IMF Estimates $15 Trillion Of World’s Foreign Direct Investments Are “Phantom Capital”
A new study published by the International Monetary Fund has found that $15 trillion of the world’s foreign direct investments are “phantom capital” – a term used to describe capital that is designed to minimize tax bills of multinational firms.
This total makes up 40% of the world’s foreign direct investments, and is the equivalent to the combined GDP of China and Germany, according to Bloomberg.
These types of investments have risen about 10% over the past decade despite global efforts to curb tax avoidance, according to the IMF study. The capital makes its way through corporate shells that generally have no operations or real business activity.
The study stated:
“FDI (foreign direct investment) is often an important driver for genuine international economic integration, stimulating growth and job creation and boosting productivity. But phantom capital is financial and tax engineering that blurs traditional FDI statistics and makes it difficult to understand genuine economic integration.”
It continued:
“Luxembourg, a country of 600,000 people, hosts as much FDI as the U.S. and much more than China. FDI of this size hardly reflects brick-and-mortar investments in the minuscule Luxembourg economy, whose $4 trillion in FDI comes to $6.6 million a person. Unsurprisingly, an economy’s exposure to phantom FDI increases with the corporate tax rate.”
About half of the world’s “phantom capital” is hosted by Luxembourg and the Netherlands, with just 10 economies globally holding more than 85% of such investments.
The study concluded that “international cooperation” was vital to solving the issue: “Indeed, this year the IMF put forward various alternatives for a revised international tax architecture, ranging from minimum taxes to allocation of taxing rights to destination economies. No matter which road policymakers choose, one fact remains clear: international cooperation is the key to dealing with taxation in today’s globalized economic environment.”
Trump and Johnson face a common enemy in their complacent and costly establishments, but it is wrong to think they share a common approach to government business and finances. For the moment, all attention in Britain is focused on Brexit, but under Johnson’s predecessors, spending has become increasingly driven by process instead of outcomes. Johnson’s chief strategist has identified the reversal of this trend as offering the key to delivering outcomes in a post-Brexit UK while balancing the budget and reducing tax.
Introduction
Superficially, the electorates of America and Britain share one thing in common. They have both become sick of the establishment’s arrogant presumption that it knows better than the common people. Donald Trump spotted it and won the presidency in the face of enormous hostility from the establishment, both Democrat and Republican, as well as the deep state comprised of unaccountable intelligence operators and bureaucrats. The year before, the Westminster establishment found ordinary people rebelled against its assumed right to run the affairs of the electorate.
In Britain, if a mistake was made, it was to offer a referendum which produced the wrong answer. That is how the establishment appears to see it. In America, the UK as well as in Europe an elite has emerged for which democracy has become an irritant. But the establishment knows the rules and cannot deny their validity. The electorates in America and Britain have now given their establishments an unpalatable message, that they overrated their own importance. The bureaucrats no longer represent the interests of the people. Quite simply, the establishment and its bureaucrats have broken their contract with their electors, drifting away from the primary reason for their existence. The ordinary person has had enough of being ignored.
The result is the establishment is being forced to fight for its survival. President Trump has been fighting this battle on behalf of the American people for nearly two years. The British establishment has been fighting a rear-guard action for three over Brexit. Neither establishment has yet been vanquished. In America, there are signs of an accommodation, a compromise, which will allow the state to gradually resume control. In the UK, the survival of Boris Johnson and his new government depends on his refusal to compromise in its fight against the establishment’s Europhiles and placemen.
Brexit is a conflict that is only now being forced to a conclusion after three years of a Remainer government trying to appear to comply with the referendum result, while locking the United Kingdom into the EU, potentially in perpetuity. The electorate rumbled it and threatened the ruling Conservative party with extinction. Recognising the danger, their parliamentary party in conjunction with the party membership ejected the complicit Theresa May and elected Boris Johnson to take the country out of the EU on the delayed date of 31 October.
It is by no means certain Johnson will succeed. Remainers are now fighting his government in the courts, with the Supreme Court due to adjudicate next Tuesday (17 September) on whether the prorogation of Parliament was legal. And a way has to be found around the Benn-Burt Law, the last act of Remainer MPs.
The behaviour of the opposition parties in Parliament has been unedifying. The public sees a parliament out of control under a partisan Speaker. Not surprisingly, the opinion polls are swinging more in support of Johnson’s Conservatives and against the other parties, widening the gulf even further between Parliament and the people its members are elected to serve. If Parliament had any public respect before recent events, then it has certainly lost it now.
The similarities between President Trump’s position fighting the Federal establishment and that of Boris Johnson fighting Westminster gives the impression to many international observers that Boris is a British version of The Donald. Trump is urging the British to leave the EU, and thinks Johnson is the man to do it. Johnson is happy to encourage Trump’s support for a quick, post-Brexit trade deal. They get on together well.
But they are not peas in the same pod. Johnson has shown a free-marketeer grasp over trade issues and the damage that tariffs can do, while Trump is an interventionist. And when it comes to deficit financing, the evidence is emerging that Boris will fund promised spending in education, policing and health by cutting bureaucracy rather than relying on deficit stimulation now to provide tax income tomorrow. This is where Dominic Cummings comes into play.
