Category: zerohedge

Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The great de-coupling is here. The U.S. now has plan a to purge Chinese tech companies fully from America’s internet, creating what the Trump administration has dubbed the Clean Network. It mirrors the White House’s existing 5G Clean Path initiative to remove all Chinese components from systems ‘everywhere’, and which now extends it to everything tech on the ‘net.

China fears a financial ‘Iron Curtain’ is about to fall – a complete expulsion from the dollar sphere. In fact, soft capital control is already birthing, with Bloomberg reporting that the U.S. is now asking colleges and universities to divest from Chinese holdings in their endowments, “warning schools in a letter this last week, to get ahead of potentially more onerous measures [coming] on those holding the shares”.

Reportedly, the Chinese leadership annual August Beidaihe retreat, agreed (should the recommendations be subsequently endorsed at the Central Committee plenum in October) that China should prepare for war; build food and energy reserves; establish the Eurasian continental economic system, recover its overseas gold and broaden the global RMB settlement system (including its digital Yuan) – and prepare for the complete interruption of relations with the U.S.

Yet, whilst the media focus is all on this ‘tech’ and ‘sphere’ de-coupling, something profound – and quite separate – is already shaping the global monetary order (quite apart from likely Chinese exclusion).

It is set, in the longer term, to be more revolutionary – and contentious – than even ‘de-coupling’. It is getting sparse attention.

However, as it becomes ever more evident that no ‘V’ shaped economic rebound will be arriving soon – as the U.S. ‘house’ catches fire again with Coronavirus over the autumn and winter, presaging a further economic closedown – the chances are that this bombshell will indeed ignite.

First, a little background:

Earlier this month, Zero Hedge published a remarkable interview with two former Fed economists – Simon Potter (who was also the former head of the Fed’s Plunge Protection Team for many years) and Julia Coronado – both of whom have tremendous impact on thinking at the Fed.

They hinted at the Fed’s ‘last ditch’ stimulus and bailout strategy (i.e. should the U.S. economy be further stalled by Coronavirus): It is ‘to wire’ digital money directly into Americans’ smartphone financial apps, bypassing the banking system entirely.

“The two propose creating a monetary tool that they call ‘recession insurance bonds’, which draw on some of the advances in digital payments and ‘wired’ instantly to Americans”:

“As Coronado explains the details, Congress would grant the Federal Reserve an additional tool for providing support — say, a percent of GDP [in a lump sum that would be divided equally and distributed] to households in a recession. Recession insurance bonds would be zero-coupon securities, a contingent asset of households that would basically lie in wait. The trigger could be reaching the zero lower bound on interest rates or, as economist Claudia Sahm has proposed, a 0.5 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate. The Fed would then activate the securities and deposit the funds digitally in households’ apps.

“As Potter then elucidates: “it took Congress too long to get money to people, and it’s too clunky. We need a separate infrastructure. The Fed could buy the bonds quickly without going to the private market. On March 15 they could have said interest rates are now at zero, we’re activating X amount of the bonds, and we’ll be tracking the unemployment rate—if it increases above this level, we’ll buy more. The bonds will be on the asset side of the Fed’s balance sheet; the digital dollars in people’s accounts will be on the liability side.””

Then, just days later, Federal Reserve Governor, Lael Brainard, hinted once again at the coming monetary revolution:

“To enhance understanding of digital currencies, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is collaborating with researchers at MIT, in a multi-year effort to build and test a hypothetical digital currency oriented to central bank uses … It is important to understand how the existing provisions of the Federal Reserve Act with regard to currency issuance apply to a CBDC and whether a CBDC would have legal tender status, depending on the design”.

So what would prompt the Fed to pursue “this significant policy process”? Why – another leg down, resulting from an upsurge in Covid-19, of course. The last bailout was not just “clunky”, it sent stocks and bonds soaring skyward. And has severed asset prices from any connection to metrics of value, from fundamentals, and from analysis (and did do not much either for ordinary Americans). What we now have, therefore, is a market focussed only on narratives, and not on reality. This has implications, too.

The prospect of the Fed ‘printing’ digital dollars, wired to peoples’ cash-pay apps, as a new stimulus mechanism – replete with the overtones of a ‘Davos Reset’ formula for moving toward a digital, global Universal Basic Income model is obvious – as is the political temptation for politicos to pay for all sorts of political ‘projects’ in this way.

Yet this is only a half of the ‘Revolution’ – two other components are already ‘done’.

Two tipping-points have been passed.

• Firstly, people can see (with Boomer entitlement spending about to soar into the Trillions), that the U.S. government cannot support the debt burden without having the central bank simply ‘print’ more money. Many on Wall Street will see this as the solution: Putting digital money directly onto apps must be inflationary, they believe. And inflation can melt away America’s debt-load through de-basing the currency.

• Secondly, in April, the Fed already changed the Supplementary Leverage Ratios (SLR) to exempt U.S. Treasuries from capital-ratio requirements. In simple English, this means that commercial banks can buy any amount of U.S. government debt instruments, without putting aside capital on their balance sheet, to support such purchases. So that (as long as rates are even marginally positive) they can buy and enjoy a nominal income. In June, U.S. banks increased their U.S. Treasuries by 48%. Effectively, the Fed facilitates the credit creation; the banks use it to buy Treasuries; and the government then spends the money.

Magic. Like the Mad Hatter’s tea-party – out of thin air, things appear. Not once, but twice: as a similar trick was done by the Fed via multiplying the value of Treasury bails out – by providing credit on a 10:1 basis to the Treasury’s special purpose vehicle. (The Fed says this is not direct spending, which would be illegal).

So, let’s try putting all this into some sort of order:

Firstly, America has already started down the path towards a nationalised (centrally-managed) economy – rather like China’s. The Treasury and Blackrock Hedge Fund, (who manage the Congressional bails out distribution on behalf of the Treasury), now make the (economic) life-or-death decisions for U.S. businesses – from the very big, down to the very small.

This is a ‘great reset’. And like most temporary measures, it is likely here to stay. What’s not to like from the U.S. President’s point of view? He controls ‘money’ issuance now that the Treasury and Fed effectively are fused together, and can ‘steer’ the U.S. economy in a ‘national-interest’ direction during its tech war with China (and Europe). Free markets? They do not exist in America at this point.

