Tag: news

Following two days of violent, historic swings in the US stock market, S&P500 futures climbed to session highs, up as much as 0.9% and back over 2,500 after swinging between gains and losses following the biggest upside reversal in the index since 2010 on Thursday and the single biggest point gain in the index on Wednesday as a result of a massive, 11th-hour pension fund rebalancing trade which has seen over $60 billion shifted out of bonds and into stocks into what has been a historically illiquid market.

The US rally followed a sharp rebound in European shares and a mixed Asian session as traders struggled to make some sense of the ridiculous, wild price swings in the final sessions of the year which prompted comparisons to watching the cult favorite Pulp Fiction. The dollar tumbled and gold climbed.

The active S&P 500 future contract gained as much 0.9 percent, after dropping as much as 0.7 percent earlier in the session. Contracts on the Nasdaq 100 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.5 percent and 0.6 percent, respectively. The benchmark index for American equities erased a 2.8 percent tumble late Thursday afternoon, finishing the day with a 0.9 percent gain, following a historic point gain the day prior which in turn followed the biggest ever Christmas Eve drop the day prior.

European shares, which tumbled the day prior, extended gains on Friday, after a mixed session for Asian stocks as traders struggled to make sense of wild price swings in the final sessions of the year. All sectors were in positive territory, as cyclical equities led gains in Europe, with construction materials and technology the top performers in the Stoxx Europe 600 Index according to Bloomberg.

Volatility in Europe and in the United States has spiked to highs not seen since the sharp global correction in stock markets in February.

Top European News

• SNB Disregards Critics as Franc Keeps Negative Rates in Play
• DIA Trading Suspended by Spanish Regulator
• ECB Officials Request Carige Capital Increase at Meetings: Sole
• Baloise Buys 20% Stake in Aevis Victoria’s Infracore

Earlier in Asia, Japan and China – which had their final trading day of the year Friday – had opposing fates with the Nikkei closing down 0.3% due to yen strength, while the Shanghai Composite rose 0.4% but closed below the critical 2,500 level.

Top Asian News

• One of World’s Top LNG Users Buys Into Offshore Wind Farms
• Japan Shares Fall, Capping Worst Annual Performance Since 2011
• Philippines Increases Bills and Bonds Offers to 360b Pesos in 1Q
• India Is Said to Announce Universal Basic Income Program: AajTak

Even with the latest pension rebalancing rebound, the yearly picture for world stocks remains grim, with the MSCI world equity index, which tracks shares in 47 countries, losing close to 12% so far in 2018. Indeed, the last-minute rebound is doing little to mend the damage from the worst year for global stocks since 2008 and the gains in haven assets show investors are still looking for value in safer investments. Plenty of event risks loom in the coming quarter, from the U.K. vote on the Brexit deal to U.S.-China trade talks to the continuing showdown between President Donald Trump and Congress over the budget.

While stocks showed signs they might recoup more losses in the year’s final days, lingering doubts about the stability of the market sustained demand for safe-haven currencies, as the following strategist quotes demonstrate:

• “Markets are a bit more cautious on risk appetite, with the Japanese yen and the Swiss franc gaining,” said Lee Hardman, an FX strategist at MUFG. “The dollar continues to be soft across the board as volatile stock markets are reducing the relative safe haven appeal for U.S. assets.”
• “We’re heading into a period of higher volatility,” said Manpreet Gill, head of fixed income, currency and commodities strategy at Standard Chartered. “You need to have some dry powder on the side to take advantage of that. That’s where we particularly think that cash plays a bit of a role.”
• “Consensus is firmly set on a 2020 recession, but the question for investors is whether they are willing to stay away from equities for all of next year when the U.S. is still expected to grow, albeit at a slower pace than this year,” said Edward Park, investment director at Brooks Macdonald Asset Management. “The current market bounce may have been catalyzed by institutional portfolio re-balancing, however valuation levels seem to be tempting investors to become incrementally more bullish.”
• “Where stocks head from here is anyone’s guess as uncertainty looks set to seep into the first quarter of 2019”, said Ben Emons, managing director at Medley Global Advisors. “While a bounce is positive news, it’s coming with much more volatility – which normally falls when stocks rally”, he told Bloomberg TV.

Sentiment was boosted by a sliding dollar as the Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index extended declines, falling to lowest level since Nov. 8, as the greenback slipped against all G-10 peers; meanwhile the Norwegian krone among top performers after rebounding from the lowest in a decade.