This article skims over recent developments in Britain’s fight to free itself from the EU, particularly with respect to the role of Cummings. Making a huge assumption that Johnson and Cummings manage to implement Brexit on 31 October and the Conservatives are re-elected in a general election shortly, it also looks at how the government is likely to fund its promised expenditure plans.
Cummings – the confident back-room operator
Dominic Cummings scares much of the Westminster establishment, with good reason: he is intent on destroying it in its current form and replacing it with a system that prioritises objectives, minimising non-essential political and administrative intervention. There will be no tolerance of virtue-signalling by ministers and pressure groups. Of the money allocated to a project, instead of a Pareto eighty per cent being spent on process and twenty per cent on the final objective, Cummings is bent on ensuring it is the other way around, even releasing funds to permit tax cuts while retaining a balanced budget.
But first Cummings is dedicated to achieving Brexit on 31 October, when he will have directed the strategy to remove Britain from under the stultifying regulations and bureaucracy emanating from EU membership, freeing him to pursue his ultimate objective. On Brexit, we can only watch developments, because outsiders can only guess the government’s next moves and the final outcome.
To understand more fully Cummings’s role as special advisor to Boris Johnson, his ambitions, intentions and prospects for success, it is worth delving into his personal story. He was born in Durham in North-East England to middle-class parents in 1971. He attended Durham School, a middle-of-the-road fee-paying school, and then attended Exeter College at Oxford University, graduating with a First in Ancient and Modern History.
Robin Lane Fox, his tutor in Ancient History described him in a recent BBC profile as “extremely aware of his own abilities and had every reason to be”. When asked who was cleverer, Boris Johnson or Dominic Cummings, Lane Fox responded “Dominic is cleverer by a long way than Boris. Different class altogether”.
Lane Fox would also have known Johnson, who attended Oxford at Balliol, where he entered as a Brackenbury Scholar to read Literae Humaniores, a four-year course in Ancient Greek and Latin Classics. But Johnson, who as a student appears to have lacked Cummings’s focus, only got a 2:1. However, his intellect should not be in doubt, and while one can understand Lane Fox underestimating Johnson due to his lack of intellectual focus, Cummings appears to have been exceptional.
His other tutor in Modern History was Norman Stone, who died in June. Stone was also a notable intellect, and in his day had been an advisor to Margaret Thatcher. Both Stone and Thatcher shared a distrust of the British and European establishments. Stone’s was based on his deep knowledge of European history, honed from his studies at Glasgow University. Smith’s association with Glasgow University would have also had a bearing on Stone’s free-market thinking. Adam Smith, the founder of economics as a human science, had been appointed as its Professor of Logic, and the following year he was appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy.
Stone was a man who would cut to the quick and did not suffer mediocracy, let alone fools. He was a chain-smoking hard-drinking argumentative Glaswegian who would not have endeared himself to “the humourless halfwits who are the bedrock of university management and the political class”. As an example of his impiety and wit he came up with one of the best questions ever set in a Cambridge tripos: “Romanticism: masculine, feminine or neuter?”
In his own way, Stone wanted to help Mrs Thatcher undermine the rotten British political system, which by 1979 had drifted onto the rocks of socialism. The Thatcher revolution saved Britain by driving Marxist Labour into the wilderness, much as the Johnson/Cummings partnership seeks to today.
After Thatcher’s initial success against socialism, the establishment reconstituted itself on proto-capitalist lines and ejected her in 1990. Despite Stone’s brilliance, his influence and role as Thatcher’s foreign policy advisor on Europe and speech writer was sadly limited in the light of events. Stone would have found that with all its mediocracy, the establishment always regroups. But perhaps a more sober, focused and ruthless operator in his protégé might have a better chance. It appears that Stone quickly recognised Cummings’s intellect, and would have been attracted by his directness and sense of purpose. They were like-minded dissident geniuses.
Cummings learned about Thucydides from Fox Lane, and Bismarck from Stone. I see a parallel with TE Lawrence, another young man a century ago who was a loner, aloof from his contemporaries but with a remarkable intellect. In Lawrence’s case, he single-mindedly inspired Bedouin tribesmen to revolt against the Turks in Palestine, leading to the creation of nation states in the Middle East. As well as having Lawrence’s detached ability to analyse and lead, Cummings appears to possess Lawrence’s brilliant singlemindedness. He clearly identifies an objective and is ruthless in his focus and determination to achieve it, just as was Lawrence.
Cummings’ first serious role in government was as special advisor to Michael Gove, at that time David Cameron’s education secretary. He helped Gove push through many major reforms, and his view on the importance of the state getting education right and the means of achieving it is the subject of his 235-page essay, Some thoughts on education and political priorities. His ambition then and now is for Britain to become the school of the world, echoing Pericles’ description of Athens as the school of Greece.
In his essay, Cummings describes those in English politics and power as lacking structured and disciplined thought, being much more interested in appearing to be on the side of the poor and less able, than they are in raising standards. Policy debates had become little more than exercises in moral exhibitionism.
Crucially, from his essay he is convinced that enormous savings can be made in the administration of state education, enough to fund the achievement of end-objectives and still have money left over to spend elsewhere or to reduce spending overall. He also observes that savings from his focused approach can be made across all Whitehall departments. It is clear from his essay that he intends to release the funds for the new Johnson government’s proposed spending on education, policing and health by cutting spending on bureaucratic and political processes not essential to end objectives.
