- Escobar: Rewiring Eurasia – Mr. Patrushev Goes To Tehran…
Escobar: Rewiring Eurasia – Mr. Patrushev Goes To Tehran…
Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,
The meeting this week between two Eurasian security bosses is a further step toward dusting away the west’s oversized Asian footprint…
Two guys are hanging out in a cozy room in Tehran with a tantalizing new map of the world in the background.
Nothing to see here? On the contrary. These two Eurasian security giants are no less than the – unusually relaxed – Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev and Ali Shamkhani, the Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council.
And why are they so relaxed? Because the future prospects revolving around the main theme of their conversation – the Russia-Iran strategic partnership – could not be more exciting.
This was a very serious business affair: an official visit, at the invitation of Shamkhani.
Patrushev was in Tehran on the exact same day that Russian Minister of Defense Sergey Shoigu – following a recommendation from General Sergey Surovikin, the overall commander of the Special Military Operation – ordered a Russian retreat from Kherson.
Patrushev knew it for days – so he had no problem to step on a plane to take care of business in Tehran. After all, the Kherson drama is part of the Patrushev negotiations with US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Ukraine, which have been going on for weeks, with Saudi Arabia as eventual go-between.
Besides Ukraine, the two discussed “information security, as well as measures to counter interference in the internal affairs of both countries by western special services,” according to a report by Russia’s TASS news agency.
Both countries, as we know, are particular targets of western information warfare and sabotage, with Iran currently the focus of one of these no-holds-barred, foreign-backed, destabilization campaign.
Patrushev was officially received by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, who went straight to the point: “The cooperation of independent countries is the strongest response to the sanctions and destabilization policies of the US and its allies.”
Patrushev, for his part, assured Raisi that for the Russian Federation, strategic relations with Iran are essential for Russian national security.
So that goes way beyond Geranium-2 kamikaze drones – the Russian cousins of the Shahed-136 – wreaking havoc in the Ukrainian battlefield. Which, by the way, elicited a direct mention later on by Shamkhani: “Iran welcomes a peaceful settlement in Ukraine and is in favor of peace based on dialogue between Moscow and Kiev.”
Patrushev and Shamkhani of course discussed security issues and the proverbial “cooperation in the international arena.” But what may be more significant is that the Russian delegation included officials from several key economic agencies.
There were no leaks – but that suggests serious economic connectivity remains at the heart of the strategic partnership between the two top sanctioned nations in Eurasia.
Key in the discussions was the Iranian focus on fast expansion of bilateral trade in national currencies – ruble and rial. That happens to be at the center of the drive by both the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and BRICS towards multipolarity. Iran is now a full SCO member – the only West Asian nation to be part of the Asian strategic behemoth – and will apply to become part of BRICS+.
Have swap, will travel
The Patrushev-Shamkhani get together happened ahead of the signing, next month, of a whopping $40 billion energy deal with Gazprom, as previously announced by Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mahdi Safari.
The National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) has already clinched an initial $6.5 billion deal. All that revolves around the development of two gas deposits and six oilfields; swaps in natural gas and oil products; LNG projects; and building more gas pipelines.
Last month, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Novak announced a swap of 5 million tons of oil and 10 billion cubic meters of gas, to be finished by the end of 2022. And he confirmed that “the amount of Russian investment in Iran’s oil fields will increase.”
Barter of course is ideal for Moscow and Tehran to jointly bypass interminably problematic sanctions and payment settlement issues – linked to the western financial system. On top of it, Russia and Iran are able to invest in direct trade links via the Caspian Sea.
At the recent Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) summit in Astana, Kazakhstan, Raisi forcefully proposed that a successful “new Asia” must necessarily develop an endogenous model for independent states.
As an SCO member, and playing a very important role, alongside Russia and India, in the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), Raisi is positioning Iran in a key vector of multilateralism.
Since Tehran entered the SCO, cooperation with both Russia and China, predictably, is on overdrive. Patrushev’s visit is part of that process. Tehran is leaving behind decades of Iranophobia and every possible declination of American “maximum pressure” – from sanctions to attempts at color revolution – to dynamically connect across Eurasia.
BRI, SCO, INSTC
Iran is a key Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) partner for China’s grand infrastructure project to connect Eurasia via road, sea, and train. In parallel, the multimodal Russian-led INSTC is essential to promote trade between the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia – at the same time solidifying Russia’s presence in the South Caucasus and the Caspian Sea region.
Iran and India have committed to offer part of Chabahar port in Iran to Central Asian nations, complete with access to exclusive economic zones.
At the recent SCO summit in Samarkand, both Russia and China made it quite clear – especially for the collective west – that Iran is no longer going to be treated as a pariah state.
So it is no wonder Iran that is entering a new business era with all members of the SCO under the sign of an emerging financial order being designed mostly by Russia, China and India. As far as strategic partnerships go, the ties between Russia and India (President Narendra Modi called it an unbreakable friendship) is as strong as those between Russia and China. And when it comes to Russia, that’s what Iran is aiming at.
The Patrushev-Shamkhani strategic meeting will hurl western hysteria to unseen levels – as it completely smashes Iranophobia and Russophobia in one fell swoop. Iran as a close ally is an unparalleled strategic asset for Russia in the drive towards multipolarity.
Iran and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) are already negotiating a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in parallel to those swaps involving Russian oil. The west’s reliance on the SWIFT banking messaging system hardly makes any difference to Russia and Iran. The Global South is watching it closely, especially in Iran’s neighborhood where oil is commonly traded in US dollars.
It is starting to become clear to anyone in the west with an IQ above room temperature that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal), in the end, does not matter anymore. Iran’s future is directly connected to the success of three of the BRICS: Russia, China and India. Iran itself may soon become a BRICS+ member.
There’s more: Iran is even becoming a role model for the Persian Gulf: witness the lengthy queue of regional states aspiring toward gaining SCO membership. The Trumpian “Abraham Accords?” What’s that? BRICS/SCO/BRI is the only way to go in West Asia today.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/12/2022 – 23:20 - These Are The World's Biggest Employers
These Are The World’s Biggest Employers
No company in the world has more employees than Walmart.
The latest information from the U.S. retail giant put the figure at a massive 2.30 million. Not even the behemoth that is Amazon comes close, despite being in second place with a 1.61 million-strong workforce. As Statista’s Martin Armstrong shows in the inforgraphic below though, there’s one sector that apparently needs even more manpower than retail, and that’s defense.
You will find more infographics at Statista
At the top of the ranking for the world’s largest employers is India’s Ministry of Defence. Combining active service personnel, reservists and civilian staff, the total headcount comes to 2.99 million – a touch ahead of the United States equivalent, the Department of Defense.
In China, the People’s Liberation Army (which doesn’t include civilian positions) employs around 2.55 million people.
The Chinese equivalent of the U.S. Department of Defense, the Central Military Commission may have as many as 6.80 million people in its employment, though that figure was not deemed sufficiently reliable to be included in this list.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/12/2022 – 22:50 - The Decline of the West: Spengler In Today's World
The Decline of the West: Spengler In Today’s World
Authored by Oscar Silva-Valladares via The Ron Paul Institute,
Timelessness of thought and vision in world politics is a rare mark of grandeur. Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, written a century ago, deserves this distinction as it reads like it was done yesterday.
The German historian-philosopher wrote in 1922 that the centuries old West-European-American civilization was in permanent and irretrievable decline in all manifestations of life including religion, art, politics, social life, economy and science. For him, the political, social and ideological dimensions of this decline were evident in the failings of the Western political class in both sides of the Atlantic. He saw politicians, mostly based in large cities, consumed by ideology and contempt towards silent majorities and described them as “a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, and deeply contemptuous of the countryman.” Nowadays the Brussels-based European Union (EU) leadership, through their recurring disdain for nation sovereignty, fully befits this definition.
Spengler believed that decadence in politics means predominance of ideology over action.
“Men of theory commit a huge mistake in believing that their place is at the head and not in the train of great events” he wrote, unaware about how true this is today as we just saw the fall of UK Prime Minister Truss who sacrificed economics in the altar of ideology. Dogma destroying social cohesion and prosperity is also present in the wrecking of Europe’s manufacturing competitiveness as their politicians forcibly deny cheap Russian energy or when Lilliputian Lithuania picks a fight with China in defence of Taiwan’s “sovereignty.” On the face of these events the German thinker would have repeated his assertion that “the political doctrinaire … always knows what should be done, and yet his activity, once it ceases to be limited to paper, is the least successful and therefore the least valuable in history.”
When we listen to the German Minister of Economic Affairs Harbeck or his Foreign Affairs counterpart Baerbock lecturing on the primacy of the green agenda or on how Ukraine military support needs to continue regardless of what voters think, we can’t help remembering the writer’s damning query:
“[have they] any idea whatever of the actualities of world-politics, world-city problems, capitalism, the future of the state, the relation of technics to the course of civilization, Russia, Science?.”
The “rules-based international order,” that Western axiom born out of post-Cold War euphoria and used to justify US-led hegemonism, reminds us the writer’s aphorism that “nothing is simpler than to make good poverty of ideas by founding a system”. “Even a good idea has little value when enunciated by a solemn ass” comes to mind when we hear the European Commission President von der Leyen or the EU Foreign Affairs Head Borrell repeat the same mantra. “In politics, only its necessity to life decides the eminence of any doctrine,” something that has been forgotten as Europe blindly follows the US in an economic war that is ruining the continent.