In fixed income, US Treasurys were slightly higher with yields dipping to 2.7556%, with the yield curve flattening with 10-year rate down almost 2bps.

Elsewhere, European bonds trade mixed, with short end of bund curve underperforming. Italian yields rose as investors made space for the last auction of the year. A strong auction of zero coupon bonds on Thursday led to a mini-rally in Italian government debt as investors saw this is a good omen for today’s up to 5 billion euro bond sale, which caps one of the largest borrowing programs. The Treasury is hoping the auction will decisively show that Italy has turned a corner after months of volatile trading on the back of fractious talks between Rome and Brussels over its spending plans.

Finally, Japan’s 10-year yield turns negative for first time since 2017.

Oil bounced with commodities and emerging-market equities. Oil prices rebounded and took back some of the ground lost this week, but remained close to their lowest levels in more than a year as rising U.S. inventories and concern over global economic growth kept markets under pressure. Brent crude oil was up $1.10, or 2.1 percent, at $53.26 a barrel, having earlier risen more than 3 percent. It had dropped 4.2 percent on Thursday.

Spot gold, which has benefited this week from the global market turmoil, was just slightly higher at $1,276.33 an ounce following an ascent to a six-month high of $1,279.06 on Wednesday.

Aside from any further developments on the American political front – where departures of senior officials and tensions at the White House over the Federal Reserve have unsettled investors, upcoming manufacturing PMIs from China and the U.S. may be a focus in the coming week. Among key events next quarter are the Brexit-deal vote in the U.K., a U.S.-China trade-talks deadline and the annual gathering of China’s legislature.

Market Snapshot

• S&P 500 futures up 0.8% to 2,515.50
• STOXX Europe 600 up 1.4% to 334.23
• MXAP up 0.4% to 146.06
• MXAPJ up 0.8% to 475.47
• Nikkei down 0.3% to 20,014.77
• Topix down 0.5% to 1,494.09
• Hang Seng Index up 0.1% to 25,504.20
• Shanghai Composite up 0.4% to 2,493.90
• Sensex up 0.8% to 36,093.34
• Australia S&P/ASX 200 up 1% to 5,654.32
• Kospi up 0.6% to 2,041.04
• German 10Y yield rose 0.3 bps to 0.234%
• Euro up 0.2% to $1.1450
• Italian 10Y yield fell 8.2 bps to 2.389%
• Spanish 10Y yield rose 1.6 bps to 1.402%
• Brent futures up 2.1% to $53.23/bbl
• Gold spot little changed at $1,276.90
• U.S. Dollar Index little changed at 96.44

Top Overnight News

• The S&P 500 erased a 2.8 percent drop in an afternoon rebound, finishing the day with a 0.9 percent gain. It’s the first time since May 2010 that the index has posted such a huge upward reversal, data compiled by Bloomberg show
• The partial U.S. government shutdown will probably continue into 2019 after House Republicans said Thursday they didn’t plan any votes this week and President Donald Trump said most federal employees losing pay because of the closure are Democrats
• The Trump administration granted the first exclusions from tariffs imposed on China for intellectual property violations, according to a Federal Register notice scheduled for Dec. 28 publication
• Unease has strengthened within the Bank of Japan’s policy board over the outlook for prices as cheaper oil and mobile phone charges threaten to drive inflation toward zero and possibly back into negative territory
• Japan’s factory output dropped again in November, marking the sixth contraction in eight months. The data and risks to the outlook suggest limited strength in any rebound in coming months as businesses navigate the U.S.-China trade war, Brexit and slowing global growth
• China’s economy slowed for a seventh straight month in December, as the trade war, subdued domestic demand and decelerating factory inflation combined to undercut growth. That’s the signal from a Bloomberg Economics gauge aggregating the earliest-available indicators on business conditions and market sentiment
• Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte played down the risk of Italy’s huge level of debt as he reaffirmed confidence in his coalition government’s controversial economic policies.
• China will speed up approvals for securities firms and fund-company joint ventures in which foreign investors have majority stakes, a senior official said, another sign that policy makers are pressing ahead with efforts to open up the country’s financial system.
• Japan’s 10-year bond yield fell below zero for the first time since Sept. 2017, as slide in global equities fueled a rally in government debt around the world.

