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Every city’s down town is different. Some function as commercial hubs where many travel to shop and work, but where few would want to live. In some cities, down town areas struggle with high crime rates following decades of urban flight that have left ramshackle buildings and dilapidated homes in their wake.

And just as the specific features of every urban center are different, the manner in which they recovered from the housing crisis has been different, too. And one way to explore these differences is too look at how real-estate prices in down town areas relative to the surrounding city. In a recent study, analysts at Property Shark examined the spread between the median home sale price in downtown areas vs. the city as a whole, which they described as a key indicator to measure the progress of gentrification as younger Americans continue to favor hip urban centers. Their analysis looked at a decades’ worth of home-price data in 34 of the largest  US cities, plus Manhattan and Brooklyn, to suss out just how much more expensive it is to live in a down town area.

What they found is hardly surprising: Since the crisis, the recovery in urban home prices in down town areas has typically outpaced the recovery in the surrounding area. However, there are a few notable exceptions where the reverse is true, and the spread between down town home prices and those in the surrounding area has actually compressed.

PropertyShark’s analysts outlined four broad categories based on the change in the downtown-broader city home-price spread: There are cities like Charlotte, NC, where the spread has widened considerably since the crisis, cities like Minneapolis where the spread has been steadily decreasing, and cities like Las Vegas where living down town has consistently been cheaper than the surrounding area and cities like Boston and Chicago, where living down town has long been far pricier than finding a home in an outlying area.

While Manhattan has typically been the epicenter for pricey down town real estate, in 2018, Chicago emerged as the city with the widest gap between downtown media sales price and the broader city.

And while gentrification has pushed thousands of people out of their neighborhoods in New York City, elsewhere, the forces of gentrification have offered some welcome relief for homeowners. Take Detroit, where rapid price growth in downtown real estate in recent years has helped assist a revival of the city.

Interestingly enough, San Francisco, one of the priciest real-estate markets in the country, has seen the spread fluctuate wildly over the past ten years, sometimes by as much as $500,000 a year.

But outside of San Francisco, downtown real estate in California cities tends to be on the cheaper side, with Los Angeles the largest city in the country where down town real estate is cheaper than the surrounding area, largely because of exclusive celebrity packed neighborhoods.

Property Shark has published an interactive database that allows readers to view the change in price spreads over time. Readers can find it here.

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Authored by Henry Edwardes-Evans via Platts’ “The Barrel” blog,

Years late and massively over-budget, Europe’s first EPR nuclear plants in Finland and France are on the verge of “energizing”, as the sector jargon goes…

Barring last-minute glitches, this will be the final act in what must be the longest-running construction saga in the region.

Finland’s 1993 vote to reject plans for a fifth reactor was one of the first stories I covered as a trainee.

Readers of Power in Europe were already bored witless by all the back-and-forth on the topic when, in 2002, the government changed its mind and the project was waved through.

It was another six years before construction of the new-generation, pressurized water reactor began.

Now, ten years late and two-and-a-half times over budget, TVO’s Olkiluoto-3 EPR is set to spark up in 2019 ahead of full operation in 2020.

Meanwhile a mere eight years late and, at Eur10.5 billion, three times over budget, EDF’s Flamanville 3 EPR in Normandy, northern France is also due to deliver first power in summer 2019.

Even when complete, there is a cloud hanging over this project due to “anomalies” found in its reactor pressure vessel head, potentially requiring replacement within a few short years. Not a great start to a 60-year operational life.

For Finland, commissioning of O-3 will go a long way to erasing the country’s multi-year electricity supply deficit, freeing up Norwegian and Swedish hydro resource. For France, operational scrutiny will be intense as EDF seeks to prove the design and build a case for further units.

However late, these baseload behemoths are going to be welcome additions to Europe’s volatile power markets.

For the year just passed, over 15 GW of conventional thermal plant closed across Europe, offset by just 3 GW of gas plant adds. Meanwhile 24 GW of wind and solar were installed.

Hefty net closures in recent years mean that Italy, Finland, Hungary and Lithuania go into 2019 reliant on imports.

Under harsh winter conditions Austria, Belgium, Slovakia and Slovenia are equally dependent.

This is ahead of a slew of more determined energy transition actions by European governments, phasing out big chunks of coal and nuclear plant in the early to mid-2020s.

Platts Analytics sees 65 GW of net coal and nuclear closures over next seven years, nearly double the level of closures seen over the last seven years.

The coal closures are front-loaded in the period, with heavy losses across Germany, the UK and Spain before end-2020, ahead of total phase-outs in France (2022), the UK (2025) and the Netherlands (2030).

Nuclear reductions start to hit home with 10 GW of German capacity closed by 2022, followed by removal of 6 GW of Belgian capacity by 2025, and the loss of 4.3 GW in the UK between 2024-2026.

