Beijing is demanding answers from FedEx, after the American package-delivery and logistics service again botched the delivery of a package sent by Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant at the center of the US-China trade spat.
FedEx said on Sunday that an operational error prevented a Huawei package from being delivered to the US just weeks after the US delivery firm said an error led to several of the firm’s packages being misdirected.
“The package in question was mistakenly returned to the shipper, and we apologize for this operational error,” FedEx told Reuters in an emailed statement.
The package had been bound for the US, but was mistakenly returned to its sender in China (unlike the last misdirected packages, which were re-routed to FedEx facilities in the US, even as the packages were destined for other Asian countries).
In response to that incident, Beijing launched an investigation into FedEx that it stressed was in no way meant to be retaliation for the trade war, and also threatened to create a list of “undesirable entities” and place FedEx on it.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said during a regular press briefing in Beijing that, since this wasn’t the first time FedEx made a mistake like this, it should offer a more detailed explanation for what happened. Geng was ominously quiet about whether this latest incident might land FedEx on the “undesirable entities” list, though he did accuse the US of “bullying” that hurts Chinese companies and American companies alike. Geng urged the US to stop this behavior and create a more “conducive” atmosphere for cooperation.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2KyMaV6 Tyler Durden
In his latest attempt to one-up Elizabeth Warren and establish his brand of “democratic socialism” as something entirely different from the progressive capitalism practiced by some of his peers, Bernie Sanders is preparing to unveil a new plan that would involve cancelling all of the country’s outstanding $1.6 trillion in student debt.
The massive student-debt jubilee would be financed with a tax on Wall Street: Specifically, a 0.5% tax on stock trades, a 0.1% tax on bond trades and a .005% tax on derivatives trades.
Additionally, Sanders’ plan would also provide states with $48 billion to eliminate tuition and fees at public colleges and universities. Thanks to the market effect, private schools would almost certainly be forced to cut prices to draw talented students who could simply attend a state school for free.
Reps Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Pramila Jayapal of Washington have already signed on to introduce Sanders’ legislation in the House on Monday.
The timing of this latest in a series of bold socialist policy proposals from Sanders – let’s not forget, Bernie is largely responsible for making Medicare for All a mainstream issue in the Democratic Party – comes just ahead of the first Democratic primary debate, where Sanders will face off directly against his No. 1 rival: Vice President Joe Biden, who has marketed his candidacy as a return to the ‘sensible centrism’ of the Democratic Party of yesteryear.
By introducing the student-debt plan, Sanders has outmaneuvered Elizabeth “I have a plan for that” Warren and established himself as the most far-left candidate in the crowded Democratic Primary field. Hopefully, this can help stall Warren’s recent advance in the polls. The plan should help Sanders highlight how Biden’s domestic platform includes little in the way of welfare expansion during the upcoming debate.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/31PN19h Tyler Durden
Draghi’s shenanigans get hilarious, months before his term ends.
So here’s ECB President Mario Draghi, whose term ends in October, and he’s at the ECB Forum in Portugal, and in a speech on Tuesday titled innocuously, “Twenty Years of the ECB’s monetary policy” – so this wasn’t a press conference after an ECB policy meeting or anything, but a speech on history at an ECB Forum – he suddenly threw out a whole bunch of stuff…
How, “in the absence of improvement” of inflation, “additional stimulus will be required,” in form of “further cuts in policy interest rates” and additional bond purchases, and how “in the coming weeks, the Governing Council will deliberate how our instruments can be adapted commensurate to the severity of the risk to price stability,” and that “all these options were raised and discussed at our last meeting.”
Whoa! Wait a minute, said the good folks who were part of the ECB’s June meeting. These options were not discussed, they told Reuters on Tuesday.
Draghi had ventured out there on his own – apparently trying to push his colleagues into a corner single-handedly as his last hurrah.
His vision laid out on Tuesday was quite a change from the June 6 post-meeting announcement, which didn’t mention anything about even discussing rate cuts. It said that the ECB expects its policy rates to “remain at their present levels at least through the first half of 2020,” before the ECB would begin to raise them, with the bias still on raising rates, not cutting rates. That was less than two weeks ago, and there had not been another ECB policy meeting since then.
Interviewing six “sources” at the ECB with “direct knowledge of the situation,”Reuters found that these policy makers “had not expected such a strong message and that there was no consensus on the path ahead.”
At the June 6 policy meeting, any possibility of a rate cut or renewed asset purchases had been mentioned “only in passing” and without any substantive discussion. The discussion had instead focused on the new package of loans for the banks, the sources said.
The sources told Reuters that ECB policymakers were worried “Draghi was flagging his measures so strongly to markets as a ‘fait accompli’ that there would be no chance for them to disagree with them in at the next policy meeting on July 25,” Reuters reported.
“But they added that, with a global trade war escalating and financial worries around Italy already high, there was little appetite for a fight in July,” Reuters said.
