The small town of Aurora, Illinois – best known for being Wayne‘s hometown in Wayne’s World – has another peculiar appeal to its location: it is one of the closest places that high frequency traders can get to the $63 billion CME Group exchange, where futures and derivatives on commodities and US treasuries trade making it a mecca for HFTs seeking to frontrun slower orderflow. That makes local real-estate extremely coveted, as detailed in a recent Bloomberg follow up to Michael Lewis’ “Flash Boys”.
The story is familiar to anyone who has been reading this website for the past decade, or leafed through Michael Lewis’ HFT thriller: the closer traders can collocate to the CME, the more likely they are to shave off milliseconds from their trades, resulting in frontrunning of slower orderflow that can net them millions. For instance, this small brick hut is owned by New Line Networks a joint venture of HFT giants Jump Trading and Virtu Financial: the two paid $14 million for the land just to be close to the CME Group.
Not happy with the arrangement, Chicago HFT titan DRW Holdings wishes to be even “faster” than Jump and Vitru, and plans to move just a few yards closer to the exchange, having recently put an antenna on a light pole. Next to that is yet another light pole that has been rigged with antennas owned by McKay Brothers, an Oakland-based company. Meanwhile, on nearly all the roads in the area, trading companies have erected antennas or rented space on towers and poles, all of them littered with white circular dishes to try and get closer to the CME data center, all for the purpose of frontrunning slower traders, even if there are still no lasers to be seen, unlike what a visitor to the NYSE in Mahwah, NJ can observe.
As Michael Lewis first hinted in 2014, the real-estate scramble around the exchange had become a turf war between rival HFT corporations until one company decided it was going to do something about the constant jostling back-and-forth between high frequency traders. Dallas-based CyrusOne, which owns the CME center, decided last year that it would finally end the scramble for real-estate by putting up a 350 foot tall wireless tower that would allow anybody to rent space on it. It’s closer than any trading firm could get to the center and targeted putting everybody “on equal footing”… in exchange for a very generous fee to CyrusOne, of course.
And although the tower has room for about 35 satellite dishes but, to this day, remains unused.
Why? Because yet another smaller company, Scientel Solutions LLC, has announced plans to build its own tower about 1000 feet east of CyrusOne’s tower, which CyrusOne says would block its own “line of sight” to downstream microwave dishes, and interfere with its communication to and from the CME data center. To prevent this potentially catastrophic development, CyrusOne sued to block Scientel’s tower.
And with the litigation ongoing, Scientel’s development site remains 2.6 mostly vacant acres that house only a trailer, a portable toilet, and a pile of metal poles.
Amid the legal fray, elected officials in Aurora find themselves confused, trying to figure out which projects should be approved and which projects should be rejected. It appears that the elected officials didn’t initially understand the weight of the decisions that they were making in approving and rejecting these towers. For instance, Alderman Bill Donnell described his technological know-how by saying: “I came from being a guy who didn’t know where the cloud was to realizing speed matters. I didn’t realize being a millisecond faster was all that important.”
Actually being a nanosecond faster is just as important, hence the litigation: microwave networks rely on line-of-sight transmissions as microwaves need to be able to “see” the dish they are communicating with. Because of the Earth’s curvature, the signal must be relayed from towers that are spaced apart generally every couple of miles. Companies like McKay say that they can process a trade from Aurora to Carteret, location of the Nasdaq data center, or Carteret to Aurora, in 4 milliseconds.
Back in March 2016, when it appeared that HFTs are starting to cannibalize one another, the CME sold its data center building for $131 million. The local government thought it had the issue squared away when it required CyrusOne to lease space to traders on its tower at “fair market rates”. The intention was to “equalize wireless access to the CME.”
But when mayor Richard Irving took office, Scientel caught his attention with the company’s proposal. They said that they wanted to move their headquarters from another Illinois town to a patch of land near the CME data center. They claimed they would bring 50 jobs at a $100,000/year average salary if the city allowed it to erect a 195 foot tall communication tower on the site. At the time, they pitched it to the city as a way to get more value from the fiber optic ring Aurora had built over the past decade.
They didn’t mention doing business with traders at all.
What they also didn’t mention is that by erecting a tower blocking the CME’s own microwave “line of sight”, it would instantly crush the value of the tower that CyrusOne had built in hopes of collecting millions in rental fees from HFT traders. Instead, should Scientel end up building its own “mega tower” (one which makes the CME’s own frontrunning contraption obsolete), it would be the recipient of all those millions in HFT squatting fees.
To this day, the case is still ongoing.