So it’s better late than never for these EPRs. EDF will be keeping everything crossed, meanwhile, that Hinkley Point C offers less drama as it sets out on its own construction journey. Let’s hope some cub reporter is not still writing about it in 2029 . . .

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Smithsonian Magazine this month published a stunning map detailing just how expansive the post-9/11 “war on terror” has become, demonstrating that contrary to the common assumption that it’s “winding down” more than 17 years later, it actually continues to grow and has now spread to more than 40% of the world’s countries. 

This includes American military and support personnel engaged in ongoing missions in 80 nations on six continents, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, which has recently calculated that since 2001 the US has spent $5,900,000,000,000 on war, mostly in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen — where US military operations have become more or less permanent, with no consideration of ending them under any circumstances.

The map creators for The Smithsonian culled information from foreign government sources, published and unpublished reports, military websites and geographical databases, as well as foreign embassies and interviews with journalists and academics, according to Smithsonian.com.

And the authors of the study even note they were “conservative” in their numbers concerning US military and State Dept. personnel engaged in the “terror war” throughout the globe as of 2019. 

The map demonstrates the following:

We found that, contrary to what most Americans believe, the war on terror is not winding down—it has spread to more than 40 percent of the world’s countries. The war isn’t being waged by the military alone, which has spent $1.9 trillion fighting terrorism since 2001. The State Department has spent $127 billion in the last 17 years to train police, military and border patrol agents in many countries and to develop antiterrorism education programs, among other activities.

The authors also noted that US counter-terror operations abroad “are likely more extensive than this map shows,” especially as this is merely based on non-classified information. 

The timing of the map’s publication this month is interesting given Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s “Force For Good” speech in Cairo on Jan. 10, wherein he lauded the US military as a “liberating” and progressive force for good for the Middle East: “For those who fret about the use of American power, remember this: America has always been and always will be a liberating force, not an occupying power. We’ve never dreamed of domination in the Middle East,” he said. 

Pompeo asserted the US has never been “an empire-builder or an oppressor,” and noted at one point that “when the mission is over, when the job is complete, America leaves.”

But based on the above map, the now global American military machine doesn’t appear to be pulling back anytime soon, but will likely only continue its pattern of expansion, especially as the relatively young AFRICOM finds fresh conflicts on the African continent following the 2011 NATO war to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Meanwhile…

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Authored by Steven Guinness,

Engaging in double speak has become a routine means of communicating amongst politicians. Whilst obfuscation is used to confuse the public and distort their understanding of events (notably Brexit), occasionally a granule of truth winds its way into the narrative which serves to offer a more accurate picture of where members of parliament stand on an issue.

Brexit has dominated political discourse in the UK ever since the original referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU was announced three years ago. Most recently, we have seen an attempt by Conservative party ‘rebels‘ to remove Prime Minister Theresa May from office fail, the withdrawal agreement negotiated by May’s government comprehensively rejected by MP’s, and a subsequent vote of no confidence in the government defeated.

What these events have done is solidify the impression that parliament is at an ‘impasse‘ over Brexit. But as I have argued in previous articles, what this ‘impasse‘ is actually doing is creating the necessary conditions for a second referendum (a ‘people’s vote‘) to become a reality. Gradually all other options are withering away to leave going back to the ballot box as the only remaining solution. A referendum therefore assumes the appearance of being an organic occurrence rather than a premeditated outcome.

Here is how a referendum could find itself in the statute book in the next few weeks:

The next significant parliamentary event is Monday, January 21st, when Theresa May will make a statement to parliament outlining a ‘plan B‘ for how she proposes to gain approval for a revised version of her defeated withdrawal agreement. Whilst it is unknown what she will suggest, it is a safe assumption that it will exacerbate rather than quell division amongst MP’s.

The key aspect to whatever Theresa May puts before parliament is that it will be amendable, meaning MP’s can table amendments to the plan in an attempt to influence the next steps in the Brexit process. One of those amendments is expected to call for a second referendum. Conservative MP Sarah Wollaston, a supporter of the People’s Vote campaign, is due to table the amendment.

For it to be successful, three things need to happen.

Firstly, the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, is responsible for determining which amendments are selected for debate. Bercow, a supporter of the EU, has previously accepted amendments that allow parliament to assume more control over the legislative direction of Brexit. Thus it would come as no surprise if he chose an amendment that called for a second referendum.

Secondly, for the amendment to pass through the House of Commons, it would need to command the support of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party. Corbyn’s preference has been for a general election rather than a second Brexit referendum. But the defeat of his no confidence motion in the government has eliminated this option. Back in September last year, the Labour party voted to keep the prospect of a second vote ‘on the table‘ should attempts at forcing a general election fail. Now that they have, it is likely that Labour will soon adopt a ‘People’s Vote‘ as official party policy.