This has been attempted before. All attempts, and there have been many over the years, to have a bonfire of the quangos have failed. [Quango is an acronym which stands for quasi-autonomous non-government organisation, an arms-length entity set up by a government department, which usually add little value and much bureaucracy. It is estimated there are 742 quangos spending some £100bn annually, though estimates vary considerably].
Cummings’ approach to eliminating this waste appears to be different from previous attempts. He is the lead special adviser in a network of nearly a hundred “spads” (as at end-2018). He is moulding them into a combined force, separate from both government and the civil service, responsible directly to him as well as their relevant ministers. This ensures that ministers will be advised in accordance with Cummings’ policy of cutting waste and increasing the effectiveness of decision making by focusing on objectives, and not process.
In effect, the continuing advice given to ministers by their departmental civil servants will be made to conform with the Cummings policy. It is no less than a carefully planned attempt to wrest control from a floundering political establishment to make government more efficient and objective in its aims. However, the initial task is to deliver Brexit on 31 October, and we are already seeing the consequences of the Cummings approach.
Cummings does not compromise in pursuing his objectives. He has ensured the removal of the whip from plotting Remainers in the Conservative parliamentary party in brutal, public fashion. Any special adviser not totally onside is treated equally brutally, one in the Treasury suspected of leaking having been sacked by him on the spot and marched out of Downing Street by an armed policeman. Whitehall has not in living memory seen this level of hard-headedness, focus and determination. And he is Boris Johnson’s real chef de cabinet.
The relationship with Boris was forged when they worked together on the Brexit referendum campaign where Boris was the front man and Cummings the operator. It suited Boris, who is an excellent delegator and was happy for Cummings to run the show on his and his political colleagues’ behalf. It is a relationship that continues to endure between two like-minded classicists. Boris’s other appointments, particularly in Gove, Javid, Rees-Moog and Raab, amount to an intellectually capable cabinet espousing free market economics. By restoring Cabinet discipline, Johnson has ensured ministers will be in tune with Cummings’s plans to reduce government’s operating costs to the lowest possible level. But their first task, to deliver Brexit, is still in play. With Cummings and Boris working on a plan towards a clear objective, they are likely to succeed against the Remainers, who beyond being disruptive, are incapable of coming up with any feasible strategy. But for the moment, we do not know how this will play out and can only speculate.
Britain’s future under a reforming government
Without a majority in the Commons and an antagonistic House of Lords it may seem premature to consider how a Johnson government will change the political landscape. However, much of the current uncertainty will disappear when an uncompromising Brexit is finally achieved, and the hastily formed alliance on the opposition benches can then be expected to collapse. This assumes the government finds a way of neutralising the Benn-Burt Law, which forces it to secure the approval of MPs for either a withdrawal agreement or leaving without a withdrawal agreement. If at the end of 19 October neither has been achieved, the Prime Minister must then have sought an extension of the Brexit date until at least 31 January 2020. But assuming a way is found around this hurdle, the loose coalition of opposition parties will have no binding reason for its existence. Scottish Nationalists and Liberals will then relish the prospect of taking Labour seats and support a move to a general election.
Following that election and assuming Johnson achieves a working majority, all the pointless, virtue-signalling politics that ministers who served under Mrs May and their departments indulged in will be confined to the opposition benches, since Cummings and his cohort of special advisers will expunge them from ministerial decision-making. Despite the headline numbers reflecting more spent at the point of delivery in all ministries, they should be adequately funded by the elimination of needless process. At least, that’s the plan.
This is why Johnson is not on the same page as Trump, at least when it comes to the prosecution of government business, and there is a strong likelihood his Chancellor will be able to run a balanced budget (all else being equal), compared with Trump’s deliberate ramping up of unfunded spending to perpetuate the illusion of American prosperity.
This week government officials came back from their summer recess, and I have heard from a couple different sources that the US Senate in particular is seeking to fast track legislation on Red Flag gun laws as well as a possible ban on private party transfers of firearms and a possible ban on high capacity magazines. I can only hope that these are just rumors, but I suspect they are accurate.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has publicly vowed to pursue any new gun control legislation that the Trump Administration supports, and Donald Trump has openly called for Red Flag gun laws involving mental health guidelines. The mainstream media now claims that a majority of Americans on both sides of the political divide support red flag legislation, but we all know how rigged such polls can be. The real question is, does the average American even know what red flag laws would entail? I think they do not.
Red flag gun laws are a method of gun control by which a family member or law enforcement can petition the court to confiscate a person’s firearms on the SUSPICION that the person may present a danger to themselves or others. But it doesn’t necessarily stop there. Some reports indicate that Trump is seriously considering using big tech companies like Amazon and Apple to monitor people’s behavior and link this data to a social credit system similar to the system that already exists in China. Your gun rights could then be determined by algorithms that mark you as a potential risk simply by what you post online.
Prosecution using the public to spy on itself is a hallmark of these kinds of laws. It is also nothing new. The Puritans in early America used intangible evidence, such as “spectral evidence” to punish people of various crimes including witchcraft. This encouraged extreme collectivism and conformity, for anyone stepping outside the lines of what the group saw as righteous behavior could find themselves secretly accused using rhetorical evidence and unable to defend themselves. Their only option was to admit to the crime, whether they were guilty or not, and then repent.