On the East-West confrontation, concerning China, Spengler highlighted Western politicians’ traditional lack of understanding of the main drivers of Chinese thinking which have to do with a 4000-year view of history and of their place in the world, as compared to the Western narrow timeframe absorbed by events that took place since 1500. Western self-contained perception of history negates world’s history, he says, adding that world-history, in the Western eyes, is our world picture and not all mankind’s.
American exceptionalism, the dangerous notion that US values, political system and history destines it to play the world’s leading role, was questioned when he pointed out that there are as many morals as there are Cultures, no more and no fewer, and that each Culture possesses its own standard, the validity of which begins and ends with it, a statement that explains the need for a multipolar world. As much as has become politically correct to criticize Nietzsche’s ideas after his appropriation by Nazi ideology, Spengler affirmed that Nietzsche’s basic concept of will of power is essential to Western civilization, and this is consistent with the Western belief on the superiority of its values and the need to impose them on other cultures. “Western mankind is under the influence of an immense optical illusion. Everyone demands something of the rest. We say “thou shalt” in the conviction that so-and-so in fact will, can and must be changed or fashioned or arranged conformably to the order, and our belief both in the efficacy of, and in our title to give, such orders is unshakable.”
Money, politics and the press play an intimate role in Western civilization, declares Spengler. In politics, money “nurses” the democratic process particularly during elections, as is the recurring US case. The press serves him who owns it and it does not spread “free” opinion – it generates it. “What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears.” On freedom of the press, we are reminded that it is permitted to everyone to say what he or she pleases, but the Press is free to take notice of what he or she says or not. The Press can condemn any “truth” to death simply by not undertaking its communication to the world – “a terrible censorship of silence which is all the more potent in that the masses of newspaper readers are absolutely unaware that it exists.”
Striking parallels exist between today’s poverty in US cities and his observation of Rome at the time of Crassus, who as a real-estate speculator also recalls Donald Trump. In Rome, people are portrayed as living “in appalling misery in the many-storied lodging-houses of dark suburbs”, a misfortune directly linked to the consequences of Roman military expansionism and which suggests current conditions in Detroit, Cleveland or Newark.
The Decline of the West was first read as the epilogue of World War I, the war that ended all wars. Hopefully it will not be read in today’s world as the introduction of a new calamity.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/12/2022 – 22:20 - Visualizing India's Population Growth From 2022-2100
Visualizing India’s Population Growth From 2022-2100
For years, India has been on track to overtake China as the world’s most populated country.
In fact, we’ve covered this phenomenon in past articles, back when India was expected to overtake China’s population by the end of the decade.
However, as Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang notes, according to the UN’s latest population prospects, this takeover is projected to happen sooner than previously expected—as early as next year.
This graphic by Pablo Alvarez provides an up-to-date chart of India’s population growth projections compared to other countries. Projection data from Our World in Data ranges from 1800 all the way to until 2100.
Some Historical Context
For over three centuries, China has had the largest population of any country in the world.
In the 1800s, China’s population was about 322 million, which was nearly double India’s at the time. And until the mid-20th century, both countries’ populations stayed relatively stable.
However, in 1949, China’s population started to experience dramatic growth. This occurred after the Chinese Civil War when the People’s Republic of China was first established.
Around the same time, India’s population had also started to increase. Since both countries were experiencing population booms, the status quo remained the same, and China kept its position as the world’s most populated country.
China’s baby boom lasted two decades. But by the late 1970s, the Chinese government implemented a one-child policy in an attempt to slow things down and control population growth, out of fear that China was becoming overpopulated.
The plan worked—according to China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission spokesman Mao Qunan, the government’s efforts ended up reducing the number of births over the years by roughly 400 million.
China’s Population is Aging Faster Than India’s
These days, China has one of the most rapidly aging populations in the world. By 2040, it’s expected that 28% of the country’s population will be over the age of 60.
In contrast, India’s population is relatively young—half of its population is under 30, and only an eighth is over 60.
Does this mean that India’s GDP will eventually outpace China’s? Not necessarily.
As quoted in an article published in Business Standard, Madan Sabnavis, Chief Economist of the Bank of Baroda says that India needs to increase its labor participation, as well as general access to education, in order to reap the benefits of its increasing working-age population.
As of 2022, India’s workforce participation rate sits at 46%, compared to China’s 68%. How will this change in the future?
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/12/2022 – 21:50 - Are Robots And AI Really Going To Displace All Workers? Probably Not
Are Robots And AI Really Going To Displace All Workers? Probably Not
Authored by Robert Blumen via The Mises Institute,
Among the components of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset are a drastically reduced population and the replacement of human labor with robots and artificial intelligence (AI). The question immediately comes to mind: can robots and AI really make all the stuff for the elites after they have gotten rid of the people?
Because a plan has been formulated and described does not mean that it is possible to realize. The plan may contradict laws of logic or reality, or assume the existence of resources that do not exist.
Podcaster and journalist James Delingpole, speaking to investigative journalist Whitney Webb on October 23, 2021, discussed this topic with his guest. I have transcribed several minutes from their conversation, edited for concision:
Webb: The fourth industrial revolution. One of the main pillars of that is automation and artificial intelligence. We’ve already seen that with corporate behemoths, like Amazon’s efforts to replace human workers with robots. Starbucks is piloting their AI barista with plans to have at least one in most if not all locations…. How long until humans are gone entirely? That’s in a retail setting.
In the UK Tesco recently joined the cashier less checkout. It’s all done on your phone. You scan when you enter the store. Everything is tied to you, your unique digital identifier with the corporation. You can just walk out of the store. How convenient that you didn’t have to walk by a cashier at all.
We’re going to see this happen in big ways in manufacturing. Chile is one of the biggest producers of copper in the world. In the northern part of Chile, the economy is driven by mining…. They are automating the mining here [in Chile]. Most of Chile’s middle class in the north work in the mining industry. They are about to all be cut out….
It’s infinitely more profitable for a corporation to make an initial investment in a robot or an AI algorithm than to continuously pay a worker. Not have to deal with sick pay. There are efforts all over the world to demand better worker benefits. Better hours. Robots are the ultimate worker for a lot of these people because they are not interested in the human equation of things. There is a move to a human-free future coupled with anti-human rhetoric.
The substitution of machines for human labor is a process that has been going on since the first industrial revolution. A considerable amount of manufacturing is already done by robots. But does it matter if a machine is a robot or not? Telecommunications switches connect calls that used to be done by telephone operators. We do not identify these machines as robots (perhaps because they do not have a recognizable torso and limbs or perhaps because they perform their work on data rather than physical objects) but the impact on the demand for labor to perform those tasks is the same.
Contrary to Webb, it is not “infinitely more profitable” for a corporation to use an AI-powered robot in place of a person. Profitability is a calculation that depends on the price of the robot, the productivity of the robot, the wages of the person and the productivity of the human worker.
The substitution of capital for labor makes economic sense when the cost of the capital goods per unit value of output—including paying for the entire supply chain—is less than the wages of the person that is replaced.
Yes, workers are paid wages. However, robots and other machines are themselves not free goods. They must be designed, tested, and maintained. They are made of many parts which must be manufactured and transported. The manufacturing process is performed by some combination of people and other machines. The parts are ultimately made from materials that are mostly mined or extracted from the earth, also by men and machines.
Workers prefer better working conditions over worse. And for machines as well there are optimal working conditions. A truck that is driven on poor roads in bad weather will wear out or break down more quickly. Computers need a carefully tuned environment that is temperature and humidity controlled. Computer servers are housed in a complex capital good known as a “data center.”
The wages that are required to hire the workers are determined on the labor market, by the various competing uses for each person’s skills. If the cost of the robot is less than the worker, that is only because their labor is more urgently demanded doing something else. There is a greater need for human labor somewhere else in the world.
AI itself is not inexpensive. Building and running AI requires engineering effort and computing resources such as networks, servers, and storage. AI models are trained by data that must originate with the same human intelligence that the AI is trying to reproduce. If you want to train AI to recognize photographs of cats, someone must have taken the photographs and classified them as cats or “not cats” so that the AI can be validated. If the photos come from security cameras, someone must have installed the cameras.
After the model is built it must be maintained. AI models do not run perfectly forever. They must be monitored for drift, and it requires a human to determine if the drift is due to an error in the ingestion of data, such as a change in units, or a true change in the customer preferences that the model is trying to extract. In the latter case, the model must be retrained on a new data set.
Modern computer systems are built with some degree of self-diagnosing and self-repairing abilities. But the automation must punt all but the most straightforward cases into a call for help that brings a human into the process. Humans are necessary to diagnose problems and restore service when something has gone wrong.
The manufacture of machines such as robots requires a complex structure of production with perhaps tens of thousands of individual parts. Each part must be designed—by a person—manufactured and integrated with the other parts. The integrations, including isolating manufacturing defects, must be tested, and debugged.
Parts are transported by industries such as shipping and trucking. All of these steps involve combinations of labor and capital goods. It is true that people take sick days, however, machines break, wear out, and, and require repairs. The humans who repair the machines also have kids and take sick days. If you need to send the robot out for service, a mover will pack it up and load it on a truck. Self-driving cars? Maybe someday, but not any day soon.
Robots and made out of metals, which are mined out of the ground. Mineral deposits are not straightforward to find, to delineate and to mine. The discovery and extraction of mineral resources is a tremendously high-intellect activity. A small number of exploration geologists—many with doctoral degrees in fields such as geology and geophysics—have discovered a disproportionate fraction of mineable mineral deposits. Without labor, where would the metals come from to build the robots?
Someone like Webb might respond that robots will replace all of these functions as well. And some day, they might. However, the replacement of humans by machines for one task creates a need for labor—with different skills—to operate the machines. That is why we now have jobs for truckers, power plant operators, and machinists instead of wood cutters.