US Event Calendar

• 9:45am: Chicago Purchasing Manager, est. 60.3, prior 66.4
• 10am: Pending Home Sales MoM, est. 1.0%, prior -2.6%
• 10am: Pending Home Sales NSA YoY, prior -4.6%

via RSS http://bit.ly/2QTYuTp Tyler Durden

Ever since the Steele dossier was released, many of its claims have been under dispute. However none of them have been more scrutinized than whether or not Trump Organization lawyer Michael Cohen was traveling to Prague during August 2016 to meet with representatives of Russian intelligence. On Thursday, McClatchy reported, citing four unnamed sources, that a phone traced to Cohen “briefly sent signals ricocheting off cell towers in the Prague area in late summer 2016”.

While some in the media will likely cling to this report as gospel and some type of “smoking gun”, others have been skeptical, noting how easy it could be to clone Cohen’s phone for nefarious purposes.  

According to the Steele dossier, the alleged meet up was for the purposes of “compris[ing] questions on how deniable cash payments were to be made to hackers who had worked in Europe under Kremlin direction against the [Clinton] campaign and various contingencies for covering up these operations and Moscow’s secret liaison with the [Trump] team more generally.”

Defending themselves vehemently, Cohen, Trump and others associated with the president all insisted that he had never even been to Prague once in his entire life. Here is a clip of Cohen stating “I’ve never been to Prague” earlier this year on Hannity. He further goes on to say that he allowed Trump to inspect his passport in order to corroborate his innocence. 

4/ Of course, you can hear it straight from the horse’s mouth- @MichaelCohen212 went on @seanhannity‘s show during the transition- just after @BuzzFeedBen published the dossier on @BuzzFeedNews– to deny the entire thing and ask for an apology. pic.twitter.com/UJd6wA8FzQ

— Justin Hendrix (@justinhendrix) October 10, 2018

This extremely firm and verbose denial has been the cornerstone of doubt and skepticism that has surrounded the dossier since then.

Also of interest, the Daily Mail raised the question of how easy it could be to clone a phone like Cohens, stating that “a Cohen adversary might have obtained the unique digital ID of his phone and put it on another,” which the paper calls “a simple task for the technically inclined.”

Back in April of this year, it was reported that the Mueller team had obtained evidence that Cohen was in fact in Prague. Also reportedly during that period, an Eastern European intelligence agency supposedly electronically surveilled a conversation in which a Russian had stated that Cohen was in Prague. Follow up on the April report has been spotty so far.

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A mysterious blue light rising over Queens Thursday night sowed mass confusion in the metropolis of nearly 9 million people as thousands of city dwellers took to their social media feeds to express fears that the aliens might have finally arrived…only to learn that the source of the light was quite pedestrian.

Adding to the effect, power in nearby homes flickered, the 7 train experienced major service disruptions, Riker’s Island was forced to rely on backup generators and La Guardia airport was plunged into darkness.

According to the NYPD and Con Edison, a few transformers at the Con Ed substation on 20th Avenue and 32nd Street in Astoria tripped and caused a fire at a power, which was described as the source of the eerie blue light. The fire was quickly brought under control, but not before thousands of New Yorkers took to the streets (or social media) to wonder what the hell was going on, NBC News reported.

ADVISORY: The lights you have seen throughout the city appear to have been from a transformer explosion at a Con Ed facility in Queens. The fire is under control, will update as more info becomes available. Follow @fdny, @NYPD114pct and @conedison. pic.twitter.com/fdzQKs1wVV

— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) December 28, 2018

There was a brief electrical fire at our substation on 20th Avenue & 32nd Street in Astoria this evening, which caused a transmission dip in the area. All power lines serving the area are in service and the system is stable. Photo: Michael Friedl, New York Times pic.twitter.com/vq2Ao46rhk

— Con Edison (@ConEdison) December 28, 2018

And for 20 minutes before the NYPD revealed the cause, residents commenting on social media appeared to come to a unanimous conclusion: Aliens.

Is this an alien invasion? pic.twitter.com/ED4G94tQYo

— Emily C. Singer (@CahnEmily) December 28, 2018

hell yeah fam time to get alien murdered https://t.co/cofkE129G3

— julia reinstein 🚡 (@juliareinstein) December 28, 2018

I’ve never seen the Astoria Borealis before in my life. What a shock…. @ConEdison pic.twitter.com/vrMfwkzWOa

— Benjamin Passikoff (@benpassikoff) December 28, 2018

Gozer the Gozerian making landfall in Astoria pic.twitter.com/tzFXnpIbG1

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 28, 2018

Haunting blue-tinged photos and videos flooded social media:

The NYPD and ConEd are still investigating the cause of the fire.