Thirdly, to gain a majority in the House, the amendment would require around twenty disgruntled Conservative ‘remainers‘ to support it. Again, this appears increasingly likely.

January the 29th is when MP’s will vote on Theresa May’s ‘plan B‘. It represents the first opening for a referendum to be called. If we surmise that over the next few weeks a second vote will officially be in the works, it would then become about what question parliament would put to the British people. This is the area in which politicians have been practising to deceive.

A proportion of MP’s are openly demanding that Theresa May rule out a no deal exit from the EU. One of them is Labour’s Chuka Umunna. Seen as the leading political figure behind the People’s Vote campaign, Umunna has consistently communicated via Twitter that to prevent no deal from happening, parliament must ‘extend Article 50 and give Brexit back to the people‘.

If you are wondering at this point what Umunna recommends asking the UK electorate a second time round, the answer might surprise you. Speaking to Sky News presenter Sophy Ridge this month, he advocated for the option of remaining in the EU, and also for a ‘hard‘ Brexit:

I do think you have to have an option that would please the likes of Peter Bone (Conservative supporter of Brexit), that is a hard Brexit so to speak.

Those two choices, in some way, shape or form, would need to be presented to the British people.

For some time now the term ‘hard Brexit‘ has been perceived as the UK dropping out of the EU with no withdrawal agreement in place.

Umunna is not a lone voice in advocating for a ‘hard‘ Brexit option. Over the months, former Prime Minister Tony Blair has called for a ‘clean break‘ choice on a future ballot paper, as have Gina Miller (founder of Best for Britain) and Conservative MP Justine Greening.

The Independent’s ‘Final Say‘ campaign also endorses a no deal option, whether parliament approves a withdrawal deal or not.

Then there is the man who conceived Article 50, Lord Kerr. Kerr recently appeared on LBC radio where, in regards to what the public could vote on, he told presenter James O’Brien:

Do they want the deal, do they want no deal crash out or do they want our existing deal with the European Union?

Kerr and Umunna are not strangers to each other. They shared a platform together back in November 2017 – on behalf of the anti Brexit group Open Britain – where Kerr proclaimed that Article 50 was reversible and that Britain could change it’s mind on Brexit at any stage prior to withdrawal.

The European Court of Justice have since ruled that the UK can revoke Article 50 unilaterally, but would still require the approval of all twenty seven member states in order to extend the deadline beyond March 29th.

Ask those calling for a ‘People’s Vote‘ their perspective on a no deal outcome, and they will tell you how it would be the height of irresponsibility. An eventuality that the House of Commons should in no way countenance. Why, then, does Chuka Umunna and company wish to see this option dismissed by MP’s, but presented as part of a referendum? It is a question that no broadcaster has thought to raise.

It should be obvious that by endorsing a ‘hard‘ Brexit option, it intensifies the risk of no deal rather than mitigates it.

The People’s Vote campaign continues to promote that the only way to prevent leaving the EU without an agreement is to consult the public. This is nonsense if we consider that in the event of a referendum, the electorate will likely be granted the option of leaving on World Trade Organisation terms. Sections of MP’s would view this option as reckless, but in my view the argument that ‘hard Brexiteers‘ need to have their voice heard in a referendum would win enough support.

As noted previously, Lord Kerr is on the Executive Committee of the Trilateral Commission, whereas Chuka Umunna is a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations. What we are witnessing are representatives of globalist institutions frequenting both sides of the argument. On one hand they have successfully managed to implant into people’s consciousness that no deal would be disastrous, yet on the other have advocated that those same people should have the choice of engineering said disaster.

In the background as ever are the Bank of England. This week governor Mark Carney addressed the Treasury Select Committee and expressed how the recent rise in the value of sterling ‘would appear to reflect some expectation that the process of resolution would be extended and that the prospect of no-deal may have been diminished‘. Carney was quick to point out, however, that this was not his opinion, rather it was ‘the market’s initial take‘.

With the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos next week, I would expect warnings over a ‘disorderly Brexit‘ to be re-emphasised as the potential for a second referendum gains ground.

Unfortunately, as campaigners hyper focus on securing a remain option for a future vote, they continue to perpetuate the belief that a ‘People’s Vote‘ would kill off any prospect of a ‘hard‘ Brexit. The danger of this misguided logic should now be self evident.

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Authored by Erik D’Amato via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

If there’s one thing everyone in today’s Washington can agree on, it’s that whenever an official or someone being paid by the government says something truly outrageous or dangerous, there should be consequences, if only a fleeting moment of media fury.

With one notable exception: Arguing that the US should be quietly working to promote the violent disintegration and carving up of the largest country on Earth.