Several sources told Reuters that, because very little new economic information on the Eurozone will come out before the July 25 meeting, “it would be difficult to justify coming to a different policy conclusion than in June.”
And at the June meeting, the conclusion was to delay rate hikes – and there was no mention of rate cuts.
The sources told Reuters that the debate about which policy measures to implement, when, and in what order was still wide open, with policy makers having very different opinions.
For some the first step should be a change in the ECB’s policy message. Others favor a reinforcement of the pledge not to raise rates for a longer time.
Others favor restarting the asset purchase program to bring borrowing costs down for governments so that they could spend more during a downturn, though that would be handicapped by the “issuer limit” that prevents the ECB from holding more than 30% of a country’s sovereign bonds. But the ECB could dispose or circumvent that limit, “some” sources said.
Some policymakers lean toward rate cuts, the sources said. And other policymakers think the ECB should not make any changes at all unless economic data deteriorated substantially and inflation expectations dropped further below the ECB’s target.
But there was no consensus, and there had been no substantive discussions of these topics at the last meeting that had focused on the modalities of the new bank loan package.
What is hilarious is how Draghi was outed as a fabricator and schemer on the very same day he made his additional-stimulus-will-be-required speech, by people who were surprised by his speech, some of whom felt “powerless,” as Reuters put it, and knew he was trying to box them into a corner with his devious move. This has the smell of a palace revolt at the ECB against the head honcho and his last hurrah.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2X3C8C3 Tyler Durden
Google’s Chrome is essentially spy software according to Washington Posttech columnist Geoffrey Fowler, who spent a week analyzing the popular browser and concluded that it “looks a lot like surveillance software.”
Fowler has since switched to Mozilla’s Firefox because of its default privacy settings, and says that it was easier than one might imagine.
My tests of Chrome vs. Firefox unearthed a personal data caper of absurd proportions. In a week of Web surfing on my desktop, I discovered 11,189 requests for tracker “cookies” that Chrome would have ushered right onto my computer but were automatically blocked by Firefox. These little files are the hooks that data firms, including Google itself, use to follow what websites you visit so they can build profiles of your interests, income and personality.
Chrome welcomed trackers even at websites you would think would be private. I watched Aetna and the Federal Student Aid website set cookies for Facebook and Google. They surreptitiously told the data giants every time I pulled up the insurance and loan service’s log-in pages.
And that’s not the half of it.
Look in the upper right corner of your Chrome browser. See a picture or a name in the circle? If so, you’re logged in to the browser, and Google might be tapping into your Web activity to target ads. Don’t recall signing in? I didn’t, either. Chrome recently started doing that automatically when you use Gmail. –Washington Post
When you use Chrome, signing into Gmail automatically logs in the browser to your Google account. When “sync” is also on, Google receives your browsing history. (Geoffrey Fowler/The Washington Post)
Meanwhile, Chrome is even worse when it comes to mobile devices – reporting the precise location of Android users unless location sharing is turned off, in which case it will send out your rough coordinates.
Cookie monsters
According to one study, tracking cookies from third-parties are on 92% of websites. The Washington Post, for example, uses around 40 – which the company said is “average for a news site,” and says they are designed to deliver better-targeted ads and track ad performance.
But cookies can also be found on websites with no advertising.
Both Aetna and the FSA service said the cookies on their sites help measure their own external marketing campaigns.
The blame for this mess belongs to the entire advertising, publishing and tech industries. But what responsibility does a browser have in protecting us from code that isn’t doing much more than spying? –Washington Post
Mozilla to the rescue?
For the past four years or so, Firefox browser has had a built-in anti-tracking feature for the past four or so years in its “private” browsing mode. Earlier this month, Mozilla activated this feature for normal browsing mode. While ads will still appear, Firefox is now separating cookies in real time to determine which ones are required for a website to function correctly, and which ones are simply spies.
Applebegan to block cookies on their Safari mobile browser starting in 2017, using an algorithm the company calls “intelligent tracking protection.”
Chrome, meanwhile, continues to welcome cookies onto your computer and phone with open arms. That said, the company announced last month that it would require third-party cookies to better identify themselves, which will supposedly allow them to apply better controls. That said, the company did not offer The Post a timeline or say whether it would employ default tracking blockers.
I’m not holding my breath. Google itself, through its Doubleclick and other ad businesses, is the No. 1 cookie maker — the Mrs. Fields of the Web. It’s hard to imagine Chrome ever cutting off Google’s moneymaker. –Washington Post
“Cookies play a role in user privacy, but a narrow focus on cookies obscures the broader privacy discussion because it’s just one way in which users can be tracked across sites,” according to Chrome’s director of product management, Ben Galbraith. “This is a complex problem, and simple, blunt cookie blocking solutions force tracking into more opaque practices.”