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Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Irony is dead when British state media controllers accuse Russian news outlets RT and Sputnik of “imbalance” over their reporting on the Skripal alleged poisoning affair.

In the past week, Ofcom, the British media watchdog, condemned seven programs aired during March and April this year following the apparent poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury. The Russian outlets may be fined or denied future broadcasting rights in Britain. The latter suggests what the real, ulterior agenda is all about.

It remains a mystery as to what happened exactly to Skripal and his daughter when they reportedly fell ill on March 4 in the famous south of England cathedral town. Neither Sergei nor Julia have been seen in public since, apart from a brief and carefully controlled interview given by Julia to Reuters a few months ago, apparently having recovered from her stricken condition. Russian consular services have been denied access to Julia by the British authorities, despite her being a Russian citizen.

The murkiness of the affair, the flagrant obfuscation by the British authorities and their violation of diplomatic norms speaks of a British state intrigue aimed at provoking international recriminations against Russia. Such is the outrageous apparent skullduggery by the British state, it is arguably very appropriate therefore for critical media coverage of the incident and the subsequent prevarication by London.

However, in a staggering inversion of reality, British media regulators complain that Russian news outlets have broken “impartiality rules” in their reporting on what is a bizarre de facto disappearance of a Russian citizen and her father while in the custody of British authorities. The protagonists are off-limits from criticism; their ropey claims must be treated as the sane version of events.

Within days of the Salisbury incident, senior British officials, including Prime Minister Theresa May, were accusing Russia of an assassination attempt against the Skripals, allegedly with a Soviet-era nerve poison.

London’s narrative inculpating the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin continues, despite Russia’s vehement denial of involvement and despite the lack of independently verifiable evidence.

This week, in her Christmas speech to the nation, premier May again repeated her condemnation of the “nerve agent attack in Salisbury” and she praised British armed forces for “protecting the country’s waters and skies from Russian intrusion”.

So, Russian media are castigated for “bias”, but British media are evidently permitted to report and broadcast official British assertions that are unproven and wildly sensational, if not tantamount to inciting international conflict. Just who is breaking journalistic standards?

Among the news outlets reporting May’s words were the BBC. The government-owned British broadcaster routinely and snidely refers to Russian news outlets RT and Sputnik as “Kremlin-backed”. As if the state-backed BBC is somehow immune from disseminating British government propaganda.

May’s assertions in her Christmas speech about Russia carrying out an alleged assassination and threatening Britain with invasion went unchallenged by the BBC. Nor were her other claims about chemical weapons being used by Syrian government forces against civilians.

On Syria, May was referring to an incident near Damascus in April this year when toxic chlorine was purportedly used in an assault on civilians. Back then, the British prime minister joined with US President Trump and France’s President Macron to order air strikes on Syria, supposedly in retaliation for the Syrian army’s use of chemical weapons. But it soon transpired that the incident was a provocation staged by jihadist militants and their media operatives, the so-called White Helmets. In other words, the British, American and French carried out a criminal act of aggression against Syria under false pretenses.

Yet May in her solemn set-piece nationwide Christmas speech this week was allowed by British media to repeat blatant lies against Syria, and brazenly avoid the issue of justice facing her government over illegal air strikes on Syria, as well as to continue smearing Russia over the murky Skripal affair.

The arrogant hypocrisy of British media and the state regulator is astounding. British citizens are compelled by law to pay an annual license fee of £150 ($190) per household for possessing a television set. Failure to pay can result in a jail sentence. The TV license fee collected by the British state is handed over to the BBC. So, here we have a state-owned media channel that is funded through a compulsory tax on citizens, and yet this same channel willingly broadcasts British government propaganda claims denigrating Russia and covering up for British war crimes in Syria. If that sounds Orwellian, that’s because it is.

The BBC’s corporate advertising claims to be the “world’s leader in breaking global news”. It also assures its listeners and readers that it produces “news you can trust”.

There are countless cases where the BBC’s pompous self-importance can be exposed, revealing an altogether more malevolent purpose. One of the most notorious cases was its complicity in orchestrating the 1953 coup in Iran carried out by the American CIA and Britain’s MI6. In his book, Web of Deceit, British historian Mark Curtis details the crucial role played by the BBC and its Persian service in helping to foment the coup against the elected premier Mohammad Mosaddegh.