If miners were replaced with robots—how much labor would be required to build the robots including the entire supply chain, transportation, and the energy used to run them? It’s hard to say but a fraction of the impact would be shifts in the type of employment.
Has the substitution of capital for human labor over the centuries since the industrial revolution has reduced overall employment? Not so much. We have far more need for labor now because we have accumulated so much capital and require more labor to operate it. The human population has increased—in lockstep with the demand for human labor—because we are so much more productive with our enormous legacy of capital goods that we can support much more population.
Replacing the most routine and repeatable human labor with machines creates demand for the currently irreplaceable types of labor: creativity and problem-solving skills. It is true that boundaries of what machines can do expands over time. For example, voice recognition, which used to be quite poor, now handles a range of accents much better. However, AI is still at a point where it can at best replicate human learning by observing many samples created by humans. But for anyone who has tried to change their airline ticket by talking to a chat bot, it is clear that AI is at present limited to a standardized set of tasks.
As we can afford it, out of our accumulated savings, capitalists will continue to invest in robots and other forms of automation to replace workers. When this results in cost savings, that means more output at a lower cost, and a rising standard of living. As certain goods become cheaper to manufacture, workers can demand other, new and different goods and services, which feeds the indirect demand for labor in those industries.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/12/2022 – 21:20 - Binance Dominates Crypto Exchange Landscape
Binance Dominates Crypto Exchange Landscape
Despite crypto evangelists describing the current situation in the cryptocurrency market as just another dip, the phenomenon known as crypto winter has real and possibly lasting consequences for one of the more volatile finance sectors. As Statista’s Florian Zandt details below, since May 2022, 38 companies in the crypto industry have laid off employees, among them crypto exchanges BitMEX and Coinbase, crypto service providers Crypto.com and Blockchain.com as well as NFT marketplace OpenSea.
Now, 130 companies in the FTX Group owning the crypto exchange FTX have officially filed for bankruptcy due to a liquidity crunch caused by several factors. The chief reasons cited were increased user withdrawals starting November 6 and the revelation that Alameda Research, a company in the FTX Group, had a significant portion of its holdings in FTX’s own FTT coin. Following this discovery, rival company Binance divested its FTT holdings, which caused the coin’s value to fall drastically. According to now-resigned Chief Executive Sam Bankman-Fried, the company would have needed $9.4 billion to stave off collapse. As Statista’s chart shows, the default of FTX could hurt a shaky-kneed crypto industry even further.
You will find more infographics at Statista
When looking at the year-to-date trading volume on the biggest crypto exchanges as aggregated by analysts at The Block, FTX ranks fourth behind Coinbase and OKX. No single exchange even comes close to Binance’s trade volume though, with transactions amounting to $4.6 trillion between January and November 11. Its market leader position allowed Binance to be one of the first companies offering to bail out FTX, but the deal fell through as quickly as it was announced. “As a result of corporate due diligence, as well as the latest news reports regarding mishandled customer funds and alleged U.S. agency investigations, we have decided that we will not pursue the potential acquisition of FTX.com”, the company announced on Twitter on November 9.
FTX’s scrambling to save its business and cryptocurrency valuations further careening downhill also caused U.S. lawmakers concern with calls for tighter regulations of crypto getting louder. “It is crucial that our financial watchdogs look into what led to FTX’s collapse so we can fully understand the misconduct and abuses that took place,” said Senate Banking Committee Chair Sherrod Brown. U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee chair Debbie Stabenow echoed that sentiment and added: “It is time for Congress to act. The Committee remains committed to advancing the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act to bring necessary safeguards to the digital commodities market.”
CZ is the king of crypto…
Given the chart above, let’s hope there’s nothing afoot at Binance.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/12/2022 – 20:50 - Much Ado About Nothing
Much Ado About Nothing
Authored by Todd Hayen via Off-Guardian.org,
Do any of you think we are over-reacting? I don’t think so, but the sheep-folk certainly do. They claim they are willing to let bygones be bygones and just put it all in the past and get on with life.
I am sure everyone reading this is aware of the bombshell editorial The Atlantic dropped recently with their amnesty nonsense. I don’t think I have been more livid reading an article since the days of seeing piece after piece about how effective masks are against viral transmission.
I won’t comment on The Atlantic blather directly here, as there have been many fine responses to it, but wow, what a piece. So typical of a bully trying to pretend he loved his victims all along when he knows he is cornered and about to be punished. One last punch disguised as a kiss.
I just got back from a little cruise. Major ports were Barcelona, Rome, Florence, Monaco, and a smattering of little French and Italian hideaways. I had mixed feelings about going, but realized that if this tsunami we all see coming a few miles off the shore has the potential of wiping out most travel in the foreseeable future, I figured I might as well get something in before the onslaught.
It was nice in a lot of ways, as would be expected, but in other ways unusually disconcerting. For one thing, very, very few people had masks, and thus there was a palatable scent in the air of “Covid is a thing of the past.”
One would think this was a good thing, but instead it exuded a very clear vibe of denial.
Oddly enough, not wearing masks, and believing Covid to be over, to me is just another example of compliance to authority.
I know that seems a stretch, but if Covid were real, coupled with the truth that the vaccines do not work, and we were told again and again that there would be no natural herd immunity without a working vaccine, and we still hear of infections rising, variants being created, and hospitals becoming over crowded, why would people think the disease just died and disappeared? The reason is because we were told it was over.
We were told we suddenly didn’t need masks, that we could party with friends, vaxxed or unvaxxed, that we could gather in huge crowds, get on cruise ships (no one even cared that I was unvaccinated.) We were told what was true, what was real and what to worry or not worry about. And like sheep, most people blindly followed.
So shouldn’t I be happy? If I were, it would be for all of the wrong reasons. It is true we are all happy when the slave owner puts down the whip. Whip or not, however, we are still slaves.
I, too, bask in the sun of my controlled freedom—I went on a cruise didn’t I? After two years of not being “allowed to”—so I am just as guilty of this sort of compliance. I am one step closer to truth though; I know this offer of freedom is a tactic, a ploy, and a ruse.
I’ll take a scrap of bread when it is offered, but I will not succumb to complacency and forgive my master for his cruelty when he behaves, albeit for just a moment, as my friend. Most everyone else seems fine to let bygones be bygones.
I am not, and I suspect most of you reading this are not as well.
The great danger I see here in the masses just carrying on in complacent forgiveness is that they are encouraged to stay blind. Surely if they speak out against the atrocities that the world has experienced over the past three years they would quickly be categorized as a trouble maker, a pariah, and a misfit.
“Just get over it, man, it’s all over.”
Is it? No, of course not, you and I know that, and it is all still going on in various ways under the covers now, in the dark recesses of the culture: persecutions, continued efforts to vaccinate, and particularly vaccinate children, warnings of an “upcoming dark winter” where restrictions will come back into the mainstream. On and on, you know what I am speaking of.
However, the mass attitude now, as per The Atlantic piece, is “nothing all that much really happened.”
No one died unnecessarily due to the Covid response, no one got sick, no one lost their job or their livelihood, no one suffered socially (particularly children wearing masks in school), no one suffered educationally, nothing bad really happened.
If you are still pissed about all that DID happen, then you are overreacting…much ado about nothing.
So get over it, forget and forgive.
Not everyone on the world has read that article, but what I saw in Europe, it seems that most people, at least on physical observation, are basically taking on that attitude.
It breaks my heart.
I think about the countless mothers sitting by their children in countless hospitals nurturing them through a totally unprecedented heart incident.
I think of the countless families standing together at the funeral of a loved one, dead prematurely from a heart attack, blood clotting, or cancer—cause unknown, unless you want to apply the newly created diagnoses, “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome.” What the hell is that?
A novel disease and now a common cause of death? Easy peasy explanation, eh? I think of the countless numbers of people suffering from a myriad of strange afflictions, which suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
I think again of countless people having suffered unconscionably, and pointlessly, after losing their jobs, their businesses, their life savings, and their livelihood—the countless children with lower IQs, and those who have suffered social retardation due to the mask mandates, social distancing, and mandatory online teaching at home with no socialization at all.
I could write 100 pages describing all of this—but most people don’t know, and if they do, don’t care, or just attribute all of this horror to the “cost of living—some are lucky in life, some are not.”
During my recent cruise not a word was uttered about any of this, thousands of people were encountered walking the streets of Rome, Florence, Barcelona, all laughing, eating, drinking, playing. While just beneath their feet, hidden a foot underground, there are skulls and bones of the fallen—all forgotten, and the perpetrators all forgiven.
When I was occasionally shaken from my self-induced and compliant vacation reverie, my heart ached talking to all of the young vibrant crewmembers on our ship.
I would hear of their plans to be married, create families, further their careers and live fully their vibrant lives—followed with the admission that they all had to be vaccinated to get their current jobs on the ship.
What really lies ahead for these beautiful children of God so innocent and full of life? I would shake my head, “maybe none of this is true, and maybe I am making more of it than it really is. Maybe they are right, and it really wasn’t that bad, just a mistake made here and there that we really could get over. It is all fine…let’s move on.”
Then a bone cracks under my foot—just a few inches from the surface of awareness—the truth. And I slip back into reality.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/12/2022 – 20:20 - Eerie Similarities Between Democratic Party And Chinese Communist Party Lingo
Eerie Similarities Between Democratic Party And Chinese Communist Party Lingo
Authored by Stu Cvrk via The Epoch Times,
The brilliant former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was once quoted as saying, “Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn’t change.” That is absolutely true, but the meanings of commonly understood words are frequently corrupted, represented, or obfuscated by nefarious people.