Giving up on Google
In his decision to kick Chrome to the curb, Fowler cites a blog post by Johns Hopkins associate professor Matthew Green, who said last year he was “done” with the browser.
Like Green, I’ve chosen Firefox, which works across phones, tablets, PCs and Macs. Apple’s Safari is also a good option on Macs, iPhones and iPads, and the niche Brave browser goes even further in trying to jam the ad-tech industry.
What does switching to Firefox cost you? It’s free, and downloading a different browser is much simpler than changing phones.
In 2017, Mozilla launched a new version of Firefox called Quantum that made it considerably faster. In my tests, it has felt almost as fast as Chrome, though benchmark tests have found it can be slower in some contexts. Firefox says it’s better about managing memory if you use lots and lots of tabs.
Switching means you’ll have to move your bookmarks, and Firefox offers tools to help. Shifting passwords is easy if you use a password manager. And most browser add-ons are available, though it’s possible you won’t find your favorite. –Washington Post
Perhaps Fowler can reach out to some of his Washington Post colleagues to see what their many sources in the US intelligence community think of Chrome vs. Firefox…
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2IDJlA3 Tyler Durden
Trump Administration unveiled on Saturday a $50bn Palestinian economic proposal aimed at supporting its “Opportunity of the Century” Middle East peace plan.
The plan, which many compare to the ‘Marshall Plan for Europe’, calls for a mix of public and private financing and intends to create at least a million new jobs for Palestinians, was posted to the White House website before a two-day conference in Bahrain.
The Marshall Plan (officially the European Recovery Program, ERP) was an American initiative passed in 1948 to aid Western Europe, in which the United States gave over $12 billion (nearly $100 billion in 2018 US dollars) in economic assistance to help rebuild Western European economies after the end of World War II.
Speaking to Reuters on Saturday, Donald Trump’s adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is one of the architects of the plan, said:
“I laugh when [Palestinian leaders] attack this as the ‘deal of the century’. This is going to be the opportunity of the century if they have the courage to pursue it.”
Calling it ‘Peace and prosperity, a new vision for Palestinian people and the Broader Middle East’, the White House plan aims to “empower the Palestinian people to build a prosperous and vibrant Palestinian society,” explains the White House on its website.
“It consists of three initiatives that will support distinct pillars of the Palestinian society: the economy, the people, and the government.
With the potential to facilitate more than $50 billion in new investment over ten years, Peace to Prosperity represents the most ambitious and comprehensive international effort for the Palestinian people to date. It has the ability to fundamentally transform the West Bank and Gaza and to open a new chapter in Palestinian history—one defined, not by adversity and loss, but by freedom and dignity.
These three initiatives are more than just a vision of a promising future for the Palestinian people—they are also the foundation for an achievable plan.
If implemented, Peace to Prosperity will empower the Palestinian people to build the society that they have aspired to establish for generations. With the support of the international community, this vision is within reach. Ultimately, however, the power to unlock it lies in the hands of the Palestinian people. Only through peace can the Palestinians achieve prosperity.”
Generations of Palestinians have lived under adversity and loss, but the next chapter can be defined by freedom and dignity.
Today, we’re unveiling Peace to Prosperity: the most ambitious international effort for the Palestinian people to date. https://t.co/q1pX9yJJzE
But not everyone is excited about the plan. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday rejected the economic plan. “The economic situation should not be discussed before the political one,” Abbas said on Saturday. “As long as there is no political solution, we do not deal with any economic solution,” reported Al-Jazeera.
“The economic situation should not be discussed before a political situation, and so long as there is no political situation, we cannot deal with any economic situation.”
Palestinian Authority has decided not to attend the Manama workshop, and the ‘Jerusalem Post’ is reporting that ‘Fatah’, the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority, has called for days of violence against Israel in response to the Bahrain Conference, where the economic part of President Trump’s Middle East plan will be unveiled.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2RskkdC Tyler Durden
An Israeli startup called Eviation Aircraft unveiled the world’s first commercial all-electric passenger plane last week at the Paris Airshow, reported GeekWire.
Called Alice, the all-electric plane is powered by three rear-facing pusher-propellers, one in the back and two at the wingtips that rotate.
Eviation CEO Omer Bar-Yohay told reporters that the plane seats nine passengers and can travel 276mph at 10,000ft altitude over the distance of about 650 miles. Flight testing is expected in the near term at Moses Lake’s airport in partnership with Seattle-based AeroTEC. The plane is scheduled to enter service by 2022, could transform small distance travel across America.
“This plane looks like this not because we wanted to build a cool plane, but because it is electric,” said Bar-Yohay.
“You build a craft around your propulsion system. Electric means we can have lightweight motors; it allows us to open up the design space.”
Eviation logged its first orders this year from regional airline Cape Air, which runs a fleet of 90 aircraft. Retail price is $4 million per plane, Bar-Yohay said.