Because so much of the discussion around US-Russian affairs is marked by hysteria and hyperbole, you are forgiven for assuming this is an exaggeration. Unfortunately it isn’t. Published in the Hill under the dispassionate title “Managing Russia’s dissolution,” author Janusz Bugajski makes the case that the West should not only seek to contain “Moscow’s imperial ambitions” but to actively seek the dismemberment of Russia as a whole.

Engagement, criticism and limited sanctions have simply reinforced Kremlin perceptions that the West is weak and predictable. To curtail Moscow’s neo-imperialism a new strategy is needed, one that nourishes Russia’s decline and manages the international consequences of its dissolution.

Like many contemporary cold warriors, Bugajski toggles back and forth between overhyping Russia’s might and its weaknesses, notably a lack of economic dynamism and a rise in ethnic and regional fragmentation. But his primary argument is unambiguous: That the West should actively stoke longstanding regional and ethnic tensions with the ultimate aim of a dissolution of the Russian Federation, which Bugajski dismisses as an “imperial construct.”

The rationale for dissolution should be logically framed: In order to survive, Russia needs a federal democracy and a robust economy; with no democratization on the horizon and economic conditions deteriorating, the federal structure will become increasingly ungovernable…

To manage the process of dissolution and lessen the likelihood of conflict that spills over state borders, the West needs to establish links with Russia’s diverse regions and promote their peaceful transition toward statehood.

Even more alarming is Bugajski’s argument that the goal should not be self-determination for breakaway Russian territories, but the annexing of these lands to other countries. “Some regions could join countries such as Finland, Ukraine, China and Japan, from whom Moscow has forcefully appropriated territories in the past.”

It is, needless to say, impossible to imagine anything like this happening without sparking a series of conflicts that could mirror the Yugoslav Wars. Except in this version the US would directly culpable in the ignition of the hostilities, and in range of 6,800 Serbian nuclear warheads.

So who is Janusz Bugajski, and who is he speaking for?

The author bio on the Hill’s piece identifies him as a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Washington, D.C. think-tank. But CEPA is no ordinary talk shop: Instead of the usual foundations and well-heeled individuals, its financial backers seem to be mostly arms of the US government, including the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the US Mission to NATO, the US-government-sponsored National Endowment for Democracy, as well as as veritable who’s who of defense contractors, including Raytheon, Bell Helicopter, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin and Textron. Meanwhile, Bugajski chairs the South-Central Europe area studies program at the Foreign Service Institute of the US Department of State.

To put it in perspective, it is akin to a Russian with deep ties to the Kremlin and arms-makers arguing that the Kremlin needed to find ways to break up the United States and, if possible, have these breakaway regions absorbed by Mexico and Canada. (A scenario which alas is not as far-fetched as it might have been a few years ago; many thousands in California now openly talk of a “Calexit,” and many more in Mexico of a reconquista.)

Meanwhile, it’s hard to imagine a quasi-official voice like Bugajski’s coming out in favor of a similar policy vis-a-vis China, which has its own restive regions, and which in geopolitical terms is no more or less of a threat to the US than Russia. One reason may be that China would consider an American call for secession by the Tibetans or Uyghurs to be a serious intrusion into their internal affairs, unlike Russia, which doesn’t appear to have noticed or been ruffled by Bugajski’s immodest proposal.

Indeed, just as the real scandal in Washington is what’s legal rather than illegal, the real outrage in this case is that few or none in DC finds Bugajski’s virtual declaration of war notable.

But it is. It is the sort of provocation that international incidents are made of, and if you are a US taxpayer, it is being made in your name, and it should be among your outrages of the month.

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Throughout vast swaths of New York City, members of the city’s vast middle class work force can barely afford even a modest apartment. Yet for years after the post-crisis housing market recovery began, that reality did little to slow down the rise in home valuations as foreign capital and rock bottom interest rates fueled a buying frenzy, pushing rents ever-higher. But after citywide rents peaked in 2014, the NYC housing market, particularly the most expensive areas of Manhattan, has started to soften.

But whereas only a few quarters ago that weakness was largely confined to the top tiers of the city’s housing market, the pressure on sellers to lower their asks has swiftly spread. Now, in almost every neighborhood in Manhattan and in nearly every one of Brooklyn’s trendiest neighborhoods, more than one-fifth of sellers have been forced to lower their asks – sometimes substantially so – as mortgage rates rise and global growth begins to slow.

Here’s more from Bloomberg:

In almost every Manhattan neighborhood, at least a fifth of the listings got a price cut in the last three months of 2018, data from StreetEasy show. The biggest share was in the East Village, where 33 percent of homes were offered for less.

Inventory is piling up across the city, and that’s good news for buyers in search of a bargain. For sellers with dreams of making a big profit, it’s time for a reality check.