More recently, BBC coverage of the war in Syria over the past eight years has been a relentless propaganda assault on the government of President Bashar al Assad. It is not merely about omission or biased distortion. The BBC has been caught out actually fabricating fake news in Syria, such as the case when it accused the Syrian army of using napalm on civilians near Aleppo in 2013. Those reports were later exposed as deliberate fabrications.

More generally on Syria, the BBC, as with other Western news media, are serving as facilitators of the criminal regime-change objective of their governments. May’s grotesque falsehoods reiterated this week – in a Christmas speech of all things! – about chemical weapons are afforded respectability and apparent credibility by the way the BBC and other British outlets dutifully report her words without any qualification, let alone criticism.

It is a measure of how distorted the British media landscape is when alternative news channels which do raise critical viewpoints and insights on propaganda narratives are then accused of being “imbalanced” and “in breach of broadcasting rules”.

In response to Britain’s Ofcom regulator condemning Russia’s RT and Sputnik, Moscow is now saying that its own state regulator is considering filing a case against the BBC and how it operates in Russia. Given how the BBC tried to tie Russia to instigating the Yellow Vest protests in France and how it recently ran an article accusing the Kremlin of “weaponizing satire”, there seems much more credibility to Russian claims that the “British state-backed outlet” is in breach of journalistic standards.

The broader background of how the BBC serves British state propaganda is panoramic in its scope. But such is official British hypocrisy, the authorities attack critical news outlets that happen to expose their propaganda service posing as “news you can trust”.

Free speech in Britain? Yes, as long as you freely speak in the service of British state propaganda.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2GGk2hC Tyler Durden

A study by the Trades Union Congress has found that an average worker in the UK has lost £11,800 since 2008.

As Statista’s Niall McCarthy points out, the TUC said that among leading economies, the UK has suffered the worst real wage slump.

The impact has been more pronounced in different parts of the country with the capital worst hit.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Over the past decade, London workers have seen their real wages fall by £20,000.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2Al5fTS Tyler Durden

Authored by Brendan O’Neill via Spiked-Online.com,

Europeans are in revolt against the political and moral order and it’s wonderful…

The emptiest, dumbest platitude of our time, uttered both by establishment stiffs like the Archbishop of Canterbury and by self-styled radical leftists, is that the 1930s have made a comeback. Treating that dark decade as if it were a sentient force, a still-extant thing, observers from both the worried bourgeoisie and the edgy left insist the Thirties have staggered back to life and have much of the West in their reanimated deathly grip. Looking at Brexit, the European turn against social democracy, the rise of populist parties, and the spread of ‘yellow vest’ revolts, the opinion-forming set sees fascism everywhere, rising zombie-like from its grave, laying to waste the progressive gains of recent decades.

This analysis is about as wrong as an analysis can be. Comparing contemporary political life to events of the past is always an imperfect way of understanding where politics is at. But if we really must search for echoes of today in the past, then it isn’t the 1930s that our era looks and feels like – it’s the 1840s. In particular 1848. That is the year when peoples across Europe revolted for radical political change, starting in France and spreading to Sweden, Denmark, the German states, the Italian states, the Habsburg Empire, and elsewhere. They were democratic revolutions, demanding the establishment or improvement of parliamentary democracy, freedom of the press, the removal of old monarchical structures and their replacement by independent nation states or republics. 1848 is often referred to as the Spring of Nations.

Sound familiar? Of course 2018 has not been as tumultuous as 1848 was. There have been ballot-box protests and street-based revolts but no attempts at actual revolutions. And yet our era also feels like a Spring of Nations. In Europe especially. There are now millions of people across Europe who want to re-establish the ideals of nationhood, of national sovereignty and popular democracy, against what we might view as the neo-monarchical structures of 21st-century technocracy. The sustained gilets jaunes revolts in France capture this well. Here we have an increasingly monarchical ruler – the aloof, self-styled Jupiterian presidency of Emmanuel Macron – being challenged week in, week out by people who want greater say and greater national independence. ‘Macron = Louis 16’, said graffiti in the gilets jaunes-ruled streets during one of their revolts. And we know what happened to him (though in 1793, of course, not 1848).

