- India Seeks Rapid Purchase Of 33 Russian Fighter Jets In Response To Chinese Border Fight
India Seeks Rapid Purchase Of 33 Russian Fighter Jets In Response To Chinese Border Fight
Tyler Durden
Mon, 06/22/2020 – 02:45India is reportedly seeking to beef up military purchases from Russia following last week’s major border incident with China that resulted in 20 Indian Army troops killed, and an undisclosed number of Chinese PLA casualties in the disputed Galwan Valley area of East Ladakh.
Indian government sources were cited in New Delhi-based ANI News Agency as saying “the Indian Air Force (IAF) has pushed a proposal to the government for acquiring 33 new fighter aircraft, including 21 MiG-29s and 12 Su-30MKIs from Russia.”
Indian Air Force Su-30 MKI multirole fighter aircraft, via Economic Times. “The Air Force has been working on this plan for a while, but the process took a faster curve, and a 600-crore (about 787.4 million dollars) offer will be submitted to the Ministry of Defense for final approval this week,” the report continued.
Indian has long conducted major weapons systems purchases from Russia, including recently acquiring a fleet of Su-30 fighter jets.
New Delhi now wants to speed up such acquirement as both sides reportedly build up their forces along the border.
Forbes also pointed out that the new aircraft order from Russia is in direct response to the deadly Galwan Valley border incident with China:
So it should come as no surprise that India this week reportedly placed a $780 million order with Russia for 33 fighters, enough to equip or reequip two squadrons. What’s weird is which fighter types New Delhi reportedly is buying.
The Indian order includes 21 MiG-29s and 12 Su-30s, according to press reports. But one aviation expert believes the Sukhois in particular are a poor fit for mountain patrols.
China meanwhile, has reportedly been pursuing expansion and modernizing of its high-altitude airbase at the dual use civilian/military Ngari Gunsa airport in Tibet.
Advanced PLA J-11 and J-16 fighters have recently been spotted at the base near Ladakh via satellite images.
- Finally, The EU And Trump See Eye-To-Eye On One International Policy: China
Finally, The EU And Trump See Eye-To-Eye On One International Policy: China
Tyler Durden
Mon, 06/22/2020 – 02:00Authored by Martin Jay via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
Both Trump and the EU are turning on China for very similar reasons but with different timescales ahead of them. The West still struggles with what it requires from China and whether it wants to get rich and become a big spender, or become poorer and flood western markets with cheaper and cheaper goods. Expect more devaluation of the Yuan.
EU is “rebalancing this relationship” with China. EU ambassador to the UK João Vale de Almeida tells Chatham House. It’s not about “isolating” or “ganging up” on China, but it’s about addressing issues. We have different systems of values on human rights and other areas”.
A pretty remarkable statement to make and one which could only have come from a relatively obscure EU official, if it was based on solid support from the highest echelons of the EU in Brussels – who, in turn, would not go ahead with such a bellicose policy if they didn’t have the gilt-edged backing from France and Germany.
So, in a matter of weeks, where the EU was caught red-handed redacting its own internal report which slammed China over its COVID-19 role – and media coverage – now, we seem to be in the midst of the EU waking up to its own economy imploding and a political calamity to follow which could be the end of the EU as we know it.
The EU is starting to think about protectionism and is about to develop a new relation with China, which, we should assume means cutting less slack to Beijing on its goods, by jacking up tariffs.
In the U.S., analysts are also saying that the U.S.-China trade deal is dead in the water, chiefly due to corona crashing world oil prices, which knocked a big hold in the first phase of Trump’s deal which involved China buying huge chunks of oil and gas from the U.S. at higher prices. In reality, for most of this year China’s energy needs have also been dramatically reduced due to chaos and lockdowns which are corona-related. Trump got the first phase off to a good start by forcing China’s hand on agricultural goods which were floundering in many states which supported Trump, but the ‘art of the deal’ U.S. president is actually not very good at doing trade deals. The essence of a trade deal is its rigidity and sustainability. Trump’s barely lasted weeks. Foreign Policy, the high-brow international politics magazine, put it aptly.
“Amid the collapse in oil demand and prices unleashed by the pandemic, it is now all but certain that China will fail to meet its targets for energy purchases and expose the folly of Trump’s trade strategy” it says. “While Trump was right to address China’s problematic trade practices, the administration’s approach made little sense before the pandemic—and makes even less sense now”.
And many might argue that Trump’s determination to get a trade deal with China which helped blue collar families back home, was all about getting re-elected anyway, according to John Bolton’s bombshell book which reveals that the U.S. president right from the off was positioning the Chinese premier to help him (Trump) get re-elected. Trump believed all he needed to nail a second victory was a deal with China. Remarkable.
The toughening of both rhetoric and action now from Trump as the deal falls apart was inevitable. Almost like a petulant child, as it becomes clear that Beijing can’t keep its side of the bargain, Trump goes into self-preservation mode to deflect blame. Barely within a heartbeat, U.S. media announces news of sanctions against China on its reported concentration camps against Muslim groups, which, according to Bolton, he had secretly supported all along with Xi, which the former National Security chief claims was the “right thing to do” according to Trump.
Within seconds, almost, it’s as though if China cannot serve Trump with his specific needs, then it has to become and enemy to at least generate the requisite media traffic which continues to get Trump on the front pages. And this is what is playing out now. Already Beijing sees the game and is ready to play that role.
“We again urge the U.S. side to immediately correct its mistakes and stop using this Xinjiang-related law to harm China’s interests and interfere in China’s internal affairs,” the ministry said in a statement.
“Otherwise China will resolutely take countermeasures, and all the consequences arising there from must be fully borne by the United States.”
That sounded like a pretty lucid threat from China. Remarkably, Trump, despite the losses to business and the crippling effect on U.S. companies in China, is happy to get tough with China. There is, in fact, no limit in what he can do to get re-elected – even make friends with the Taliban, if that’s what it takes.
More remarkable is that the EU seems to be following his lead with their rationale why they should be tougher on China. Its own political survival beyond the next European elections in 2024.
With the catastrophic impact on the EU economy, many member states – not only Italy and Spain which were hit particularly hard – themselves are going to have to make tough decisions which resonate with angry voters over how to hold China accountable for the pandemic. The EU will be forced to follow this trend for its own survival as, for those member states where the political establishment save their own seats, scapegoats will be required. The Blame Game will make losers of the EU and its delusional ideas of being a super power.
Some political elites will blame Brussels and will have some success with this. And it’s as though EU chiefs are already ahead of the game, if one of its “ambassadors” in London can openly make a comment to the press which talks about a new relationship with China. Xi and his ministers will patiently wait for Trump to fall on his own sword in November, as the scandal mounts up and the pressure on the Republican party reaches fever pitch. For the EU though, there is a longer game at play, with higher stakes. But will Brussels make it to 2024 though?
- China's Big Surprise (Years In The Making): An EMP Attack?
China’s Big Surprise (Years In The Making): An EMP Attack?
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/21/2020 – 23:45Authored by Peter Pry, op-ed via The Hill,
The coronavirus pandemic has exposed dangerous weaknesses in U.S. planning and preparation for civil defense protection and recovery, and those weaknesses surely have been noticed by our potential enemies: China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and international terrorists.
The U.S. spent decades, and billions of dollars, supposedly preparing for biological warfare. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the departments of Defense and Homeland Security are supposed to have contingency plans to protect the American people from lethal biological weapons such as anthrax and genetically engineered smallpox, which could have mortality rates of over 90 percent.
But our defenders have not even been able to competently cope with COVID-19, which has a mortality rate under 1 percent. The White House took over management of the pandemic, apparently to compensate for the failure of the U.S. government to have adequately stockpiled such basics as ventilators, masks and pharmaceuticals.
Hostile foreign powers surely have noticed the panicked, incompetent U.S. response to the virus that shut down a prosperous U.S. economy, self-inflicting the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The nationwide lockdowns brought shortages of all kinds, exposing societal and critical infrastructure fragility — and causing widespread fear.
Adversaries also have noticed the ongoing U.S. “cold civil war.” According to federal authorities, radicalized young people on both sides of the political divide and criminals have been infiltrating recent protests — rioting, toppling statues and setting fires. The swelling counter-culture anarchy and self-condemnation is reminiscent of 1968, a year of riots and anti-war protests in America that is recognized by most historians as the psychological turning point toward U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War.