“What we’re seeing right now is a lot of folks being forced to adjust their expectations,” said Grant Long, senior economist at StreetEasy. “We expect that prices are going to have to come down even more for it to make sense for a lot of buyers who are in the market.”

In Brooklyn, 21 percent of listings in trendy Williamsburg were reduced. The share was 22 percent in nearby Greenpoint, and 39 percent in Fort Greene.

Unsurprisingly, one exception to the trend of price declines in trendy neighborhoods is Queens’ Long Island City, soon to be the host of Amazon’s new HQ2 (or one of them, at least). Only 12% of sellers in LIC had to lower their expectations.

As we pointed out earlier, the softness in NYC is having a knock-on effect on markets outside of NYC: In tony Greenwich, Conn., home sales plunged during Q4 as buyers who were forced to lower the ask on their NYC apartments cut their budget for homes in Greenwich. And with brokers warning about the looming impact of Trump’s SALT elimination, sellers who are holding out for a better price might soon wish they had sold sooner.

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Authored by Tom Luongo,

While no one, including me, doubts that the intensity of corporate espionage that goes on in the tech industry the latest news in the Trump Administration’s assault on Chinese telecom giant Huawai should dispel any doubts as to what the real issue is.

The Trump administration is preparing an executive order that could significantly restrict Chinese state-owned telecom companies from operating in the U.S. over national security concerns, according to people familiar with the matter.

Reached by Bloomberg, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council wouldn’t confirm whether an order is in the works, but did state that “the United States is working across government and with our allies and like-minded partners to mitigate risk in the deployment of 5G and other communications infrastructure.” In the statement, spokesman Garrett Marquis also said that “communications networks form the backbone of our society and underpin every aspect of modern life. The United States will ensure that our networks are secure and reliable.”

As always with statements in stories planted in major U.S. media houses like these what isn’t said is more important than what is said.

There are two major bones of contention with Huawei from the U.S. government’s perspective.

First is that Huawei is way ahead of everyone else in 5G technology.

They have the only end-to-end technology stack in the industry. Turnkey 5G networks from antennas and chips to the power stations needed to operate them. Simply peruse their website to see what I’m talking about.

All across the “Five Eyes” countries we have seen announcement after announcement of their banning Huawei 5G equipment from their networks. This is as much economic protectionism as it is about ‘national security.’

But, the real issue here is that, in very short order, Huawei has become a global leader in 5G infrastructure technology which the U.S. is falling behind on.  And now with this arrest [Huawei CFO Weng Wanzhou] Trump is betting that he can scare everyone else into not buying their superior products through the ruinous application of sanctions policies.

The West has been systematically cutting Huawei out of the global 5G rollout because of ‘security’ concerns. More like profit concerns.  It is, simply, typical protectionism by Mr. Tariff himself.

And he’s made no bones about any of this.  Trump has stated quite emphatically that all a policy has to do is pass his ‘America First’ sniff test and it’ll get implemented.

And since he’s not a deep thinker, all he cares about are first-order effects and how he can sell it on his Twitter feed to his now brain-dead base who believes all of this ‘China hacked muh everything’ narrative we’re being inundated with all of a sudden.

So that’s the first angle on this.

But, the real issue isn’t just Huawei’s technological advantage which will put it in the driver’s seat to connect most of the unconnected world.

The real issue is that nothing has changed since a 2014 report from The Register that Huawei categorically refuses to install NSA backdoors into their hardware to allow unfettered intelligence access to the data that crosses their networks.

However, documents disclosed by Edward Snowden this year suggest Huawei may be more sinned against than sinner. The US National Security Agency’s ‘Tailored Access Operations’ unit broke into Huawei’s corporate servers, and by 2010 was reading corporate email and examining the source code used in Huawei’s products.

“We currently have good access and so much data that we don’t know what to do with it,” boasted one NSA briefing. The slides also disclose the NSA intended to plant its own backdoors in Huawei firmware.

So, make no mistake, the China hawks in the Trump administration are willing to derail a much-needed technology rollout in order to maintain complete control over data flow which four years ago was beyond their ability to process.

John Bolton is willing to start WWIII over a couple of pipe bombs thrown at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, for pity’s sake. Is it so far-fetched to believe he doesn’t want us to have 5G data access without the security blanket of spying on anyone he wants at any time?

Never forget that when they are presenting you with one bogeyman it is to distract you from the real one — them. We know from the myriad of leaks and data breaches that all of our data winds up in the hands people we didn’t give consent to.

We know that the NSA has access to any information it wants, obtained via the fiction of ‘legal channels.’ So why should we go through the fiction of pretending like Huawei is the real threat?

They may very well be, but it hasn’t been proven and it would be bad business for them to actually do so.

The national security angle is simply about Huawei refusing the U.S. repeatedly on granting backdoor access to our information.