You can red Bloomberg’s full long-form write up on the story here.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2TKQ6Xb Tyler Durden
Washington and the Convict Appointed to Overthrow Venezuela Continue the Lies…
Don’t you think something is fishy when the presstitutes orchestrate a fake news “humanitarian crisis” in Venezuela, but totally ignore the real humanitarian crises in Yemen and Gaza?
Don’t you think something is really very rotten when the expert, Alfred Maurice de Zayas, sent by the UN to Venezuela to evaluate the situation finds no interest by any Western media or any Western government in his report?
Don’t you think it is a bit much for Washington to steal $21 billion of Venezuela’s money, impose sanctions in an effort to destabilize the country and to drive the Venezuelan government to its knees, blame Venezuelan socialism (essentially nationalization of the oil company) for bringing “starvation to the people,” and offer a measly $21 million in “humanitarian aid.”
As the United States is completely devoid of any print or TV media, it falls upon internet media such as this website to perform the missing function of honest journalism.
As for the alleged starvation and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, Zayas has this to say:
The December 2017 and March 2018 reports of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) list food crises in 37 countries. “The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is not among them.”
“In 2017, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela requested medical aid from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the plea was rejected, because Venezuela ‘is still a high-income country … and as such is not eligible’.”
The “crisis” in Venezuela “cannot be compared with the humanitarian crises in Gaza, Yemen, Libya, the Syrian Arab Republic, Iraq, Haiti, Mali, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Somalia, or Myanmar, among others.”
In order to discredit selected governments, failures in the field of human rights are maximized so as to make violent overthrow more palatable. Human rights are being “weaponized” against rivals.
In paragraph 37 of his report, de Zayas says:
“Modern-day economic sanctions and blockades are comparable with medieval sieges of towns with the intention of forcing them to surrender. Twenty-first century sanctions attempt to bring not just a town, but sovereign countries to their knees.
A difference, perhaps, is that twenty-first century sanctions are accompanied by the manipulation of public opinion through ‘fake news’, aggressive public relations and a pseudo-human rights rhetoric so as to give the impression that a human rights ‘end’ justifies the criminal means. There is not only a horizontal juridical world order governed by the Charter of the United Nations and principles of sovereign equality, but also a vertical world order reflecting the hierarchy of a geopolitical system that links dominant States with the rest of the world according to military and economic power. It is the latter, geopolitical system that generates geopolitical crimes, hitherto in total impunity.”
He expresses concern about the level of polarization and disinformation that surrounds every narrative about Venezuela. “A disquieting media campaign seeks to force observers into a preconceived view that there is a ‘humanitarian crisis’ in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. An independent expert must be wary of hyperbole, bearing in mind that ‘humanitarian crisis’ is a term of art (terminus technicus) that can be misused as a pretext for military intervention.”
In order to discredit selected governments, failures in the field of human rights are maximized so as to make violent overthrow more palatable. Human rights are being ‘weaponized’ against rivals.
A political solution is blocked because “certain countries [the US] do not want to see a peaceful solution to the Venezuelan conflict and prefer to prolong the suffering of the people of that country, with the expectation that the situation will reach the threshold of a humanitarian crisis and provoke a military intervention to impose a regime change.”
Washington’s attack on Venezuela is in violation of established international law.
“The principles of non-intervention and non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign States belong to customary international law and have been reaffirmed in General Assembly resolutions, notably 2625 (XXV) and 3314 (XXIX), and in the 1993 Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action. Article 32 of the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States, adopted by the General Assembly in 1974, stipulates that no State may use or encourage the use of economic, political or any other type of measures to coerce another State in order to obtain from it the subordination of the exercise of its sovereign rights.”
Chapter 4, article 19, of the Charter of the OAS stipulates that “No State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State. The foregoing principle prohibits not only armed force but also any other form of interference or attempted threat against the personality of the State or against its political, economic, and cultural elements.”
As Washington’s sanctions and currency manipulations constitute geopolitical crimes, Zayas asks what reparations are due to the victims of sanctions. He recommends that the International Criminal Court investigate Washington’s coercive measures that can cause death from malnutrition and lack of medicines and medical equipment.
“Despite being the first UN official to visit and report from Venezuela in 21 years, Mr de Zayas said his research into the causes of the country’s economic crisis has so far largely been ignored by the UN and the media, and caused little debate within the Human Rights Council.
“He believes his report has been ignored because it goes against the popular narrative that Venezuela needs regime change.”
Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world and an abundance of other natural resources including gold, bauxite and coltan. But under the Maduro government they’re not accessible to US and transnational corporations.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HldWlo Tyler Durden
Beginning in Feb 2017, as part of China’s broader “National Sword” campaign, the largest buyer of recyclables from the US, banned 24 types of solid waste from being imported and placed tougher restrictions on the ones it continues to accept.