North Korea applauds America’s domestic chaos as proof that democracy does not work and the future belongs to totalitarian states such as China. America looks fragile to dictators who would replace the U.S.-led world order with a new one dominated by themselves. China, for example, has been planning to defeat the U.S. with an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and cyber “Pearl Harbor” attack for a quarter-century. As I warned the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security in 2005, Chinese military writings — such as the following excerpt — make reference to U.S. vulnerability to EMP attacks:
“Some people might think that things similar to the ‘Pearl Harbor incident’ are unlikely to take place during the information age. Yet it could be regarded as the ‘Pearl Harbor incident’ of the 21st century if a surprise attack is conducted against the enemy’s crucial information systems of command, control and communications by such means as electronic warfare, electromagnetic pulse weapons, telecommunications interference and suppression, computer viruses, and if the enemy is deprived of the information it needs as a result. Even a super military power like the United States, which possesses nuclear missiles and powerful armed forces, cannot guarantee its immunity. … In their own words, a highly computerized open society like the United States is extremely vulnerable to electronic attacks from all sides. This is because the U.S. economy, from banks to telephone systems and from power plants to iron and steel works, relies entirely on computer networks.”
As noted in a May 14, 1996, People’s Liberation Army newspaper about a surprise attack on U.S. critical information systems:
“When a country grows increasingly powerful economically and technologically… it will become increasingly dependent on modern information systems… The United States is more vulnerable to attacks than any other country in the world.”
So it is very bad news, more than a year after President Trump issued an Executive Order on Coordinating Resilience Against Electromagnetic Pulses, that the Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have done nothing to protect the national electric grid or other critical infrastructures that sustain the lives of 330 million Americans.
Instead, non-expert bureaucrats conduct endless studies and conferences to wrangle over technical issues — in effect, reinventing the wheel regarding EMP — that were resolved long ago by real EMP experts. The “coordination process” for national EMP preparedness is the same kind of bureaucratic fumbling that Washington regards as “action,” which gave us the biological warfare unpreparedness and inability to properly respond to the coronavirus pandemic.
Hopefully, the U.S. Navy is better prepared to cope with an EMP attack than are DOE and DHS. A nuclear EMP attack against U.S. aircraft carriers is the key to victory in China’s military doctrine, as noted in a Feb. 12, 2000, article in the official newspaper of the Shanghai Communist Party Central Committee:
“The weak points of a modern aircraft carrier are: 1) As a big target, the fleet is easy for a satellite to reconnoiter and locate. … 2) A high degree of electronization is like an Achilles’ heel for an aircraft carrier fleet, which relies heavily on electronic equipment as its central nervous system. These two characteristics determine one tactic.” Therefore, military strategist Ye Jian said in the article in Jiefang Ribao: “The possession of electromagnetic pulse bombs (missiles) will provide the conditions to completely destroy an aircraft carrier fleet, and the way to complete victory in dealing with aircraft carrier fleets.”
In March 2020, a panel of China’s military experts threatened to punish U.S. Navy ships for challenging China’s illegal annexation of the South China Sea by making an EMP attack — one of the options they considered least provocative because the crew would be unharmed, but most effective because the ship would be disabled. Now three U.S. aircraft carriers are in the Pacific to challenge China’s aggression in the South China Sea.
Dan Gallington, a former senior Defense Department official, asks in his recent Washington Times article, “Is America on the path to another Pearl Harbor, but with China?”
China may offer the answer soon.
- New Zealand Unveils Web Safety Ad Featuring Two 'Porn Stars'
New Zealand Unveils Web Safety Ad Featuring Two ‘Porn Stars’
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/21/2020 – 23:15A rather unusual New Zealand government online safety video advertisement featuring “porn actors” went viral in the first half of June.
In the ad, the porn stars, named Derek and Sue, greet a mother at her front door and say: “Hiya… your son’s been watching us online.”
Derek (left); Sue (right). h/t Keep It Real Online The shocked mother, Sandra, played by comedian Justine Smith, is told by the nude couple that her son just watched them on his laptop, iPad, PlayStation, his phone, her phone, and on a smart TV.
Sue explains: “We usually perform for adults, but your son’s just a kid. He might not know how relationships work.”
The porn stars tell Sandra she must have a word with her son, Matt, about what was happening in the video, emphasizing hardcore lovemaking is not exactly real life. Sue said, “we just get straight to it” in the videos; Derek admits: “I’d never act like that in real life.”
About halfway through the ad, Sandra’s son walks in on the conversation and immediately drops a plate, realizing that, the porn stars he was just watching are at his front door.
Sandra then says: “Alright matey, it sounds like it’s time to have a talk about the difference between what you see online and real-life relationships. No judgment!”
The video ad is part of a campaign called “Keep it real online,” which raises awareness that online porn is not real-life:
“In today’s digital world, it’s very easy for children to come across pornography. This can happen by accident, as most sites are free and don’t require any type of age verification, or intentionally out of curiosity. While children might see porn for the first time by accident, teens are more likely to be seeking it out.
“It’s normal for young people to be curious about sex. The best way to support them is to have open, honest conversations about what they might see and how it’s different from real sex and relationships,” the campaign said on its website.
A recent report found youngsters in New Zealand use porn sites as a tool to learn about sex. At least a third of all porn videos in the country are non-consensual acts.
The campaign has debuted as internet porn activity exploded during months of virus lockdowns around the world. Americans used porn to cope with pandemic stress.
- Smart Society, Stupid People
Smart Society, Stupid People
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/21/2020 – 22:45Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic Research,
We’ve lived through the most bizarre experience of human folly in my lifetime, and perhaps in generations.
Among the strangest aspects of this has been the near universal failure on the part of regular people, and even the appointed “experts” (the ones the government employs, in any case), to have internalized anything about the basics of viruses that my mother understands, thanks to her mother before who had a solid education in the subject after World War II.
Thus, for example, are all governments ready to impose new lockdowns should the infection data turn in the other direction. Under what theory, precisely, is this supposed to help matters? How does reimposing stay-home orders or mandating gym closures mysteriously manage to intimidate a virus into going away?
“Run away and hide” seems to have replaced anything like a sophisticated understanding of viruses and immunities.
So I decided to download Molecular and Cell Biology for Dummies just to check if I’m crazy. I’m pleased to see that it clearly states that there are only two ways to defeat a virus: natural immunity and vaccines.
The book completely left out the option that almost the entire world embraced in March: destroy businesses, force everyone to hide in their homes, and make sure that no one gets close to anyone else. The reason that the text leaves that out is that the idea is essentially ridiculous, so much so that it was initially sold as a strategy to preserve hospital space and only later mutated into a general principle that the way to beat a virus is to avoid people and wear a mini-hazmat suit.
Here is the passage:
For all of recorded history, humans have done a deadly dance with viruses. Measles, smallpox, polio, and influenza viruses changed the course of human history: Measles and smallpox killed hundreds of thousands of Native Americans; polio killed and crippled people, including US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and the 1918 influenza epidemic killed more people than were killed during all of World War I.
For most viruses that attack humans, your only defenses are prevention and your own immune systems. Antibiotics don’t kill viruses, and scientists haven’t discovered many effective antiviral drugs.
Vaccines are little pieces of bacteria or viruses injected into the body to give the immune system an education. They work by ramping up your own defensive system so that you’re ready to fight the bacteria or virus upon first contact, without becoming sick first. However, for some viral diseases no vaccines exist, and the only option is to wait uncomfortably for your immune system to win the battle.
A virus is not a miasma, a cootie, or red goo like in the children’s book Cat in the Hat. There is no path toward waging much less winning a national war against a virus. It cares nothing about borders, executive orders, and titles. A virus is a thing to battle one immune system at a time, and our bodies have evolved to be suited to do just that. Vaccines can give advantage to the immune system through a clever hack. Even so, there will always be another virus and another battle, and so it’s been for hundreds of thousands of years.
If you read the above carefully, you now know more than you would know from watching 50 TED talks on viruses by Bill Gates. Though having thrown hundreds of millions of dollars into cobbling together some global plan to combat microbes, his own understanding seems not to have risen above a cooties theory of run away and hide.
There is another level of virus comprehension that came to be observed in the 1950s and then codified in the 70s. For many viruses, not everyone has to catch them to become immune and not everyone needs a vaccine if there is one. Immunity is achieved when a certain percentage of the population has contracted some form of virus, with symptoms or without, and then the virus effectively dies.
This has important implications because it means that vulnerable demographics can isolate for the active days of the virus, and return to normal life once “herd immunity” has been realized with infection within some portion of the non-vulnerable population. This is why every bit of medical advice for elderly people has been to avoid large crowds during the flu season and why getting and recovering for non-vulnerable groups is a good thing.
What you get from this virus advice is not fear but calm management. This wisdom – not ignorance but wisdom – was behind the do-no-harm approach to the polio epidemic of 1949-1952, the Asian flu of 1957-58, and the Hong Kong flu of 1968-69. Donald Henderson summed up this old wisdom beautifully: “Communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.”