It reveals both an insecurity and an insanity that grips every society in the late stages of Imperialism. As the competitive edge is lost the threat of competition fuels paranoia and the need to control everything.

But it is this need for control and the diverting of an ever-increasing proportion of the country’s resources to it that drives further loss of competitive edge.

Simply put capital isn’t going into innovation, it’s going into defending your moats, as Warren Buffet would put it. Moats around your business aren’t permanent. They require maintenance and innovation to remain strong.

Banning Huawei’s 5G network technology will ensure the communications gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world remains since the best products will not be on the market to spur competition, drive prices and costs down which fuel the next round of innovation.

Even as patriots worried about China’s most nefarious schemes we should not be applauding this. Because 5G itself is technology so far in advance of where we are now it means a completely different Internet architecture.

We’re staring at one capable of resisting the ham-fisted control techniques currently in place to keep us bottled up behind pay-walls, app-stores and, most importantly, hub and server connectivity.

Bandwidth so wide it means peer-to-peer networks so fast we won’t need sites like YouTube or Periscope to do citizen journalism. Deplatforming will become harder and harder. Decentralized data storage on blockchains which they can’t hack, etc.

And that’s what truly scares these people. What happens when the net itself becomes so decentralized they won’t be able to pick up a phone and take you offline?

As always, regulators and generals like John Bolton are fighting the last war. And if history tells us anything those people always lose.

*  *  *

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Over the last five years, markets have pushed concerns about debt under the rug.

But, while economic growth and record-low interest rates have made it easy to service existing government debt, Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins points out that it’s also created a situation where government debt has grown in to over $63 trillion in absolute terms.

The global economic tide can change fast, and in the event of a recession or rapidly rising interest rates, debt levels could come back into the spotlight very quickly.

THE DEBT SNOWBALL

Today’s visualization comes to us from HowMuch.net and it rolls the world’s countries into a “snowball” of government debt, colored and arranged by debt-to-GDP ratios. The data itself comes from the IMF’s most recent October 2018 update.

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

The structure of the visualization is apt, because debt can accumulate in an unsustainable way if governments are not proactive. This situation can create a vicious cycle, where mounting debt can start hampering growth, making the debt ultimately harder to pay off.

Here are the countries with the most debt on the books:

Note: Small economies (GDP under $10 billion) are excluded in this table, such as Cabo Verde and Barbados

Japan and Greece are the most indebted countries in the world, with debt-to-GDP ratios of 237.6% and 181.8% respectively. Meanwhile, the United States sits in the #8 spot with a 105.2% ratio, and recent Treasury estimates putting the national debt at $22 trillion.

LIGHT SNOW

On the opposite spectrum, here are the 10 jurisdictions that have incurred less debt relative to the size of their economies:

Note: Small economies (GDP under $10 billion) are excluded in this table, such as Timor-Leste and Solomon Islands

Macao and Hong Kong – both special administrative regions (SARs) in China – have virtually zero debt on the books, while the official country with the lowest debt is Brunei (2.8%).

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Authored by James George Jatras via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

A survey of nations in what was once known quaintly as the Free World shows some of them engaged in what could best be described as a cold civil war.

Such a condition is inherently unstable. One possible future is one where the cold conflict becomes hot with unforeseeable consequences. Another is that one side successfully represses the other before violence reaches a certain threshold.

Now before we go any further, let’s make one thing clear. Whatever the country and its specific ills, we can be sure that Vladimir Putin is the culprit. According to Stephen Collinson of CNN (“Another good day for Putin as turmoil grips US and UK”):

‘In London, Theresa May on Tuesday suffered the worst defeat in the modern parliamentary era by a prime minister, as lawmakers shot down her Brexit deal with the European Union by a staggering 432 votes to 202.

‘The United States, meanwhile, remains locked in its longest-ever government shutdown, which is now entering its 26th day, is nowhere near ending and is the culmination of two years of whirling political chaos sparked by President Donald Trump.

‘It’s hard to believe that two such robust democracies, long seen by the rest of the world as beacons of stability, have dissolved into such bitter civic dysfunction and seem unmoored from their previous governing realities. [ … ]

‘The result is that Britain and the United States are all but ungovernable on the most important questions that confront both nations.

‘That’s music to Putin’s ears.

‘The Russian leader has made disrupting liberal democracies a core principle of his near two-decade rule, as he seeks to avenge the fall of the Soviet empire, which he experienced as a heartbroken KGB agent in East Germany.

‘Russia has been accused of meddling in both the Brexit vote and the US election in 2016 — the critical events that fomented the current crisis of the West.’

It isn’t exactly clear how the “meddling” of which the coryphaeus of the Kremlin is merely “accused” managed to entice Theresa May into botching (or sabotaging) Brexit talks or to embolden Donald Trump into finally standing his ground on his top campaign pledge. Even Collinson admits that folks in the US and UK may have had something to do with the ruckus: “Supporters of Trump in the US and Brexit in Britain see their revolts as uprisings against distant or unaccountable leaders who no longer represent them or share their values.”