The move left the recycling industry and authorities in a number of US cities struggling with the disposal of plastic, paper and glass trash, and as RT reports, US officials say it creates pollution, negatively impacting the health of residents.
“Communities around trash incinerators have experienced elevated levels of certain cancers,”environmental activist Mike Ewall told Ruptly video agency in Chester, outside Philadelphia, where a large incinerator is located.
It burns around 200 tons of recyclable materials every day.
Ewall noted that burning trash releases “28 times more dioxin pollution” than burning coal, emitting “the most toxic chemicals known to science,” like mercury and lead.
The residents complain that the incinerator affects house prices as well.
“It destroyed the sense of community, because people that were here moved. You cannot sell the house. It has destroyed the foundations,” local activist Zulene Mayfield told Ruptly.
Finally, some have suggested Beijing’s move to crack down on waste imports may be part of the ongoing trade war with Washington:
“I have to take off my hat to China: it’s a very clever trade move,” Jeffrey Tucker, the editorial director at the American Institute for Economic Research, told RT, adding that Beijing “would never admit that this is part of the trade war.”
For some context, U.S. plastic waste exports to China plummeted by 92 percent between the first part of 2017 and the first part of 2018.
Back in 2014, due to safety concerns, the government suspended dangerous research that could make the bird flu virus more easily transmitted to humans.
It was a wise decision, but unfortunately, short-lived.
In February, Science Magazine revealed a troubling discovery: Last year, a U.S. government review panel decided to let the research resume. They actually want scientists to figure out how to make the avian flu more likely to kill us all and what’s more, they’re not telling us why.
Do they want a pandemic? Because this is how you get a pandemic. Anyone who’s read a book like The Stand knows this is how you get a pandemic.
Not only did the government approve the experiments, but they are also paying for them.
Two research teams, in Wisconsin and the Netherlands, have been told by the Department of Health and Human Services that their work is eligible for research funding from the United States government. The Wisconsin group was notified in October, and the Dutch group in January, a spokeswoman for H.H.S. said in an email.
Despite requests from The New York Times on Thursday and Friday, officials from H.H.S. did not explain why they had not announced their decisions on the two labs at the time they were made.
The lack of information about the decision and how it was reached have provoked outrage from many scientists.
They oppose the research because they say it could create mutant viruses that might cause deadly pandemics if they were unleashed by lab accidents or terrorism.
The experiments, which were conducted by teams led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin in Madison and the University of Tokyo and Ron Fouchier at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, sparked worldwide fears when they were first revealed in 2011.
In 2011, Fouchier and Kawaoka alarmed the world by revealing they had separately modified the deadly avian H5N1 influenza virus so that it spread between ferrets. Advocates of such gain of function (GOF) studies say they can help public health experts better understand how viruses might spread and plan for pandemics. But by enabling the bird virus to more easily spread among mammals, the experiments also raised fears that the pathogen could jump to humans. And critics of the work worried that such a souped-up virus could spark a pandemic if it escaped from a lab or was intentionally released by a bioterrorist. After extensive discussion about whether the two studies should even be published (they ultimately were) and a voluntary moratorium by the two labs, the experiments resumed in 2013 under new U.S. oversight rules.
But concerns reignited after more papers and a series of accidents at federal biocontainment labs. In October 2014, U.S. officials announced an unprecedented “pause” on funding for 18 GOF studies involving influenza or the Middle East respiratory syndrome or severe acute respiratory syndrome viruses. (About half were later allowed to continue because the work didn’t fit the definition or was deemed essential to public health.) (source)
In case you are wondering what “gain of function” studies are (as I was), here’s an explanation from a 2014 statement from the National Institutes of Health:
For purposes of the deliberative process and this funding pause, “GOF studies” refers to scientific research that increases the ability of any of these infectious agents to cause disease by enhancing its pathogenicity or by increasing its transmissibility among mammals by respiratory droplets. (source)
That statement, which was published on October 16, 2014, concluded with this:
Public involvement in this deliberative process is key, and the process is thus designed to be transparent, accessible, and open to input from all sources. Consultation with the NSABB, the first step in this process, will take place October 22, and I encourage you to follow these deliberations closely. (source)
That transparency didn’t happen, and some scientists are upset because the government’s review will not be made public.
The lack of openness is “indefensible”
Harvard University epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch is one of the scientists who is not happy with the government’s decision, “After a deliberative process that cost $1 million for [a consultant’s] external study and consumed countless weeks and months of time for many scientists, we are now being asked to trust a completely opaque process where the outcome is to permit the continuation of dangerous experiments,“ he told Science Magazine.