And that’s what we did for the one hundred years following the catastrophic Spanish flu of 1918. We never again attempted widespread closures or lockdown precisely because they had failed so miserably in the few places they were attempted.
The cooties theory attempted a comeback with the Swine flu of 2009 (H1N1) but the world was too busy dealing with a financial crisis so the postwar strategy of virus control and mitigation prevailed once again, thankfully. But then the perfect storm hit in 2020 and a new generation of virus mitigators got their chance to conduct a grand social experiment based on computer modeling and forecasting.
Next thing you know, we had this new vocabulary shoved down our throats and we all had to obey strangely arbitrary exhortations. “Go inside! No, wait don’t go inside!” “Stay healthy but shut the gyms!” “Get away from the virus but don’t travel!” “Don’t wear a mask, wait, do wear a mask!” (Now we can add: “Only gather in groups if you are protesting Trump”)
People started believing crazy things, as if we are medieval peasants, such as that if there is a group of people or if you stand too close to someone, the bad virus will spontaneously appear and you will get infected. Or that you could be a secret superspreader even if you have no symptoms, and also you can get the virus by touching almost anything.
Good grief, the sheer amount of unscientific phony baloney unleashed in these terrible three months boggles the mind. But that’s what happens in any panic. Apparently.
Now, something has truly been bugging me these months as I’ve watched the incredible unravelling of most of the freedoms we’ve long taken for granted. People were locked out of the churches and schools, businesses were shuttered, markets were closed, governors shoved through shelter in place orders meant not for disease control but aerial bomb raids, and masks were mandatory, all while regular people who otherwise seem smart hopped around each other like grasshoppers.
My major shock is discovering how much sheer stupidity exists in the population, particularly among the political class.
Forgive a defense of my use of the term “stupid” but it is technically correct. I take it from Albert Camus and his brilliant book The Plague (1947). “When a war breaks out, people say: ‘It’s too stupid; it can’t last long.’ But though a war may well be ‘too stupid,’ that doesn’t prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.”
Indeed it is true.
It was only last February when we seemed smart. We had amazing technology, movies on demand, a smartphone in our pockets to communicate with everyone and reveal all the world’s knowledge. There was peace more or less. There was prosperity. There was progress. Our medical systems worked. It seemed that only a few months ago, we had it all together. We seemed smart. Until suddenly stupid took over, or so it seemed.
Actually we weren’t smart as individuals. Our politicians were as dumb as they ever have been, and massive ignorance pervaded the population, then as always. What was smart last February was society and the processes that made society work in the good old days.
“Please explain.”
I shall.
Consider the social analytics of F.A. Hayek. His major theme is that the workings of the social order require knowledge and intelligence, but none of this essential knowledge subsists within any individual mind much less any political leader. The knowledge and intelligence necessary for society to thrive is instead decentralized throughout society, and comes to be embedded or instantiated within institutions and processes that gradually evolve from the free actions and choices of individuals.
What are those institutions? Market prices, supply chains, observations we make from the successful or unsuccessful choices of others that inform our habits and movements, manners and mores that work as social signals, interest rates that carefully coordinate the flow of money with our time preferences and risk tolerances, and even morals that govern our treatment of each other. All these come together to create a form of social intelligence that resides not in individual minds but rather the process of social evolution itself.
The trouble is that a well functioning society can create an illusion that it all happens not because of the process but rather because we are so damn smart or maybe we have wise leaders with a good plan. It seems like it must be so, else how could we have become so good at what we do? Hayek’s main point is that it is a mistake to credit individual intelligence or knowledge, much less good governments with brainy leaders, with civilizational achievements; rather, the real credit belongs to institutions and processes that no one in particular controls.
“To understand our civilisation,” Hayek writes, “one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection — the comparative increase of population and wealth — of those groups that happened to follow them.”
The lockdowns took a sledgehammer to these practices, processes, and institutions. It replaced them nearly overnight with new bureaucratic and police-state mandates that herded us into our homes and arbitrarily assigned new categories: elective vs non-elective medical procedures, essential vs nonessential business, permissible vs. impermissible forms of association, even to the point of measuring the distance from which we must be separated one from another. And just like that, via executive order, many of the institutions and processes were crushed under the boot of the political class.
What emerged to take its place? It’s sad to say but the answer is widespread ignorance. Despite having access to all the world’s knowledge in our pockets, vast numbers of politicians and regular people defaulted back to a premodern cognition of disease. People did this out of fear, and were suddenly and strangely acquiescent to political commands. I’ve had friends tell me that they were guilty of this back in the day, believing that mass death was imminent so the only thing to do was to shelter in place and comply with the edicts.
The seeming intelligence that we had only in February suddenly seemed to turn to mush. A better way to understand this is all our smartest institutions and practices were crushed, leaving only raw stupidity in its place.
Truth is that we as individuals are probably not much smarter than our ancestors; the reason we’ve made so much progress is due to the increasing sophistication of Hayek’s extended orders of association, signalling, capital accumulation, and technological know how, none of which are due to wise leaders in government and industry but are rather attributable to the wisdom of the institutions we’ve gradually built over decades, centuries, and a millenia.
Take those away and you reveal what we don’t really want to see.
Looking back, I’m very impressed at the knowledge and awareness that the postwar generation had toward disease mitigation. It was taught in the schools, handed down to several generations, and practiced in journalism and public affairs. That was smart. Something happened in the 21st century to cause a kind of breakage in that medical knowledge chain, and thus did societies around the world become vulnerable in the presence of a new virus to rule by charlatans, hucksters, media howlers, and would-be dictators.
With lockdown finally easing, we will see the return of what seems to be smart societies, and the gradual loss of the influence of stupid. But let us not deceive ourselves. It could be that we’ve learned nothing from the fiasco that unfolded before our eyes. If economies come to be restored, eventually, to their former selves, it will not be because we or our leaders somehow beat a virus. The virus outsmarted everyone. What will fix what the political class has broken is the freedom once again to piece back together the institutions and processes that create the extended order that makes us all feel smarter than we really are.
- China Keeps Loan Prime Rates Unchanged For Another Month, Sparking Confusion Over Beijing's Intentions
China Keeps Loan Prime Rates Unchanged For Another Month, Sparking Confusion Over Beijing’s Intentions
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/21/2020 – 22:15One month after unexpectedly keeping its 1 and 5-year Loan Prime Rates unchanged at 3.85% and 4.65% respectively following the April 19 rate cut (which came just as China was supposedly V-shaped recovering), moments ago Beijing did it again and kept China’s so-called Libor flat, with the benchmark LPRs for 1 and 5-year tenors unchanged at 3.85% and 4.60%.
As a reminder, the LPR is a recently launched market indicator of the price that lenders charge clients for new loans, released around the 20th day of every month.
While there was some speculation that after last month’s People’s Congress where the PBOC vowed it would ease financial conditions further including broad and RRR-based rate cuts, in its preview, SocGen correctly said that it expects “no change to China’s Loan Prime Rates, as the PBoC left the MLF rate unchanged last week.”
What the move would suggest is that while China – whose economy is still shrinking due to covid – is certainly desperate for easier funding conditions, we may have reached a critical threshold where banks may no longer be profitable should LPRs be cut further (especially now that borrowers have non-traditional, shadow sources of funding once again).
This brings up another point brought up by SocGen’s Kiyong Seong:
On top of the heavy bond supply since May, the PBoC’s reluctance to inject liquidity has also been partly accountable for the significant correction in CNY rates. To our understanding, this reluctance stemmed from the fact that abundant liquidity and easier borrowing conditions were being abused, flowing into financial products rather than the real economy. However, this development has been gradually contained by rising interest rates and regulatory action, allowing the PBoC to turn more dovish again, as the slow private-sector recovery calls for.
All this means that Beijing is stuck between a rock and a hard place, on one hand urgently needing more rate cuts, and on the other unable to implement them without causing even more bubbles (see shadow bank products and China’s nevernding housing bubble) and another round of impairments, NPL builds up and potential bank failures.
- Ghislaine Does Paris: Jeffrey Epstein's Fugitive 'Madam' Hiding Behind French Extradition Laws
Ghislaine Does Paris: Jeffrey Epstein’s Fugitive ‘Madam’ Hiding Behind French Extradition Laws
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/21/2020 – 22:15Jeffrey Epstein’s accused ‘madam’ is reportedly holed up in a luxury apartment on Paris’s Avenue Matignon – just a five minute drive from the dead pedophile’s $8.6 million flat, according to the Daily Mail.
Maxwell “is moving locations every month to keep private investigators off her tail and is staying at the residences of trusted colleagues and contacts,” according to a source.
