as possible motivations.
Present conditions such as crime, lack of business opportunities or religious tensions are key factors, according to the report – which can also serve as key future indicators according to Andrew Amoils, New World Wealth’s head of research.
“It can be a sign of bad things to come as high-net-worth individuals are often the first people to leave — they have the means to leave unlike middle-class citizens,” says Amoils.
Top destinations
According to New World’s report, Australia tops most “wish lists” for immigrants due to its perceived safety (deadly bugs and animals aside, we assume). There is also no inheritance tax down under, and the country has strong business ties to Japan, China and South Korea. Moreover, Australia “also stands out for its sustained growth, having escaped the financial crisis largely unscathed and avoided recessions for the past 27 years,” according to Bloomberg.
The second most popular country was the United States – and in particular the cities of Los Angeles, New York, Miami and the San Francisco Bay as preferred options.
Fleeing China and India
Due to China’s strict regulations on capital outflows in recent years, many of the country’s wealthy are subject to hefty taxes. In response, assets are shifting as rich Asians move to more developed countries.
The outflow of high-net worth individuals from China and India isn’t particularly concerning from an economic standpoint as far more new millionaires are being created there than are leaving, New World Wealth said.
“Once the standard of living in these countries improves, we expect several wealthy people to move back,” Amoils said. –Bloomberg
Turkey, meanwhile, lost 4,000 millionaires last year – the third straight year of losses, while around 7,000 Russian millionaires have left the country amid crippling sanctions related to the annexation of Crimea.
Meanwhile, the desire for privacy has prompted many rich families to reconsider where they call home.
Under the Common Reporting Standard, launched by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development in 2017, banks and other financial institutions are disclosing data on foreign account holders to their local tax authority. Authorities automatically exchange relevant information with their counterparts overseas annually, allowing governments to zero in on tax evaders. More than 100 jurisdictions have joined CRS, setting a new precedent for the global exchange of data on offshore assets.
This trend is reflected in the growth in demand for second passports and residencies. –Bloomberg
“Many wealthy people are looking for opportunities to reduce risks associated with spreading information about their accounts,” said Polina Kuleshova of Henley & Partners, which counsels people on citizenship options and publishes rankings such as the Quality of Nationality Index.
There’s no place like home – unless you can make, or save more money elsewhere.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2IU8Caa Tyler Durden
College professors have long positioned themselves to the political left of the American public. The progressive skew in higher education used to be a stable plurality though. Beginning with the earliest survey data in the 1960s, self-identified left-liberals consistently comprised, on average, about 43 percent of all college professors in the United States. Self-described “moderate” and “conservative” faculty members split the remainder for the next three decades.
Then something changed around the year 2001. The percentage of faculty who identify with the political left began to skyrocket. In the course of under 15 years, left-leaning faculty rose to an outright majority of 60 percent of the professoriate.
The leftward tilt of the university is depicted in the chart below, which includes the recently released results of the 2016-17 faculty survey from the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA. The latest results confirm and extend earlier observations about the same ideological skew.
The three lines are unfortunately limited by the category choices, but include “liberal” and “Far Left” (blue), “moderate” (red), and “conservative” and “Far Right” (grey). They nonetheless provide a clear illustration that the progressive turn is now the new normal in higher education.
Source: Carnegie Foundation surveys of higher education (1969-84), HERI Faculty Survey (1989-present)
Political skews in higher education are nothing new, and taken alone may not even be a problem if they reflected a stable long-term pattern. But the recent sharp leftward turn of the professoriate after 2001 is a clear break from historical norms.
It also carries implications for faculty who fall outside of the university system’s progressive majority. Faculty who identify to the right of center have taken the greatest hit, dropping from 28 percent in the late 1960s and 22 percent as recent as 1995 to only 12 percent today.
A closer look at the data reveals that the shift does not reflect subtle changes in the U.S. political mainstream. Rather, it appears to be driven by a sharp rise in the subset of “liberal” faculty who identify as “Far Left.” As the chart below illustrates, this number more than doubled between 2001 and 2010 and now sits at near parity with the total number of conservatives in the academy.