But in a social or political witch hunt, you are not repenting to get in God’s good graces, but to get in the good graces of the collective. You are supposed to sublimate yourself for the group and beg their forgiveness; not for the crime you are accused, but for the crime of acting as an individual. The message is clear – There is no way to fight back. Just give in and if you are lucky the collective will let you continue living, under their watchful eye, of course.
This might sound like something that could never happen in the US today, but it already has. The existence of the No Fly List, which is generated in secret, is often politically motivated and is based on evidence that the accused is never allowed to see. It is a perfect example of a “law” that is similar to Red Flag legislation. While the no fly list has been confronted in court numerous times, it still endures and is little changed since its inception. Once ingrained, these laws are rarely ever removed.
It is likely that Red Flag gun laws will operate in the same way. One day you may walk into the sporting goods store and be denied a gun purchase by the ATF. There will be no explanation, only the denial of your rights.
Accusations can come from anywhere, even complete strangers using anonymous online applications (this is how the Chinese social credit system works). They could be based on legitimate behavior, such as suicide or murder threats, or they could be based on a political statement you wrote or said years ago. It doesn’t matter. The goal will be to take gun rights away from as many people as possible while the government still claims to support the 2nd Amendment. It’s about the back door destruction of gun rights, not public safety. It’s also about silencing public dissent.
The bottom line is, if you allow pre-crime judgment based on hearsay evidence for one person, then you are allowing it for ALL people including yourself. And, it might not stop with whether or not a person is allowed to buy or own a gun. These systems of control expand into every facet of life. Again, simply look at what is happening in China.
The method of using “mental health” or social disruption as an excuse to silence dissent was not actually mastered by China, however. It was standardized in communist Russia during the reign of the Soviets. The mental health excuse was exploited on a regular basis in order to quietly sweep government critics and dissidents under the rug never to be seen again. The metal hospitals where these deplorables were kept were called “Psikhushka”, an ironic diminutive label. The hospitals worked hand in hand with the Cheka secret police and their vast networks of civilian informants.
‘See Something Say Something’ began under communists in the East. It’s only being recycled today in the West.
For the Soviets, the methodology made sense. The message they were sending was that anyone who criticized socialism/communism MUST be crazy. And, in a way, this is how Red Flag laws function. For if you are put on the list, or denied gun rights, then there MUST be something mentally wrong with you. And, by extension, if you are placed on the list for political reasons, then your political beliefs or convictions MUST also be psychologically disturbed. You see how this works?
Red Flag laws and social credit systems take the Psikhushka and flip it around. They don’t need mental health prisons, they simply turn the whole country into a mental health prison. The wardens and guards of this prison will be the citizenry, and they will police each other.
Make no mistake, the mainstream media and the government have been conditioning the public for years to the concept that certain ideals and political activists are on the “fringe”. They are “conspiracy theorists”. They are exhibiting “defiance disorders”. They are not right in the head. Red Flag gun laws are meant for people like me, or perhaps people like you.
Precursor testing of denial of gun rights based on mental health accusations has already taken place against war veterans in the US based on PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). It makes sense that the government would seek to disarm trained combat experienced veterans first, as they tend to present the biggest source of resistance to a totalitarian shift.
I can’t say that Trump’s open support of Red Flag laws surprises me in the slightest. Trump’s long term business relationships and debts to the Rothschild banking elites as well as his many dubious cabinet choices including Pompeo, Ross, Mnuchin, Kudlow, Lightheizer, etc., indicate to me that Trump is not on the side of liberty activists. John Bolton’s recent exit from the White House does not impress me. It is clearly a crumb thrown to conservatives as a means to keep them close to the Neo-Con table. The goal of the elites to lure conservatives into blind adulation of the Trump Admin. is starting to fail, and they had to do something. Also, it is not uncommon for elitist members to jump ship from an administration right before their agenda’s are implemented so that they get none of the blame for the consequences.
Bolton should never have been in Trump’s cabinet to begin with, he was there for years, and just because Bolton is leaving doesn’t mean his agendas will be leaving. Trump has many elitist handlers, and I’m sure Bolton will be replaced with yet another reprehensible ghoul in due course.
In my recent article ‘The Real Reasons Why The Media Is Suddenly Admitting To The Recession Threat’, I noted that if an economic crisis strikes in the next year, then it’s highly unlikely that Trump is slated to be president after the 2020 elections. If he supports Red Flag laws, then it is almost assured that he will not be president for another term.
In our controlled political machine in which presidents from both parties are merely puppets for elitist interests, these kinds of liberty crushing laws are not generally designed for the current Administration’s use. Rather, they are supported by one president or party, and then exploited by the next president or party in power. In this way, conservatives could be tricked into backing unconstitutional laws in the name of “helping their side win”, only to discover that the laws they supported (or ignored) are being used against them by Democrats a few years later.
I think this would be especially true for Red Flag legislation. If conservatives do not raise hell in response to these laws just because they don’t want to derail the Trump train, then they will find themselves complicit in their own disarmament if markets tank and the Dems take over in 2020. The socialist front runners will say that we “asked for this” under Trump, and now we’re getting what we wanted. And, once these laws are in the books, expect that a majority of police will comply with them and enforce them.