“She wants to remain in France for as long as she can to take advantage of extradition laws and has a huge network of contacts willing to keep her hidden,” they added. “Under French law anyone born on French soil is safe from extradition to another country, regardless of the alleged crime.“
Maxwell is now understood to have moved into a flat on on Avenue Matignon, in Paris’s 8th Arrondissement (via the Daily Mail) “It doesn’t mean she won’t be prosecuted for her links to Epstein but if she does end up facing charges it will be in France and not the US.“
Why is Ghislaine Maxwell so anti-interesting to our media? To our FBI? To our CIA? I mean these folks do *not* want to find her or talk to her in a HUGE way.
Let’s find out. https://t.co/XjB04fvDyt
— Eric Weinstein (@EricRWeinstein) June 21, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The French apartment is linked to a Normandy-based business contact, according to the report.
Epstein and Maxwell began dating in the early 1990s, after which she became his ‘madam’ and helicopter pilot – allegedly ferrying underage girls to his multiple properties around the world. In 2003, Epstein told a reporter with Vanity Fair that Maxwell was his “best friend.”
Maxwell’s Her new luxury abode is only a short five-minute drive from Epstein’s £7million pad on Avenue Foch (pictured) Maxwell comes from money. Her father was publisher Robert Maxwell – who himself faced accusations of being a Mossad double (and possibly triple) agent and a “bad character” who was “almost certainly financed by Russia,” according to the British Foreign Office. Robert Maxwell died in 1991 when he fell from his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine – however the circumstances surrounding his demise have been rife with speculation (including that it was a Mossad assassination – a theory which attorney and longtime Epstein associate Alan Dershowitz slammed in a 2003 op-ed).
Ghislaine has been accused by three women of procuring and training young girls to perform massage and sexual acts on Epstein and his associates.
Virginia Giuffre (previously named Virginia Roberts), one of Epstein’s alleged victims, claimed in a civil lawsuit that Maxwell “recruited” her into Epstein’s orbit, where she was forced to have sex with Epstein and his powerful friends, including Prince Andrew.
Giuffre asserts in her complaint that Maxwell, the sole defendant in the suit and the daughter of late publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, routinely recruited underaged girls for Epstein and was doing so when she approached the $9-an-hour locker room attendant at Mar-a-Lago in 1999 about giving massages to the wealthy investment banker.
Maxwell also attended Chelsea Clinton’s wedding – and has been linked to other prominent people such as Prince Andrew, Donald Trump and Alan Dershowitz.
Here’s Ghislaine Maxwell, by many accounts Jeffrey Epstein’s “pimp” and “groomer of girls” at Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. pic.twitter.com/leBUwqoWnT
— Adam McKay (@GhostPanther) July 7, 2019
Meanwhile, it looks like the ‘untouchable’ Maxwell may be in Paris for the forseable future.
- Russia Can Play Crucial Role In Calming China-India Conflict
Russia Can Play Crucial Role In Calming China-India Conflict
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/21/2020 – 21:45Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
The timing of a Russia-India-China summit next week could not be more apt following a deadly skirmish in the disputed Himalayan region which resulted in dozens of military casualties.
The summit scheduled for June 22 of the RIC (Russia-India-China) group was initiated weeks ago by Moscow. It will be held by teleconference between the foreign ministers. The event predates the flare-up in dangerous tensions between New Delhi and Beijing.
At least 20 Indian soldiers were killed earlier this week in hand-to-hand fighting with Chinese forces. It was the deadliest incident in more than half a century since the two Asian powers fought a brief war in 1962 over similar border dispute. There are dozens of casualties also reported on the Chinese side, but Beijing has not officially confirmed numbers.
New Delhi and Beijing immediately expressed willingness at the highest level to deescalate the tensions. There is mutual recognition that further clashes could spin disastrously out of control between the nuclear-armed states.
However, the acrimony will not be easy to contain. Both sides have blamed the other for aggression following the bloody incident on Monday-Tuesday night. There is popular anger in both nations with Indian protesters burning images of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Reports say hundreds of soldiers were engaged in a pitched battle using rocks, clubs and knives after opposing units became involved in a brawl in the high-altitude Galwan Valley. Many soldiers were thrown to their deaths from treacherous slopes.
Indian and Chinese forces patrol the disputed 3,500-km Line of Actual Control between the two countries with competing territorial claims. A bilateral agreement stipulates that the rival units are unarmed in order to reduce risk of conflict.
Confrontations have increased in recent years with both sides accusing the other of encroachment. Following a border skirmish in May, Indian and Chinese army commanders negotiated a de-escalation deal earlier this month. Now both sides are accusing each other of bad faith.
The RIC summit may provide a path for New Delhi and Beijing to find a way out of escalation. One crucial factor is Russia’s respected standing with both powers. Russian President Vladimir Putin has cordial relations with both Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping. Moscow can be trusted to act as an honest broker to facilitate dialogue for resolving the long-running territorial dispute between India and China, a dispute which goes back to the legacy of the British Empire and the contested borders it bequeathed.
U.S. President Donald Trump has already offered to mediate between India and China. But that offer, made in May, was rebuffed at the time by New Delhi. It was perceived that Washington is not a credible broker, given its well-established alignment with India for strategic-military aims against China. Indian premier Modi may have felt the patronage of Washington would undermine his credibility as a strong leader in dealing with China on a one-to-one basis.
In any case, any pretensions of Trump acting as a mediator have been blown apart since his administration ratcheted up China-bashing over the Covid-19 pandemic. Trump and his aides have made incendiary claims blaming China for causing global spread of the disease and in particular huge economic damages and more than 112,000 deaths in the U.S. Beijing has dismissed Washington’s claims as a cynical cover-up of inherent failures on the part of the Trump administration.
The Cold War-like tensions between Washington and Beijing have also seen an increasing deployment of U.S. military forces in the Asia-Pacific region to counter what the Trump administration and Pentagon provocatively claims to be “Chinese aggression”.
Any involvement of the U.S. in the current India-China tensions can only make the already fraught situation even worse. Indeed, the Trump White House and anti-China hawks in Congress will try to exploit the tensions with a view to destabilize Beijing.
India should tread carefully to avoid being used by Washington as a proxy for its geopolitical confrontation with China.
In an editorial this week, China’s semi-official Global Times accused India of being misled by Washington as a “lever” for the latter’s own strategic goals.
If New Delhi and Beijing are genuinely motivated to find a negotiated settlement to their decades-old territorial dispute, they will have to work together to find a mutual compromise on defining a sovereign border, one that finally supplants the diffuse Line of Actual Control. The incoherence of the LAC is an-ever present source of contention and ultimately a tinderbox for war.
Russia is the only power with bona fides and credibility as an honest broker for resolving the India-China conflict.
New Delhi will have to decide if it wants to fully engage with the Eurasian multipolar vision of development espoused by China and Russia, among others, or will it allow Washington to interfere with its selfish imperialist agenda to the detriment of the entire region?
- NYC's Army Of 3,000 COVID-19 'Contact Tracers' Have Accomplished Surprisingly Little
NYC’s Army Of 3,000 COVID-19 ‘Contact Tracers’ Have Accomplished Surprisingly Little
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/21/2020 – 21:15As officials and experts around the world continue to stubbornly insist that contact tracing is ‘the answer’ to preventing a resurgence in new cases once economies reopen, even as a growing body of research suggests that the virus spreads most quickly among members of the same household, and less frequently via asymptomatic ‘carriers’ (though it surely does happen), New York City is finding that the ‘army’ of contact tracers raised by Mayor Bill de Blasio is much less useful than officials had hoped, according to a report in the New York Times published one day before the city enters its second phase of reopening.
with outdoor dining, in-store shopping and office work resuming tomorrow, the first batch of data from the program, which began on June 1, indicates that the tracers are usually unable to locate infected people or gather any useful information from newly infected subjects. Interestingly, the biggest ‘obstacle’ to obtaining this information is the patients themselves: Only 35% of the 5,347 city residents who tested positive or were presumed positive for COVID-19 in the program’s first two weeks gave information about close contacts to tracers, the city said.
If anything, this failure suggests that contact tracing in this manner simply isn’t an effective tool for preventing a second wave of the virus, though states have many other tools, including widespread testing and quarantining the sick and vulnerable. Instead, the NYT suggests the failure is a “worrisome” sign that “the difficulties in preventing a surge of new cases as states across the country reopen.”
Though contact tracing has worked in the past during outbreaks of tuberculosis and measles, the technique appears to be much less useful when implemented on the scale of the coronavirus, officials are finding. However, other countries have reported more success with these techniques, including China, South Korea and Germany and other countries have set up extensive tracking networks that have helped identify potentially infected individuals before they become seriously symptomatic.