Source: Carnegie Foundation surveys of higher education (1969-84), HERI Faculty Survey (1989-present)
The leftward shift is also unique to faculty. Comparable surveys of both university students and the American public show that left and right political identification remained completely stable during the same period that faculty opinion moved in a radical direction.
The Rise of the Hyper-politicized Faculty
In illustrating these recent trends, I have no intention of stating what the proper balance should be between faculty on the left and right (to say nothing of omitted categories such as classical liberal/libertarian). Rather, the data speak to an alarming pattern in which our university faculty have become hyper-politicized around a single ideological pole.
As recently as 20 years ago the academy exhibited a relatively stable diversity of political perspectives. Now it is skewed heavily toward a single “consensus” ideology that constitutes a clear majority of the professoriate. At the same time, non-leftist voices have been squeezed out of the academy due to a combination of retirements and an emerging bias in faculty hiring that appears to privilege progressive political beliefs.
The observed political skews have also played out unevenly across academic disciplines, concentrating heavily in subjects that lend themselves to political content. Professors in the humanities and social sciences skew much further to the left than the physical sciences. Over 80 percent of English professors, for example, identify on the political left. Subjects such as history, political science, sociology, and fine arts typically approach or exceed 70 percent. In short, the humanities and social sciences have become ideological monoliths.
The only fields with a semblance of ideological balance tend to be pre-professional programs such as business and the so-called STEM majors in science and engineering — all areas where political opinion is less likely to appear in instructional content or research. Contrary to popular mythology, humanities-faculty hiring growth has also outpaced the STEM fields in the last two decades, which further helps to explain the source of the ideological skew.
The Echo Chamber Effect
The hyper-politicization of academia shows few signs of dissipating anytime soon, although it appears to be taking a toll on the most severely afflicted disciplines. Monolithic ideological echo chambers make for poor incubators of research as they insulate their participants from outside challenges. The recently observed crisis of rigor in scholarly research, exemplified by the recent wave of hoax articles being accepted for publication in ostensibly scholarly outlets, is directly symptomatic of an associated collapse in the safeguards and standards of peer review.
But also note another trend at play. The most ideologically skewed academic disciplines also correlate closely with recent woes in attracting students to their classrooms.
A 2018 report by the American Historical Association tracked trends in undergraduate majors by subject area over the previous six years using Department of Education data. The most severe declines in the number of degree seekers occurred in fields such as history, religion, English, foreign languages, political science, fine arts, and the humanities in general.
Perhaps not coincidentally, these same subjects have all become hyper-politicized in the last 15 years. The HERI survey indicates that 65, 70, or even 80 percent of the faculty in these disciplines identify on the political left. Similar measures using political-party data from faculty voter registrations show an even more pronounced skew, concentrated in the exact same subjects.
Are the hyper-politicized faculty ranks of these same fields driving away students?Multiplesurveys suggest that students outside of the progressive left self-censor their beliefs on campus, fearing both viewpoint discrimination and bias from faculty in grading. Recent empirical studies of faculty in psychology and law also reveal evidence of actual discrimination against viewpoints that fall outside of the progressive umbrella, particularly in academic hiring. It is not difficult to surmise how an extremely skewed professoriate in certain disciplines would make students with dissenting views feel unwelcome in their classrooms.
Students are currently abandoning the humanities and certain social sciences in droves. While faculty in these fields are apt to blame this problem on poltergeists such as the “devaluation” of their teaching (as Jason Brennan and I document in our new book, Cracks in the Ivory Tower) and exaggerated budgetary woes, the actual source seems to be that fewer and fewer students actually want what these subjects have to offer in the classroom.
With no small irony, the leftward hyper-politicization of the faculty in these subjects may also be a primary reason for their recent inability to attract majors outside of a small cadre of like-minded political activists.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2UOfffS Tyler Durden
Even at a time of low interest rates and rising wages, Americans simply can’t afford a home in more than 70% of the country, according to CBS. Out of 473 US counties that were analyzed in a recent report, 335 listed median home prices were more than what average wage earners could afford. According to the report from ATTOM Data Solutions, these counties included Los Angeles and San Diego in California, as well as places like Maricopa County in Arizona.