France’s February Revolution of 1848 – which brought to an end the constitutional monarchy that had been established in 1830 and led to the creation of the Second Republic – was one of the key igniters of the people’s spring that spread through Europe in 1848. Today, likewise, the gilets jaunes revolts have spread. In recent weeks yellow-vest protesters in Belgium have tried to storm the European Commission – an unprecedented event, which got strikingly little media coverage – while yellow vests in the Netherlands have called for a referendum on EU membership and in Italy they have gathered to express support for their Eurosceptic government. That election in Italy was a key event of 2018. Coming in March, it brought to power the League and the Five Star Movement, parties loathed by the EU establishment, and in the process it shattered the delusions that had gripped many European observers following the election of Macron last year – that Macron’s victory represented the fading-away of the populist moment. Italy disproved that, French revolters confirmed it, and local and national elections everywhere from Germany to Sweden added further weight to the fact that the populist revolt is not going away anytime soon.

When you’re in the thick of something, when you’re reading daily reports about the elite’s war on Brexit and seeing tweeted photos of Paris burning and watching as the EU declares political war on the elected government of Italy, it can be hard to appreciate the historic nature of what is going on. Or just the magnitude of it. We all get so bogged down in the ins and outs of the Brexit ‘negotiations’ (in truth there is no real negotiation, but rather mild disagreements between the UK and EU establishments over how Brexit might be most smoothly killed off). We pore over graphs showing the collapse in public support for the old mainstream parties, especially social-democratic ones. We express surprise at the corrosion of consensus politics even in Sweden, that traditionally most consensual of countries. But it can be hard to piece things together and create a bigger picture. We should try to, though, because then we might see that ours really is an era of revolt, of chaos even – but welcome, good, fruitful chaos.

What we have, across Europe, is people calling into question the prevailing political, moral and cultural order. These are not mere economic revolts, even in France, where economic issues have certainly been in the mix. Leftist observers, when they can bring themselves to confront the revolting moment, have tried to reduce the populist uprising to a cry for help by the ‘left behind’ or the ‘economically vulnerable’. The vote for Brexit was really caused by people’s sense of economic insecurity, they claim. Such analysis demeans the populist revolt; it empties it of its genuinely radical character, of its conscious challenge not only to the neoliberalism that is central to the EU project but far more importantly to the cultural norms and political practices of the new elites in 21st-century Europe. To say ‘These people are poor and that’s why they’re angry’ is to rob these people of their radical agency.

In a sense, 2018 is less like 1848 itself and more like the decades that preceded that tumultuous year. These were, in the words of Trygve Tholfsen in his 1977 study of working-class radicalism in the run-up to 1848, ‘hungry decades’ – decades in which disgruntlement and radicalism bristled and grew before exploding in firm demands for change. And though many people were alarmingly poor in these ‘hungry decades’, it wasn’t their ‘immediate deprivation’ that drove them to organise and take action, says Tholfsen; rather, their instinct for revolt was built on ‘solid intellectual foundations’ and it expressed a ‘denial of the legitimacy of the social and political order’. We have something similar today. Yes, Macron’s fuel tax hit people’s pockets; yes, many Brexit voters are less well-off than the Remainer elites; yes, Eurosceptic Italian youths struggle to find work. But their revolts, whether at the ballot box or on the streets, are energised by more than ‘immediate deprivation’ – they are built upon a denial of the legitimacy of the existing political and cultural order.

Brexit captured this: a mass vote in defiance of the political and expert classes who insisted that Euro-technocracy was the onlyrealistic way to organise a continent as large and complicated as Europe. We said no to that. We called into question the legitimacy of this political orthodoxy. France captures it, too. There we have the emergence of a new countercultural movement, though the culture being countered by the gilets jaunes is the culture of the new elites, of the post-1968 generation itself, in fact. The new culture of ideological multiculturalism, technocratic governance, anti-nation-state elitism, environmental diktats – that is what is being countered now, and consciously so, by French revolters. Some even carried placards calling for the creation of a Sixth Republic: an explicit confrontation of the highly centralised, parliament-weakening style of governance of the Fifth Republic, and of the EU too, of course.