In South Korea, for example, people at weddings, funerals, karaoke bars, nightclubs and internet-game parlors write down their names and telephone numbers, and the authorities have been able to draw on cellphone location data. Of course, all of this relies on the subjects being willing to give out their information.
But when American tech behemoths instead decide to surreptitiously install tracking apps without the direct consent of the user, well, let’s just say it doesn’t exactly help establish the trust and confidence that’s critical for these programs to work.
One of the program’s leaders told the NYT that while things are getting off to a less-than-ideal start, there are signs that NYC’s program could help prevent another outbreak. For example, at least most of the patients who are being contacted are at least answering the phones.
Dr. Ted Long, head of New York City’s new Test and Trace Corps, insisted that the program was going well, but acknowledged that many people who tested positive had failed to provide information over the phone to the contact tracers, or left interviews before being asked. Others told the tracers they had been only at home and had not put others at risk, and then did not name family members.
Dr. Long said one encouraging sign was that nearly all the people for whom the city had numbers at least answered the phone. He added that he believed that the tracers would be more successful when they start going to people’s homes in the next week or two, rather than just relying on communication over the phone.
The NYT then spent most of the piece focusing on individual contact tracers from minority backgrounds who had been assigned to canvass patients in more ‘economically disadvantaged’ neighborhoods.
But another expert quoted by the NYT pointed out that Mayor de Blasio’s decision to establish the corp of contact tracers outside the City Department of Public Health would ensure that all the contact tracers lack the experience for this type of work.
Dr. Halkitis at Rutgers said he thought the low cooperation rate was likely due to several factors, including the inexperience of the tracers; widespread reluctance among Americans to share personal information with the government; and Mayor de Blasio’s decision to shift the program away from the city’s Department of Health.
“You have taken it away from the people who actually know how to do it,” he said. “The D.O.H. people, they are skilled. They know this stuff.”
- Resist Or Submit
Resist Or Submit
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/21/2020 – 20:45Authored by Robert Gore via Straight Line Logic blog,
The objective of the coronavirus response and the riots...
During the coronavirus hoax and the George Floyd riots, most people kept their comments and criticisms to private conversations and internet postings. They didn’t respond to forced lockdowns or violence in the streets with violence of their own, although many of them have the ability and capacity to do so. Their restraint has been the primary force keeping whatever remains of the peace in this country.
The restraint stems from respect for that peace, their stake in maintaining it, and a fading hope that things will eventually get back to normal. People who run businesses, have jobs, own property, and are engaged in honest production have a vested interest in civil order. Only reluctantly will they overtly oppose unjust and idiotic government measures or rampaging rioters. Keeping their cold rage on ice, the vast majority will be moved to action only when they feel they have no other choice.
That day is coming. Consider the philosophical obscenity of governments renouncing their only justified reasons for existence—protecting individual rights, particularly the foundational rights of security for people and property. The Minneapolis city council voted to disband its police force and other jurisdictions are considering defunding theirs. Minneapolis and Seattle abandoned police stations to mobs. No word yet if criminals are going to swear off crime and embark on productive pursuits, or where they’ll find such pursuits with 30 plus million unemployed. The only certainly is that official appeasement will elicit nothing but what appeasement always elicits—contempt.
The criminals will fill the void as any remaining police retreat from law enforcement that might subject them to personal danger as well as official recrimination and punishment. As slums and ghettoes become “no-go” areas akin to Islamic “no-go” districts in Europe, the criminals and their gangs will thrive while the innocent will suffer, forced to either leave or cower in place. Eventually entire cities will be “no-go.”
The government officials pushing to eliminate or defund police are slitting their own throats. The praetorians of any government—the police and military—are always just as corrupt as the government of which they are a part. However, the de facto first duty of the praetorians is to protect the government itself, and that becomes more paramount as the government becomes more corrupt. Appeasing violence by renouncing one’s defenses against it guarantees more violence and the eventual elimination of the renouncers, i.e. useful idiots.
It’s already happening in once great cities that have been governed by statist stooges for decades. Their governments are crumbling and the cities are dissolving into chaotic hellholes before their eyes. Many cities are already shunned by anyone seeking freedom and its fruits: individual rights, honest production, voluntary interaction, wealth, security, and peace.
City and state governments and the federal government are flat broke and technically bankrupt. Coronavirus totalitarianism and the George Floyd riots have destroyed businesses, jobs, and property values—the tax base—while at the same time increasing the demand for support payments, social services, and public safety. Governments are presently running deficits and their future medical and pension liabilities are far greater than their means to pay them.
Insolvency will be anti-government revolutionaries’ staunchest ally, not requiring them to lift a finger but merely watch as governments spend and borrow themselves into ruin. This will undoubtedly inflict a great deal of misery on the populace, but governments are not their people. The latter will still have productive assets and skills; the former produce nothing.
The federal government is resorting to the tactic resorted to by bankrupt governments throughout history—debasing its own debt—as if manufacturing ever increasing trillions of new IOUs can actually produce value. A government undermining its own debt is idiocy on par with a government disbanding its police department. Historically, debasement becomes debauchery followed by downfall. A government that can offer the honest and the productive nothing but its own worthless promises has one foot in the grave, potential prey to anyone who can promise something better—restoration of political, financial, and economic stability—by fair means or foul.
The coronavirus response, monetary debasement, and George Floyd riots have clearly demonstrated to the honest and the productive that governments offer them less than nothing. For decades they’ve been told they have to put up with governments’ protection racket. Taxes, coerced redistribution, and funny money would keep the rabble at bay and protect whatever governments left them of their businesses, incomes, and wealth. By and large they put up and shut up.
Now governments can’t or won’t protect themselves and officials are taking the knee in hopes they’ll be spared by the marauding horde. We’ll see how that works out. Many of their constituents who still have spines have gone full rooftop Korean—stocking up on guns and ammo to protect the homes and businesses governments won’t. They’ve seen the futility of governments as protection racket, and of putting up and shutting up.
The marauding horde and its rhetorical and political enablers have told a vast swath of the population that their jobs, businesses, safety, and lives do not matter, except as fodder for the horde. Predictably, the horde is setting up its own protection racket: show us the money…or else.
Politicians will be writing rubber checks to propitiate the ceaseless demands for the unearned from anyone with a gripe and political clout. A figure of $14 trillion, even if it is just funny money, has been bandied about as slavery reparations from people who were never slaveowners to people who were never slaves. That $14 trillion may not make it into law, but a smaller amount might—more money from those who earn it to those who don’t. The honest and the productive always pick up the tab, and the recipients never stay propitiated. Why is anyone surprised at the former’s contempt for the latter or the latter’s contempt for the former? Perhaps we need to have a conversation about that.
Or perhaps before the collapse of the cities spreads to the rest of the country, before cold rage erupts into hot rage, before the financial and economic system completely fails, and before wars erupt and governments are overthrown, we need to have a conversation about divorce. Here’s a proposal that will never be peaceably implemented, but it’s important to understand why it won’t be.
Given the irreconcilable ideological divisions within the U.S., why not split the country into six or seven different countries that reflect those divisions? The East Coast and New England could go their own way, same for the Middle Atlantic, the South, the Midwest, the Southwest, the mountain states, and the far West. Not that there aren’t cultural and political differences within those regions, but there is more homogeneity than within the US as a whole.
For the first ten years allow free immigration between the new countries so everyone has the opportunity to migrate to the country for which they have the most affinity. Split up the nukes and other military assets so each country can deter attack. The countries will work out taxes, trade, and other economic arrangements as they see fit. Those may run the gamut from Marxist collectivism to laissez faire (where SLL would end up).
The animating spirit of this proposal is allowing people to go their own way and find their own place, in short, to live and let live. And that is why it has no chance of being accepted. Other than Laissez-Faire land, none of the countries could allow live and let live. From mixed economy welfare-statism to democratic socialism to Marxist totalitarianism, every political system is built on subjugation and submission, on a principle that boils down to: your life is the state’s.
There are differences in degree, but the essential principle is always the same. The state can take what it wants from you, up to and including your life as it sends you off to a concentration camp, a gas chamber, or a pointless war. Governments all over the world just deprived their citizens of jobs, businesses, free movement, and even the right to breathe fresh air. Coming soon: mandatory vaccines, biometric identification, a health credentialing and credit system modeled on China’s social credit system, and universal contact and location tracing.
Anyone who has watched a baby, a kitten, a puppy, or any other animal being born has witnessed the miracle of new life. For humans, those precious moments open the gates to all the amazing potential of the human mind, spirit, and soul. The possibilities on this extraordinary journey called life are endless—to be met with anticipation and realized with joy.