An HHS spokesperson told Science Magazine that the government cannot make the panel’s reviews public because they contain proprietary and grant competition information.
Isn’t it comforting to know the government is more concerned about protecting trade secrets than it is about protecting the public?
The government only confirmed its decision after Science Magazine learned of it and publicized the information.
Critics say the HHS panel should at least publicly explain why it thought the same questions could not be answered using safer alternative methods.
“Details regarding the decision to approve and fund this work should be made transparent,” said Thomas Inglesby, director of Center for Health Security of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland.
The lack of openness “is disturbing. And indefensible,” said Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers.
This virus poses an extremely significant threat to humans.
Back in 2012, Ebright told Scientific American that the deadly virus could pose a significant threat to humans:
“The primary risks are accidental release through accidental infection of a lab worker who then infects others — for which there are many precedents — and deliberate release by a disturbed or disgruntled lab worker, for which the 2001 US anthrax mailings provide a precedent. Bioterrorism and biowarfare also are risks.” (source)
Amazingly, despite the potential public-health consequences of such work, neither the approval nor the deliberations or judgments that supported it were announced publicly. The government confirmed them only when a reporter learned about them through non-official channels.
This lack of transparency is unacceptable. Making decisions to approve potentially dangerous research in secret betrays the government’s responsibility to inform and involve the public when approving endeavors, whether scientific or otherwise, that could put health and lives at risk.
***
No description of who reviewed these proposals has been provided. It is not stated what evidence was considered, how competing claims were evaluated or whether there were potential conflicts of interest.
***
But creating potentially pandemic pathogens creates a risk — albeit a small one — of infecting millions of people with a highly dangerous virus. For this kind of research, there is no justification for keeping risk-benefit deliberations secret. (source)
They’re trying to turn the bird flu into the human flu.
Not surprisingly, then, when other scientists (including me) learned about the efforts to turn bird flu into a human flu, we asked: why the heck would anyone do that? The answers were and still are unsatisfactory: claims such as “we’ll learn more about the pandemic potential of the flu” and “we’ll be better prepared for an avian flu pandemic if one occurs.” These are hand-waving arguments that may sound reasonable, but they promise only vague benefits while ignoring the dangers of this research. If the research succeeds, and one of the newly-designed, highly virulent flu strains escapes, the damage could be horrific. (source)
Perhaps the most chilling statement from Salzberg is this:
This research has the potential to cause millions of deaths.
Should H5N1 mutate sufficiently to move from a disease caught by those working in live bird markets, or those living and working with poultry in their immediate area, to a disease able to pass easily from human to human a pandemic is not just possible but extremely likely.
At the end of that piece, Bennett asked two important questions:
The fact is that bird flu will eventually mutate, the question is will science bring this down on us earlier than it would have happened naturally? Or will science save us by finding out how to stop the disease in its tracks?
“We are glad the United States government weighed the risks and benefits … and developed new oversight mechanisms. We know that it does carry risks. We also believe it is important work to protect human health,” Kawaoka said of being able to return to his research.
Exactly how dangerous is this research?
Here’s a quote that will give you a general idea of how dangerous this research is. Rebecca L. Moritz, a microbiologist specializing in biosafety and biosecurity, is involved with the bird flu research at the University of Wisconsin.
Ms. Moritz said local fire departments were directed not to enter the virus lab for any reason and if there was a fire, to let it burn. If someone working in the virus lab has a medical crisis, “first-responders are not able to reach them until they have been decontaminated by qualified lab staff,” she said. (source)
Let it burn.
Now imagine if scientists could figure out how to make this transmissible between humans.
Why is the government being so secretive about these experiments?
Call me crazy, but I can’t help but suspect the government has undisclosed reasons for allowing this research to continue. I doubt it is to create stockpiles of vaccines because science can’t even do that for season flu viruses – they mutate too fast.
Could it be that this research is being conducted to create a bioterrorism weapon? Or, is it possible that another country (perhaps China or Russia) is working on this as well, and the U.S. is trying to beat them to it?
Is there a possible threat we aren’t being told about? Perhaps it is past time to start preparing for a pandemic, because natural or man-made, it is likely coming.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2NSCyTX Tyler Durden
Days after the Democrat-controlled House Judiciary Committee fired off 81 document requests for their post-Mueller investigations (in anticipation of a ‘disappointing’ Mueller report) – Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham has revived his committee’s probe into potential surveillance abuse by the FBI.