Secondly, this financial war is already underway, and China will likely use its CIPS (financial clearing system) and its Central Bank initiated digital yuan (already in use) to circumvent SWIFT and the USD. Except this will mean others being paid in a non-fungible digital currency that can only be recirculated back to China for its goods. Or, maybe not? Like China’s Shanghai oil futures market, foreign sellers may be given the option to hold their sale proceeds either in Chinese debt instruments, or, to exit their Yuan via the physical gold market.

But, apart from U.S. and China, Russia, Italy, Iran and UK are, amongst others, planning their own CBDCs. Are we moving then – in an era of enhanced financial war – towards multiple, non or quasi, fungible digitalised of means of payment, as the new normal?

Third, the world again is demanding gold in exchange for U.S. dollars. And the Fed’s primary dealers – some of which operate as bullion banks — seem unable to comply. But with the advent of the Coronavirus, the U.S. financial system has been forced to lower real interest rates down into negative territory, causing gold to look more attractive than holding devaluing U.S. Treasuries.

Traditionally, the Fed controls the gold market to prevent gold from effectively competing with, or displacing, the U.S. dollar as the primordial monetary instrument. But someone, or some entity somewhere, is now battling the U.S. central bank for that control. In short, the Fed’s manipulation process presently is failing. And unless the Fed can suppress the price of gold, and regain control, we may see an escalating, downward spiral in the value of the dollar vis à vis gold.

Here – finally – we come to the crux. In outlining the monetary ‘revolution’ taking place in the U.S., there is much in it for the Wall Street ‘Davos’ contingent to like: the move from traditional money into digital; Central Banks issuing digital money (though the ‘Davos’ crowd would prefer that to be done by a global authority); the end of cash; and the system-control and transparency that digitisation would allow. Some of this – such as the political instrumentalisation of smartphone apps – have been given a push by the Coronavirus.

But the U.S. Establishment is deeply split: Yes, there is a powerful, Wall Street, globalist component who support Davos, but others in the Deep State, including some amongst the neo-cons, would rather die-in-a-ditch than see U.S. dollar hegemony lost – amidst the undoubted exigencies of the present economic recession. These tend to be Trump supporters.

So let us put the final pieces into place: U.S. asset markets are presently unhinged from all fundamentals, and ruled by a ‘don’t fight the narrative’, and existential fear of potentially ‘missing out’. In other words, the un-anchored stock market highs – on which Trump’s re-election hopes are pinned – are highly vulnerable. Sentiment can shift in the flash of an eyelid from an adrenalin-fuelled ‘fight’ mode, to ‘flight’. All that is needed is a changed narrative.

And what narrative might that be? Well, the ‘Sage’ of Omaha, Warren Buffet, this week dropped a very unexpected narrative: Not known as a ‘gold bug’, he was shown to have dumped stocks and bought gold, and gold-miners.

So, who next for sparking the October market sell off, as the dollar continues to spiral downwards, and interest rates edge upwards?

Mr Soros may be smiling?

The Pentagon and US intelligence community will be closely observing Russia’s most advanced anti-air missile system as it enters state trials before eventually being delivered to Russia’s military.

The cutting edge system, nicknamed Prometheus (and formally known as 55R6M “Triumfator-M”), is a mobile, surface-to-air missile system (SAM) and will undergo the final stages of field testing. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Borisov announced the commencement of the state trials at the Army-2020 forum at Patriot Park near Moscow on Monday.

“Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu earlier said that the deliveries of the latest S-500 surface-to-air missile systems to the troops would begin in 2020,” according to TASS. “Russia has been training specialists to learn to operate the new system at the Military Academy of the Aerospace Force in Tver since 2017.”

It is designed to supplement the current S-400 system, intercepting medium-range ballistic missiles as well as intercontinental ballistic missiles that enter close proximity to Russian airspace.

Russian S 500 system will be able to destroy hypersonic missiles and space targets

S 500 capable of destroying targets 600 km above Earth pic.twitter.com/l1jo9KH9qL

— ivan (@ivan8848) July 3, 2020

The deputy prime minister indicated in his latest remarks to the major multi-day defense technology forum outside Moscow: “The fact is that state trials have begun and today the S-500 configuration, its simplified configuration is already available and work is underway to purchase parts for its serial production.”

Last year when news of the S-500 was picked up more and more in international press, Russian defense officials made the claim that ‘Prometheus’ is capable of reaching targets in space.

It’s developer, the VKO Almaz-Antey, or “Air and Space Defense Corporation” – which is a Russian state-owned company and the country’s largest defense tech contractor – had touted that the S-500 can successfully take out “ballistic missiles of all types” and crucially that it’s missiles are capable of “working outside the atmosphere where aerodynamic control is impossible.”

Authored by Edward Curtin via Off-Guardian.org,

Don’t bother, they’re here, already performing in the center ring under the big top owned and operated by The Umbrella People…

Trump, Biden, Pence, Harris, and their clownish sidekicks, Pompeo, Michelle Obama, et al., are performing daily under the umbrella’s shadowy protection. For The Umbrella People run a three-ring circus, and although their clowns pop out of separate tiny cars and, acting like enemies, squirt each other with water hoses to the audience’s delight, raucous laughter, and serious attentiveness, they are all part of the same show, working for the same bosses.

Sadly, many people think this circus is the real world and that the clowns are not allied pimps serving the interests of their masters, but are real enemies.

The Umbrella People are the moguls who own the showtime studios – some call them the secret government, the deep-state, or the power elite. They run a protection racket, so I like to use a term that emphasizes their method of making sure the sunlight of truth never gets to those huddled under their umbrella.

They produce and direct the daily circus that is the American Spectacle, the movie that is meant to entertain and distract the audience from the side show that continues outside the big top, the place where millions of vulnerable people are abused and killed. And although the sideshow is the real main event, few pay attention since their eyes are fixed on the center ring were the spotlight directs their focus.

The French writer Guy Debord called this The Society of the Spectacle.