He said the new electric plane is being “built the way a plane should be built in the 21st century.”
Clermont Group, a private investment fund of Singapore-based billionaire Richard Chandler, has been the top funder of Eviation since inception. Clermont has given Eviation $76 million in exchange for a 70% stake, according to the latest SEC filing dating January 3.
In a memo, Chandler told his staff that commercial electric planes would “change the culture of air travel for future generations,” and that the aerospace industry is about to enter a new golden era.
“45% of all flights are under 500 miles – approximately the distance from London to Zurich, or New York to Detroit. This puts almost half of all global flights within the range of an electric motor.”
Clermont has also invested millions of dollars into magniX, the firm that manufactures the plane’s electric motors. Bar-Yohay claimed if there was an air-emergency, the aircraft could fly on two engines.
Bar-Yohay said, “This is an exciting accomplishment…especially here on the grounds in Paris, but it’s also very clearly just the beginning.”
If Alice passes upcoming flight tests and goes into production; it could enter service by 2022. By the mid-2020s, the plane could completely revolutionize small distance travel.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2X3yiJa Tyler Durden
“Frenchness” is disappearing and being replaced by a kind balkanization of enclaves not communicating with one another…. this is not a good recipe.
The more the French élites with their disposable incomes and cultural leisure cloister themselves in their enclaves, the less likely it is that they will understand the everyday impact of failed mass immigration and multiculturalism.
The globalized, “bobo-ized [bourgeois Bohemian] upper classes” are filling the “new citadels” — as in Medieval France — and are voting en masse for Macron. They have developed “a single way of talking and thinking… that allows the dominant classes to substitute for the reality of a nation subject to severe stress and strain the fable of a kind and welcoming society.” — Christophe Guilluy, Twilight of the Elites,Yale University Press, 2019.
“Regarding France in 2019, it can no longer be denied that a momentous and hazardous transformation, a ‘Great Switch’, is in the making”, observed the founder and president of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, Michel Gurfinkiel. He was mourning “the passing of France as a distinct country, or at least as the Western, Judeo-Christian nation it had hitherto been presumed to be”. A recent cover story in the weekly Le Point called it “the great upheaval“.
Switch or upheaval, the days of France as we knew it are numbered: the society has lost its cultural center of gravity: the old way of life is fading and close to “extinction“. “Frenchness” is disappearing and being replaced by a kind balkanization of enclaves not communicating with one another. For the country most affected by Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, this is not a good recipe.
The French switch is also becoming geographical. France now appears split between “ghettos for the rich” and “ghettos for the poor”, according to an analysis of the electoral map by France’s largest newspaper, Le Monde. “In the poorest sector, 6 out of 10 newly settled households have a person born abroad”, notes Le Monde. A kind of abyss now separates peripheral France — small towns, suburbs and rural areas – from the globalized metropolis of the “bourgeois Bohemians”, or “bobos”. The more the French élites with their disposable incomes and cultural leisure cloister themselves in their enclaves, the less likely it is that they will understand the everyday impact of failed mass immigration and multiculturalism.
A recent European poll reflected these “two Frances that do not cross or speak to each other”,observed Sylvain Crepon of the University of Tours, in analyzing the success of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party in the recent European Parliament election. Le Pen and President Emmanuel Macron, the two winners in the election, speak to completely different sociological groups. In the Paris suburbs — Aulnay-sous-Bois, Sevran, Villepinte and Seine-Saint-Denis — the far-right National Rally has been experiencing a boom. In the cities, Le Pen is largely behind: she came fifth in Paris, third in Lille, fourth in Lyon. According to Crepon:
“[T]hese cities will be protected from the National Rally’s vote by their sociological structuring. It gives credit to the populist talk that diagnoses a disconnected elite. This [view] backs the idea of a sociological break, which is not completely wrong”.
On one side of this break are towns such as Dreux, which Valeurs Actuellescalled“the city that prefigures the France of tomorrow”:
“On one side, a royal city with the vestige of a history believing that all things are being changed [millenarian]; on the other, cities imbued with [drug] trafficking and Islam. The bourgeois of the city center vote for Macron, the ‘small whites’ for Le Pen”.
On the other side, is Paris. “All the metropolises of the world know the same fate. This is where wealth flows and where the alliance between the ‘winners of globalization’ and their ‘servants’, immigrants who have come to serve the new masters of the world, keep their children, bring their pizzas or work in their restaurants”, writes the distinguished social commentator Èric Zemmour in Le Figaro. From now on, he writes, “Paris is a global city, not really a French city”.
The globalized, “bobo-ized [bourgeois Bohemian] upper classes”, according to one of France’s most respected authors. Christophe Guilluy, are filling the “new citadels” — as in Medieval France — and are voting en masse for Macron. They have developed “a single way of talking and thinking… that allows the dominant classes to substitute for the reality of a nation subject to severe stress and strain the fable of a kind and welcoming society”. Guilluy has been criticized by some French media for addressing this reality.