New York City claimed the largest share of a person’s income to purchase a home. While on average, earners nationwide needed to spend only about 33% of their income on a home, residents in Brooklyn and Manhattan need to shell out more than 115% of their income. In San Francisco this number is about 103%. Homes were found to be affordable in places like Chicago, Houston and Philadelphia.
This news is stunning because homes are considerably more affordable today than they were a year ago. Although prices are rising in many areas, they are also falling in places like Manhattan. Unaffordability in the market has been the result of slower home building and owners staying in their homes longer. Both have reduced the supply of homes in the market.
And the market may continue to create better conditions for buyers. Affordability could improve because of the fact that homes are out of reach for so many seekers, according to Todd Teta, chief product officer at ATTOM Data Solutions. Today’s market is also more affordable than it was a decade ago, before the crisis. Home prices were about the same prior to the crisis, even though income adjusted for inflation was lower.
“What kept the market going was looser lending standards, so that was compensating for affordability issues,” Teta said. Since then, standards have toughened (for now, at least).
We recently wrote about residents of New York City who simply claimed they couldn’t afford to live there.
More than a third of New York residents complained that they “can’t afford to live there” anymore (and yet they do). On top of that, many believe that economic hardships are going to force them to leave the city in five years or less, according to a Quinnipiac poll published a couple weeks ago. The poll surveyed 1,216 voters between March 13 and 18.
In total, 41% of New York residents said they couldn’t cope with the city’s high cost of living. They believe they will be forced to go somewhere where the “economic climate is more welcoming”, according to the report.
Ari Buitron, a 49-year-old paralegal from Queens said: “They are making this city a city for the wealthy, and they are really choking out the middle class. A lot of my friends have had to move to Florida, Texas, Oregon. You go to your local shop, and it’s $5 for a gallon of milk and $13 for shampoo. Do you know how much a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment is? $1700! What’s wrong with this picture?”
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Y08N7n Tyler Durden
Robots at Amazon decide who gets a job. Based on performance algorithms, the robots also decide who gets fired.
Software and algorithms are used to screen, hire, assign and now terminate workers at Amazon. For lower-paid employees, the Robot Overlords Have Arrived.
Millions of low-paid workers’ lives are increasingly governed by software and algorithms. This was starkly illustrated by a report last week that Amazon.com tracks the productivity of its employees and regularly fires those who underperform, with little human intervention.
“Amazon’s system tracks the rates of each individual associate’s productivity and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding quality or productivity without input from supervisors,” a law firm representing Amazon said in a letter to the National Labor Relations Board, as first reported by technology news site The Verge. Amazon was responding to a complaint that it had fired an employee from a Baltimore fulfillment center for federally protected activity, which could include union organizing. Amazon said the employee was fired for failing to meet productivity targets.
Perhaps it was only a matter of time before software was used to fire people. After all, it already screens resumes, recommends job applicants, schedules shifts and assigns projects. In the workplace, “sophisticated technology to track worker productivity on a minute-by-minute or even second-by-second basis is incredibly pervasive,” says Ian Larkin, a business professor at the University of California at Los Angeles specializing in human resources.
Industrial laundry services track how many seconds it takes to press a laundered shirt; on-board computers track truckers’ speed, gear changes and engine revolutions per minute; and checkout terminals at major discount retailers report if the cashier is scanning items quickly enough to meet a preset goal. In all these cases, results are shared in real time with the employee, and used to determine who is terminated, says Mr. Larkin.
Amazon employees have complained of being monitored continuously—even having bathroom breaks measured—and being held to ever-rising productivity benchmarks. There is no public data to determine if such complaints are more or less common at Amazon than its peers. The company says about 300 employees—roughly 10% of the Baltimore center’s employment level—were terminated for productivity reasons in the year before the law firm’s letter was sent to the NLRB.
Big Brother is Watching
In addition to the government wanting to know everything you do, so do employers and their robots.
Those robots do not care about someone’s race. They only care about performance.
If you are supposed to handle x packages per minute, and you underperform, goodbye.