For many months now, all eyes have been directed to the Covid-19 propaganda show with Fauci and Gates, and their mainstream corporate media mouthpieces, striking thunderbolts in the storm to scare the unknowing audience into submission so the transformation of the Great Global Reset, led by the World Economic Forum and the International Monetary Fund, can proceed smoothly.

Now hearts are aflutter with excitement to see the war-loving Joe Biden boldly coming forth like Lazarus from the grave to announce his choice of a masked vice-presidential running mate who will echo his pronouncements.

And the star of the big top, the softly coiffured reality television emcee Trump, around whom the spectacle swirls, elicits outraged responses as he plays the part of the comical bad guy.

Punch and Judy indeed.

All the while the corporate mainstream media warn of grim viral milestones, election warnings, storms ahead! The world as you know it is coming to an end, they remind us daily.

The latter meme contains a hint of truth since not just the world as we know it may be coming to an end, but the world itself, including human life, as the clowns initiate a nuclear holocaust while everyone is being entertained.

Meanwhile, as the circus rolls along, far away and out of mind, shit happens:

With more than 400 military bases equipped with nuclear weapons surrounding China, the United States military continues its encirclement of China and China enters a “state of siege.”

The US conducts military exercises with the Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group in the contested South China Sea. These US “maritime Air defense operation[s]” close to the Chinese mainland are a part of significantly increased US military exercises in the area.

The US Defense Secretary Esper announces that the US is withdrawing troops from Germany but moving them closer to the Russian border to serve as a more effective deterrent against Russia.

Russia says it will regard any ballistic missile aimed at its territory as a nuclear attack and will respond in kind with nuclear weapons.

Although the US is formally not at war with any African country, a new report reveals that the United States has special forces operating in 22 African countries with 29 bases and 6,000 troops, with a huge drone hub in Niger that cost 100 + million to build and is expected to have operating costs of more than $280 billion by 2024.

The US continues its assault on Syria, aside from direct military operations, by building up Kurdish proxies in northeastern Syria to protect the oil fields that they are stealing from the Syrian government, a plan hatched long ago. The US says their strategy is to deny ISIS a valuable revenue stream. The same ISIS they used to attack the Syrian government in a war of aggression.

A new document exposes the US plan to overthrow the socialist government of Nicaragua through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a traditional US regime change and CIA front organization.

Meanwhile, in Belarus, a place most Americans can’t find on a map, there is another color “revolution” underway.

Continuing its war against Iran and Venezuela by other means, the Trump administration seizes Iranian tankers carrying fuel to Venezuela. “Something will happen with Venezuela. That’s all I can tell you. Something will be happening with Venezuela,” said Trump in a July interview with Noticias Telemundo.

And of course the Palestinians are left to suffer and die as Israel is supported in its despotic policies in the Middle East.

The list goes on and on as the US under Trump continues to wage war by multiple means around the world. But his followers see him as peaceful president because these wars are waged through sanctions, special operations, drones, third parties, etc.

But back in the center ring, the two presidential clown candidates keep the audience entertained, as they shoot water at each other. Trump, who now presides over all the events just listed, and Biden, who enthusiastically supported the American wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, etc.

But then the followers of Obama/Biden also see their champions as peaceful leaders. This is even more absurd.

Don’t you like farce?

Besides being a rabid advocate for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as a senator, Biden, as Vice-President under Obama for eight years, seconded and promoted all of Obama’s wars that were wrapped in “humanitarian” propaganda to evade international law and keep his liberal supporters quiet.

From Bush II, an outright cowboy war-wager who used America’s large military forces to invade Afghanistan and Iraq under false pretensions – i.e. lies, Obama and his sidekick Biden learned to arm and finance thousands of Islamic jihadists, run by the CIA and US special forces, to do the job in more circumspect ways.

They expanded and grew The United States Africa Command (US AFRICOM) throughout Africa. They agreed to a $1 trillion upgrade of US nuclear weapons (that continues under Trump). They disarmed their followers, who, in any case, wished to look the other way.

Out of sight and out of mind, Obama/Biden continued the “war on terror” with drones, private militias, color revolutions, etc. They waged war on six-seven – who knows how many – countries.

An exception to the more secretive wars was the Obama administration’s openly savage assault on Libya in 2011 under the lies of an imperial moral legitimacy. In order to save you, we will destroy you, which is what they did to Libya, a country still in ruins and chaos.

Their equally blood-thirsty Secretary of State Hillary Clinton let the cat out of the bag when she laughed and gleefully applauded the brutal murder of Libya’s leader Moammar Gaddafi with the words: “We came, we saw, he died.” Yippee!

After Libya was destroyed and so many killed in an illegal and immoral war financed with $2 billion dollars from the America treasury, Joseph Biden bragged that the US didn’t lose a single life and such a war was a “prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward.”

Biden was Obama’s front man on Iraq, the war he voted for in 2003, and wrote an op ed article in 2006 calling for the breakup of the country into three parts, Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish.

When Obama launched 48 cruise missiles and more than ten thousand tons of bombs on Syria in 2016, killing over a hundred civilians, a third of them children, V.P. Biden stood proud and strong in support of the action.

When the US launched the bloody coup in Ukraine in 2014, Biden was of course in agreement.

But we are told that Trump and Biden are arch-enemies. One of them wants war and the other wants peace.

How many Americans will vote for these clowns this year? They are really front men for The Umbrella People, the money people who use the CIA and other undercover forces to carry out their organized crime activities.

As CS Lewis said in his preface to The Screwtape Letters:

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint […] But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.

In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump received 129 million votes out of 157 million registered American voters eager to believe that this system is not built on imperial war-making by both parties.

Perhaps that’s a generous assessment. Maybe many of those voters believe in the USA’s “manifest destiny” to rule the world and wage war in God’s name. I hope not. But if so, you can expect a big turnout on November 3, 2020.

In any case, it’s quite a circus, but these clowns aren’t funny. They are dangerous.

“But where are the clowns?
Quick, send in the clowns
Don’t bother they’re here”

Don’t you like farce?

Lofty expectations for 5G-driven sales have finally started to offer the shares of global chipmkers some respite from the doldrums, as their shares have lagged the Nasdaq’s ‘Big Tech’-driven rally, with companies based in Taiwan and mainland China particularly hurt by President Trump’s crackdown on Huawei, as well s the simmering trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies.