Of course, this leads to an inevitable outcome – War. There are millions of people in the US that are not going to fold to the dismantling of gun rights or gun confiscation. No doubt, we would all be labeled terrorists, and our defiance would be held up as further proof of our mental instability. So be it.
Once the Pandora’s box of pre-crime and hearsay evidence is opened, the sky is truly the limit for the violation of American constitutional rights.
For whatever it’s worth, now would be a good time for gun rights advocates to contact their representatives and warn them that Red Flag laws are unacceptable. Also keep in mind that the government may push a long list of new gun control restrictions on top of Red Flag laws as a means to frighten the public. They will then rescind many of the items on the list (except the red flag legislation) in order to make it appear as thought we “got lucky”. The real goal here is the mental health restrictions and the ability for government to deny your rights according to hearsay evidence.
Gun ownership is as integral to a free society as free speech and property rights. Without firearms ownership, the public is at the mercy of any criminal or criminal government that seeks to oppress them. Remember, if your “military style” rifle was not a threat to the elites then they would not constantly seek to take it away. Never let it go.
* * *
If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch. Learn more about it HERE.
“We Need A Back-Up Plan”: Middle-Class Hong Kongers Look To Emigrate As Protests Drag On, Rents Crash
Hong Kong’s wealthy elite didn’t wait long before they started moving assets abroad after the anti-extradition bill protests morphed into a broader pro-democracy movement over the summer. Apparently, they could sense where the wind was blowing. Now, Hong Kong’s rank-and-file are starting to catch up.
According to Reuters, as the pro-democracy demonstrations stretch into the fall with no end in sight, more Hong Kongers are starting the lengthy process of relocating outside the special administrative region. Many are looking to join family in areas with large Chinese immigration populations – cities like Sydney, Australia and Vancouver, Canada.
The city government recorded what appears to be a surge in applications for migration. Since these types of data aren’t as readily available in HK as they are in the US, here’s how Reuters arrived at this conclusion: Requests for police-record printouts (which cost HK$225, or about $29) have jumped more than 50% in the month of August compared with last year. These records, according to Reuters, are only issued for visa applications or child adoptions. From what the news agency can tell, the number of adoptions has remained roughly constant. Last year, the city estimates that 7,600 citizens left HK for good.
Plus, attendance at emigration seminars, which help Hong Kongers learn and understand the complex process of leaving China, has soared. Via conversations with regular Hong Kongers, reporters got the sense that many who own property in the city feel that now might be the best time to capitalize on HK’s still frothy property market, sell, and move elsewhere. The protests have also started to have an impact on the city’s notoriously high rents, which have fallen in recent months along with property values.
On the other end, authorities in Malaysia, Australia and Taiwan have reported a spike in emigration inquiries and applications. Property agents also told Reuters that their phones are ringing ‘off the hook’.
One investor who spoke with Reuters after buying a house-and-land package in suburban Melbourne said her motives are simple: She wants to provide a stable home for herself and her child because, as she said, “there are many uncertainties in Hong Kong.”
“There are many uncertainties in Hong Kong,” one investor on a property agent’s late-August tour of suburban Melbourne said before, laying out A$600,000 ($410,000) for a house-and-land package.
“People like me in their 40s and 50s – we think about our child,” said the investor, who gave only her family name, Lee, because her employer forbids speaking to the media.
“We want a back-up home, a better place to live,” she added. “At least if something bad happens, they have a back-up plan, an exit plan.”
Reuters reported that Lee’s sentiments were echoed by 10 other families that agreed to be interviewed for the story.
Though there are no official data tracking immigration out of Hong Kong, at least one of Reuters sources believes the volume of people seeing to emigrate now is higher than it was back in 2014, when the last round of pro-Democracy protests roiled the city.
“The numbers are the highest in recent years, even higher than 2014,” said Peggy Lau, a sales director at Uni Immigration Consultancy in Hong Kong, where enquiries have surged sevenfold since protests began in June.
To be sure, there is no official data tracking emigration applications from Hong Kong, which has a population of about 7 million. Nor is there evidence of departures or cash outflows on the scale of those in the aftermath of the 1997 handover from Britain to China.
But there are firm signs of preparations.
Favored destinations such as Malaysia, which is relatively cheap, and Taiwan, which is culturally similar to Hong Kong, show sharp rises in interest.
At Johor, near Malaysia’s southern tip, property consultant Bruce Lee said Hong Kongers have poured into a project called Forest City, developed by China’s Country Garden Holdings Co Ltd, buying 800 units since June.
That compares with 200 units purchased between then and 2016, when sales began.
In Taiwan, the number of visas issued to Hong Kongers in June and July was 38% higher (at 884) than during the same period from a year ago, according to the island’s Ministry of the Interior National Immigration Agency. Given the sudden upswing in violence during the month of August, it’s likely that the number of applicants continued to climb. In Australia, authorities confirmed to Reuters a “significant” increase in visa applicants from Hong Kong, but declined to give specific information. In New Zealand, applications for residency visas from Hong Kong passport holders hit 34 in June and 44 in July, modestly higher than the average of 29.
Property agents report that they’re already beginning to shift their focus away from Hong Kong’s real estate market, as prices edge lower for a second straight month, and are beginning to focus on finding new homes for Hong Konger clients in Taiwan and elsewhere.