In a Thursday letter to Attorney General William Barr – just three weeks on the job, Graham asked for all FBI and DOJ documents which would explain what steps were taken to verify the Steele dossier before it was used by the FBI to obtain a surveillance warrant on a Trump campaign staffer.
The FBI relied heavily on Steele’s report to obtain four Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
Republicans investigated whether the FBI misled the FISA court by relying on the dossier even though its allegations about Page were unverified. They also asserted the FBI failed to tell surveillance court judges that Steele was working on behalf of the DNC and Clinton campaign on an investigation of Donald Trump. –Daily Caller
Graham also notified Barr that he is investigating the FBI’s original decision making process behind opening up investigations of Trump campaign associates in 2016 – including, we assume, the decision to infiltrate the campaign using Stefan Halper – a former Oxford University professor and longtime intelligence asset who was paid over $1 million by the Obama Department of Defense between 2012 and 2018, with nearly half of it surrounding the 2016 US election.
Furthermore, Graham has requested:
All documents and communications originally shared with the Gang of Eight in May 2018 related to the Russia investigation.
All “FD-302” forms for former DOJ #4 Bruce Ohr and any other individual at the Department, the FBI, or elsewhere in the federal government who received information from individuals outside the Department or the FBI that was used in the Carter Page FISA applications.
A “302” serves to “report or summarize” witness interviews involved in FBI investigations – while Ohr’s testimony was recently found to have contradicted that of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson.
Read Graham’s letter below:
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2NRsU3U Tyler Durden
Americans are infamous for their eagerness to spend money they don’t have. A whole industry has grown up around making that happen, from payday lenders to the government that guarantees or insures a large portion of the mortgages so that lenders and investors don’t have to carry the risk. Consumer debt is turned into asset-backed securities, from government-guaranteed mortgage-backed securities to subprime-auto-loan-backed securities whose top tranches carry an AA-rating or even a AAA-rating.
It all worked out. But then came the moment when Americans deleveraged, mostly by defaulting on their debts, particularly their mortgage debts, which triggered the US Financial Crisis and then the Global Financial Crisis. The world should have learned a lesson, but no. Who has learned a lesson? American consumers whose household debt in relationship to US GDP has continued to decline.
US household debt inched down to 76.4% of GDP in the third quarter 2018, according to the newest batch of global data from the Bank for International Settlements. This was the lowest level since 2002. It put Americans in the inexplicably wimpy, and for the finance sector, insufferable 11th place:
Even at the peak just before the Financial Crisis, American household debt never quite reached 100% of GDP. This is important as we move on to the winners on this list.
UK households also deleveraged after the Financial Crisis, with the UK banking system kept upright only by massive bailouts and the nationalization of some banks. But recently, household debt as percent of GDP has been ticking up, reaching 86.5%, which put the UK into 10th place:
This ratio is a function of two factors: Household debt measured in local currency and the size of the economy measured by nominal local-currency GDP. This ratio cancels out inflation. When household debt grows more slowly than nominal GDP, the ratio declines. When household debt grows faster than GDP, the ratio increases, and consumers are becoming an ever-riskier part of the financial system.
Then there is Sweden. Swedish households used to be notoriously debt-averse, like German households, and their household-debt-to-GDP ratio remained below 50% until 2001. But then someone figured out how to fix that, and suddenly, Swedes went on a phenomenal borrowing binge, and the household-debt-to-GDP ratio nearly doubled over those years to 88.5%, earning them the 9th place in the debt-slave competition:
On this list of winners, the charts are on the same scale, and that’s why there is so much white space above American, British, and Swedish consumers. Consumers that did not do their job in the early part of this century and did not borrow enough fell off the chart entirely, which is a fate that afflicted the Swedes until 2002.
Germans, with a household-debt-to-GDP ratio of merely 52.7%, still, after all these years, would barely register on the bottom of this chart. And Austrians with a ratio of 48.7% wouldn’t even be on the chart. On the other hand, the white space in the charts gets filled in by the winners on this list.
New Zealand, with a household-debt-to-GDP ratio of 93.3% and in eighth place, has been helped along by a property bubble that has been inflating mortgage debts:
Economists love debt slaves.
Household borrowing converts mostly into household spending, which is the biggest contributor to GDP. So economists adore growing household debt because it means growing GDP, and the economic system moves heaven and earth to get consumers to borrow more so that they buy more and add to GDP. And these households become enslaved to their debts and their financiers.
Korean households have made amazing progress becoming debt slaves, now closing in on the glorious 100% line, with household-debt-to-GDP at 96.9%. At the current pace, a couple more years, and they’ll have arrived!