Such is a healthy human spirit. What is the animating spirit of coercion, power, subjugation, and totalitarianism? No truism was ever truer: misery loves company. Those who privately bear their suffering out of strength of spirit and quiet consideration for the rest of us deserve a salute. Miserable, malignant souls have no strength of spirit or consideration for others. They exercise power for power’s sake, their cancer feeding on submission and domination.
A strong human spirit recoils in instinctive loathing at ritual exactions like wearing a mask or taking a knee. At least 90 percent of the masks worn are ineffective, and 100 percent adversely affect wearers, who are rebreathing their own respiratory waste and affirming mindless group-think.
Will stepped in front of his portrait and studied it. In Arabella’s experience, no one could look upon his own face in a mirror, or see a representation of it, indifferently. Will liked to look at himself. He was handsome, why shouldn’t he? Arabella liked to look at herself. She liked what she saw, and she studied her face’s angles and proportions. There were those who didn’t like looking at themselves, sometimes because their faces were unsightly or deformed, but usually because they saw deformity or ugliness in themselves that no one else saw.
The Golden Pinnacle, Robert Gore, 2013
It’s conjecture, but not unfounded, that masks satisfy a psychic need. People are wearing masks when they are alone in their cars or outdoors, and they may not remove them even after the official all clear, if that ever comes. You don’t hide what you’re proud of, and the face is the window to the soul.
No conjecture is required here; this is abject self-abasement. Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and company are concretizing a handover. Their politics draped pursuit of power in professed altruistic concern for the constituencies that provided them power. Now they are kneeling to the new politics, if you can call it that, which dispenses with the hypocritical concern, sees people not as individuals but as members of groups who either aid or hinder the acquisition of power, and are driven by malevolent plans to subjugate and enslave. It’s a race to the bottom. This handover is like the brutal and vicious Mafia ceding the drug business to the even more brutal and vicious Columbians.
Such power always insists, at the point of a gun if necessary, on complete submission in thought, word, and deed. Those scheming for control of CHOP, a city, a state, the United States, or the entire world are overjoyed that millions submit to Covid-19 tyranny and that government officials, corporate executives, celebrities, and other “important” people genuflect to orchestrated violence. Does anyone think all this taking of knees would have happened if there had been peaceful protests but no riots? The lesson our would-be rulers, or more correctly, our would-be dictators, will take from this: fear works on both the masses and the elite.
The translation of “laissez faire” is “let go.” Unfortunately for those of us who want the freedom to live our lives as we see fit, malignant souls don’t let go and won’t allow us to live in freedom, pursuing our own happiness. Even a laissez-faire district the size of CHOP wouldn’t receive the tolerance that collectivist CHOP has so far. The police or troops would clear it out as quickly as they could.
The point of coronavirus totalitarianism and orchestrated riots is surrender, humiliation, and submission, not for the sake of health or justice, but for the sake of surrender, humiliation, and submission.
The choice for each of us couldn’t be clearer: resist or submit.
- Indian Troops Given 'Fire At Will' Orders Against Chinese Troops If Threatened, Enraging Beijing
Indian Troops Given ‘Fire At Will’ Orders Against Chinese Troops If Threatened, Enraging Beijing
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/21/2020 – 20:15Beijing is enraged over current widespread Indian media reports that the Indian Army has been given orders to shoot or use “complete freedom of action” in hostile engagements with Chinese PLA forces along the disputed Ladakh border region.
The reports come following last week’s major border incident with China that resulted in 20 Indian Army troops killed, and an undisclosed number of Chinese PLA casualties in the disputed Galwan Valley area of East Ladakh.
Chinese state-media Global Times editor Hu Xijin called out the reports, saying that if the new ‘rules of engagement’ are true, it’s a serious violation of prior treaties implemented for deescalation.
Indian media reported that Indian army along the border with China had been given “complete freedom of action”, including using firearms in “extraordinary situations.” If true, this is a serious violation of agreement, & the Indian side will pay a heavy price for any such action. pic.twitter.com/ukmIZIX9Mp
— Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) June 21, 2020
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Indeed multiple headlines in major Indian newspapers asserted that Indian troops have been issued the new controversial orders.
The Hindustan Times for one, had this to say:
A significant change in Rules of Engagement (ROE) by the Indian Army following the Galwan Valley skirmish that left 20 Indian soldiers dead gives “complete freedom of action” to commanders deployed along the contested Line of Actual Control (LAC) to “handle situations at the tactical level,” two senior officers said on Saturday on condition of anonymity.
The commanders will no longer be bound by restrictions on the use of firearms and will have full authority to respond to “extraordinary situations” using all resources at their disposal, said one of the officers cited above.
Essentially troops will be able to fire on opposing Chinese troops if they feel under threat without consulting higher level officers or the national chain of command.
Obviously this holds the potential for more such deadly escalations as happened a week ago, considered the most severe Chinese-India clash along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in a half-century.
June 16 satellite image showing Chinese military personnel in the Galwan Valley. Souce: 2020 Planet Labs/AFP/Getty Images The Hindustan Times report cited another military source further, who explained: “With the changes in the ROE, there’s nothing that limits the ability of Indian commanders to take whatever action they deem necessary on the LAC. ROE have been amended to address the brutal tactics being employed by Chinese troops.”
Days after the Monday night clash, which apparently did not involve discharging of firearms, but instead brutal hand-to-hand combat that resulted in Indian soldiers succumbing to severe wounds in freezing high-altitude conditions, some almost unbelievable details emerged of the “violent face-off” in the western Himalayas.
Just days after #GalwanClash, India modifies engagement rules across LAC giving soldiers “complete freedom of action” to handle situations at the tactical level. https://t.co/6xAJ8Oqejl
— OTV (@otvnews) June 21, 2020
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The Guardian reported that Indian soldiers actually “fell to their deaths” after being knocked off a narrow ridge:
The hand-to-hand combat lasted hours, on steep, jagged terrain, with iron bars, rocks and fists. Neither side carried guns. Most of the soldiers killed in the worst fighting between India and China in 60 years lost their footing or were knocked from the narrow Himalayan ridge, plunging to their deaths.
Other international reports said that baseball bats spiked with nails and barbed wire were even used in the clash.
Chinese PLA troops training in harsh Himalayan border area conditions, file image. At one point it reportedly involved hundreds in close-quarter combat on dangerous, steep terrain:
Reinforcements from the Indian side were summoned from a post about 2 miles away and eventually about 600 men were fighting with stones, iron rods and other makeshift weapons in near-total darkness for up to six hours, Indian government sources said, with most deaths on both sides occurring from soldiers falling or being knocked from mountain terrain.
At least four more Indian soldiers were said to be in critical condition. Indian media outlets cited intelligence sources claiming up to 50 Chinese soldiers may have been killed in the melee but did not present the evidence. Chinese CCTV’s widely watched evening news broadcast made no mention of the border confrontation on Tuesday.
Certainly with these numbers, now with an additional build-up of forces on each side said to number in the tens of thousands near the Galwan Valley area of East Ladakh, a new authorization of “shoot to kill” if under threat holds the potential to spark a major battle possibly leading to war between the two nuclear powers.
Last week top diplomats on both sides called for deescalation, but these latest Indian media reports, and subsequent accusations and anger out of Beijing, aren’t helping matters.
- AG Barr Says "Developments" In Durham's FBI Probe May Arrive Before End Of Summer
AG Barr Says “Developments” In Durham’s FBI Probe May Arrive Before End Of Summer
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/21/2020 – 19:50Authored by Alex Nitzberg via JustTheNews.com,
Attorney General Bill Barr during a Fox News interview with Maria Bartiromo said that there soon may be “developments” in Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Russia probe.
“In terms of the future of Durham’s investigation, you know he’s pressing ahead as hard as he can and I expect that you know we will have some developments hopefully before the end of the summer,” Barr said in the interview today.
Durham’s investigation has slowed as a consequence of the coronavirus crisis, the attorney general said. When Bartiromo asked about a grand jury, Barr declined to divulge whether one has been impaneled.
“I don’t want to suggest there has been or is a grand jury but it is a fact that there have not been grand juries in virtually all districts for a long period of time and also people have been reluctant to travel for interviews and things like that,” Barr said.
Durham has “been working where he can on other matters that aren’t affected by the pandemic. But there has been an affect,” Barr noted.
During the interview Barr expressed concern that mail-in voting is ripe for fraud and could harm public confidence in election integrity.
“It absolutely opens the floodgates to fraud. Those things are delivered into mailboxes, they can be taken out,” he said.
“Right now a foreign country could print up tens of thousands of counterfeit ballots and be very hard for us to detect which was the right and which was the wrong ballot,” he said.
The attorney general said that “it can upset and undercut the confidence in the integrity of our elections. If anything we should tighten them up right now.”