Both the Chinese Communist Party and the U.S. Democratic Party are masters at obfuscating language to achieve their political objectives. There are even some interesting similarities in certain aspects of messaging by both parties.
Let us explore the thesis.
Democracy
In order to convey a false sense of the legitimacy, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-ruled government Xi Jinping regularly opines about the crackpot term “whole people’s democracy,” which is then endlessly repeated in the echo chamber of state-run Chinese media. The concept is absurd because there is no such thing as genuine democracy in a one-party dictatorship in which only CCP-approved candidates occupy positions across all levels of government.
The report presented by Xi during the recently concluded 20th National Congress of the CCP included a new slogan that embellishes “whole people’s democracy”: acting for people, relying on people. This is simply more twisted gobbledygook, as the CCP has been “acting for the people” without regard to any democratically-obtained input from the Chinese people since the communist regime took power in 1949.
Red Guard members wave copies of Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book” during a parade in Beijing on June 1, 1966. (Jean Vincent/AFP via Getty Images)
The Democratic Party, too, has an odd definition of democracy. Throughout the 2022 election campaign, one of the key pillars of the Democrats’ election narrative has been the imperative to “save our democracy.” Joe Biden attempted to close the political sale on Nov. 2 in a speech devoted almost entirely to condemning “extreme Republicans” and urging voters to “preserve democracy” by electing Democrats, as reported by the New York Post here.
Coupled with the continuing Biden administration’s weaponizing of federal agencies against perceived political opponents (e.g., arresting peaceful anti-abortion activists, suppressing political speech, and refocusing on the investigation and prosecution over various “domestic terrorists” like the J6 protestors), Biden’s naked political appeal is akin to the CCP’s ongoing efforts to perpetuate a one-party state. After all, “saving our democracy” is a thinly veiled slogan whose real meaning is to save the Democrats, not the democratic actions of Americans who are poised to sweep the Democratic Party out of political power, as noted here by The Epoch Times.
Democrats would apparently like to “act for people and rely on people” by encouraging voters to support a one-party Democrat-run state analogous to communist China!
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, alongside House Democrats, holds the CHIPS for America Act, providing domestic semiconductor manufacturers with billions in subsidies to cut reliance on foreign sourcing, after signing it during an enrollment ceremony outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington on July 29, 2022. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Political Purges
Xi Jinping completed a political purge of former leader Hu Jintao and his faction of the CCP during the 20th Party Congress. In a shocking display, Hu was frog-marched out of the Congress during an obviously staged event intended to convey to the assembled CCP apparatchiks and the rest of the world that Xi is completely in charge. Besides Xi, the six other standing members of the newly-appointed 20th Politburo are all Xi allies and confidants, as are the members of the new Central Military Commission. Enter the era of complete unanimity of CCP thoughts and deeds, and a return to Mao-style authoritarianism—and a very dangerous time for the Chinese people and the world in general.
Young Red Guards brandish copies of Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book” in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The Red Guards rampaged through Chinese towns, terrorizing people, particularly the elderly. (Jean Vincent/AFP via Getty Images)
Chinese people demonstrate during the “great proletarian Cultural Revolution” in front of the French embassy in Beijing on January 1967. Protesters show symbols of the Revolution such as the portrait of Mao Zedong, banners, and the book “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung.” Since the cultural revolution was launched in May 1966 at Beijing University, Mao’s aim was to recapture power after the failure of the “Great Leap Forward.” The movement was directed against those “Party leaders in authority taking the capitalist road.” (Jean Vincent/AFP via Getty Images)
A Chinese man stands alone to block a line of tanks heading east on Beijing’s Avenue of Eternal Peace during the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 5, 1989. (Jeff Widener/AP Photo)
The Democratic Party is deep into conducting its own political purge of the “Republican faction” from the greater U.S. polity: suppress dissent, redesignate political dissenters as “domestic terrorists,” and refocus federal law enforcement on political crimes. The actions involve silencing and canceling the political speech of those who dissent from Democrat political orthodoxy. For example, the Department of Homeland Security has embarked on an “expansive effort” to influence Big Tech and social media giants, as reported here and revealed through analysis of “years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents—obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents.”
Misinformation and disinformation are now apparently what the Democrats and bureaucratic allies deem them to be, despite the public outcry that deep-sixed (at least temporarily) the DHS’s “Disinformation Governance Board” earlier this year. Never mind the First Amendment that protects all political speech. Democrats know better than the Founders did!
The Biden administration has loosened the definition of “domestic terrorists” to smear, attack, and investigate J6 protestors, those who question the adherence to due process during the 2020 election, and vocal “America First” supporters.
Several hundred J6 protestors have been pursued vigorously for nearly two years, while thousands of violent antifa and BLM rioters (politically supported by many Democrats, as noted here) have been virtually ignored by the Democrat-controlled DOJ and FBI. The FBI targeted True the Vote after alleged election-related crimes by Chinese-owned Konnech Corporation. And after years of lies about now-dismissed Trump-Russia collusion and other politically-motivated efforts to “get Trump,” the FBI carried out an unprecedented action against a former U.S. president by raiding Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in August.
An aerial view of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home after FBI agents searched it, in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 15, 2022. (Marco Bello/Reuters)
The Democrats’ three-pronged effort to suppress dissent, as defined by their own party, target Democrat-defined “domestic terrorists,” and prosecute/harass/raid Democrat political opponents is eerily similar to the CCP’s decades-long campaign to squelch all political resistance against the Chinese communist regime.
A Brave New World
The CCP and the Democratic Party each have their own visions of what amount to variations on the dystopian future, as presented in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in which each party exercises totalitarian control of their respective societies. We must remember, those visions were also marketed with flowery words and slogans that mask reality.
From the newest amendment to the CCP’s constitution approved during the 20th Party Congress comes the slogan of “advancing the building of an open, inclusive, clean, and beautiful world that enjoys lasting peace, universal security, and common prosperity.” Riiiiiggght. The “shared future” promised by the CCP involves boots on the necks of all dissenters (especially ethnic and religious minorities in China), complete and intrusive social controls to manage the behavior of individual citizens, and arbitrary and punitive measures such as those associated with Xi’s “zero-COVID policy” that continues to destroy businesses and lives.
The Democratic Party’s vision for America’s future is laid out in their party platform here. Behind the flowery words such as “stronger fairer,” “universal affordable,” and “healing the soul,” a glimpse at that future has already been presented to Americans over the past two years: economic chaos, massive inflation, out-of-control crime, the fentanyl scourge, sexualizing children, and foreign policy incompetence.
The reality of the Democrats’ future vision for America includes gender affirmation (human experimentation and barbarism), unlimited women’s “healthcare” (infanticide), counting all votes (rigged elections), “free” healthcare (including for the increasing number of illegal aliens), and much, much more. How do the secular Democrats equate all of this damage to “healing the soul” of America?
The above comparisons between the Chinese Communist Party and the Democratic Party in the United States are similar but not matching—yet. However, what the CCP has managed through 73 years of totalitarian control of communist China gives us a glimpse of the future in the U.S. under long-term Democrat domination and control of the federal government.
But American voters who understand the true meaning of the words already spoken may have other ideas for our future.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/12/2022 – 19:20 - Canada Doubles Down On Record Immigration-Driven Population Surge
Canada Doubles Down On Record Immigration-Driven Population Surge
Authored by Joe Guzzardi (emphasis ours),
Canada’s Immigration Minister Sean Fraser recently announced a bold immigration plan that has serious long-term deleterious consequences for the nation’s population growth and environmental degradation.
Fraser’s goal is, by 2025, to add 1.45 million permanent resident immigrants to address what he and other government officials claim is a critical labor shortage; allegedly 1 million Canadian jobs are unfilled. Fraser said: “Make no mistake. This is a massive increase in economic migration to Canada.” The Minister’s new plan projects a flood of new arrivals that will see 465,000 foreign nationals in 2023, rising to 500,000 in 2025. By comparison, 405,000 permanent residents were admitted last year.
Fraser’s immigration vision to admit a record-breaking number of immigrants is inspired by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s sentiments. Following his 2019 election wherein he campaigned on more immigration, he followed up with welcoming messages to refugees. Defending his massive immigration increase, Fraser repeated familiar refrains about an aging Canadian population and a low birth rate. Without immigration, Fraser foresees a Canada that won’t have the financial resources to fund schools, hospitals and other services. In short, Fraser used scare tactics to deceive Canada’s citizens.
Canada’s long-standing commitment to higher immigration levels has created an unprecedented population surge. In 2021, Canada’s population rose to 37 million people, up 5.2 percent from 2016, driven mostly by immigration, according to official government data. Downtowns and distant suburbs of large cities have experienced the largest growth rates.
Canada added 1.8 million people between 2016 and 2021, with nearly 80 percent of those new residents arriving from across the globe. Research from Statistics Canada (StatsCan) published in its Census 2021 release gives Canada the dubious distinction of being the fastest growing G7 country. Almost 90 percent of new immigrants settled in urban centers, Statscan said, edging up the proportion of Canadians living in large urban centers to 73.7 percent from 73.2 percent five years ago. During the five-year time period studied, Toronto’s population increased 16.1 percent, Montreal, 24.2 percent, and Vancouver, 7.4 percent. The report concluded that Canada continues to urbanize as large city centers benefit most from new arrivals to the country. But not all Canadians would use “benefit” as a descriptor for rapid, uncontrolled population growth.