When household borrowing outruns GDP growth for long enough and reaches certain levels, things can get iffy, as US household debt has shown with its starring role in the Financial Crisis though it never even exceeded 100% of GDP. So below are all the countries whose household-debt-to-GDP ratio now exceeds 100%.
Canadian households have long been making headlines with their top-notch borrowing binge to support their top-notch housing bubble. By other debt measures, such as debt-to-disposable income, Canadian and Australian households have been battling over first place for years. In the debt-to-GDP measure, Canadian households are in a still respectable 6th place: This debt will pose some issues as the majestic housing bubbles in top metros are now deflating:
Norwegian households have bravely taken their household-debt-to-GDP ratio from 81% in 2012 to 101% in 2016. But this has since hit a ceiling as even regulators began to fret about the steep ascent, and a down-tick has been observed in the third quarter:
Households in the Netherlands were track to be undisputed king of the hill, with a debt-to-GDP ratio nearing 120%, in part because GDP plunged during the Financial Crisis, which caused the spike in the debt-to-GDP ratio and the collapse of some banks. During the subsequent euro debt crisis, GDP declined again. But since then, the economy has grown, and households have curtailed their borrowing, edging away from the brink, and in the process getting demoted to 4th place:
Households in Denmark exploded their debt-to-GDP ratio from an already high 90% in 2003 to nearly 140% during the euro debt crisis as the country went through a blistering recession. GDP still hasn’t recovered to the level before the debt crisis, as households are maxed out and have been whittling down their debts, but at 116.7% of GDP, the household-debt-to-GDP ratio lands them on 3rd place on the list of the biggest debt slaves in the world:
Australian households have been caught up in one of the biggest housing bubbles in the world, financed by debt. The household-debt-to-GDP ratio more than doubled between 1997 and 2016. Now that the housing bubble is deflating at an astounding pace, the debt ratio has begun to tick down, but remains in second place:
And the #1 debt slaves in the world: Swiss households. This is one of the reasons interest-rate repression remains the rule in Switzerland. The Swiss National Bank has imposed its negative interest rate policy on the country for years, and there have been stories of mortgages with 0% and even negative interest rates. There is simply too much household debt, and no one wants to see it blow up. Hence the negative interest rate policy. But this policy encourages more household borrowing, and the cycle will continue until it can’t:
The most explosive household debt: China
China is in a category of its own. And so the chart has a different scale. The household-debt-to-GDP ratio is still in the German neighborhood of just above 50%, but it has quintupled in the 12 years since the BIS data began in 2006. The idea that Chinese households are paying cash to sustain their housing bubble or to buy cars has become a bad joke: Chinese consumers have discovered debt, and they are eagerly turning into debt slaves:
Another Global Financial Crisis, with China at the Epicenter? Here’s my podcast, a 13-minute financial rollercoaster ride…. THE WOLF STREET REPORT
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HnbdYU Tyler Durden
After Rotten Tomatoes removed over 50,000 Captain Marvel reviews, or around 93%, the movie’s audience score barely moved – rising from a dismal 32% to a pathetic 36%.
While the unusually high user rating count was widely reported as the work of sexist, pro-patriarchy “trolls” – Rotten Tomatoes told Hollywood Reporter that the problem was due to a “bug in the post-release functionality for movies that have released into theaters since our product update last week,” which “included both pre-release and post-release fan voting.”
Rotten Tomatoes recently retooled its scoring system in an effort to combat trolls from sandbagging scores for movies they believed inferior and hadn’t necessarily seen. A film now can no longer be “reviewed” by audiences before it is released. –Hollywood Reporter
Metacritic’s user score, meanwhile, is just 2.9 out of 10, which is terrible.
Some recent reviews:
I had free tickets to see this… and it was a net lost for me… Not great… just sorta a boring movie with a female lead shoehorned in…. just because? IDK, I’d pass… –rodeobravo
I wanted to like this movie expecting something aggressively average… I was disappointed. I’ll give this movie a 2.0 hopefully the all female Avengers will be better than this. –RumBecker
If I were to sum up this movie in three words they would be: bland, unimaginative and unwanted. It says it all when the cat is the most attractive part of the movie. –ChunkyM0nkey
Saw it on Thursday night with low expectations, hoping to be pleasantly surprised. Sadly, I was not. Boring plot, bad acting, forgettable villains, and lackluster action scenes. Waste of time and money. Most egregiously, the movie somehow managed to make me less excited about the upcoming Avengers: Endgame. There is only one good character in this movie — the cat. –zhall
In short, the movie’s “rotten” score isn’t necessarily due to overly-aggressive feminist marketing, or star Brie Larson’s man-hating comments against white movie reviewers. The movie simply sucks.