One huge advantage for employers having robots fire people is the process will stop discrimination lawsuits. As a side benefit companies can get rid of higher paid employees who used to make these decisions.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2WkaHPN Tyler Durden
It’s been a rocky road for American farmers under the Trump administration rule. Personal incomes have plummeted the most in three years last quarter, as the entire industry is on the verge of collapse from the ongoing Sino-American trade war.
The Commerce Department on Monday provided new details of the intensifying pressure on farmers hit by the trade war. The report cited a huge decline in farm proprietors’ income in March.
Trade wars, depressed commodity prices, natural disasters, and a synchronized global slowdown have brought many farmers onto the edge of bankruptcies.
Several months ago, we reported that federal data showed the number of farmers filing for bankruptcy has climbed to its highest level in a decade.
“Bankruptcies in three regions covering major farm states last year rose to the highest level in at least 10 years. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, had double the bankruptcies in 2018 compared with 2008. In the Eighth Circuit, which includes states from North Dakota to Arkansas, bankruptcies swelled 96%. The 10th Circuit, which covers Kansas and other states, last year had 59% more bankruptcies than a decade earlier.”
As of Feburary, the Trump administration paid out a total of $7.7 billion in farm aid to offset the effects of retaliatory tariffs.
The aid “certainly was appreciated,” Blake Hurst, the president of the Missouri Farm Bureau, recently told Yahoo Finance. The bailout propped up farm income in 1Q19, but earnings fell by an annualized $11.8 billion in the same period, according to seasonally adjusted data.
Hurst warned that the bailout “is not enough in the sense that it no way makes us whole for what we suffered from these trade disputes.”
Trump’s spending plan for 2020, which was submitted to Congress, would reduce federal subsidies for crop insurance to small farmers. It calls for crop insurance premiums to 48% from 62% and limits current subsidies for growers who make less than $500,000 per annum. A move that could paralyze small farmers.
Well before the trade war started, farmers have been battling deflation for 96 months, with Thomson Reuters/CoreCommodity CRB Index dropping around 30% since the April 2011 high. This drop in price has crushed rural America for years, which means fixed capital investments by farmers have suffered.
A surge in December income was “likely a function of gyrations in federal subsidy payments” because of the farm bailout, Stephen Stanley, chief economist for Amherst Pierpont Securities, wrote in a note to clients.
Trump has promised to “Make Farmers Great Again” – but as Zerohedge readers already know by now, when government intervenes in markets – they tend to create more harm than good.
“We’re doing trade deals that are going to get you so much business, you’re not even going to believe it,” Trump told an energized crowd at American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual meeting in New Orleans earlier this year
While Trump whispers sweet nothings into the ears of Americans farmers, telling them what they want to hear so he can get re-elected in 2020, the entire farm complex is teetering on the edge of disaster: a perfect storm that has been in the making for many years, could unleash a monsterous bankruptcy wave in rural America.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2XTqfuq Tyler Durden
Donald Trump Jr: Don’t Risk The 2nd Amendment by Voting Democrat
The right to bear arms is sacred, and endowed by God to every citizen from birth.
Most Americans recognize that it’s not dependent on some old-fashioned notion about arming citizen militias. It’s a fundamental right that enables the people to maintain a check against the near-limitless power of government, which is granted by the people in the first place.
Democrats, particularly the field of 2020 presidential candidates, disregard our 2nd Amendment rights for political gain, demagoguing about violence and the illegal use of arms. If, Heaven forbid, one of these 2nd Amendment deniers were to win the White House in 2020, he or she would strip this sacred right from us without hesitation.
I had the pleasure of spending my weekend with some of the Americans most fervently committed to defending our 2nd Amendment rights at the NRA’s Annual Meeting in Indianapolis.
In my conversations with these activists, I was struck by one unshakable impression: no matter what rage the Democrats unleash on defenders of the Constitution, and no matter how strenuously they advocate the same failed gun control policies they have for half a century, they will not win.