Fraser’s plan is so ill-conceived that even the most basic and fundamental need of arriving immigrants – affordable housing – will be an insurmountable challenge. Canada is undergoing a severe housing crisis that has driven home prices out of the range for many buyers. Simply put, more people mean that more homes and more roads that lead to them must be built. And new home development creates urban sprawl.
Mike Moffatt, executive director of the Smart Prosperity Institute, outlined the crisis that exploding population has wrought for environmentalists. “What [land] isn’t being used for housing is either being used for nature, like the Greenbelt, or for farmlands, – and we’re already losing 175 acres a day in Ontario of farmland to development.”
Ontario environmentalists like Moffatt are fighting to save its glorious Greenbelt from ever-greater development and sprawl. Today, plans to run a highway through a portion of the belt are advancing.
Like most environmentalists in Ontario, Moffatt fears that at any time the government could decide to develop “little pieces” of the Greenbelt. Sooner or later, Moffatt fears, those little pieces could add up to great big chunks.
To be crystal-clear, the new immigrant total will far exceed 1.45 million. New immigrants will grow their existing families and petition certain family members. Princeton University scholars estimated, conservatively, that each migrant petitions three relatives living abroad. Within a generation, the 1.45 million new Canadians could swell to more than 3 million.
Trudeau and Fraser have concocted an immigration plan that will devastate Canada. Immigration isn’t a one-off. Arriving immigrants need nurturing, a compassionate exercise that often comes at the expense, at least partially, of the native-born population. The Canadian government and the corporate elite are all-in on more immigrants. But, if the population at large knew that the arriving 1.45 million immigrants would more than double during many of their lifetimes and degrade Canada’s natural beauty, it would be staunchly opposed.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/12/2022 – 18:50 - The Five Biggest Takeaways From This Results Season
The Five Biggest Takeaways From This Results Season
By Sagarika Jaisinghani, Bloomberg Markets Live reporter and analyst
This earnings season hasn’t been for the faint-hearted, marked by profit warnings, job cuts and share-price volatility — all while high inflation and dollar strength wreak havoc. The bad news is that worse may be to come.
S&P 500 companies had the lowest share of profit beats since the first quarter of 2020, according to data from Bloomberg Intelligence, even after expectations were lowered going into the season. Those that missed — such as Alphabet Inc. and FedEx Corp. — were severely punished, while investors rewarded the likes of Intel Corp. for concrete plans to deal with rising costs and an economic downturn.
“Earnings this quarter were an early hint of what’s to come as we go through an environment of slowing growth,” said Ronald Temple, head of US equity at Lazard Asset Management. “Estimates have started to come down but they don’t yet reflect the economic outlook and need to fall much more.”
Note: Latest quarter accounts for companies that have reported; excludes Energy, Diversified REITs. Even after Thursday’s huge sentiment boost from good inflation news, investors will need to assess how slower growth and rising costs will affect margins going forward, as well as how prepared companies are for a raft of other factors — from staffing to the impact of China’s reopening.
Here’s what we learned from third-quarter results:
Margin Squeeze Is Getting Worse
Data from JPMorgan Chase & Co. showed more pressure on margins this quarter as companies faced higher costs for materials, energy and labor, while slowing consumer demand limited their ability to raise prices.
With firms including Nike Inc. and appliances maker Whirlpool Corp. issuing profit warnings, Barclays Plc strategists said in a report that management teams in general were now less optimistic about maintaining high margins.
Analysts have been cutting margin expectations — but some say more is needed. “Input costs should be plateauing, but that won’t be enough to erase the pain for the bottom line” next quarter, said Sophie Lund-Yates, an equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown. “It isn’t just costs that are pinching margins, but weaker revenue growth too.”
Staffing Tops CEO Concerns
Conference calls showed that executives are facing a staffing headache. Big tech firms are embarking on huge layoffs in a new age of austerity for the industry — but companies in other sectors are struggling to find enough staff in a tight labor market. Wages have also become a pain point as workers contend with soaring living costs.
Esty Dwek, chief investment officer at Flowbank SA, expects layoffs to spread from tech to other sectors. “Prudence will be the name of the game going forward,” she said.
China Still a Curveball
China’s Covid Zero policy continued to have a global impact, with Apple Inc. saying shipments of its latest iPhone models will be lower than previously expected after lockdowns disrupted factories. But as the country relaxes restrictions, investors are counting on a boost to global earnings.
China generates about 6% of revenue for companies in the Russell 1000 Index, with technology, energy and consumer companies set to benefit the most from a reopening, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. Still, one curveball could come from the impact on inflation as demand for commodities and the yuan rises, strategists warn.
Europe Set for a Shock
A sharp increase in energy company profits and euro weakness meant European earnings held up far better than those in the US and emerging markets — but the region may be in for a shock next year.
Bloomberg Intelligence strategists see Europe’s lead fizzling out as Chinese earnings return to double-digit growth and US profits pick up. Europe will suffer due to a slowdown in energy earnings and as companies and consumers endure a gas crisis this winter.
Analysts Are Always Too Positive
While profit estimates for the next couple of years have been coming down, the number and magnitude of misses this quarter showed that analysts were still too cheerful.
Willem Sels, global chief investment officer of private banking and wealth at HSBC Holdings Plc, said the current outlook for inflation and economic growth suggests no US earnings growth for 2023. With analysts projecting a 6% increase, “estimates are still too optimistic,” he said.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/12/2022 – 18:20 - Elon Musk Has A Fake Blue Checkmark Problem
Elon Musk Has A Fake Blue Checkmark Problem
Among other changes incoming CEO Elon Musk has hastily made at Twitter has been the addition of once “verified” restricted blue checkmarks to the profiles of anyone who ponies up $8 per month for a Twitter Blue subscription.
This, combined with the ability to change ones display name on Twitter, has led to a deluge of fake accounts for politicians, celebrities and corporations that look extremely close to “official” social media accounts.
Before Musk’s takeover, the company had made sure to grant verification status to people that it wanted to ensure could not be impersonated. Now, under Musk’s regime, just the opposite is taking place.
Among the confusion are now accounts that appear to be from people like US president George W. Bush, wherein he tweeted offensive messages that were then re-tweeted by a similarly official looking former British prime minister Tony Blair account.
Other impersonators included a fake O.J. Simpson account that confessed to the murder of his former wife, and a fake LeBron James account claiming to be asking for a trade from the Los Angeles Lakers.
Meanwhile, other users have had trouble changing their names back after Twitter appeared to remove the feature to try and fix the original verification issue. For example, the Financial Post notes that singer Doja Cat “found that she was unable to change her display name back from “christmas” after a new rule came in”.
“I don’t wanna be Christmas forever @elonmusk please help I’ve made a mistake,” she pleaded with Musk on the platform.
In another example, someone impersonating a fake Eli Lilly account appeared to have wiped billions from the company’s market cap after it Tweeted that the company was “excited to announce” that “insulin is free now”.
Did Twitter Blue tweet just cost Eli Lilly $LLY billions?
Yes. pic.twitter.com/w4RtJwgCVK
— Rafael Shimunov is on Mastodon (@rafaelshimunov) November 11, 2022
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The company had to step in and correct the record:
We regret to inform you that we will not be giving away insulin, a publicly funded invention that was given away by its creator to be given away to people so they don’t die.https://t.co/lft5DvAlKf
— Rafael Shimunov is on Mastodon (@rafaelshimunov) November 11, 2022
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Elsewhere on the site, other accounts were impersonating political figures like Sen. Ted Cruz. One account, sporting the name “Ted Cruz” with a blue checkmark, wrote: “The first time I entered my human wife, I said, groaning into her ear, “This is exactly how mother said it would feel”.
It elicited a response from a fake Ben Shapiro account.
I don’t think this is what the @gop thought would happen when Elon took over. pic.twitter.com/GUZlBuGnY5
— Seamus Blackley (@SeamusBlackley) November 11, 2022
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Entrepreneur Mark Cuban also lodged complaints, namely that “the new system made it harder to filter out notifications”. He said he used the platform to screen out verifications in the past in order to reduce the amount of noise he encountered on the platform.
“I just spent too much time muting all the newly purchased checkmark accts in an attempt to make my verified mentions useful again,” Cuban remarked.
Elon Musk responded: “It’s working for me. That said, we can definitely make the verified mentions tab more usable.”
Musk said in response to the issue the company is removing many legacy blue checkmarks and will be adding “official” tags to people’s bios – which would essentially replace the former purpose of the blue checkmark, to validate an account’s validity.
Late in the day on Friday, the confusion prompted Sen. Ed Markey to reach out to Twitter for answers “about its new verification and impersonation policies”, according to CNBC.
In a letter to Elon Musk, Markey wrote: “Safeguards such as Twitter’s blue checkmark once allowed users to be smart, critical consumers of news and information in Twitter’s global town square. But your Twitter takeover, rapid and haphazard imposition of platform changes, removal of safeguards against disinformation, and firing of large numbers of Twitter employees have accelerated Twitter’s descent into the Wild West of social media.”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/12/2022 – 17:50 - Pakistan "Has No Option But To Ration" Nat Gas Supply This Winter
Pakistan “Has No Option But To Ration” Nat Gas Supply This Winter
Authored by Charles Kennedy via OilPrice.com,
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The energy crisis in Pakistan has deepened this year.
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Gas supplies available for households will be very limited this winter.
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Pakistani households will have gas available for three hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon, and three hours in the evening.
Pakistan has no other option but to ration natural gas supply this winter, with gas provided three times a day for cooking to households, amid acute shortages and a forex crisis in the world’s fifth most populous country, an official from the petroleum ministry told a Parliament panel this week.
The energy crisis in Pakistan has deepened this year, and now, natural gas supplies will be very limited for households, according to officials.