So we live, again, in ‘hungry decades’. People are hungering for change, for the alternative that we have been told for 40 years does not exist (‘There is no alternative’, in Thatcher’s infamous words). These hungry years, of which 2018 has been the hungriest yet, should be welcomed, and celebrated, and built upon. It is an open question as to who, if anyone, will shape and lead this hunger. The left cannot, for it has either thrown its lot in with the elitism of the decaying technocracy that sees our populist hunger as a new form of fascism, or it tries to reduce populism to an economic cry, which has the terrible effect of downplaying and even killing off its far more historic and revolting cultural nature. New voices are needed. This hungry revolt is really people searching for a voice; a political, moral voice. In 2019, voices will, we should hope, emerge from this neo-spring of nations.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2ENLzv7 Tyler Durden

French President Emmanuel Macron’s vision for a pan-European army might finally become a reality…in Germany.

According to the BBC, seven years after Germany abandoned conscription, the military of Europe’s largest economy is struggling to fill senior roles, and might need to start hiring non-German soldiers to occupy specialized positions in its armed forces like doctors and IT specialists, said Army general inspector Eberhard Zorn, who noted that Germany is being forced to “look in all directions” as it struggles to fulfill a promise to President Trump to raise its defense spending closer to the NATO-mandated target of 2% of GDP.

The country’s military has been beset by under-investment for years and is presently struggling to expand its armed fighting force by 21,000 people by 2025 and increase its defense budget from 1.2% to to 1.5% of its gross domestic product by 2024. Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen said in an interview on Thursday that Germany now has 182,000 uniformed soldiers, an increase of 6,500 in two years. Within seven years, that number should reach 203,000. Of these, 12% of army recruits are women, and one in three applicants to officer positions are women.

Zorn was careful to point out that non-Germans would only be considered for “specialist” positions.

Gen Zorn told the Funke newspaper group that “of course the Bundeswehr needs personnel” and the army had to “push hard for a suitable new generation”, although EU citizens in uniform were “an option” to be examined only in specialist fields.

The media group said the government had already consulted EU partners and that most had reacted cautiously, particularly in Eastern Europe.

Of course, there’s one slight complication that could create problems for the German military: After World War II, Germany passed a law mandating that soldiers in the German army must be Germans. Suggestions that an exception might be made have been met with scepticism, particularly in Eastern Europe.

Though Hans-Peter Bartels, the member of Parliament responsible with overseeing the German armed services, noted that recruiting EU citizens was already a “kind of normality” as many members of the German army are immigrants or hold dual EU citizenship. Because of these exceptions, more than 900 foreign citizens are already employed by the German military in civilian roles.

And Germany isn’t the only European power hoping to add more non-citizens to the ranks of its military. Last month, the UK said more foreign nationals would be able to join its armed forces to meet a shortfall of 8,200 soldiers, sailors and “air personnel.”

Germany is hoping to have roughly 70% of its military ready for combat at any given time due to the perceived threat from Russia in the Baltics, which recently provoked the largest NATO exercise since the Cold War. Meanwhile, some academics see a 70% chance of a “hot war” erupting between NATO and Russia.

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Authored by Burak Bekdil via The Gatestone Institute,

• In Freedom House’s democracy index, Turkey belongs to the group of “not free” countries, performing worse than “partly free” countries including Mali, Nicaragua and Kenya.

• Just as there cannot be a “not free” member of the EU, there cannot be a member that blatantly ignores rulings of the European Court of Human Rights.

• “I think that, in the long term, it would be more honest for Turkey and the EU to go down new roads and end the accession talks … Turkish membership in the European Union is not realistic in the foreseeable future.” – Johannes Kahn, EU Enlargement Commissioner; interview in Die Welt.

In September 2017, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she will seek an end to talks for Turkish membership in the European Union. Pictured: Merkel and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan meet in Berlin, September 28, 2018. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

When Turkey first applied for full membership in the European Union in 1987, the world was an entirely different place — even the rich club had a different name: the European Economic Community. U.S. President Ronald Reagan had undergone minor surgery; British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had been re-elected for a third term; Macau and Hong Kong were, respectively, Portuguese and British territory; the Berlin Wall was up and running; the demonstrations at the Tiananmen Square were a couple of years away; the Iran-Contra affair was in the headlines; the First Intifada had just begun; and what are today Czech Republic and Slovakia were Czechoslovakia.

In March 2003, just a few months after he was elected Prime Minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that Turkey was “very much ready to be part of the European Union family.”

In October 2005, formal accession negotiations between Turkey and the EU began.

Today, 31 years after the first date, the alliance seems to be broken, with no signs in the foreseeable future of a marriage between two perfectly unsuitable adults. Knowing that, both sides in the past decade have played an unpleasant diplomatic game of pretension: not be the one that throws away the ring. This boring opera buffa is no longer sustainable.