The essential determination that, as Thomas Jefferson put it, “No Freeman Shall Ever Be Debarred the Use of Arms” runs in a straight, unbroken line from the ancient English traditions of liberty, through the Founding Fathers, to the men and women of the MAGA Movement today.
The strength of that spirit, however, must not blind us to the dark storm of gun-grabbing demagoguery gathering among our opponents.
The pro-gun rights victories we’ve secured through painstaking effort over the decade since the Supreme Court’s landmark DC v. Heller decision do not mean that our work is done. The left is more determined than ever to roll back this fundamental freedom.
***
Read the rest at Human Events – including analysis of inflammatory comments and sobering threats by top Democrats, including Rep. Eric Swalwell, Sen. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. Don Jr. also discusses the Poway, California Synagogue attack which was stopped by a “good guy with a gun,” as well as his father’s decision to pull out of the UN “Arms Trade Treaty” inked under Obama.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2GUND4R Tyler Durden
Congressional Republicans are “working to finalize” a criminal referral of Russiagate lynchpin Nellie Ohr, the wife of the Justice Department’s former #4 official Bruce Ohr.
(Getty Images; AP; The Epoch Times; Photo illustration by The Epoch Times
Nellie was hired by opposition research firm Fusion GPS, where she conducted extensive opposition research on Trump family members and campaign aides, which she passed along to Bruce on a memory stick.
Of note, the Hillary Clinton campaign paid Fusion GPS to produce the salacious and unverified “Steele Dossier,” which was created by former UK spy Christopher Steele and used Kremlin sources.
Meanwhile, today we learn from The Hill‘s John Solomon that Nellie Ohr exchanged 339 pages of emails with DOJ officials, including her husband Bruce, and met with DOJ prosecutors while working for Fusion GPS.
Now, a series of “Hi Honey” emails from Nellie Ohr to her high-ranking federal prosecutor-husband and his colleagues raise the prospect that Hillary Clinton-funded opposition research was being funneled into the Justice Department during the 2016 election through a back-door marital channel. It’s a tale that raises questions of both conflict of interest and possible false testimony.
Ohr has admitted to Congress that, during the 2016 presidential election, she worked for Fusion GPS — the firm hired by Clinton and the Democratic National Committee to perform political opposition research — on a project specifically trying to connect Donald Trump and his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, to Russian organized crime.
Now, 339 pages of emails, from her private account to Department of Justice (DOJ) email accounts, have been released under a Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative legal group Judicial Watch. –The Hill
And according to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Rep. Mark Meadows “is working to finalize” a criminal referral of Nellie.
“Hi Honey, if you ever get a moment you might find the penultimate article interesting — especially the summary in the final paragraph,” Nellie emailed Bruce on July 6, 2016 according to the release. The article in question suggested that Trump was a Putin stooge. “If Putin wanted to concoct the ideal candidate to service his purposes, his laboratory creation would look like Donald Trump,” Nellie bolded for emphasis.
As Solomon writes, “Such overt political content flowing into the email accounts of a DOJ charged with the nonpartisan mission of prosecuting crimes is jarring enough. It raises additional questions about potential conflicts of interest when it is being injected by a spouse working as a Democratic contractor trying to defeat Trump, and she is forwarding her own research to his department and co-workers.”
House GOP investigators who reviewed Nellie Ohr’s emails believe that their timing may be essential to understanding how the false Russian narrative — special counsel Robert Mueller recently concluded there was no evidence of Trump-Putin collusion — may have gotten such credence inside DOJ and intelligence circles despite its overtly political origins.
For instance, just 24 days after the anti-Trump screed was emailed, both Ohrs met in Washington with British intelligence operative Christopher Steele. Nellie Ohr testified that she had known Steele from past encounters and learned at that July 31, 2016, meeting at the Mayflower Hotel that Steele, like herself, was working for Fusion GPS on Trump-Russia research. She said she learned that Steele had concerns that he hoped the DOJ or FBI would investigate, with help from her husband. –The Hill
Nellie, who speaks fluent Russian, worked with Fusion GPS between October 2015 and September 2016. She also admitted during her October 19, 2018 congressional testimony that she favored Hillary Clinton as a candidate, and would have been less comfortable researching Clinton’s Russia ties (P. 105).