Recently, the US has moved to close loopholes allowing Huawei to use chips made with American technology, even if they are produced abroad, by foreign companies. The latest step in Washington’s crackdown is creating serious logistical pressures for Huawei at a critical time: around the world, the rollout of 5G technology is nigh, with the upcoming generation of smartphones all expected to be 5G enabled.

While Huawei has been smart at adapting to each new round of Trump Administration sanctions, the latest round of sanctions are leaving it with fewer and fewer options. A few weeks ago, we reported how Taiwan’s largest contract chipmaker has had to terminate Huawei’s business because of the US sanctions, a major blow to both companies.

Now it appears even more rival chipmakers that were supposed to benefit from Huawei’s misfortune will instead find themselves unable to continue doing business with Huawei, cutting them off from a critical and extremely lucrative customer for a new set of 5G enabled chips that the company had just released. 

MediaTek is one of Taiwan’s most successful companies, and its founder, Tsai Ming-kai, the Taiwanese billionaire once known as China’s “bandit phone king”, has been on a roll as of late. But unfortunately, what looked like impeccable timing for the rollout of its new “Dimensity” chipset has been rendered moot, since – in addition to being unable to produce its own chips – MediaTek could face Treasury Department sanctions that would cripple its business if it sells any of these chips to Huawei, according to Trump Administration sanctions rolled out last Monday.

Here’s more from the FT:

The founder and chairman of chip design house MediaTek had already seen his personal wealth jump by 80 per cent last year. The launch of the company’s “Dimensity” chipset for 5G smartphones and Washington’s blacklisting of Chinese technology group Huawei from buying from US chipmakers had sent MediaTek’s shares soaring. This year, things looked even brighter.

The US in May barred chip manufacturers from selling to Huawei any custom-made semiconductors produced with US equipment. For Huawei, the most obvious solution was MediaTek’s off-the-shelf smartphone chipsets, a development that would have boosted the Taiwanese company’s fortunes immensely.

But that dream was shattered last week when the US Department of Commerce closed the loopholes in its May sanctions against Huawei by prohibiting the sale without a licence of chips made using US software or equipment to the Chinese company. Given the prevalence of US technology in the semiconductor industry, this would include chipsets sold by MediaTek. “If the May rules had played out, MediaTek would have been the beneficiary, at least in the short run,” said Phelix Lee, an analyst at Morningstar in Hong Kong.

Analysts quoted in the FT report explained that, if Huawei is unable to secure new supplies of microchips for its phones and 5G networking equipment, it could delay the rollout of 5G worldwide, destroying what is perhaps the only conceivable tailwind for MediaTek’s business.

Spun off from Taiwanese chipmaker United Microelectronics Corporation in 1997, MediaTek has climbed the supply chain ladder, moving from CD drives and DVD drives to TV sets and finally smartphones. Now, it’s Taiwan’s largest, and the world’s fourth-largest, chip design company.

MediaTek has more at stake than many other Huawei suppliers, mostly due to its heavy reliance on mainland China. The company broke into handset chip design when it designed chips allowing producers of “knock-off” smartphones in Shenzen to create more sophisticated products. These “bandit” phones are how MediaTek’s founder got his nickname, the “Bandit Phone King”.

Its biggest break came after it started offering a turnkey solution for mobile phones in 2004 that enabled scores of no-name workshops manufacturing knock-off handsets — “bandit phones” — in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen to produce more sophisticated products. The platform, which included a chipset and reference designs for phone features that the small factories would not have been able to develop themselves, earned Mr Tsai the nickname of the “bandit phone king”.

It also helped create a breed of Chinese companies that would later morph into formidable rivals for multinational brands such as Apple and Samsung in China and other emerging markets. Adapting its turnkey chipset business model to the smartphone era was difficult but MediaTek again managed to build a strong emerging-markets position on the back of China’s rising handset brands.

In 4G, MediaTek was weaker than it had been in the previous generation of mobile services technology. But it promised a comeback in 5G. The Dimensity’s price tag is expected to be significantly lower than that of Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon chip, with long battery power and high energy efficiency.

It’s just the latest reminder of how the Trump Administration’s crackdown on Huawei will impact more than just Huawei. And for investors in American chip companies, that’s definitely not a bad thing.

Authored by Elias Marat via TheMindUnleashed.com,

Massive, hulking exoskeleton or mech suits are usually the type of thing one would encounter in a science fiction movie, whether it’s the low-budget classic Robot Jox or the American kaiju blockbuster Pacific Rim.

However, engineering firm Furrion Exo-Bionics has unleashed a colossal, four-legged, 9,000-pound powered exoskeleton dubbed Prosthesis – and anyone interested will be able to take up the controls and pilot the beast.

The company recently launched a wildly popular Kickstarter campaign laying out its mission, which is to start a “global racing league that would pit multiple world-class athletes in head-to-head competitions, through complex technical obstacle courses, wearing giant powered mech suits.”

And while the vision may seem larger-than-life, Furrion and its Prosthesis: Mech Racing research and development team are confident that they can unleash this new class of “large scale exo-bionic technology” and use it to power its global mech racing league.

Backers of the Kickstarter campaign will be eligible to receive “one-on-one mech pilot training” or kick back and watch the mechs kick each other’s butts at live events.

The company’s flagship mech, dubbed Prosthesis: the Anti-Robot, took over three years of field trials – including engineering and pilot training – to create this all-terrain mech suit that has four massive legs and the power to lift cars, run through the snow, and climb boulders.

“We ended up with four legs because the pilot has four limbs, and the machine has the wide stable form factor that it has so that it’s easy to balance,” chief test pilot and project co-founder Jonathan Tippett told CNET.

In a video kicking off the successful crowdfunding campaign, Tippett notes that the mech is “basically a cross between a trophy truck, an excavator, and a dinosaur.”

However, the idea behind Prosthesis isn’t simply passive entertainment – instead, this will require athleticism on the part of mech pilots who will be moving their arms and legs to get these massive machines going, making this a true sport rather than a simple robot exhibition.