“There would be no gas supply (to household consumers) for 16 hours” a day, Muhammad Mahmood told the Parliament’s Standing Committee on Petroleum, as carried by the local outlet Dawn.
Pakistani households will have gas available for three hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon, and three hours in the evening, Mahmood added.
Pakistan—whose population is the fifth largest in the world after China, India, the United States, and Indonesia—has been experiencing an energy crisis as the country cannot afford to import a lot of energy products at the current high prices. The stronger U.S. dollar and the sky-high LNG prices have worsened the country’s finances, with foreign exchange reserves down in October to their lowest level in three years.
In April, soaring prices of LNG and coal on the international markets left Pakistan with having to cut electricity supply to households and industry as the country, in a deep political and economic crisis, could not afford to buy more of the expensive fossil fuels.
This year, Europe has been outbidding Asian customers for LNG supply as it has scrambled to secure gas supply with very low pipeline imports from Russia. High spot rates for LNG have discouraged many buyers and users of the super-chilled fuel in Asia, including in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
Meanwhile, industry customers across South Asia have turned to fuel oil because of the high prices of natural gas. In Pakistan, oil-fired power generation has surged five-fold this year, Lucy Cullen, Principal Analyst, APAC Gas & LNG Research at Wood Mackenzie, said in September.
“Demand-side management measures are being implemented, but the situation is likely to worsen,” Cullen added.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/12/2022 – 17:20 -
- Sam Bankman-Fried Bought Into Stakeholder Capitalism And Proved It's A Disastrous Ideology
Sam Bankman-Fried Bought Into Stakeholder Capitalism And Proved It’s A Disastrous Ideology
While many analysts and economists will be talking for months about the epic downfall of crypto-exchange company FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried, their focus will be primarily on the billions lost, the mismanagement of funds, the fraud inherent in yield farming and the alleged betrayal of investor trust. This is a tale as old as time and not anything surprising. What many in the mainstream are missing, though, is Fried’s attachments to the World Economic Foundation, various global elitists and his avid sermonizing of the tenets of “effective altruism”, which are nearly identical to the tenets of Klaus Schwab’s Stakeholder Capitalism agenda.
The WEF lists FTX as a corporate “partner” and participant, which means the company must meet the globalist organization’s standards for Stakeholder Capitalism, a socialist economic model which deconstructs the Adam Smith and Milton Friedman free market foundation.
Milton Friedman argued that the only responsibility of business should be growth and profit (within the boundaries of the law) with the shareholders in mind. The WEF insists that the Friedman philosophy must be abandoned and that the job of wealthy elites and corporations is to use profits as a tool for managing society (the so-called “stakeholders”). In other words, corporate leaders should become cultural and political leaders fulfilling greater ideological goals, all of them decidedly socialist/Marxist in origin.
Stakeholder Capitalism becomes a way to trick the public into investing their faith in corprorate leadership because these companies are no longer simply “in it for the money,” they are in it for the survival of the world and the species, right? The companies become saviors, not just mercantilists. That kind of blind faith allows people to be taken advantage of in a big way. It’s the same kind of faith once applied to kings and monarchies centuries ago, and it usually leads to various forms of feudalism.
In the WEF’s vision of the future, the average person will “own nothing, have no privacy and be happy about it” while corporate elites in partnership with governments micromanage all production, all distribution and all finance.
An ongoing example of the early stages of this model is ESG, a credit system in which loans are given to companies and individuals based on their ESG score, derived from how dedicated they are to globalist causes. In the near future, if you don’t promote social justice ideology and support establishment climate change claims, then you might not be able to get a loan from the bank for your business. You might not be able to get a mortgage loan for a new home. In fact, you might not even be allowed to have a bank account.
FTX and Fried heavily relied on investment firms like Blackrock, which is a major component of the spread of ESG. This may be why FTX regularly announced their devotion to climate and social justice projects, it kept them in the good graces of the ESG overlords.
A key component of Stakeholder Capitalism is the need for a digital currency framework, which might explain the WEF’s interest in FTX as a partner. The move to a cashless society is the next step necessary for the micro-management of the economy and the ability to dole out rewards or punishments based on ESG scoring. It is an incremental top down implementation of a framework similar to China’s “social credit system.”
The concept is being sold by the WEF and their corporate partners as way to create “equity” within the economy by incentivizing the redistribution of wealth from the very rich to the very poor and to ‘humanitarian causes.” It uses access to the banking apparatus and the economy itself as a carrot or a cudgel. Really, it is the ultimate form of centralization and control posing as a charitable movement for the greater good. But without the freedom to succeed and the freedom to fail, there can be no greater good.
Evidence is mounting that the equity measures involved in Stakeholder Capitalism will actually erase wealth rather than create wealth. To be sure, it would make the majority of people financially even – Instead of being equally rich, we will all suffer in equal poverty.
The downfall of FTX and Sam Blankman-Fried illustrates this problem with clarity. Fried constantly espoused the pie-in-the-sky ideals of Stakeholder Capitalism, engaging in a kind of corporate charity built on socialist guidelines and climate cultism, while at the same time draining client accounts.
The FTX profit strategy was based initially on taking advantage of imbalances in international crypto exchange rates; a limited window for a quick cash grab rather than an idea for long term viability. It also relied on the crypto market constantly reinventing the wheel with new branding and marketing to grow demand for technology that the majority of people around the world don’t really need or particularly desire.
Fried suggests that his intent all along was to expand capital as a means to give it away to leftist causes. He donated over $40 million to Democrat campaigns, for example. The problem was he failed in business while giving away the money of his clients at the same time. Some people argue that his clients are partly culpable for the losses, but Fried explicitly stated that his company would not use client funds in such a way. He lied to them, which is not a great feature of a supposed humanitarian.
Being 30 years old and naive certainly didn’t help him, but Fried is a perfect example of why corporation leaders have no business being involved in social engineering. They are not qualified enough nor intelligent enough nor benevolent enough to mold society at large; no one is that wise or experienced. Beyond that, the Stakeholder Capitalism ideology is rooted in socialist drivel, making FTX a socialist drivel-based company.
The model is designed to inevitably reduce the standard of living for most people over time rather than improve it. Fried just showed us how and why.
FTX is a petri dish for the disease of Stakeholder Capitalism. In the end, FTX and Fried are a warning to us all that business should be separate from politics and cultural moderation. They are better off focusing on making money and increasing productivity and innovation; those companies that can’t should be allowed to fail, not be propped up as pillars of social cohesion. This is the true way to ensure human progress. In the meantime, the rest of us are much better off without their help and “charitable” oversight.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/12/2022 – 16:50 - FTX Founder Spent $40 Million As Democrat Midterm Megadonor
FTX Founder Spent $40 Million As Democrat Midterm Megadonor
Leading up to Sam Bankman-Fried’s spectacular implosion – in which his firm FTX evaporated billions in wealth after the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange allegedly commingled client assets with his trading firm into a liquidity crunch – he became the sixth-largest donor in this year’s midterm election cycle, giving some $40 million to mostly Democratic candidates and causes.
According to Forbes, Bankman-Fried was second only to George Soros among billionaire donors to Democratic groups during the 2022 midterm election cycle.
FTX allegedly loaned Alameda Research – a trading firm founded by Bankman-Fried – roughly $10 billion in client assets, which has landed him under federal investigation by the SEC, CTFC, and the Justice Department – the latter of which already had been working on a months-long investigation, according to the Wall Street Journal. The CTFC, meanwhile, is tasked with regulating certain elements of the crypto markets – including digital assets that are as commodities, and crypto exchanges and clearinghouses.
In late September, Bankman-Fried admitted that his political donations were mostly to Democrats, and Republican recipients were ‘targeted’.
Spot the rare journalism by host Chuck Todd;
But it goes much deeper than that
Bankman-Fried ‘heavily courted’ the CFTC, “and funded several key lawmakers charged with overseeing the agency, pouring cash into their campaign coffers,” as the Daily Caller notes.
The CFTC is charged with regulating certain elements of the crypto marketplace, including digital assets that are commodities as well as crypto exchanges and clearinghouses. The agency is overseen by the Senate and House Agriculture Committees, with the former tasked with approving CFTC commissioners nominated by the president.
The former FTX CEO personally donated to the Senate committee’s chairwoman, Democratic Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, contributing over $20,000 to the Stabenow Victory Fund and $5,800 to her campaign for Senate. Bankman-Fried donated roughly $6,000 to the committee’s ranking member, Republican Arkansas Sen. John Boozman, as well, and $5,800 to the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Commodities, Risk Management and Trade, Republican Montana Sen. John Hoeven. -Daily Caller
Others have connected dots and concluded that FTX may have been a money laundering operation.
— Gordo Stevens 🇺🇸 (@GordoCDA) November 12, 2022
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What’s more, a PAC founded by FTX executive Ryan Salme, American Dream Federal Action, spent over $1 million on Boozman during the 2022 election cycle, as well as more than $1 million on House Agriculture Committee member and Republican Minnesota Rep. Brad Finstad.
Bankman-Fried also donated $27 million to the Protect Our Future PAC, which primarily works to elect Democrats. It spent over $1 million towards Rep. Shontel Brown (D-OH), a member of the House Agriculture Committee.
Another donation linked to members of the House Ag committee includes $200,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), headed by Chair Sean Patrick Maloney, and nearly $6,000 to Maloney himsself. He also gave $20,000 to the campaign and victory fund of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), whose father worked for the NXIVM sex cult in the early 2000s, where he made $25,000 per month.