In 2010, she represented the CIA’s “Open Source Works” group in a 2010 “expert working group report on international organized crime” along with Bruce Ohr and Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson.
Nellie Ohr, the wife of demoted DOJ official, Bruce Ohr, not only worked for Fusion GPS, but has also represented the CIA’s “Open Source Works” group. https://t.co/u5HPgJwvWdpic.twitter.com/ZPhAIzR6wv
some have wondered if Nellie’s late-life attraction to Ham radios was in fact a method of covertly communicating with others about the Trump-Russia investigation, in a way which wouldn’t be surveilled by the NSA or other agencies.
was Nellie Ohr’s late-in-life foray into ham radio an effort to evade the Rogers-led NSA detecting her participation in compiling the Russian-sourced Steele dossier? Just as her husband’s omissions on his DOJ ethics forms raise an inference of improper motive, any competent prosecutor could use the circumstantial evidence of her taking up ham radio while digging for dirt on Trump to prove her consciousness of guilt and intention to conceal illegal activities. –The Federalist
Bruce Ohr was demoted twice after the DOJ’s Inspector General discovered that he lied about his involvement with Simpson – who employed dossier author and former British spy, Christopher Steele.
Last month, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) announced that his panel would do a “deep dive” into the “other side” of the Trump-Russia investigation. He also called for the appointment of a new special counsel to look into abuse between the DOJ and Obama administration while investigating Donald Trump and his campaign.
Are heads actually going to roll?
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2J7Exn6 Tyler Durden
Here are my remarks at the New York conference of the Committee on the Present Danger in New York City. I spoke on a panel with Steve Bannon, Roger Robinson, Kyle Bass and Gordon Chang, chaired by Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy.
Historian Andrew Roberts reports that Winston Churchill said just after Pearl Harbor that “in the event of war, the Japanese would ‘fold up like the Italians,’ because they were ‘the wops of the Far East.’” The West chronically underestimates Asians, as the Russians found out at Port Arthur, the Americans at Pearl Harbor and the Yalu River, the British at Singapore, and so forth.
A case in point is the present tariff war. The U.S. assumed that tariffs on Chinese imports would force China to make fundamental concessions to American trade demands. On January 6, President Donald Trump said, “China’s not doing very well now. It puts us in a very strong position. We are doing very well.” Since then China’s CSI 300 stock index has gained 37% during 2019 to date, double the gain in U.S. stock markets. China’s economic growth has accelerated while America’s has slowed. The tariff war may have hurt the U.S. economy more than China’s. With an internal market of 1.4 billion people, China can replace lost foreign business by increasing internal demand. Ten years ago exports made up 36% of China’s gross domestic product versus only 18% today. World trade is shrinking, but the impact on China is manageable.
I support President Trump. I applaud him for calling attention to China’s challenge to America’s strategic position. But I have warned from the outset that the tools he has employed won’t get the results he wants.
Early in 2018, the United States banned exports of U.S. components to the Chinese telecommunications equipment maker ZTE, which violated U.S. sanctions on Iran. Huawei, the dominant Chinese telecom equipment maker, undertook a crash program to devise substitutes for the U.S. chips that power Chinese-made handsets, and achieved self-sufficiency as of December 2018. Now a Japanese study reports that Huawei’s handset chips are equal to or better than Apple’s.
America’s campaign to persuade its allies to keep Huawei away from the rollout of 5G (fifth generation) mobile data networks has failed. Britain, Germany, Italy, Malaysia, Thailand, India, South Korea and the whole of Eastern Europe have rejected American demands. This was a sadly foreseeable diplomatic disaster. Huawei is the highest-quality as well as the lowest-cost provider of 5G systems. It spends US$20 billion a year on research and development, double the combined outlay of its two largest competitors, Nokia and Ericsson. Half of Huawei’s workforce is engaged in R&D, including thousands of European engineers.
Cisco used to dominate the market for mobile data systems. It currently has $72 billion of cash in the bank, roughly what Huawei spent on R&D during the past seven years. The question is: Why do Chinese companies invest while American companies hoard?