- Musk Sells Bel-Air Home To Chinese Billionaire For $12 Million More Than He Paid For It In 2012
Musk Sells Bel-Air Home To Chinese Billionaire For $12 Million More Than He Paid For It In 2012
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/21/2020 – 19:25It was just a little more than a month ago that we wrote that Elon Musk claimed he would be selling “almost all” of his physical possessions and had put his houses on the market.
Now, he’s found a buyer for his Bel-Air mansion: a Chinese billionaire who seems to be happy forking over $29 million to Musk for the home. The buyer is tied to billionaire William Ding, according to Business Insider, who is the founder and CEO of NetEase.
Ignoring the fact that it’s odd for Musk to be offloading his assets at the same time Tesla’s valuation is at, or near, all time highs of ~$185 billion, Musk was able to cash out with a $12 million profit on this home (which he bought for $17 million 2012) in the midst of a real estate market that is enduring chaos from both the supply and the demand side as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Even stranger was that we took the time to note in our early May writeup that according to Bloomberg: “Fewer buyers were coming from China, Russia and the Middle East amid international tensions, and limits on state and local tax deductions dampened the appeal of owning California homes for wealthy U.S. buyers.”
So not only did Musk find himself a buyer from China, he found one that was willing to pay him a $12 million premium on his house to what it cost in 2012.
Recall, we also noted in 2019 that Musk took out $61 million in mortgages on five of his properties in California. Four of these properties were in the Bel Air neighborhood.
The loans were signed off on by Morgan Stanley and represented $50 million in new borrowing for Musk at the time. One loan was a refinancing on a 20,200 plus sq. foot property that Musk purchased in 2012 for $17 million. The initial $10 million loan he took on the property had turned into a $19.5 million debt, with a monthly payment of about $180,000.
- Bolton: Trump Gave Bibi Green Light For Preemptive Israeli Strike On Iran Nuclear Sites
Bolton: Trump Gave Bibi Green Light For Preemptive Israeli Strike On Iran Nuclear Sites
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/21/2020 – 19:00Among the new revelations and interesting tidbits found in John Bolton’s now leaked pre-published edition of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” is that President Trump was said to be prepared to endorse an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear sites.
In a section which describes the “elusive search” for an Arab-Israeli peace deal, Bolton writes that Trump told him at a moment of increased Israeli concerns over Iran’s nuclear development:
“You tell Bibi that if he uses force, I will back him. I told him that, but you tell him again.”
Image via GPO Though the significant revelation has barely made a dent in US media, it generated multiple headlines in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long held out the ‘option’ of a preemptive attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.
But Israel’s political and defense establishment would likely never sign onto such a huge and aggressive military ‘first strike’ action without first securing Washington’s backing. Bolton’s book essentially says Tel Aviv has it under Trump. The former national security adviser even boasted he pushed a ‘military solution’ on Iran.
This as Israel perceives Iran is bent on developing nukes despite Tehran officials long assuring they are only interested in peaceful nuclear energy development.
Oh no!! The pdf of Bolton’s book got leaked and people can download it and read it on the phones or iPads! That would mean he doesn’t get a royalty!! Oh no! The Room Where It Happened – John Bolton.pdf – Google Drive https://t.co/K7XgcQ63qT
— Ayelet Waldman (@ayeletw) June 21, 2020
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In the section, which comes early in the book, Bolton reveals the following conversation with the president at the White House:
“On Iran, I urged that he press ahead to withdraw from the nuclear agreement and explained why the use of force against Iran’s nuclear program might be the only lasting solution. ‘You tell Bibi [Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] that if he uses force, I will back him. I told him that, but you tell him again,’ Trump said, unprompted by me.”
More recently Netanyahu has also claimed a ‘green light’ from the US administration to annex parts of the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley.
In related sections in Bolton’s book, various Syria conversations with Trump and among his security team are revealed, including details of chemical weapons incidents, the Kurds, Russian intervention in Syria, Turkey policy, and ‘Iranian expansion’. Some crucial sections from the book can be seen here compiled at the following Reddit thread.
- NPR Busted Framing Self-Defense Getaway From Gun-Toting 'Protesters' As Right-Wing Extremist Attack
NPR Busted Framing Self-Defense Getaway From Gun-Toting ‘Protesters’ As Right-Wing Extremist Attack
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/21/2020 – 18:39NPR has altered an article after they were busted using a misleading photo of a ‘vehicle ramming’ in Louisville to make the claim that ‘right-wing extremists’ are targeting protesters with cars.
Archived photo of original article claiming an increase in ‘right-wing extremist’ vehicle attacks on protesters. Here’s what actually happened – the driver of the car, a woman with dreadlocks, was attacked by the ‘peaceful’ protesters, one of whom reportedly pulled a gun on her – and another who was struck as she accelerated to escape:
Here’s a fuller video of what you’re calling a “right-wing extremist attack” … a driver is harassed by a group of people, tries to get away, is then attacked by a larger group… and uses their vehicle to defend themselves and get away.
This story is leftist bullshit. pic.twitter.com/771gEebiqg
— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) June 21, 2020
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The driver of the vehicle came forward and won’t face charges, while two of the protesters have been arrested.
The incident near 6th and Liberty streets during the Wednesday morning rush was captured on a real-time crime camera.
Police said protesters had blocked the intersection, standing in front of the woman’s car with a megaphone.
During a verbal altercation between the driver and the protesters, someone ripped out one of the driver’s dreadlocks.
When someone pulled a gun, the driver sped off and struck a protester.
When she stopped at a red light a block later, someone pointed a gun at her.
Police said that man was 21-year-old Darius Anderson, who allegedly passed the gun off to 19-year-old Brioanna Richards.
Both are charged with rioting, disorderly conduct and obstructing a highway. –WAVE3
NPR deleted their tweet and changed the photo in the article to a 3-year-old image of the Charlottesville vehicle ramming.
The article is still up, but they changed the picture to Charlottesville… because that’s all they have.https://t.co/OtwCFz1MRl
— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) June 21, 2020
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So – while NPR claims at least ’50 vehicle-ramming incidents’ since late May, and tried to pass off a photo of a victim fleeing a potentially deadly situation, the liberal news network was unable to find a single photo of a recent ramming incident by ‘said extremists.’
Note: A previous version of this post and story included a photo of a protester being struck by a car in Louisville, Kentucky. The photo, chosen by editors, does not appear to be an example of the assaults described in the story, and has been replaced. pic.twitter.com/mDIzyoLmPO
— NPR (@NPR) June 21, 2020
- After The Lockdowns, Government "Fixes" For The Economy Will Make Things Even Worse
After The Lockdowns, Government “Fixes” For The Economy Will Make Things Even Worse
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/21/2020 – 18:35Authored by Anthony Mueller via The Mises Institute,
While it is relatively easy to predict that the post-corona economy will suffer from high unemployment, the outlook for price inflation is not so certain. On the one hand, there will be high government deficits and more public debt; on the other hand, given the weak economy, consumers and companies may refrain from taking on new debt and could begin to lower their debt burden.
Monetary Expansion Doesn’t Always Lead to Price Inflation
In contrast to common usage, the correct use of the term “inflation” refers to the money supply. Rising prices are not the cause, but the result of monetary expansion. However, not every rise of the money supply turns into price inflation. It can happen that the so-called price level remains stable when there are drastic shifts in the demand for goods and services that impact differently on their prices. The average will be deceiving when rising and falling prices cancel each other out and when certain goods and service vanish from the statistical basket because prices have risen so much that the demand has collapsed.
Due to the immense disruptions caused by the lockdown of the economy and because of social distancing, fundamental structural changes in business life are going on. More goods and services will be removed from the official price statistics than usual, and for those products that remain in the basket, prices may vary widely.
Problems with Measures of Price Inflation
Even more than in the past, the statistics of the price index will send wrong signals about the extent of price inflation. If the prices for some goods rise exorbitantly and, accordingly, there is less demand, they go into the statistical shopping basket with a lower weight, and these goods can drop out completely if they are hardly in demand because they have become too expensive for normal consumers. Even more than in the past, price inflation, measured by the statistical price index, will no longer be a reliable guide for monetary policy—if this has ever been the case.
Inasmuch as modern central banks follow the policy concept of “inflation targeting,” they will lose a reliable compass. Central bankers set the interest rates as if blindfolded.
More than in the past, depending on their personal demand structure, each individual will have a price inflation rate that differs from that of their fellow consumers. Different social groups will not only be affected differently by unemployment, but also by the price changes. The so-called price level stability directive is becoming less and less meaningful as an indicator of monetary policy. The same applies to official unemployment numbers. The upheavals that the lockdown has brought about affect the segments of the labor market in different ways. When persons leave the labor market for good, they no longer show up as unemployed.