The recent “yellow vests” movement — whose demonstrators have been protesting every Saturday in Paris, for months, against President Macron’s reforms — is a symbol of this division between the working class and the gentrified progressives.
Pictured: “Yellow vests” protestors occupy the steps leading to the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur on March 23, 2019 in Paris, France.
According to Guilluy, it is a “social and cultural shock“. This shock, according to the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, consists of the “ugliness of peripheral France and its effects on concrete lives, the sadness of these working classes who have lost not only a standard of living but also a cultural referent”. In France, there is now a pervasive sense of “dispossession“.
Marine Le Pen’s party won more than twice as many electoral department as Macron. Le Pen won in the depressed and deindustrialized areas of northern, south-central and eastern France that spawned the yellow vests.
“Since moving to France in 2002, I’ve watched the country complete a cultural revolution”, Simon Kuper recently wrote in the Financial Times.
“Catholicism has almost died out (only 6 per cent of French people now habitually attend mass), though not as thoroughly as its longtime rival ‘church’, communism. The non-white population has kept growing”.
Macron, Kuper explains, is the symbol of “a new individualised, globalised, irreligious society”.
France’s flight from Catholicism is so evident that a new book, L’archipel français: Naissance d’une nation multiple et divisée, by the pollster Jerôme Fourquet, has described the cultural failing of the French society as a “post-Christian era“: French society’s displacement from its Catholic matrix has become almost total. The country, Fourquet states, is now implementing its own de-Christianization. And there is only one strong substitute at the horizon. There are today already, according to a new academic study, as many Muslims as Catholics among 18-29 year-olds in France; and Muslims represent 13% of the population of France’s large cities, more than double the national average.
Sometimes Muslim feelings of community solidarity appear to have been taking advantage of this fragmentation by creating their own “ghettos of sharia“. A report from Institut Montaigne, “The Islamist Factory“, has detailed the radicalization of the French Muslim society. Instead of integration, assimilation and Europeanization, Muslim extremists in France are pursuing multiculturalism, separation and partition. The enclaves of immigrants at the edges of French cities, posits Gilles Kepel in his book, La Fracture, foment “a rupture in values with French society, and a will to subvert it”. “People do not want to live together”, said France’s former Interior Minister, Gérard Collomb, in comments reported by Valeurs Actuelles.
This “fracture” was noted again in the same publication: “Four out of ten boys in Seine-Saint-Denis have Arab-Muslim first names”. Pollster Jérôme Fourquet revealed in a new study that “18 percent of newborn babies in France have an Arab-Muslim name”.
France’s “Great Switch” is underway. As the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut recently wrote, “The Notre-Dame fire is neither an attack nor an accident, but a suicide attempt.”
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2FtOicm Tyler Durden
Sooner or later the US “maximum pressure” on Iran would inevitably be met by “maximum counter-pressure”. Sparks are ominously bound to fly…
For the past few days, intelligence circles across Eurasia had been prodding Tehran to consider a quite straightforward scenario. There would be no need to shut down the Strait of Hormuz if Quds Force commander, General Qasem Soleimani, the ultimate Pentagon bête noire, explained in detail, on global media, that Washington simply does not have the military capacity to keep the Strait open.
As I previously reported, shutting down the Strait of Hormuz would destroy the American economy by detonating the $1.2 quadrillion derivatives market; and that would collapse the world banking system, crushing the world’s $80 trillion GDP and causing an unprecedented depression.
Soleimani should also state bluntly that Iran may in fact shut down the Strait of Hormuz if the nation is prevented from exporting essential two million barrels of oil a day, mostly to Asia. Exports, which before illegal US sanctions and de facto blockade would normally reach 2.5 million barrels a day, now may be down to only 400,000.
Soleimani’s intervention would align with consistent signs already coming from the IRGC. The Persian Gulf is being described as an imminent “shooting gallery.” Brigadier General Hossein Salami stressed that Iran’s ballistic missiles are capable of hitting “carriers in the sea” with pinpoint precision. The whole northern border of the Persian Gulf, on Iranian territory, is lined up with anti-ship missiles – as I confirmed with IRGC-related sources.
We’ll let you know when it’s closed
Then, it happened.
Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, Major General Mohammad Baqeri, went straight to the point; “If the Islamic Republic of Iran were determined to prevent export of oil from the Persian Gulf, that determination would be realized in full and announced in public, in view of the power of the country and its Armed Forces.”
The facts are stark. Tehran simply won’t accept all-out economic war lying down – prevented to export the oil that protects its economic survival. The Strait of Hormuz question has been officially addressed. Now it’s time for the derivatives.