To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, you may not be interested in industrial policy, but industrial policy is interested in you. The Asian model treats capital-intensive industry as infrastructure. It supports chip foundries with public funds the way we Americans subsidize airports or sports arenas. The Asian model begins with Japan’s Meiji Restoration in 1868. China’s model is a variant of the Asian model, which Deng Xiaoping adopted with the advice of Lee Kuan Yew, in explicit emulation of Singapore.
China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan subsidize capital-intensive industry, with the result that virtually all of the high-tech products invented in America are now manufactured in Asia. Liquid-crystal displays, light-emitting diodes, semiconductor lasers, and solid-state sensors are produced almost exclusively in Asia. America’s share of semiconductor manufacturing fell from 25% in 2011, to less than 10% in 2018. Silicon is to the weapons of the 21st century what steel was to the 19th century. A country that cannot produce its own integrated circuits cannot defend itself.
China is outspending the U.S. in quantum computing, including $11 billion to build a single research facility in Hefei. By contrast, the U.S. allocated $1.2 billion for quantum computing over the next five years. Overall, federal development funding in the U.S. has fallen from 0.78% of GDP in 1988 to 0.39% in 2016.
China remains behind the U.S. in most key areas of technology, but it is catching up fast. In the last several years China has
Landed a probe on the dark side of the moon;
Developed successful quantum communication via satellite;
Built a 2,000-kilometer quantum communication network between Beijing and Shanghai;
Built missiles that can blind American satellites;
Developed surface-to-ship missiles that can destroy any vessel within hundreds of miles of its coast; and
Built some of the world’s fastest supercomputers.
China’s investment in education parallels its investment in the high-tech industry. Today China graduates four times as many STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) bachelor’s degrees as the U.S. and twice as many doctoral degrees, and China continues to gain. A third of Chinese students major in engineering, vs 7% in the U.S. Eighty percent of U.S. doctoral candidates in computer science and electrical engineering are foreign students, of whom Chinese are the largest contingent. Most return to China. The best U.S. universities have trained top-level faculty for Chinese universities. American STEM graduate programs reported a sharp fall in foreign applications starting in 2017, partly because Chinese students no longer have to come to the U.S. for a world-class education.
China’s household consumption has risen 17-fold since 1986 and its GDP in U.S. dollars has risen 35-fold. China has moved 550 million people from countryside to city in only 40 years, the equivalent of Europe’s population from the Urals to the Atlantic. China has built the equivalent of all the cities in Europe to house the new urban dwellers, as well as 80,000 miles (nearly 130,000 kilometers) of superhighway and 18,000 miles (29,000km) of high-speed trains.
China’s debt-to-GDP ratio stands at 253% (47% government, households 50%, corporate 155%). That is about the same as America’s 248% (98% to government, households 77%, corporate 74%). The high corporate debt number is due to the fact that state-owned enterprises fund a great deal of infrastructure, building with debt that is counted as corporate rather than government. China’s debt problem is no worse than ours.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative intends to Sinify the economies of the Global South, from Malaysia and Indonesia to Mexico and Brazil. Huawei often is the spearhead of the BRI, building mobile broadband networks that prepare the ground for Chinese e-commerce and e-finance companies. China wants to integrate the labor of countries with a total population of 2 billion into its economic sphere.
It is fanciful to believe that any kind of American pressure can destabilize, let alone dislodge, the present regime within any calculable time horizon. But we can regain technological leadership and prove the superiority of our way of life, and degrade the credibility of the Chinese Communist Party over time.
Solutions include:
Forcing key high-tech industries onshore using defense subsidies/tax breaks
Placing export controls on high tech (no more Boeing satellites to help China surveil its citizens)
Change Defense Department budget priorities to emphasize war-winning advance technologies rather than legacy systems
A new National Defense Education Act
Create an alternative to the Belt and Road Initiative with Japan, South Korea, India and others
Engineer a brain drain of China’s most talented scientific cadre.
China can innovate, but we can innovate much better. We need to return with a vengeance to the strategies that won the Cold War.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2GQ80PH Tyler Durden