Harrumph! Why should anyone care what the great unwashed think about accountability or values? What matters, say “skeptics” like Collinson, is that the proles’ getting uppity might be “deeply corrosive to the international political architecture that has prevailed for over 70 years.” Let’s get our priorities straight!

While Britain and the US are entertaining distractions, the current main feature is the jacquerie going on in France. To be sure, many wonder if les gilets jaunes are a genuine, grassroots rebellion of ordinary Frenchmen, or some kind of Astroturf comparable to “color revolutions” that western governments and their accomplices like George Soros have sponsored in many countries. While there is some evidence of agents provocateurs (the expression is French, after all) working for the Emmanuel Macron regime – can we start using that word now, like “Assad regime,” “Putin regime,” etc.? – and minor involvement of groups like Antifa committing vandalism with an aim to discredit the yellow vests, the definitive attestation of authenticity was pronounced by world-class poseur and shill for plutocracy and warmongering, Bernard-Henri Lévy: “It’s a real social movement, but it’s one driven by sad, mortifying, and destructive forces.”

Any movement Lévy calls sad, mortifying, and destructive – that’s French for “deplorable” – can’t be all bad, especially with some monarchists involved. It’s rather ironic, though, given that barely a year ago some were comparing vain little Macron to Napoleon.

What is perhaps most detestable to bien pensants like Collinson and Lévy is that the social basis of the yellow vests is readily identifiable. They’re who we used to call simply French working people. As geographer Christopher Guilluy describes in Spiked:

‘Paris creates enough wealth for the whole of France, and London does the same in Britain. But you cannot build a society around this. The gilets jaunes is a revolt of the working classes who live in these places.

‘They tend to be people in work, but who don’t earn very much, between 1000€ and 2000€ per month. Some of them are very poor if they are unemployed. Others were once middle-class. What they all have in common is that they live in areas where there is hardly any work left. They know that even if they have a job today, they could lose it tomorrow and they won’t find anything else.

‘Not only does peripheral France fare badly in the modern economy, it is also culturally misunderstood by the elite. … One illustration of this cultural divide is that most modern, progressive social movements and protests are quickly endorsed by celebrities, actors, the media and the intellectuals. But none of them approve of the gilets jaunes. Their emergence has caused a kind of psychological shock to the cultural establishment. It is exactly the same shock that the British elites experienced with the Brexit vote and that they are still experiencing now, three years later.

‘The Brexit vote had a lot to do with culture, too, I think. It was more than just the question of leaving the EU. Many voters wanted to remind the political class that they exist. That’s what French people are using the gilets jaunes for – to say we exist. We are seeing the same phenomenon in populist revolts across the world. [ … ]

‘The Parisian economy needs executives and qualified professionals. It also needs workers, predominantly immigrants, for the construction industry and catering et cetera. Business relies on this very specific demographic mix. The problem is that ‘the people’ outside of this still exist. In fact, ‘Peripheral France’ actually encompasses the majority of French people. [ … ]

Think of the ‘deplorables’ evoked by Hillary Clinton. There is a similar view of the working class in France and Britain. They are looked upon as if they are some kind of Amazonian tribe. The problem for the elites is that it is a very big tribe.

‘The middle-class reaction to the yellow vests has been telling. Immediately, the protesters were denounced as xenophobes, anti-Semites and homophobes. The elites present themselves as anti-fascist and anti-racist but this is merely a way of defending their class interests. It is the only argument they can muster to defend their status, but it is not working anymore.

‘Now the elites are afraid. For the first time, there is a movement which cannot be controlled through the normal political mechanisms. The gilets jaunes didn’t emerge from the trade unions or the political parties. It cannot be stopped. There is no ‘off’ button. Either the intelligentsia will be forced to properly acknowledge the existence of these people, or they will have to opt for a kind of soft totalitarianism.’

Unfortunately, “soft totalitarianism” is not out of the question, whether in France or other countries in which populism threatens to upend the elites’ neoliberal gravy train and all the social and moral baggage that comes with it. Guilluy sees the revolt in France as beyond control by the “normal political mechanisms.” That may be true, at least in France, at least for now.

But the US may be another story. At the end of this week all Washington was atwitter with an alleged bombshell (relax, in the US legacy media every other story is a “bombshell,” especially if it involves dirt on Trump) that former Trump attorney, “fixer,” and alleged literal bagman Michael Cohen had actually been instructed by his erstwhile client to commit perjury. Unlike much else thrown at Trump, this story (reported in Buzzfeed, which by total coincidence played a key early role in publicizing the US-UK Deep’s State’s “dirty dossier”) would constitute an impeachable crime. In an extraordinary move, Grand Inquisitor Robert Mueller released a statement through a spokesman indicating the report was “not accurate” but not specifying in what regard. As of this writing Buzzfeed stands by the story and asked for clarification by Mueller’s office, which may or may not be forthcoming.