Meanwhile, Friday’s #AlitaChallenge encouraging people to go see Alita: Battle Angel instead of Captain Marvel, appears to have gone well.
Launched by anti-SJW comic fans who simply want a good movie that checks its politics at the door, female lead or not – swarms of Twitter users reported taking to theaters for Alita – a way better film based on user reviews.
The unspoken assumption of the modern era is that politics can fix whatever is broken: whatever is broken in society or the economy can be fixed by some political policy or political process– becoming more inclusionary, seeking non-partisan middle ground, etc.
What if this assumption is flat-out wrong? What if politics is incapable of fixing what’s broken? What if politics merely fosters an illusion of solutions, a paper-thin veneer of faux progress? What if politics isn’t a tool that’s capable of fixing what’s broken? What if all politics is able to do is generate delusions of grandeur and unresolvable conflicts? What if politics is ultimately little more than a fatal distraction?
This is of course heresy of the highest order, for a belief in the supremacy of politics is the secular religion of our era. The orthodoxy is: there is no problem that can’t be solved with a political policy: a tax cut, a new tax, a new incentive, a broader definition of criminality, and so on.
What if the status quo is failing for reasons that are beyond the reach of politics? Politics assumes that tweaking incentives and disincentives via rewards and punishments, centralizing control of assets and income streams and manipulating the issuance of currency and interest rates can fix any and every problem.
The limits of politics are the limits of government. In the present era, all government seeks to further centralize power and capital because the era’s quasi-religious belief is that centralization is the solution to everything.
This is of course false.Centralization works until it becomes the problem, at which point further centralization of power and capital only speeds system-wide failure.
Government can force certain things but it can’t force everything. Government can encourage borrowing but it can’t force its citizens to borrow. Government can force the expansion of currency, but it can’t force the valuation of that currency.
Government can mandate this and that, but it can’t force a negative return on investment (ROI) to magically become positive. Government can prohibit and tax and force outward compliance, but it can’t force people to agree with policies that run counter to their beliefs.
Government can’t rescue a status quo which is failing due to negative return on investment (ROI), gross inefficiencies, the loss of trust in corrupt institutions , and all the other ills that are intrinsic to centralization of power and capital.
As a result, the greater the government’s power, the greater the polarization as the self-serving elites seek to protect their share of the pie as the pie shrinks. Each camp becomes increasingly extreme, and compromise is recognized as a process that erodes every camp’s power and income.
The political solution is take-no-prisoners domination and the eradication of rivals’ power to veto or contest the domination of the winner. This drive to polarization is the result of centralized elites attempting to distribute the system’s increasing failure to their competing elites.
This is the politics of decline and collapse. This is the only possible output of centralized power grabs by self-serving elites, i.e. the status quo.
Now that President Trump’s insistence that he and President Xi would need to meet to finalize a sweeping US-China trade deal has been exposed as empty talk – since Beijing absolutely refuses to send Xi all the way to Florida only to risk him returning empty handed – traders are finally being forced to accept the harsh reality: That a US-China trade deal is far from assured.
As the Wall Street Journal said last night in a report that lays out, in broad strokes, the current state of the talks, Beijing – which has reportedly removed a tentative summit at Mar-a-Lago from Xi’s calendar – wants a summit between the leaders of the world’s two largest economies to be more of a signing ceremony than a final round of negotiations. Trump’s decision to abruptly abandon talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un last month has opened old wounds dating back to the Clinton administration of political embarrassments suffered at the hands of US presidents dating all the way back to the Clinton administration, as WSJ reminds us.
Looming over the summit negotiations is the history of the late-1990s negotiations over Beijing’s entry into the World Trade Organization. In 1999, Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji traveled to Washington for final negotiations for a WTO deal and came up empty-handed after President Bill Clinton judged it wasn’t the right time politically to conclude a deal, say former advisers of Mr. Clinton.
A humiliated Mr. Zhu faced a chorus of criticism at home that threatened to derail talks.
On Saturday, Bloomberg offered some more details about one of the purported sticking points to a final deal: The issue of enforcement. According to BBG, China wants the US to lift sanctions on $200 billion of Chinese goods (constituting the bulk of the new levies imposed since the dawn of the trade war)…
…while also seeking some mechanism for holding the US accountable for holding up its end of the deal. But the real takeaway here is that Beijing wants Trump to simply trust that it will follow through with the changes promised by the deal.
Vice Commerce Minister Wang Shouwen said during a Saturday press conference that enforcement of a deal must be “two way, fair and equal.”