“Prosthesis has no joysticks, no steering wheel, no foot pedals – just 100 percent limb-for-limb pilot control,” Furrion explained. “Prosthesis has no automation, no giros, no ability to walk or balance by itself, it relies entirely on the pilot inside for all its movement. Your arm and leg movements are amplified to control its four, giant steel legs, move for move. That’s what makes it a sport.”

Cassie Hawrysh, an accomplished headfirst ice sledding champion from Canada, is the first professional “mech sports” athlete to control the hulking quadrupedal beast. According to Furrion, she was just as surprised as the engineers when she felt a sense of familiarity between her 60-pound skeleton sled and the interface of this 9,000-pound mech suit.

“With the relentless and unchecked automation of everything we do, Prosthesis reminds us that some of the most rewarding things in life are those that require effort, focus and training,” the Kickstarter page said.

 “This is the very essence of sport. Prosthesis, and mech sports, are a celebration of the age old pursuit of physical mastery and human skill, now brought to a new level through advanced technology.”

When the Trump administration withheld billions of dollars in security aid to Pakistan in 2018, the logic then was that the Pakistani military would be forced to form greater ties with the US and surrounding allies to reclaim lost aid. 

Fast forward today, the new reality, Pakistan abandoned the West and its allies for China. 

Pakistan quickly bolstered ties with China via billions of dollars in Belt and Road projects over the last two years. China has also provided the Pakistani military with aircraft, weaponry, and other advanced hardware. The cooperation between both countries has taken another giant leap as China just delivered the first of four “most advanced” warships to the Pakistani Navy, a move that will clearly upset India and the US. 

VOA News reports the first advanced warship was officially launched on Sunday as border tensions with India continue to remain elevated (see: Pakistani Minister Threatens India With Nuclear Attack “To Save Muslim Lives” On National TV). 

The Pakistani Navy released a statement Sunday confirming Chinese state-owned Hudong Zhonghua Shipyard in Shanghai officially launched the Type-054A/P frigate. 

Top Pakistani officials were in attendance at the ship launch.

The statement said the vessel (first of four) has advanced electronics, including surface and subsurface weaponry, anti-air weapons, and high-tech sensors.

“These ships will significantly contribute in maintaining peace and security in our area of responsibility,” it added.

VOA estimates each of the vessels come at the cost of around $350 million. The other three vessels are expected to be delivered to the Pakistani Navy sometime in 2021. 

Quoting Chinese state media, VOA said the four military vessels could “double the combat power” of the country’s naval fleet.

China has also delivered CAC/PAC JF-17 Thunder multi-role combat aircraft and other state-of-the-art defense items such as medium-altitude long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle combat drones. 

Much of the new firepower has been a modernization effort by Pakistan to overhaul its armed forces as tensions with India over the last couple of years have increased along the Line of Control in Jammu & Kashmir.

So while China arms Pakistan, the same is happening with the US arming India. What could possibly go wrong? 

Authored by Robert Wright via The American Institute for Economic Research,

Democratic Presidential hopeful Joe Biden is only the most high-profile politician to promise voters that he will “listen to the scientists,” mandate masks, and shut down the economy again if they so advise.

Even the humble members of the city council of Milledgeville, Georgia invoke “science” in four pages of “whereas-es” designed to justify a largely toothless mask mandate that directly contradicts a Georgia law against wearing masks in public (except for certain holidays, presumably to deter real crime) and the enforcement of which in some places in the city of 50,000 apparently hinges on the font size of a door notice.

Strange times indeed, these. One wonders why we need to elect politicians at all if they will simply defer to “the” scientists. Ah, but there be the rub. Which scientists? They don’t agree on much, especially when it comes to the novel coronavirus and masks and such. (Just look at the litany of articles on the AIER website chronicling the dissents!) 

Should we listen only to “the” scientists on the government payroll? But then wouldn’t they essentially be unelected, unaccountable dictators? That sounds vaguely undemocratic.

Sticky, this wicket!

Plus, last time I checked, “the” scientists have no policy expertise in economics. Perhaps that does not matter as many economists also have no policy expertise in economics. Is that the role of politicians, then? To decide which type of scientists get to dictate in different policy areas? Perhaps Biden will listen to “the” economists on spaceship design or military tactics? I would pay good money to see that! (Seriously, it would be a horribly expensive boondoggle certain to raise my taxes.)

Why is it so important to “listen to the scientists” anyway? Are they suddenly less fallible than previously? Is there any science to support that belief? Because let’s face it, “the” scientists have a pretty poor track record overall.

Did you know that “the” scientists once believed:

1. That the earth is a flat disk, not a sphere, and that it resides at the center of the solar system and even the entire universe.

2. Said earth was created like 6,000 years ago.

3. Complex life forms spontaneously arise from inanimate matter.

4. Species evolve by inheriting acquired characteristics.

5. That sickness arises from an imbalance of the bodily humors or bad air (miasma!) and in either case is best restored by draining the afflicted person of blood and/or applying massive doses of mercury.

6. Maternal thoughts cause birth defects.

7. Human beings are not all equal but rather composed of races, some of which are superior to others. Just measure their skulls for proof!

8. Phlogiston and caloric exist and explain combustion.

9. If you cultivate an area, rainfall in that area will increase. “Rain follows the plow.”

10. Another ice age was upon us in the 1970s.

And that is just a small sample of the silly and outrageous ideas once held by “the” scientists. (For some more recent whoppers, read this.) All those ideas have been dispelled by the functioning of science itself, so please do not mistake my point. The scientific method is one of the few rational methods of thought (some) humans employ and it does help to refine our understanding of important phenomena over time. 

The point is that “the” scientists are often wrong, very wrong, especially early on in the study of some aspect of the real world. But the realization that “the” scientists’ understanding improves over time rather than springing from their heads fully formed like Jove gives birth to a paradox: 

The more “novel” the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the less accurate “the” scientists can be about it, and hence the less reliable their policy prescriptions.

(Think how our descendants will mock us for believing masks slowed viral transmission.) 

Conversely, the less novel the virus is, the weightier “the” scientific evidence is against lockdowns, mask mandates, and other novel policy prescriptions.