There are no signs yet of an effect on prices in destination markets, but demand is strong enough that agents and developers say they have begun actively courting Hong Kongers.
“We see there is an opportunity,” said Ken Dodds, sales director at Melbourne homebuilder Resimax, which hosted 43 Hong Kong investors last month, after previously focusing on buyers from Malaysia and Singapore.
“People are keen to look for a safe haven,” he said, adding that the investors bought or reserved a dozen properties, which he described as a “great” result.
And while destination markets haven’t seen much of an impact on prices, many suspect that a “safe haven” premium could soon arise in popular markets around Taiwan, and elsewhere.
A second interstellar object is zooming through our solar system and this time, astronomers will be ready…
In 2017, scientists marveled over the first human observations of an interstellar object passing through our solar system. The cigar-shaped asteroid, named ‘Oumuamua, possessed such bizarre traits that some observers speculated it might be an alien spaceship; most astronomers, however, focused on using the narrow timeframe of its passage to make as many observations as possible.
Now astronomers believe a second interstellar object is zooming into our solar system and this time, their telescopes will be ready.
An amateur astronomer in Crimea, Gennady Borisov, discovered what is believed to be a comet using his own observatory. The Minor Planet Center (MPC) confirmed the object, subsequently named C/2019 Q4 (Borisov), and further analysis revealed it to have an unusual trajectory—an eccentric, hyperbolic path that likely means it is not gravitationally tied to our sun.
Like its predecessor ‘Oumuamua, the new interstellar visitor hails from another planetary system and is tearing through the galaxy with incredible velocity (30 kilometers a second).
There are differences between the objects, though. While ‘Oumuamua is an asteroid, the 10 kilometer wide C/2019 appears to have a tail of gas indicative of a comet. This means its composition and origins can be studied in greater detail. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, C/2019 is six times brighter and will be available for observation for far longer.
‘Oumuamua took scientists by surprise and was on its way out of the solar system by the time they discovered it, allowing only a couple weeks of analysis. C/2019, on the other hand, will be visible to astronomers for about six months.
C/2019’s cometary nature and the amount of time scientists will have to study it means we will get an unprecedented opportunity to learn about the condition of an alien planetary system that could be a billion years old.
Olivier Hainaut, an astronomer with the European Southern Observatory, says scientists are so excited about the discovery that many are dropping all other projects to focus on it and commission high-powered telescopes for observation.
“Here we have something that was born around another star and traveling toward us. It’s the next-best thing to sending a probe to a different solar system,”Hainaut said.
Someday the European Space Agency (ESA) may attempt to land a spacecraft on an interstellar object. In the meantime, scientists plan to learn more about the conditions of other parts of our vast galaxy.
US Army Expected To Test Super-Short Carbine For Soldiers Of 2025
Maxim Defense Industries has partnered with the U.S. Army at Fort Benning and The Maneuver Center of Excellence to provide soldiers with a super-short carbine for testing during the Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiment (AEWE) starting in November 2019 through July 2020.
Maxim will provide the Army with the MDX weapon system consisting of the MDX:505/PDX (5.5″ barrel), the MDX:508 (8″ barrel), and the MDX:511 (11″ barrel), along with three of their stocks: the Sub-Compact Weapon Stock, Maxim’s Gen7 Close Quarters Battle Stock and the Combat Carbine Stock, said the Military Times.
Michael Windfeldt, CEO of Maxim, said the company is delighted to provide the Army with the new weapon system for testing and believes it could one day “enhance the warfighter’s capabilities on the battlefield.”
Maxim has scheduled the first live-fire exercise on November 14 with the U.S. Army, and British and Australian Special Forces in early 2020.
The AEWE program allows U.S. soldiers to test prototype weapons and concepts that are designed for small units. These weapons will eventually find their way onto the modern battlefield by 2025.
The push for modernization comes as President Trump has flooded all services with records amounts of cash this year.
The Army expects by 2025, that most operations will likely be carried out with smaller and leaner forces capable of using advanced technologies to make the probability of completing a mission much higher than ever before.
The AEWE is focused on medium to long term modernization efforts, centered explicitly around procuring new weapon systems for combat troops by the mid-2020s.
Military Times said the MDX weapon system could shoot 300BLK, 5.56 NATO and 7.62x39mm. The barrel length is about 5.5 inches long and interchangeable with other lengths, allowing the weapon to be used in various types of missions.
YouTube handle Impact Guns provides a review and range test of the Maxim Defense PDX in the video below:
Public-opinion polls reflect that large numbers of Americans in their 20s and 30s (i.e., Gen Z and millennials) support socialism. When one considers the indoctrination to which these young Americans have been subjected in their state-run educational systems, their preference for socialism actually makes sense.
From the first grade, American students are indoctrinated with the notion that they live in a free country, one that has a free-enterprise economic system. By the time they graduate from high school, students have no doubts that this is true. The notion is refortified in those students who go on to college. By the time Americans start their careers, their mindsets are set in concrete: They are grateful that they live in a free country. Many of them continue reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, which they learned in school and which they were expected to recite every day, a pledge that confirms that in America there is “liberty for all.”