In addition to his campaign contributions to the lawmakers tasked with CFTC oversight, Bankman-Fried sought closer relations with the agency itself.
Bankman-Fried personally lobbied for legislation in the Senate Agriculture Committee that would grant the CFTC greater regulatory oversight over the crypto industry, according to Coindesk, and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying the CFTC, SEC and members of Congress on the legislation.
The bill, known as the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act, which would grant the CFTC “jurisdiction to oversee the spot digital commodity market,” was introduced by Stabenow, Boozman, Booker and Republican North Dakota Sen. John Thune, three of whom are beneficiaries of Bankman-Fried’s donations.
For its lobbying team, FTX hired former Republican Rep. Mike Conaway, longtime chair of the House Agriculture Committee, and committee staffer Scott Graves to lobby lawmakers on crypto-related issues. -Daily Caller
As a thought experiment, imagine what Bankman-Fried’s financial ‘goodwill’ would have bought the firm if FTX hadn’t divided by zero and imploded.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/12/2022 – 16:30 - "Your Words Are Violence!": Coulter Cancelled At Cornell
“Your Words Are Violence!”: Coulter Cancelled At Cornell
This week, we saw another incident of protesters shutting down an event to prevent others from hearing opposing views. At an event with commentator and author Ann Coulter, one protester yelled “Your words are violence.” It is the latest example of how some on the left are treating free speech as harm on college campuses. Unlike many other incidents, however, Cornell has stood by the right of the student group, Network of Enlightened Women, to hold the event and pledged to hold students accountable for the cancellation of the speech.
Students and faculty previously pressured Cornell to cancel Coulter as someone who engages in “hate speech” and declared her speaking on campus as harmful. Cornell stood with free speech. However, the event lasted only 30 minutes until protesters succeeded in shouting down Coulter.
One man is shown screaming “we don’t want you to be here, your words are violence… They are threats, you cannot be speaking here. We don’t want your ideas here! Leave! Leave! Your words are violence! Your words are violence!”Two students chanted “no KKK no fascist USA” as they are escorted out by security. Others blared circus music and blew whistles.
The Cornell Review reported a common tactic: protesters “seemed to be employing a chain tactic, beginning just as soon as the last heckler was removed, so as to continuously speak over Coulter.”
Joel Malina, vice president for University Relations at Cornell, told Campus Reform.“Eight college-age individuals were removed from the auditorium following Cornell protocols. All Cornell students among the disrupters will be referred for conduct violations.” He also apologized to Coulter.
Cornell is to be commended for its stance, particularly if it proceeds with appropriate sanctions for these students. The incident also shows the value of limiting these events to faculty and students of Cornell, who are subject to rules protecting free speech and open discourse on campus.
We have previously discussed the worrisome signs of a rising generation of censors in the country as leaders and writers embrace censorship and blacklisting. The latest chilling poll was released by 2021 College Free Speech Rankings after questioning a huge body of 37,000 students at 159 top-ranked U.S. colleges and universities. It found that sixty-six percent of college students think shouting down a speaker to stop them from speaking is a legitimate form of free speech. Another 23 percent believe violence can be used to cancel a speech. That is roughly one out of four supporting violence.
Faculty and editors are now actively supporting modern versions of book-burning with blacklists and bans for those with opposing political views. Others are supporting actual book burning. Columbia Journalism School Dean Steve Coll has denounced the “weaponization” of free speech, which appears to be the use of free speech by those on the right.
We discussed this issue with regard to a lawsuit against SUNY. It is also discussed in my recent law review article, Jonathan Turley, Harm and Hegemony: The Decline of Free Speech in the United States, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. We have seen how in universities (including state schools) this can turn into a type of “heckler’s veto” where speeches are cancelled in advance or terminated suddenly due to the disruption of protesters.
This has been an issue of contention with some academics who believe that free speech includes the right to silence others. Berkeley has been the focus of much concern over the use of a heckler’s veto on our campuses as violent protesters have succeeded in silencing speakers, including a speaker from the ACLU discussing free speech. Both students and some faculty have maintained the position that they have a right to silence those with whom they disagree and even student newspapers have declared opposing speech to be outside of the protections of free speech. At another University of California campus, professors actually rallied around a professor who physically assaulted pro-life advocates and tore down their display.
In the meantime, academics and deans have said that there is no free speech protection for offensive or “disingenuous” speech. CUNY Law Dean Mary Lu Bilek showed how far this trend has gone. When conservative law professor Josh Blackman was stopped from speaking about “the importance of free speech,” Bilek insisted that disrupting the speech on free speech was free speech. (Bilek later cancelled herself and resigned after she made a single analogy to acting like a “slaveholder” as a self-criticism for failing to achieve equity and reparations for black faculty and students).
A few years ago, I debated NYU Professor Jeremy Waldron who is a leading voice for speech codes. Waldron insisted that shutting down speakers through heckling is a form of free speech. I disagree. It is the antithesis of free speech and the failure of schools to protect the exercise of free speech is the antithesis of higher education. In most schools, people are not allowed to disrupt events. They are escorted out of such events and told that they can protest outside of the events since others have a right to listen to opposing views. These disruptions however are often planned to continually interrupt speakers until the school authorities step in to cancel the event.
Recently, we have seen convocations and other important events disrupted by such protesters. Universities will have to take a stand or lose control over their campuses. Students who disrupt classes or events must be held accountable if we are to maintain open and free discourse on our campuses.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/12/2022 – 16:20 - Shocking Video Shows Plane Collides With B-17 Bomber At Dallas Airshow
Shocking Video Shows Plane Collides With B-17 Bomber At Dallas Airshow
Update (1745ET):
ABC News’ Jeffery Cook tweeted, “six people, all crew members, are feared to be dead after a mid-air collision between two WWII-era airplanes at the Wings Over Dallas airshow today.”
New: Six people, all crew members, are feared to be dead after a mid-air collision between two WWII-era airplanes at the Wings Over Dallas airshow today, per @nickdotkerr @ABC
— Jeffrey Cook (@JeffreyCook) November 12, 2022
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* * *
Update (1627ET):
Both aircraft involved in the mid-air crash were historic military planes. The first, which we noted earlier, was a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress.
The second is a Bell P-63 Kingcobra.
* * *
Shocking footage has surfaced on social media of a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress involved in a mid-air collision during the Commemorative Air Force Wings Over Dallas air show on Saturday at the Dallas Executive Airport.
Local news WFFA quoted Dallas Fire-Rescue (DFR), who said the crash occurred around 1325 local time.
WFAA’s Jason Whitely confirmed a B-17 was involved in the mid-air collision, though he said the “other aircraft type uncertain,” adding debris was scattered across Highway 67.
#BREAKING: A mid-air collision has happened at the Wings Over Dallas event at Dallas Executive Airport (formerly Redbird).
A B-17 is involved. Other aircraft type uncertain.
Debris is on Hwy. 67.
— Jason Whitely (@JasonWhitely) November 12, 2022
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MORE:
Debris reportedly on Highway 67 in Oak Cliff from mid-air collision at the #WingsOverDallas event at Dallas Executive Airport. pic.twitter.com/M5etKQQhrJ— Jason Whitely (@JasonWhitely) November 12, 2022
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Videos show a smaller plane colliding with the bomber, breaking it in half as it plummeted to the ground in a fiery explosion.
NOW – B-17 bomber and a smaller plane collide at Dallas airshow.pic.twitter.com/BmJgnxBnrb
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) November 12, 2022
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Here are more videos of the crash.
Two airplanes collide at a Dallas Air show, Air involving a B-17 bomber and smaller plane pic.twitter.com/R1dxJvyF70
— Oliya Scootercaster (@ScooterCasterNY) November 12, 2022
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and another pic.twitter.com/CUiNjih9SK
— Jessica O’Donnell 🏈 (@heckyessica) November 12, 2022
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The Federal Aviation Administration has confirmed the crash and released this statement:
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/12/2022 – 15:50 - So Much For A Boycott: Almost 3 Million World Cup Tickets Already Sold
So Much For A Boycott: Almost 3 Million World Cup Tickets Already Sold
The first ever FIFA World Cup to be held in the northern hemisphere’s winter will kick off in the Gulf nation of Qatar on November 20.
This year’s World Cup has been overshadowed by questions of human rights abuses, with reports that thousands of guest workers have died in the country since it won the right to host the World Cup ten years ago, as well as criticism over the country’s attitudes to gay people.
Despite this, as Statista’s Anna Fleck reports, the tournament is selling out at a similar rate to those of the past two decades, with nearly 2.9 million tickets having been sold as of mid-October, according to a statement by FIFA President Gianni Infantino.
Demand for tickets has been highest in Qatar, the United States, Saudi Arabia, England, Mexico, the United Arab Emirates, Argentina, France, Brazil, and Germany.
According to a Statista survey conducted last year, only a third of respondents worldwide thought that the tournament should not be held in Qatar because of human rights violations.
You will find more infographics at Statista
In the UK, Shadow Cabinet Leader Keir Starmer has announced he is boycotting the games.
A survey conducted by Public First for More in Common, between November 1 and 3, found that of the 2,030 UK respondents, 69 percent supported his decision, while 12 percent disagreed.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/12/2022 – 15:30 - FTX Held Just $900MM In Liquid Assets Vs $9BN In Liabilities As Video Emerges Confirming Alameda Knew It Was Pilfering Client Funds
FTX Held Just $900MM In Liquid Assets Vs $9BN In Liabilities As Video Emerges Confirming Alameda Knew It Was Pilfering Client Funds
On Friday, we first learned courtesy of a mystery twitter account belonging to an anonymous FTX insider, that the now bankrupt crypto exchange held just $900 million in liquid assets (including, among other things, a $7.3 million online bet by Democrat megadonor Sam Bankman-Fried for Trump to lose).