Remember, widespread lockdowns/shelter-in-place orders are entirely new policies thought impolitic, impractical, and mercury purge-like until the current crisis. They are nothing like the quarantines of old, which cloistered away only the sick, or cordons, which were of limited geographical and temporal extent and constitutionality. And outside of clinical settings the efficacy of masks depends on the type of mask, how it is worn, and what the wearer is, or isn’t, doing at the time.

So what Joe Biden and other politicians invoking “the” scientists may really mean is “I don’t care enough about you to make difficult decisions so I am going to delegate to a group that I think you are dumb enough to defer to without question.”

They would never admit that, of course, so it must remain speculative, but it fully accords with Public Choice Theory. 

A politician who really had the public’s interest at heart would, instead, say:

“Times are tough. Some Americans have died from a natural cause and more are likely to. Unfortunately, there is not much we can do because viruses live by their own rules, not ours.” Executive orders and metaphorical wars can’t stop them. Obviously, it is unconstitutional, and deeply immoral, to order the death of some people (via suicide, murder, deferred healthcare, reduced income, and the myriad other costs of lockdown) in order to save others. And we can’t do the obvious and offer a live vaccine to volunteers to quickly and constitutionally build community immunity because there isn’t sufficient profit in that. So we have to wait until an expensive, modern vaccine becomes available in the next X months to Y decades. Until then, try to protect the most vulnerable people in your lives and remember, masks and social distancing are not panaceas.”

Of course those would not be the words of a mere politician, they would be the words of a true statesman.

Since their invention, automobiles have been a driving force of the global economy.

Used by millions of people to get to work, transport goods, and travel, the modern automobile has become ubiquitous in our daily lives. So much so, that, as Visual Capitalist’s Marcu Lu details below, a whopping 92 million cars were produced in just 2019.

To help us understand the might of the auto industry, this infographic from Parts Geek breaks down the earnings of 19 major car companies by an interesting metric—revenue per second.

The Full List of Automakers

Below are the earnings of the 19 automakers featured in the infographic.

The Volkswagen Group claims the top spot with $290.2B in gross revenue, translating to $9,202.88 per second. Capping off the list is the world’s most valuable automaker, Tesla, which generated a relatively smaller $24.6B in gross revenue, or $780.06 per second.

A clear takeaway from this data is that Volkswagen and Toyota have a sizable lead over the rest of their peers. Let’s take a closer look at how these two companies operate.

The Volkswagen Group

The Volkswagen Group holds a comprehensive portfolio of brands and services, and has been the world’s largest automaker, by sales, for the past three years.

Beginning with passenger cars and motorcycles, its numerous brands reported the following results for 2019.

Other sources of revenue were Volkswagen’s $44.5B commercial vehicle business, its $4.7B power engineering business, and lastly its $44.4B financial services division.

In total, the Volkswagen Group delivered just short of 11 million vehicles in 2019, besting its 2018 deliveries by 1.3% and setting a new record for the group. While a majority of these vehicles were produced in Europe, the group operates a global production network with a significant presence in Asia.

The German automaker has invested billions in China, the world’s largest car market, to scale its electric vehicle (EV) production capabilities.

Toyota Motor Corporation

Toyota Motor Corporation operates a much more concentrated brand portfolio, with Toyota and Lexus being its two most prominent names. This strategy seems to be working well, as Toyota was ranked the ninth most valuable brand in 2019, and was the only automaker to crack the top ten.

A testament to Toyota’s global influence is its relatively balanced breakdown of 2019 revenues by regional market:

• North America: 30%

• Japan: 25%

• Asia: 18%

• Europe: 11.5%

• Other: 15.3%

For comparison, here is Volkswagen’s 2019 revenues by region, which leans heavily towards Europe:

• Europe (excl. Germany): 42%

• Germany: 19%

• North America: 17%

• South America: 4%

• Asia-Pacific: 17%

The Japanese automaker’s popularity in foreign regions is likely the result of its reputation for reliability and affordability. It may also explain why Toyota’s trucks are a common sight in tough environments such as conflict zones of the developing world.

Altogether, Toyota and its subsidiaries sold nearly 9 million vehicles in 2019, setting a new record for the company but just 0.1% higher than its 2018 figure. Similar to Volkswagen, a majority of Toyota’s vehicles are produced in its home region, with the remainder being built around the world.

Outside of Japan, Toyota has significant production capabilities in the U.S., where it makes everything from pickup trucks to sedans. In 2016, the Toyota Camry made headlines after being ranked the most American-made car—over 75% of its parts were sourced domestically.

Alternative Revenue Sources

While automobiles represent the core business for these companies, many of them have alternative revenue sources. Honda, for example, produces motorcycles, boat engines, lawn mowers, and even personal jets.

Porsche takes a slightly different approach with its accessories and licensing subsidiary, Porsche Design. Since 2003, a variety of lifestyle goods including eyewear, smartphones, and watches have been sold under the Porsche name. Its most noteworthy project is the Porsche Design Tower Miami, a residential skyscraper which features a robotic car elevator.

Finally, electric vehicle (EV) maker Tesla earns additional revenues by selling carbon credits to other automakers that fail to meet government-imposed quotas on EV sales. Since Tesla only produces EVs, it has no need for its credits and is free to sell them. In the second quarter of 2020, Tesla earned $428 million from selling carbon credits, representing 7% of its total revenues for the period.

The Road Ahead

Additional revenue streams are continuing to open up as automakers integrate new technologies into their cars.

Cadillac and Tesla, two American brands, have both announced that their self-driving capabilities will eventually become a paid subscription service. Meanwhile, Germany’s premium automakers are expanding into wireless services. BMW claims it will become the first automaker to offer 5G connectivity in its cars, while Mercedes now sells downloadable software packages to enhance a driver’s experience.

While it’s too early to say whether or not these services will have a significant impact on an automaker’s bottom line, forecasts claim this so-called “connected car market” will be worth $166 billion by 2025. To put that into perspective, that’s more than half of Volkswagen’s gross revenue in 2019, or $5,264 per second.

Authored by Niall Ferguson, op-ed via Bloomberg.com,

Successful Democratic candidates for the presidency of the United States invariably campaign with promises of domestic largesse and moral uplift. They nearly always end up taking their country to war.