Now, look around you. Examine the society in which you live. There are crises, chaos, and mayhem everywhere. Social Security. Health care. Immigration. Federal spending and debt. Monetary. Afghanistan. Iraq. Syria. Korea. Russia. China. Drug war. Forever wars. Secret surveillance. Assassinations. Death. Destruction. Bombings. Terrorism. Mass killings. Tribunals. Torture. Indefinite detention. Militarism. Invasions. Occupations. Coups. Regime-change operations. Trade wars. Sanctions. Embargoes. Police states. Alcoholism. Drug addiction. Homelessness. Poverty. Suicides.
It’s not a pretty picture, is it? It’s a picture of a quite dysfunctional society.
In the mind of the Gen Zer and the millennial, that is what comes with freedom and free enterprise. Given such, it’s perfectly logical to want something else, and that something else happens to be socialism. It even makes sense that so many young people decide to check out of life early through suicide. They’re thinking, “If this is freedom — if this is the best there is — no, thanks. I’m leaving and hopefully going on to something better.”
Conservatives and liberals
Moreover, it’s not just people in their 20s and 30s who believe this. Conservatives and progressives (i.e., liberals or leftists) believe the same thing. They all fervently believe in the words of the Lee Greenwood song, “I’m proud to be an American where at least I know I’m free.” That’s why whenever they see a U.S. soldier, they go out of their way to thank him for “his service” in keeping America free. They have absolutely no doubts that they live in a free country, one that has a free-enterprise economic system.
Ironically, however, conservatives and liberals divide into two camps: Conservatives decry socialism and defend what they are convinced is America’s free-enterprise system. Liberals decry what they too are convinced is America’s free-enterprise system and want it replaced with a socialist system.
It’s all one great big confused mindset, one that is the direct result of state indoctrination.
The libertarian breakthrough
What distinguishes us libertarians from non-libertarians is that we have succeeded in breaking through the state’s system of indoctrination.
The truth is that Americans are not free and they don’t live in a free-enterprise system. What the state ingrained in during those long years in the state’s education system was a lie from the start. Americans lives their lives as serfs on a giant government plantation, one that is based on the statist principles of socialism, interventionism, militarism, and imperialism.
America’s system is based on massive mandatory charity. Through such programs as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education grants, farm subsidies, foreign aid, and thousands of others, Americas are forced to be good, caring, and compassionate. There is no way to reconcile that type of system with freedom. Freedom necessarily entails the right to make charitable decisions on a purely voluntary basis.
America’s system is also based on control, regulation, and management of peaceful activity. The drug war is a good example. President Trump’s trade wars and unilateral impositions of tariffs, sanctions, and embargoes is another. America’s system of immigration controls is another. There is no way to reconcile such a system with the principles of a genuinely free society. A free society necessarily entails ingesting whatever you want, no matter how harmful, traveling wherever you want, and doing whatever you want with your own money.
America’s system is also based on a national-security state, a type of totalitarian government structure, one that comes with assassination, torture, coups, invasions, bombings, sanctions, embargoes, wars of aggression, occupations, indefinite detention, military tribunals, death, suffering, and destruction. There is no way that such things can be reconciled with the principles of genuinely free society. A free society necessarily entails a limited-government republic type of governmental system.
Thus, we libertarians lament the dysfunctional state of American society, just as many Gen Xers, millennials, and leftists do. The difference is that they think that the dysfunctionality is the result of freedom and free enterprise and, therefore, want socialism to replace it. We libertarians, on the other hand, realize that the dysfunctionality in American society is owing to the socialist, interventionist, militarist, and imperialist system under which we live, which is why we favor a genuinely free society, a genuine free-enterprise system, and the restoration of a limited-government republic.
The hope for America
Given the popularity of statism among Gen Zers, millennials, conservatives, and liberals, is there much hope for putting American back on the right track? Of course there is! Since we libertarians have succeeded in breaking through the indoctrination to which the state subjected us in its educational system, so can others. We libertarians just need to keep speaking the truth and sticking to our principles. That’s the best way to help others achieve the same breakthrough that we libertarians have achieved.
The Sisyphean Exercise Of Afghanistan In One Shocking Map
President Trump announced Monday that his controversial Afghan peace talks and the entire process is “dead”— explaining the Taliban had continued its terror offensive targeting US personnel and allies amid talks, specifically an American soldier in a car bombing last week.
“They are dead, they are dead,” Trump told reporters on the White House lawn. “As far as I’m concerned, they are dead.”
He further described that Taliban officials had been spreading the word that they’d made a “big mistake” in crossing him.
Via Outlook Afghanistan
“They thought they had to kill people in order to put themselves in a little better negotiating position,” Trump said.
“When I heard, very simply, that they killed one of our soldiers and 12 other innocent people, I said ‘There is no way I’m meeting on that basis. There is no way I’m meeting.’ They did a mistake. And by the way they are telling people they made a big mistake. They are saying it loud and clear that they made a big mistake.”
Soon after Trump first announced Saturday that direct peace talks were effectively ended, also acknowledging Taliban leaders were set to “secretly meet with me at Camp David on Sunday,” the administration immediately starting painting a rosy picture of how things are going in America’s longest war – now approaching two decades.
Pompeo on Meet The Press: “You should know, in the last 10 days we’ve killed over 1,000 Taliban. And while this is not a war of attrition, I want the American people to know that President Trump is taking it to the Taliban.” pic.twitter.com/dXxQwzrYkD
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo promptly claimed the US had killed over 1,000 Taliban in just the last 10 days.