Whatever the fate of this report, make no mistake: there will be more of the same, an endless parade of them. The fact that such reports might turn out not to be true makes little difference. Their existence is sufficient to keep Trump constantly on the defensive pending his removal, one way or another.

Elizabethtown College Professor Emeritus Paul Gottfried describes how grandees of the GOP are already getting set to restore the status quo ante in collusion with their nominal Democrat adversaries once the interloper is gone:

‘… in the next few years, a working alliance will develop between regular Democrats—particularly New Democrats from red states—and the milquetoast Republican establishment. … Such an alliance would reflect electoral reality, as the Right seems to be growing weaker, not stronger, since the election of Trump two years ago. The ever ambitious Mitt Romney fired on his party’s leader prematurely, but his political instincts may be right after all. The GOP is likely to move leftward because that’s where a majority of the voters are, and if this happens to Trump’s detriment, Romney will hope to pick up the pieces. Neoconservatives and much of the authorized conservative movement would no doubt welcome the Utah senator or someone like him as the kind of “conservative” they could work with were he to run for the presidency.

‘If the elections since 2018 have shown anything, it’s this: blue electoral areas have remained quite solid, while traditionally red ones, even in the Deep South, are up for grabs. That’s because the party perceived as being further to the left has benefited from its growing coalition. If there’s another explanation, I can’t seem to find it. It would not be unusual to have two national parties that are recognizably on the left contending for power. The parties now running the major Western European countries are all to the left of our present GOP.

‘In a possible alliance, the GOP, as the ideologically and electorally weaker side, will readily cooperate with establishment Democrats. They will undoubtedly find such shared concerns as confronting Putin “the thug” and supporting the Likud Party in Israel. They should have no trouble reaching an agreement on giving amnesty to all non-criminal illegal immigrants once Trump is no longer on the scene.

‘There is no reason to think that this political shift won’t continue. We are looking at a process that’s been brought about by college educators, the culture industry, the mass media, and mass immigration, and the momentum may be extremely hard to reverse or even to stop. America’s future won’t necessarily be British Columbia’s, whose provincial legislature features only parties of the left and which hasn’t elected a conservative to a provincial office since the early 1990s.’

The celebrated Sage of Baltimore, H. L. Mencken observed that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” This begs the question, though, of who the “common people” are. In contrast to France, where Guilluy’s “peripheral France” is still a majority of the French population, US elites in both parties are looking to the day when America’s “deplorables” are a minority (which we already may be) that will continue to shrink. Anyone who might object to ethnic and moral replacement is clearly a racist and “white supremacist,” comparable to France’s “xenophobes, anti-Semites and homophobes.” In the not too distant future, Guilluy’s “normal political mechanisms” may be more than sufficient to handle what’s left of a disappearing America.

If Trump is going to build that Wall, he’d better do it damn fast.

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After notching its longest streak of declining prices since at least 2016, what was formerly the world’s hottest housing market has officially entered correction territory, as a single interest rate hike by monetary authorities (which prompted HSBC, one of the most active banks in the region, to raise its prime lending rate) has gone a long way toward offering some badly needed relief for prospective homebuyers in the city’s middle class.

According to Bloomberg, secondary home prices in Hong Kong have shed 9.8% from their August peak to hit their lowest level since February 2018.

Though one broker quoted by Bloomberg carefully insisted that, while “correction” was an appropriate word to describe what is happening in the market, calling it a “collapse” would be a bridge too far.

“You can say it’s a correction with a 10 percent drop in prices, though it’s not a collapse,” said Patrick Wong, a real estate analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence.

Particularly because a looming vacancy tax trade-war related volatility suggest that the market still has another 5% to 10% to go until it bottoms out (then again, considering that Hong Kong is the world’s most expensive housing market, a chasm between bids and asks could push it even lower, particularly as anxious government officials actively try to pull the rug out from under robust prices.

Various factors have combined to put downward pressure on home values, from worsening sentiment due to volatile markets and the U.S.-China trade war, to interest-rate rises and a looming vacancy tax. Prices still probably have about 5 to 10 percent further to drop, Wong said.

The dip has been welcomed by would-be home buyers trying to get on the property ladder as well as government officials concerned about affordability. The question is how long the softness will last, particularly considering demand is still strong and there are growing signs the U.S. Federal Reserve may pause its upward trajectory.

For what it’s worth, Citigroup has prices bottoming in the next two months as buyers swoop in to take advantage of relatively good deals; Morgan Stanley expects prices to rise 2% this year for similar reasons.

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