Can Joe Biden be a rare exception to that rule, if he succeeds in defeating Donald Trump on November 3? That will depend not just on how well he and his national security team conduct U.S. foreign policy. It will also depend on how stable the world around them is.

The bad news is that post-pandemic peace is another historical rarity.

First, the Democratic Party’s amazing century-plus track record of running on progressive policies and then going to war. Consider Woodrow Wilson, reviled by today’s progressives for his racist views, but nominated and elected in 1912 as a progressive.

Wilson’s acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in Baltimore was a classic in the genre of American uplift. “We must speak,” he told the delegates, “not to catch votes, but to satisfy the thought and conscience of a people deeply stirred by the conviction that they have come to a critical turning point in their moral and political development. We stand in the presence of an awakening Nation, impatient of partisan make-believe. … Nor was the country ever more susceptible to unselfish appeals to the high arguments of sincere justice.”

“The Nation has been unnecessarily, unreasonably, at war within itself,” declared Wilson. But now “the forces of the Nation are asserting themselves against every form of special privilege and private control, and are seeking bigger things than they have ever heretofore achieved. They are sweeping away what is unrighteous in order to vindicate once more the essential rights of human life.”

In office, Wilson offered progressive policy as well. His “New Freedom” agenda cut protectionist tariffs, introduced the first federal income tax, passed the Clayton Antitrust Act and created the Federal Trade Commission, not to mention the Federal Reserve. Reelected partly on a pledge to keep the United States out of World War I, however, he did just the opposite in April 1917.

The pattern repeated itself for the next hundred years. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was swept to power amid the Great Depression with the promise of a New Deal.

“Let us now and here highly resolve,” FDR told his fellow Democrats at their 1932 convention in Chicago, “to resume the country’s interrupted march along the path of real progress and of real justice and of real equality for all our citizens, great or small.”

Uplift was duly followed by a raft of legislation designed to reduce poverty and inequality by increasing the power of the federal government. Despite even stronger anti-war sentiment than Wilson had faced, Roosevelt led the United States into World War II in 1941.

Harry Truman’s acceptance speech at Philadelphia in July 1948 continued the tradition:

“The Democratic Party is the people’s party, and the Republican party is the party of special interest, and it always has been and always will be. … In 1932 we were attacking the citadel of special privilege and greed. We were fighting to drive the money changers from the temple. Today, in 1948, we are now the defenders of the stronghold of democracy and of equal opportunity, the haven of the ordinary people of this land and not of the favored classes or the powerful few.” 

Having won a famous surprise victory over Thomas E. Dewey, Truman unveiled his domestic “Fair Deal” early in 1949. Less than 18 months later, North Korea invaded South Korea and America was back at war.

John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson between them set new standards for both rhetorical uplift (Kennedy) and progressive legislation (Johnson). Yet by 1968 neither his civil rights legislation nor the Great Society could salvage Johnson’s presidency from the wreckage of the war in Vietnam.

Subsequent Democratic presidents strove mightily to avoid LBJ’s fate. Yet the world would not leave Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in peace to pursue their domestic agendas. Carter’s presidency was dealt fatal blows by the hostage crisis after the Iran Revolution of February 1979 and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ten months later. Clinton spent years trying to avoid foreign entanglements, in Somalia, in Rwanda and in Bosnia, until the last of these forced him into military intervention. Obama may still believe his decision not to intervene in the Syrian Civil War was one of his best, but the red line on the use of chemical weapons — which turned out to be a pink dotted line — was in truth the most ignominious chapter of his presidency.

Joe Biden’s speech on Thursday night was the continuation of a very long tradition in lofty Democratic rhetoric, traceable all the way back to Thomas Jefferson.

“If you entrust me with the presidency,” declared Biden, “I will draw on the best of us not the worst. I will be an ally of the light not of the darkness. It’s time for us, for We the People, to come together. For make no mistake. United we can, and will, overcome this season of darkness in America. We will choose hope over fear, facts over fiction, fairness over privilege.”

Whoever wrote that speech had done their homework.  At times I wondered if an algorithm had mashed it up on the basis of all previous Democratic acceptance speeches.

The common feature of all but one Democratic acceptance speeches since 1912 is the tiny proportion devoted to foreign policy. The exception is John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” speech in Los Angeles in 1960, which was roughly half Cold War rhetoric designed to outflank Richard Nixon on national security. Biden didn’t go there. Less than 3% of his acceptance speech was on foreign policy, and it was bromidic as well as brief.

Biden pledged to “stand with our allies and friends,” to desist from “cozying up to dictators” (mentioning no names), and not to “turn a blind eye to Russian bounties on the heads of American soldiers” or “foreign interference” in U.S. elections.

That was it. The only mention of China was apropos of the need to make America less dependent on Chinese-made medical supplies and protective equipment. To listen to Biden’s speech, you would not know that the United States is already up to its neck in Cold War II, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out here and elsewhere.

No doubt a majority of people who tuned in to Biden’s speech share his unspoken wish that this Second Cold War will simply go away the moment he is sworn in.

Biden it was who launched his bid for the Democratic nomination with the observation that the Chinese were “not bad folks, folks” and were “not competition for us” — and who earlier this month seemed ready to promise an end to U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports.

I have bad news. It wasn’t Donald Trump who started Cold War II; it was Xi Jinping. And, as I pointed out two weeks ago, his vision of a resurgent China challenging the United States not merely economically but ideologically and geopolitically is widely shared by Chinese intellectuals and (though it is hard to be sure) many ordinary Chinese people. Notice, too, that anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States has increased almost as much among Democrats as among Republicans in the past few years.

How likely is the world to be a peaceful place between 2021 and 2024, the putative first and likely only term of a Biden presidency? Not unreasonably, Biden’s speech last Thursday focused on the adverse impact the Covid-19 pandemic has had on the United States. Yet the key question for an incoming Biden administration will not be what to do about the pandemic, as I suspect — one cannot be certain — it will largely be over by January next year. The key question will not be — as many Democrats think — how best to spend all the money the United States can possibly borrow, now that all fiscal and monetary restraint has been cast aside. The key questions will be how generally unstable the post-pandemic world will be and how specifically toxic the Sino-American relationship will get.