Presenting detailed derivatives analysis plus military analysis to global media would force the media pack, mostly Western, to go to Warren Buffett to see if it is true. And it is true. Soleimani, according to this scenario, should say as much and recommend that the media go talk to Warren Buffett.
The extent of a possible derivatives crisis is an uber-taboo theme for the Washington consensus institutions. According to one of my American banking sources, the most accurate figure – $1.2 quadrillion – comes from a Swiss banker, off the record. He should know; the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) – the central bank of central banks – is in Basle.
The key point is it doesn’t matter how the Strait of Hormuz is blocked.
It could be a false flag. Or it could be because the Iranian government feels it’s going to be attacked and then sinks a cargo ship or two. What matters is the final result; any blocking of the energy flow will lead the price of oil to reach $200 a barrel, $500 or even, according to some Goldman Sachs projections, $1,000.
Another US banking source explains:
“The key in the analysis is what is called notional. They are so far out of the money that they are said to mean nothing. But in a crisis the notional can become real. For example, if I buy a call for a million barrels of oil at $300 a barrel, my cost will not be very great as it is thought to be inconceivable that the price will go that high. That is notional. But if the Strait is closed, that can become a stupendous figure.”
BIS will only commit, officially, to indicate the total notional amount outstanding for contracts in derivatives markers is an estimated $542.4 trillion. But this is just an estimate.
The banking source adds, “Even here it is the notional that has meaning. Huge amounts are interest rate derivatives. Most are notional but if oil goes to a thousand dollars a barrel, then this will affect interest rates if 45% of the world’s GDP is oil. This is what is called in business a contingent liability.”
Goldman Sachs has projected a feasible, possible $1,000 a barrel a few weeks after the Strait of Hormuz being shut down. This figure, times 100 million barrels of oil produced per day, leads us to 45% of the $80 trillion global GDP. It’s self-evident the world economy would collapse based on just that alone.
War dogs barking mad
As much as 30% of the world’s oil supply transits the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. Wily Persian Gulf traders – who know better – are virtually unanimous; if Tehran was really responsible for the Gulf of Oman tanker incident, oil prices would be going through the roof by now. They aren’t.
Iran’s territorial waters in the Strait of Hormuz amount to 12 nautical miles (22 km). Since 1959, Iran recognizes only non-military naval transit.
Since 1972, Oman’s territorial waters in the Strait of Hormuz also amount to 12 nautical miles. At its narrowest, the width of the Strait is 21 nautical miles (39 km). That means, crucially, that half of the Strait of Hormuz is in Iranian territorial waters, and the other half in Oman’s. There are no “international waters”.
And that adds to Tehran now openly saying that Iran may decide to close the Strait of Hormuz publicly – and not by stealth.
Iran’s indirect, asymmetric warfare response to any US adventure will be very painful. Prof. Mohammad Marandi of the University of Tehran once again reconfirmed, “even a limited strike will be met by a major and disproportionate response.” And that means gloves off, big time; anything from really blowing up tankers to, in Marandi’s words, “Saudi and UAE oil facilities in flames”.
Hezbollah will launch tens of thousands of missiles against Israel. As Hezbollah’s secretary-general Hasan Nasrallah has been stressing in his speeches, “war on Iran will not remain within that country’s borders, rather it will mean that the entire [Middle East] region will be set ablaze. All of the American forces and interests in the region will be wiped out, and with them the conspirators, first among them Israel and the Saudi ruling family.”
It’s quite enlightening to pay close attention to what this Israel intel op is saying. The dogs of war though are barking mad.
Earlier this week, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo jetted to CENTCOM in Tampa to discuss “regional security concerns and ongoing operations” with – skeptical – generals, a euphemism for “maxim pressure” eventually leading to war on Iran.
Iranian diplomacy, discreetly, has already informed the EU – and the Swiss – about their ability to crash the entire world economy. But still that was not enough to remove US sanctions.
War zone in effect
As it stands in Trumpland, former CIA Mike “We lied, We cheated, We stole” Pompeo – America’s “top diplomat” – is virtually running the Pentagon. “Acting” secretary Shanahan performed self-immolation. Pompeo continues to actively sell the notion the “intelligence community is convinced” Iran is responsible for the Gulf of Oman tanker incident. Washington is ablaze with rumors of an ominous double bill in the near future; Pompeo as head of the Pentagon and Psycho John Bolton as Secretary of State. That would spell out War.
Yet even before sparks start to fly, Iran could declare that the Persian Gulf is in a state of war; declare that the Strait of Hormuz is a war zone; and then ban all “hostile” military and civilian traffic in its half of the Strait. Without firing a single shot, no shipping company on the planet would have oil tankers transiting the Persian Gulf.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2x7JTYc Tyler Durden
Oregon militias have reportedly threatened violence over an ongoing standoff between GOP and Democratic state legislators over climate change legislation, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“The State Police Superintendent just informed the Senate president of a credible threat from militia groups coming to the Capitol tomorrow,” reads a text message sent out to senators on Friday. “The Superintendent strongly recommends that no one come to the Capitol.”