Turkey’s democratic deficit has grown just too bitterly huge to make it compatible with Europe’s democratic culture. According to the advocacy group Freedom House:

“In addition to its dire consequences for detained Turkish citizens, shuttered media outlets, and seized businesses, the chaotic purge has become intertwined with an offensive against the Kurdish minority, which in turn has fueled Turkey’s diplomatic and military interventions in neighboring Syria and Iraq.”

In Freedom House’s democracy index, Turkey belongs to the group of “not free” countries, performing worse than “partly free” countries including Mali, Nicaragua and Kenya. The EU is certainly not a club of the “not free.”

Most recently, a legal dispute between Turkey and the EU highlighted, once again, the huge disparity between the understanding of the rule of law in Turkish and European democratic cultures. This time, Turkey and the EU clashed over the rights of a prominent Kurdish politician who has been in jail on flimsy charges of terror. In a November verdict, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), to which Turkey is a signatory, ruled that Turkey should swiftly process Selahattin Demirtaş’s case; the court said his pre-trial detention had gone on longer than could be justified. A Turkish court, however, ignoring the ECHR’s verdict, ruled against Demirtaş’s release from prison. The Turkish court’s decision was a clear violation of the Article 90 of the Turkish Constitution:

“In the case of a conflict between international agreements in the area of fundamental rights and freedoms duly put into effect and the domestic laws due to differences in provisions on the same matter, the provisions of international agreements shall prevail.”

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Cavuşoğlu described the ECHR ruling as motivated by politics, not the law, and asserted that the case would be determined by Turkey’s courts.

Just as there cannot be a “not free” member of the EU, there cannot be a member that blatantly ignores ECHR’s rulings.

Fortunately, there have been signs from Brussels that the “show must not go on.” In April 2017, the European Parliament called for a formal suspension of Turkey’s EU membership bid, which was already effectively frozen. In September 2017, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she will seek an end to Turkey’s membership talks.

More recently, in November, the official overseeing the EU’s future enlargement said that, in the long term, it would be “more honest” for the bloc to give up talks on membership for Turkey. EU Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Kahn toldGerman daily Die Welt, “I think that, in the long term, it would be more honest for Turkey and the EU to go down new roads and end the accession talks … Turkish membership in the European Union is not realistic in the foreseeable future.” Kahn’s was honest talk, calling a cat a cat.

In fact, a month earlier than Kahn’s comments, President Erdoğan proposed a most realistic solution – although not for reasons of honesty, but merely for pre-election bluffing. Evidently he is signalling exasperation with the election process. Erdogan seems to be trying to appeal to the EU-weary, nationalistic voters ahead of Turkey’s municipal elections on March 31, 2019 that Europe’s reluctance to let Turkey into the EU is based, supposedly, on “Islamophobla”. In an October speech, Erdoğan said he would consider putting Turkey’s long-stalled bid to join the EU to a referendum.

Good idea, assuming that Turkey’s most popular ever leader should campaign for Leave (the negotiations). All the same, as always, Erdoğan was bluffing, in a seeming effort to remind EU’s leaders of Turkey’s “strategic value” for Europe. At the same time, he was playing the tough man to his usually xenophobic, conservative voter base that has grown weary of being humiliated by ‘infidel Europe.’

This author believes that there should be simultaneous EU and Turkish referenda asking the Europeans if they endorse an eventual Turkish membership, and at the same time asking the Turks whether they want to drop their bid to join. A “No” vote triumphing in either referendum should suffice formally to end Turkey’s membership process; two “Yes” votes would mean the show must go on, that the audience is happy with the opera buffa.

The unconvincing pretention that Turkey should be “kept at bay” for strategic reasons is dishonest.

“Pulling the plug” is honest but probably not practical one: no one will wish to take that historic responsibility. In addition, polling numbers suggest a decline in Turkish public opinion for membership. On the other side, in the EU, the sympathy for Turkish membership is dramatically lower than in previous years. Support for Turkey’s entrance, for instance, is at 8% in France, 5% in Germany, 8% in the UK, 5% in Denmark, 7% in Sweden and 5% in Finland. There is no way the EU average could surpass the 50% threshold.

So, let the club members and the applicant decide on a membership bid for a marriage that will never work.

via RSS http://bit.ly/2Tkr2T1 Tyler Durden