History does not give much ground for optimism on these scores. More often than not, as in 1918–19, times of war have been followed by times of plague, but the direction of causation has also run the other way. The great plagues of the ancient world — smallpox in the Athens of Pericles (429–426 BC) or the Antonine and Justinianic plagues that struck the Roman Empire —did not usher in periods of peace. To give just one example, not long after bubonic plague swept through his empire, beginning in 541 AD, the Emperor Justinian waged a successful campaign to reclaim Italy from the Ostrogoths, as well as resuming his war with the Sassanid (Persian) Empire.

The Black Death of the 1340s was among the most disastrous pandemics in history, killing between one-third and three-fifths of the population of Europe. Yet it did not prevent one of history’s most protracted conflicts from getting underway. The Hundred Years’ War between England and France began on June 24, 1340, with the destruction of the French fleet at the Battle of Sluys by Edward III’s naval expedition. Six years later, despite the ravages of the plague, Edward launched a cross-Channel invasion, capturing Caen and marching to Flanders, inflicting a heavy defeat on Philip VI’s army at Crécy, and proceeding to conquer Calais. The French king’s ally, David II of Scotland, then invaded England, only to be defeated. In 1355, Edward III’s son, the “Black Prince,” led another force into France, winning a major victory at Poitiers. A third English invasion went less well, leading to a temporary peace in 1360, but the war resumed in 1369 and continued intermittently until 1453.

At the time, nobody knew that the two countries were embarking on a “Hundred Years War.” That phrase was not coined by historians until 1823. But such is history. Most people still do not grasp that Cold War II has begun. Cold War I was a forty-year affair. But who is to say that the U.S.-China conflict will not be another hundred years’ war?

One disaster begets another. A pandemic creates a cascade of economic, social and political problems, which in turn can often precipitate cross-border conflicts. Watch, for instance, as COVID-19’s disruption of food production all over the developing world, but especially in Africa, leads not just to hunger but to population displacements and political frictions.

For that matter, look around at what’s already happening. Since the outbreak of Covid-19, Russia and Turkey have effectively partitioned Libya, Chinese and Indian soldiers have skirmished hand-to-hand on their border, the port of Beirut has blown up, toppling the Lebanese government, revolution has broken out in Belarus and there has been a military coup in Mali. Is peace at hand? Well, there has been an unexpected breakthrough in the Middle East, with the normalizing of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (a deal for which Jared Kushner deserves more credit than he is receiving). But anyone who thinks Iran is going to suspend its nefarious activities in the region just because Joe Biden is in the White House doesn’t understand the regime in Tehran.

The central issue at stake between the United States and China is not Trumps’ tariffs, nor his attempt to have a U.S. tech company take over TikTok, nor Xi’s suppression of pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, nor his genocidal policies against the Uighurs in Xinjiang — nor even the extent of China’s culpability for the Covid-19 pandemic. The central issue is Taiwan and it is due to blow up in a few weeks’ time, when new U.S. regulations come into force that will cut off Huawei from all imported semiconductors made with either American technology or software.

As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Tim Culpan argued last week, this really is the “nuclear option,” because it “threatens to kill the company, which invites retaliation from Beijing.”

Ever wondered why it was that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941?

As Harvard’s Graham Allison recently reminded us, it was because of intolerable economic sanctions imposed by the United States. Yes, that’s right: under the Democratic President Joe Biden most wants to be associated with.

Last week’s virtual convention was a great opportunity to hate on Republicans, and especially on Donald Trump. But for all his many flaws, Trump has upheld a great GOP tradition — of not starting foreign wars. The exception to the rule of Republican dovishness over the past century was of course George W. Bush, who got America into two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. (George H. W. Bush’s war to liberate Kuwait was Bismarckian in its short duration and low cost in life.) The rest — Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan — were notable for the small number of young Americans they sent into battle: vastly fewer than their Democratic counterparts.

“Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes” is a line from Virgil, usually translated as “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”

I feel the same way about Democrats when they make uplifting speeches full of promises about billions (sorry, make that trillions) of dollars to be spent on public health, education, health care and infrastructure.

If there is one man I can readily imagine – inadvertently, of course, and with the best of intentions and the most uplifting of rhetoric – turning Cold War II into World War III, it is the self-anointed heir of FDR, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.

China has rejected last week’s accusations that’s it’s pursuing an aggressive “vaccine nationalism” campaign wherein it hopes to use its COVID-19 vaccine as a tool of influence and diplomacy.

Russia was also named in an explosive Wall Street Journal piece last week as among countries on the cusp of rolling out with an early, effective vaccine, but who will use it as leverage against both Washington interests and that of US allies. Currently no less than three of six global vaccine candidates which are in final clinical trials are being developed in China. 

Days following the WSJ report, which alleged that state and private drug makers “have begun promising early access to countries of strategic interest as it seeks to shore up its global standing after a pandemic that has strained geopolitical ties,” China’s CGTN slammed the charges as baseless and without evidence.

“Well, we’ve seen this before, like when China was accused of using face mask diplomacy when it supplied countries with personal protective equipment (PPE),” CGTN wrote, dismissing the accusations. “So it should come as no surprise that China will be accused of using the vaccine to seek geopolitical leverage too.”

Amid agreements with some east Asian regional powers like the Philippines and Malaysia for priority access to a Chinese vaccine, the WSJ included perhaps the most specific and explosive charge against Beijing as follows:

Still, official Chinese statements suggest a willingness by China to blur humanitarian and foreign-policy objectives that include garnering support from countries on Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea.

In some countries, accepting a vaccine from a Chinese drugmaker could help deepen diplomatic ties with Beijing at Washington’s expense.

State-run mouthpiece CGTN admitted that “a lot of things are possible” but ripped the speculative nature of the charges. Indeed the South China Sea reference constituted a huge claim but was mentioned in WSJ in passing, without further details or exploration offered, but just merely hinting at the possibility.

CGTN quipped: “if you’re going to make a speculative statement, please back it up with something more concrete.”

More broadly when it comes to the ongoing global race to produce an effective coronavirus vaccine, it’s perhaps only inevitable that there will be geopolitical consequences and some backdoor leveraging happening among the multiple developed nations on the brink of a breakthrough.