It is unclear what the threats were, as the state’s Democratic leadership did not provide evidence of their claim.
On Saturday, Oregon State Police said that they were monitoring threats and that they were closing the building.
“The safety of legislators, staff and citizen visitors could be compromised if certain threatened behaviors were realized,” said state police captain Tim Fox.
On Thursday, the Three Percenters, a group that joined the armed takeover in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016, said it would do whatever was necessary to keep the Republican senators safe. The Republicans said they wouldn’t accept the group’s help. –Wall Street Journal
What began as a disagreement over a cap-and-trade bill that exacerbated a growing divide between city-dwelling Oregon liberals and their conservative rural counterparts erupted into a full-fledged standoff after eleven GOP senators banded together and are refusing to show up for the vote.
Despite holding an 18 to 12 supermajority in the House and Senate, Democrats cannot approve the bill without at least two Republicans present. After several days of heated debate between the two sides, eleven GOP members mutually agreed to boycott the vote.
The bill, HB 2020, would make Oregon the second state in the country to set up a cap-and-trade system for all sectors of the economy. California was the first, after passing a similar bill in 2016.
Democrats had scheduled a vote on the bill Thursday, but all 11 Republican senators fled the state. At least 20 senators must be present for a quorum, so Democrats need at least two Republicans present to hold a vote. –Wall Street Journal
After Governor Brown (D) authorized state police to hunt down and wrangle the absentee GOP lawmakers, Sen. Brian Boquist (R) said he was prepared for a bloody standoff if state troopers show up – warning “Send bachelors, and come heavily armed; I’m not going to be a political prisoner in the state of Oregon, it’s just that simple.”
The eleven senators are also being hit with a $500 daily fine for each day they refuse to show up for the vote. They say they won’t come back until Democrats agree to major changes in the bill, which they have argued would cripple manufacturing and other industries in the state.
“This bill needs to be referred to the voters” due to its profound impact on Oregon’s economy, said Republican senate leader Sen. Herman Baertschiger Jr., speaking by phone from outside the state.
Sen. Michael Dembrow, one of the Democratic architects of the bill, said manufacturers had already been given major exemptions under the bill and that Republicans were only stalling to kill the bill. Voters could still gather signatures for a ballot measure to repeal the bill, he said, but unlike with a referendum, work on it could proceed in the meantime.
He said the Democrats’ resolve had been strengthened by the Republicans’ flight from the state. “The last thing we can do is make this kind of behavior the norm, because then it’ll happen every session,” Mr. Dembrow said. –Wall Street Journal
Democratic legislators say they will return to the Senate floor Sunday whether or not Republicans had returned.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2NaUfBs Tyler Durden
They say hindsight is 20/20, and nothing exemplifies that more than the kind of post-mortem that can be done on the failed attempt by the US to overthrow the government of Venezuela. Working through the lack of options that the US has in terms of regime-change in Venezuela, should lead towards a higher degree of investor confidence in the Bolivarian Republic.
We understand that there are ultimately only three ways to attack a target state until it collapses:
Supporting an internal coup/revolution or terrorism;
Economic embargo perhaps leading to or justified by 1, and;
Military invasion justified by the government’s reaction to 1
Then we can see that US has failed in the first two. While the US does appear on the rhetorical level to be willing to embargo the rest of planet earth, they would have to effectively do so in order to embargo Venezuela. By promoting globalization as a virtue, at the institutional level, and not simply recognizing it with problems and all as an inherent component of market economies, the US has withered its own ability to control other civilizations and states in the world’s growing multipolar system.
While the US can place sanctions on Venezuela, and get some countries to even go along with these sanctions, it only improves or strengthens the role and power of those middle-man countries like China which act as ‘value transactors’ of Venezuelan commodities into the global economy. Because it is impossible to ‘cut’ China out of the global economy, it is impossible to cut Venezuela out as well. Given how much China is invested into Venezuela’s economy, as the Wall Street Journal notes, there’s little chance that will change either.
Despite an effort to unseat the democratically elected PSUV government, we were offered some keen insights into the US’s own self-realization regarding their failed process, and publicly so by Pompeo himself.
The level of honesty coming from the Trump administration in the US is refreshing even as it is only half the truth. When we read that Pompeo has explained that the Venezuelan opposition is ‘divided’, this is of course nothing other than good news for those concerned with regional stability, economic development, and a de-escalation of tensions that can lead towards war and instability.
It is also tremendously true, even if Pompeo doesn’t really explain why it’s the case, at least not entirely. But the facticity of the claim in itself reveals that there can be no US sponsored ‘internal regime change’ in Venezuela. Both the governments of Brazil and Colombia – close US allies under their present administrations – have ruled out any sort of military intervention into Venezuela.