“Well a lot of them are in their graves, and so make no mistake about it. We will continue to punish, we will continue to pound, we will continue to fight. We will continue to protect the American people,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper while making the rounds on multiple Sunday shows.
* * *
The Map
But what’s the end game here?
The map below shows the shocking reality that a little less than half of the entire country’s population is actually firmly under the US-backed national government’s control (just 48%) after over eighteen years of war and countless American sacrifice in blood and treasure.
And a majority the territory across Afghanistan is still considered “contested” (in red below) according to an interactive map maintained by FDD’s Long War Journal(see full-sized interactive map here).
This led one former Green Beret and current journalist, Jack Murphy, to say it’s past time to just skip right to the end game: get out and get out now.
He said, “instead of all of this navel gazing, teeth gnashing, and handwringing, let’s just skip right to the end game?”
This is going to sound crazy, but bear with me. We all know the US is going to pull out of Afghanistan and the country will collapse into chaos like Vietnam. So dig this, instead of all of this navel gazing, teeth gnashing, and handwringing, let’s just skip right to the end game?
Trump’s instincts to withdraw from the Afghan quagmire are correct (as they were on Syria as well before an avalanche of deep state push back).
Indeed let’s just skip right to the end game, assuming the end result will be the same no matter what.At least no more Americans would have to die, and no more tax dollars drained, on what in the end is a futile Sisyphean exercise.
* * *
Via “The Myth of Sisyphus and Man’s Search for Meaning”/Medium.com
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
The University of California, Berkeley is offering a course, titled, “The Right to be Lazy: Shifts in Marxist Thought.”
The fall 2019 course is part of UC Berkeley’s DeCal program, consisting of student-taught, but faculty-approved courses.
“Marx’s ideas were taken up by revolutionaries around the globe from the anticolonial militants in Africa and Latin America to those blockading the streets of Paris in 1968 and Italy in the 1970s,” the course description reads.
“We will find in each struggle a Marxism specific to its historical and geographic context, reflected in the various stages of capitalist development. By studying these struggles and the creative responses to conditions they faced, we will try to better understand what it means to be anticapitalist, what are the basic categories of capital, and questions of the revolutionary subject.”
Campus Reform reached out to student instructors for comment but did not receive comment in time for publication.
“Each of us has the right to be lazy, but none of us has the right to the rewards of someone else’s hard work,”Capitalism.com founder and CEO Ryan Daniel Moran told Campus Reform.
“Anticapitalist ideas are rooted in entitlement, which is one of the dangers of today’s society. I hope the students at Berkeley are taught the ineffectiveness of Marx’s ideas; if you want to create change, it starts with you.”
Campus Reform also spoke with the Berkeley College Republicans about the offering.
“We do not oppose teaching divergent subjects in DeCal classes at UC Berkeley,” the chapter said.
“However, nobody can dispute the fact that if a DeCal class with a right-leaning curriculum was ever proposed, it would be promptly rejected. Colleges should be dedicated to promoting intellectual diversity and an important part of that is giving adequate space to conservative views, even if they are unpopular with the larger campus community.”
UC-Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof previously commented to Campus Reform on the DeCal program, more generally, saying, “the campus administration has no connection to or control over these [course] offerings.”
Mogulof referred Campus Reform to the academic senate, which approves these courses. The academic senate has not returned Campus Reform‘s request for comment.
Goldman Sachs VP Stole Millions To Pay Down Poker Debt
A senior Goldman Sachs executive working at the Bengaluru office in India was arrested earlier this week for stealing $5.3 million from the firm to pay down his gambling debts, reported Business Today.
Ashwani Jhunjhunwala, 36, the firm’s vice president, was arrested and will arrive in court in the near term, deputy commissioner of police MN Anucheth told the news agency.
Based on a complaint by Goldman Sachs, Jhunjhunwala used three of his subordinates Gaurav Mishra, Abhishek Yadav, and Sujith Appaiah to transfer the money. He had allegedly used their desktops during a “training session” to send the funds in two installments to an account he controlled at the Commercial Bank of China.
“He had access to another financial manager’s account. So he used it to transfer the money to himself. It happened within a span of just 10 minutes on September 4,” the deputy commissioner said.
The fraud surfaced on September 6 during an internal audit.
Mishra told the police that Jhunjhunwala asked him to create a Settlement Reconciliation Service (SRS) for payment recall earlier this month, which he wasn’t briefed on why he had to create such a thing considering he was a new employee.
Goldman Sachs in the complaint stated that Jhunjhunwala had lost $70,000 while playing online poker.
Gambling is illegal in Bengaluru, which is part of the Karnataka state. But the New Indian Express reports that the capital city has very laxed penalties for those found guilty of violating gambling laws.
“The penalty is pitiably low – Rs 200 ($2.78) fine for gamblers and Rs 500 for the clubs. Top officials say that imprisonment is rarely ordered by the magistrate court,” New Indian Express explains.
The total charge, according to Bengaluru code, could see Jhunjhunwala facing 27 years in prison and large fines, considering he stole $5 million.
Goldman Sachs has since terminated Jhunjhunwala, and the Commercial Bank of China has returned the funds.
Jhunjhunwala’s LinkedIn profile noted that he held an MBA and had over a decade of experience in capital market businesses and financial consultancy.