Speaking Saturday at a press conference in Beijing, Wang said he “feels hopeful” about the prospects for the negotiations, which are nearing completion amid pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump to seal a deal. Wang is China’s deputy international trade representative and also leads the Chinese working team in the trade talks with the U.S.
While U.S. negotiators led by Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer have insisted on a mechanism – that could include a regular schedule of meetings – to enforce the terms of their agreement, that prospect has raised alarm in Beijing. Former high ranking officials have said that the deal will be seen as lopsided unless it also binds the U.S. to address China’s own grievances.
The U.S. and Chinese leaders agreed in December to work toward removing all additional tariffs, Wang said, adding that they’ve made substantial progress in the talks since then. He didn’t elaborate further on the enforcement mechanism or respond to a question on whether he expects that a deal can be signed this month.
But here’s the key detail from the story:
Chinese officials have made clear in a series of negotiations with the U.S. in recent weeks that removing levies on $200 billion of Chinese goods quickly was necessary to finalize any deal, according to people familiar with the discussions. But the U.S. wants to continue to wield the threat of tariffs as leverage to ensure China won’t renege on the deal, and only lift the duties fully when Beijing implemented all parts of the agreement.
Of course, Beijing has already broken many promises to past US administrations, particularly on ceasing its cyberespionage activities (they actually increased after Beijing promised the Obama administration that it would cool it). That leaves very little room for trust.
While President Trump tried to gas the markets on Friday by talking up the “very big” spike in stocks that would result from a deal being finalized, if anything, the widening US-China trade deficit revealed earlier this week will only make things more difficult for him. While China has reportedly promised to buy an absurd amount of US agricultural products (and whiskey) to help close the gap, abandoning the US’s insistence on enforcement and the other major asks of the China hawks (structural reforms, commitments to curb IP theft, ceasing its cyberespionage efforts, etc.) may risk making him look weak. Add to that the fact that, at this point, the possibility that a deal would result in the market “selling the news”, leaves very little upside for just taking whatever deal is presented in hopes of curbing anxieties about the prospect for slowing global growth.
That doesn’t mean that a deal won’t happen – it just means that we’re still a long way from a signing ceremony.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2THnxcU Tyler Durden
The chaos observed at Tesla at the start of 2019 is getting worse. Despite the company’s hastily disclosed decision to shut down all of its retail stores, it now appears as though landlords haven’t been notified of the company’s intentions to close, nor are they willing to “give the company an easy way out of its leases”, according to the WSJ.
Tesla currently owes lease obligations of $1.6 billion, with $1.1 billion due between now and 2023. This includes payments for store leases, galleries and real estate abroad. Robert Taubman, chief executive officer of Taubman Centers said at the Citi 2019 Global Property CEO conference, adding that “Tesla is a company with a viable balance sheet that is going to owe a lot of landlords a lot of money.”
The decision to close down all of its retail stores and move to an online-only sales model surprised many of the company’s employees and investors. For instance, we pointed out one investor who sold his shares in the company as a result of being blindsided by the news.
“This was a total 180-degree turn. Tesla had been talking about expanding stores, and all of a sudden they are closing them. To me, this signals a huge financial concern and a possible cash-flow issue for Tesla,” former investor in Tesla, Alex Chalekian, said.
It pains me to say this, since I really love the company, but we have sold our position in #Tesla for our advisory clients. I believe that the decision to close retail stores is a bad one and points to the weakness in sales and financial strength of the company. $TSLA
This is not an adjustment to strategy. This is a total reversal. They had a retail plan 2 months ago and concluded they had to tear the whole thing up and come up with a radical new plan. What does that say about the company? @elonmusk@teslahttps://t.co/3k04m0pW5i
Tesla was “negotiating and signing leases” as recently as last month, according to executives at Taubman and Macerich. Many mall and retail shopping leases run between 5 to 10 years and Tesla has admitted in its SEC filings that some of these are non-cancellable. Efforts to get out of these leases could result in legal battles and court challenges. Leases may be able to be canceled in the event a bankruptcy or persistent vacancies at the shopping center.
Don Wood, CEO at Federal Realty Investment Trust concluded: “The bottom line is, this is a business of contracts.”
Perhaps Tesla knows this, because additional unconfirmed rumors are already starting to circulate on social media.
Update: $TSLA is now back pedalling on recent move to close stores. Now telling sales agents to go back to the way it was a month ago and reinstating commissions and bonus strutcture. It appears absolutely no one but Elon was on board with this, pun is absolutely intended.$TSLAQ
— StockPriceBro AKA SECBro (@NotStockPricBro) March 8, 2019
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HfM7vV Tyler Durden