“We were trying to support various religious institutions so that the opposition would unite,” Pompeo remarked, going on to explain that “they [the opposition] remain divided on how to confront the Maduro regime.”
This admission came on the heels of the recorded statement to the WP, where he previously explained:
“Our dilemma, which is to keep the (Venezuelan) opposition together, has turned out to be tremendously difficult,”
He continued, saying that:
“At the moment when (Nicolás) Maduro leaves, everyone will raise their hands and say: ‘Choose me, I’m the next president of Venezuela.’”
Subsequent to that comment, he would explain that an excess of 40 different Venezuelan opposition politicians have come forward expressing their view that as Guaido is but a transitional figure, that they ought to be ‘selected’ by the US to win an actual (i.e. staged) election. This would be, ideally for them, an election that comes on the heels of an absolute restructuring of the security apparatus of Venezuela. The idea would be to ensure the marginalization of the PSUV forces from the electoral process, a ‘counter-revolution’ of sorts. The staged elections involving various opposition parties and leaders would be an afterthought in all reality. And still, there is no consensus among this opposition on who should lead.
Pompeo expressed tremendous exasperation with this state of affairs, commenting that his realization of the problem isn’t one that came about recently, but is one in fact he was aware of since he began his work in the Trump administration with the CIA. To that point he stressed that these are problems which not only manifested themselves in “public during these last months, but since the day I became director of the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), this was something that He was at the center of what President Trump was trying to do. ”
That’s to say, Pompeo understood this problem all along. The whole project was dead on arrival.
There is no military option
Given that Venezuela can’t really be effectively more embargoed than it presently is, the US is left with one option remaining. Yes, that leaves military options, nominally on the table in terms of US pressure tactics and techniques. But the reality is that these are something much less tangible than the US has historically relied upon. A lot of this has to do with the general decline of the US military in comparative terms. While the US maintains something approximating its military capacity in absolute terms, compared to a decade or two ago, it has not managed to maintain that in relative or comparative terms. The ‘gap’ between the U.S and other rising powers, military speaking – and this reflects economic changes as well – has become smaller. Even the Washington Post, as well as other mainstream US billionaire blogs, has admitted as much.
The fact of Venezuela’s anti-air capabilities in the form of the S-300 system are enough to bring unacceptable levels of material and human loss to the US air forces (Navy/Marine, Army, etc.). These could potentially bring the number of downed US fighters to many dozens in the first hours, of the first sortie. The loss of prestige alongside the scores of Cindy Sheehans this would produce, makes the venture a non-starter from go.
So this leaves the US in something of a conundrum. It has indeed brought Venezuela to the near point of collapse over the course of recent years, creating an economic catastrophe through a combination of sanctions and the manipulation of oil prices. But it failed to push it over the edge, and its thanks to a growing and new international consensus that this was the case.
Venezuelan leadership for its part has admitted also that there are a number of measures and policies that ought to have been in place, long term economic measure in terms of diversifying the economy that would have helped to off-set the worst of the damage done by the manipulated attack on Venezuela’s economy. We’ll recall that Russia experienced similar, based in the same manipulation of oil prices, leading to a temporary ‘shock’ to the Ruble, which plummeted in value relative to the Dollar overnight, stoking a major crisis between June and December of 2014. Russia was in a better position to manage this, and though without hiccups, has managed to avoid the sorts of repercussions that Venezuela has faced.
Strong reasons for optimism and the coming bullish trend
The inability of the US to move further against Venezuela’s economy has only given Caracas time, and organization, to work around them. These work-around measures by Venezuela can improve, but the distance between the economic attacks from the US, and the operationalizing of Guiado in a coup gambit, was too great for the US to use them in combination in an effective way.
It’s worth noting also that the general ‘game plan’ of the US has been effectively written about, expounded publicly, and absorbed by private intelligence agencies and government networks alike. The science and art of regime change has given rise to the science and art of the counter-coup.
When we understand that there is no really viable military option, Caracas knows that it is bracing for further acts of terrorism and sabotage on its critical infrastructure. International help in combatting such state-sponsored terrorism, as reported by Venezuelan state news agency TeleSur has already been had, however, and so we can expect that we will see how effective this has been through the lack of much materializing in this direction.
Taken all together, the essentials for a rebounded Venezuelan economy are in place. Investor confidence and the assurances to Spanish, and therefore by extension German, banking interests operating without the US as a middle-man in Latin America, are well-founded and lead towards a bullish trend.
As a post-mortem on the US’s failed regime change operation in Venezuela, it is an excellent case study in how the international community can properly deal with and respond to the often irrational and potentially destabilizing actions of former global hegemons when in a state of decline. As far as Venezuela is concerned, it’s an excellent case study in sovereignty in the 21st century, despite a west-centric socio-economic focus on globalization.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2J4Rg8d Tyler Durden