Source: minigrogu Of the $900 million in liquid assets, the largest portion – or roughly half – was in the form of $470mn of Robinhood shares owned by a Bankman-Fried vehicle not listed in Friday’s bankruptcy filing, which included 134 corporate entities. The liquid assets represent just 10% of the total assets (including $5.4BN in semi-liquid and $3.2BN in illiquid) and is a fraction of the $9 billion in liabilities at FTX which will now make their way through bankruptcy court for the next several years.
The document, which the FT also tracked down on Saturday and discussed here, and which was shared with prospective investors before the bankruptcy, provides a detailed picture of the financial hole in the FTX crypto empire and suggests customers of FTX international may face steep losses on cash and crypto assets they held on the exchange (and speaking of the 134 subs that FTX listed on its bankruptcy filing, the FT notes that the company had incorrectly listing entities it did not own in its initial filing, while as we reported earlier, the exchange suffered an apparent hack on Friday night that drained its balances to zero).
Aside from the spreadsheet shown above, the FT also noted another spreadsheet which references the $5bn of withdrawals last Sunday – which as everyone knows by know were precipitated by CZ telling the world he would pull his money after the “recent revelations” and sparking a bank run on FTX which the exchange did not have nearly the fund to defend against; the sheet also noted a negative $8bn entry described as “hidden, poorly internally labled ‘fiat@’ account”.
It is this entry that the prosecution’s case will revolve around, because Bankman-Fried told the Financial Times the $8bn related to funds “accidentally” extended to his trading firm, Alameda (he declined to comment further). Earlier this week, he tweeted that FTX international had $4bn in easily tradable assets when it faced Sunday’s $5bn surge of withdrawals. He has since deleted many of his fraudulent twitter misrepresentations.
“There were many things I wish I could do differently than I did, but the largest are represented by these two things: the poorly labeled internal bank-related acount [sic], and the size of customer withdrawals during a run on the bank,” the spreadsheet adds.
Shifting away from assets, in its now irrelevant investment materials, FTX Trading Ltd, the company behind the main international exchange, stated $8.9 billion in liabilities, the biggest portion of which is $5.1 billion of US dollar balances.
Healthy companies typically have assets that match or exceed their liabilities. The spreadsheet says FTX Trading had a total of $9.4bn of assets, but as it itself suggests, only 10% or so could be made liquid in case of a crisis.
Indeed, the vast majority of FTX Trading’s recorded assets were re either illiquid venture capital investments or crypto tokens that are not widely traded, according to the spreadsheet, which cautions that the figures “are rough values, and could be slightly off; there is also obviously a chance of typos etc. They also change a bit over time as trades happen.”
As shown in the spreadsheet above, the company’s biggest asset as of Thursday was $2.1bn worth of a cryptocurrency called Serum. Unfortunately, the market value of Serum was only $86 million on Saturday, according to CoinMarketCap, suggesting FTX’s holdings are a fraction of what was represented if sold into the market.
And while we now know that the endgame was bankruptcy, the FT reports that according to the latest set of investment materials SBF was seeking to raise $6bn-$10bn including from a convertible preferred stock paying a 10% dividend that could later be converted into common equity in FTX international at a valuation of between $12bn-$15bn. “This is just a lower bound on the terms investors can get,” the materials add.
What about the liquid assets? Well, the FT report goes on to notes that until Friday afternoon, Bankman-Fried was looking to sell the $472MM of Robinhood shares, the largest liquid asset listed for FTX Trading, in privately negotiated deals he was arranging on the messaging app Signal, according to an FT source. As a reminder, SBF acquired a 7.6% stake in Robinhood in May, a transaction which delayed (but did not halt) the company’s collapse into oblivion. As part of the attempted firesale, Bankman-Fried was entertaining offers at a 20% discount to Robinhood’s VWAP price, or about $9 per share, said an FT source, who ultimately declined to buy due to perceived legal risks.
But what is remarkable, is that the proceeds from the HOOD stock offering would not have gone to the now bankrupt FTX estate to satisfy prepetition claims; instead the Robinhood shares were held by an Antigua and Barbuda entity called Emergent Fidelity, which is personally controlled by Bankman-Fried, according to US securities filings. Emergent Fidelity is not among the entities listed in Friday’s bankruptcy filing.
In other words, SBF – who is most certainly on the run at this moment – was hoping to fill up his personal bank account by dumping his HOOD holdings, while giving FTX creditors the finger (again).
Finally, as we also noted on Friday, the FTX spreadsheet also noted that in addition to the $900mn of “liquid” assets, $5.5bn of “less liquid” assets consisting of crypto tokens, and $3.2bn of illiquid private equity investments…
SBF bet $7.3mm of user’s money on Trump losing ’24
u cant make this shit up pic.twitter.com/lAdQGO2W2W
— minigrogu (@minigrogu) November 11, 2022
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… there was also an obscure $7.3 million bet for “Trump to Lose”. Which is part for the courtse for any Democrat criminal mastermind.
The good news for the rest of the crypto space: there are no bitcoin assets listed, despite bitcoin liabilities of $1.4BN. That means the company can not dump bitcoin in the open market, and it also means that the odds of continued selling pressure are now far less than previously speculated. Which is far more than one can say for Vlad Tenev whose Robinhood stock is facing a world of pain when it reopens on Monday.
And while the above will surely be Exhibit A for the prosecution, Exhibit B will be a video meeting in which Alameda Research’s chief executive and senior FTX officials confirm they knew that FTX had lent its customers’ money to Alameda to help it meet its liabilities.
Citing ‘people familiar with the video’, the WSJ reports that Alameda employees held a video conference late Wednesday Hong Kong time, in which 27-year-old Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison (also known as @carolinecapital) said that she, Bankman-Fried and two other FTX executives, Nishad Singh and Gary Wang, were aware of the decision to send customer funds to Alameda,
Absolute disbelief pic.twitter.com/QjoZrWlz8v
— Howie (@HowieBTC) November 11, 2022
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Singh was FTX’s director of engineering and a former Facebook employee. Wang, who previously worked at Google, was the chief technology officer of FTX and co-founded the exchange with Mr. Bankman-Fried.
Ellison said on the call that FTX used customer money to help Alameda meet its liabilities, the people said, assuring the 27-year-old teenager-lookalike of a lengthy prison sentence.
Hilariously, after tweeting out all the incriminating evidence the prosecution will need to slamdunk this case, neither SBF nor Caroline Ellison returned WSJ phone message and an email seeking comment. Singh and Wang didn’t respond to multiple messages seeking comment. Ryne Miller, FTX US’s chief legal officer, declined to comment.
Of course, by it’s not like they have anything to say that we don’t already know. Well, we take that back. Considering that FTX was instrumental in laundering bitcoin into Ukraine….
will be very interesting to go through all of these fund flows as part of discovery. https://t.co/ZbxJvjmwga
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 12, 2022
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… we do wonder just how much crypto money-laundering between the US and Ukraine will emerge as a result of the bankruptcy discovery, and how long until we can safely claim that “Sam Bankman didn’t fry himself”?
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/12/2022 – 14:49 - Silvergate Rises 19% After Hours Friday After Stating It Has No "Loans Or Investments" In FTX
Silvergate Rises 19% After Hours Friday After Stating It Has No “Loans Or Investments” In FTX
Like almost every other equity related to crypto over the last week, Silvergate Capital, which we have written about extensively over the last few years, nosedived on the news of FTX’s collapse.
The stock has had a triumphant fall from grace, plunging from highs of $160 per share in early 2022 to lows near $26 on Friday before the cash session, as one new headline after another crossed the wires, offering up insight as to just how devastating FTX’s collapse could be for the crypto world.
But on Friday after hours, the bank cleared the air in terms of its exposure to the FTX blowup, issuing a statement that it had no loans or investments in FTX, but rather that less than 10% of the bank’s deposits were from FTX.
Alan Lane, Chief Executive Officer of Silvergate, said:
“In light of recent developments, I want to provide an update on Silvergate’s exposure to FTX. As of September 30, 2022, Silvergate’s total deposits from all digital asset customers totaled $11.9 billion, of which FTX represented less than 10%. Silvergate has no outstanding loans to nor investments in FTX, and FTX is not a custodian for Silvergate’s bitcoin-collateralized SEN Leverage loans. To be clear, our relationship with FTX is limited to deposits.“
Chart: WSJ The company then confirmed that the rest of its leveraged loans and banking infrastructure was safe: “To date, all SEN Leverage loans have continued to perform as expected with zero losses and no forced liquidations. As a reminder, all SEN Leverage loans are collateralized by Bitcoin, and we do not make unsecured loans or collateralize SEN Leverage loans with other digital assets.”
“Silvergate’s platform was built to support our clients during times of market volatility and transformation, and the SEN has continued to operate as designed and without interruption. As a federally regulated banking institution that is well capitalized, we maintain a strong balance sheet with ample liquidity to support our customers’ needs,” the bank said.
It then reminded investors that Lane would participate in a fireside chat at the Oppenheimer Blockchain & Digital Assets Summit on Thursday, November 17, 2022. We’re sure that’ll prove to be an interesting conversation.
For the time being, however, Silvergate’s statement was able to rein in some of the damage to the company’s stock: after touching $26 pre-market on Friday, the bank closed the day +1.74 at $34.42, before adding another 19.15%, rising to $41.01 in the aftermarket session, after the company released its statement.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 11/12/2022 – 14:30
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