As it did with the blow that came with the oil price shock in 1973, the economy after the lockdown confronts stagflation. When stagnation and recession show up together with price inflation, macroeconomic policy has hit the wall. Using Keynes as the guide for fighting the downturn of the economy after the lockdown would give an additional blow to the economy, which has already been weakened by the lockdown. The lockdown of the economy has also severely hurt the global system of supply chains that had been a major source of keeping prices low. Additionally, with the rupture of the trade with China that concerns not only the United States, the impact of cheap goods from overseas that had dampened global price inflation will recede. One of the consequences of more home production instead of global free trade will be higher production costs.
Monetary authorities have released a huge amount of money in the form of central bank money to mitigate the consequences of the economic slowdown and social isolation. Such a policy has already been implemented in response to the 2008 financial crisis and has been practiced as a so-called quantitative easing.
QE Forever?
In response to the 2008 crisis, the assets of the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve System have expanded from $870 billion in August 2007 to $4.5 trillion in early 2015. The later attempts to trim the central bank’s asset sheet only slightly brought down the amount of assets to $3.8 trillion until August 2019, when monetary policy became expansive again. Beginning in September 2019, the assets of the Fed began to rise again, reaching over $4 trillion before an additional big boost due to the lockdown lifted the total assets to over $7 trillion dollars in June 2020.
The lockdown brought the economies all over the world almost to a standstill and affected production and supply chains. The International Monetary Fund currently expects global production to shrink by 3 percent in 2020. While the US government has refrained from an economic outlook for the rest of 2020 on the grounds that the preview is too uncertain, the Congressional Budget Office predicts a fall in the real GDP of 12 percent during the second quarter and an unemployment rate close to 14 percent.
In the face of the economic consequences of lockdown, the Fed is about to expand the scope of assets that it may buy. While in the past the range of assets that central banks were able to buy was limited to government bonds, the range of asset categories is in the process of being extended to go beyond public debt titles—not to mention the possibility of direct financing of government spending.
A Credit Contraction—until the Dam Breaks
What has happened so far is a steep increase of the money supply in the form of the so-called monetary base. This increase does not necessarily mean that the newly created money will end up in the hands of businesses and consumers. If the demand for credit is low and the commercial banks assume an increased risk of default, or if they are already in a precarious state, they will use the money offered by the central bank as a liquidity cushion instead of lending it. In this way, the commercial bank’s lending capacity exists only as potential and is not yet actually executed.
This phenomenon of a credit contraction emerged also in the 2008 financial crisis. Despite the massive monetary policy stimulus from the central banks, global price inflation failed to materialize. The base money did not flow into the production economy and the demand for goods, but remained largely in the financial sector and served as a reserve for commercial banks. The most significant effect of the monetary expansion in the wake of the crisis of 2008 was the hefty price increases for bonds and shares.
Even after the lockdown, the effects of the central bank’s creation of base money over a longer period of time may not show up as lending, thus boosting aggregate demand. However, the current expansionary monetary policy harbors the danger that what has hitherto existed as mere potential could, as it were, become an avalanche overnight that swamps the real economy with liquidity. Until the dam breaks, it may appear to the superficial observer and to large sections of the population that there is nothing to fear and that the heads of the central banks have the situation under control.
One must fear that the national debt of the United States, which reached 107 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product in 2019, will rise sharply in 2020 and in the years thereafter. Deficit financing goes along with an increase of the money supply. Here, it comes in handy that the so-called modern money theory (MMT) explicitly provides a justification for direct government financing through the government’s own creation of money. Under the MMT model, a country’s central bank would become part of the Treasury. It does not take much effort to explain that following this theory of monetary mismanagement opens the door to hyperinflation and that it will be impossible to close this door once it has been opened.
The Importance of Sound Economics
Before the flood breaks loose, the central bank’s money creation may not significantly affect the real economy in terms of production, nor may it drive price inflation right away. A possible scenario could be that the central banks continue following their current policy model of “inflation targeting” and increase the money supply even further under the deception of an apparently “stable” price level. This way, the monetary authorities would ignore the inflationary potential and neglect the risk that hyperinflation exists as a clear and present danger. The monetary potential of price inflation that has accumulated in the past twelve years is so great that control has become unattainable once the avalanche starts.
Regardless of the differences in their details, the politically influential macroeconomic schools are interventionist. These doctrines are attractive to politicians, because they assume that the market economy is permanently dependent on government control. For these economists, the economy always needs leadership, control, and guidance. By declaring the market economy to be permanently ill, the interventionist economists are taking on the role of scientifically proven saviors. These social engineers then find coveted and highly paid jobs at the central banks and in the various ministries and regulatory bodies.
Austrian economics has a different perspective. For these thinkers, the economy is dynamically self-regulating. Consumers strive to improve their situation and entrepreneurs are vigilant in pursuit of these needs. In a competitive market, the price system provides control and guidance from consumers. Extensive intervention by the government and its central bank is not only not necessary, but harmful to prosperity.
More Intervention Will Bring Even More Economic Damage
Governments—not only in the United States—are about to make the same errors that were made in the 1930s, when economic policies deepened and prolonged the crisis. As Rothbard explained, America’s Great Depression came about because the policymakers encouraged the maintenance of high wage rates and implanted measures to stabilize the price level. They actively fought deflation through direct interventions. Instead of encouraging savings, the political decision-makers tried to stimulate consumption and discourage savings. Instead of promoting laissez-faire, policymakers expanded and deepened interventionism.
A new round of zero and negative interest rate policies (ZIRP and NIRP) would further deviate the price of financial assets from the fundamentals and sharpen wealth inequality at a time when social tensions have reached a revolutionary degree. What is needed in the face of an economic downturn is not more, but less government spending, and not more, but less monetary and interest rate stimuli.
The lockdown has resulted in the destruction of capital. The challenge ahead requires rebuilding the capital structure. This requires more savings and investment and less consumption. The government, Rothbard recommends, can only help positively if it lowers “its relative role in the economy, slashing its own expenditures and taxes, particularly taxes that interfere with saving and investment.” Stimulating consumption will prolong the time required to return to a prosperous economy.
Laissez-faire means freeing the multitude of economic actors from government impediments so that they can actively seek to improve their lives. Not more interventionism, but less taxes, less public debt, less inflation, less bureaucracy, and less regulations will open the way for entrepreneurial creativity and thus for the country’s prosperity. Getting the country out of the slump is not done with more alms, but with more productivity.
Conclusion
The lockdown of the economy and the imposition of social isolation have led to large-scale economic disruptions. Not only have jobs been destroyed, capital has also been consumed and the political measures have caused many cracks in the delicate network of the division of labor.
After the big mistake made with the ineffective lockdown, now another, maybe even larger mistake—not only in the United States but in Europe, too—is being made. The implementation of expansionary economic policies will mean that after the blow of the disease, and the smash of the lockdown, economic life will receive another major hit. More government spending and still lower interest rates will not accelerate the upswing but will paralyze the economy after a short flash in the pan.
The upcoming challenge requires the reconstruction of the capital structure and the restoration of global cooperation. This objective does not require more consumption but more savings and new investments. In order to overcome the economic impact of the lockdown, the Austrian school of economics recommends the opposite of the official economic policy that is in effect today. Instead of trying to get the economy going again with the futile means of low or negative interest rates, economic policy should provide a policy environment that promotes savings, encourages innovation, and gives room for private initiative.
- Futures Slide In Early Trading
Futures Slide In Early Trading
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/21/2020 – 18:31For once, the spreadbetting estimate of where Dow futs would be on Sunday was correct, and with IG expecting a drop of -230 points several hours ahead of the market open…
… that’s precisely what we got at 6pm ET when Dow futs opened down 250, Spoos were -30 and the Naz -80.
Why the early encounter with gravitation? Because as Amplify Trading writes, the market still remains wary of a second wave of coronavirus with nationwide cases in the US up 15% in the last two weeks and cases rising in 18 states across the South, West and Midwest, according to the NYT. Over the weekend, new cases in California rose by a record (4,515) and Florida infections up 3.7% from a day earlier, compared with an average increase of 3.5% in the previous seven days.
As a reminder, on Friday stocks slumped after Apple said that it will again close almost a dozen stores in the US because of a recent rise in coronavirus infections in the South and West, and although the tech giant can still operate effectively online the move was an ominous sign for brick and mortar retailers across America and a dent to the optimism that the US recovery is in full swing.
A number of Fed officials also remained cautious with Fed’s Rosengren (non-voter) stating on Friday “this lack of containment could ultimately lead to a need for more prolonged shut-downs, which result in reduced consumption and investment, and higher unemployment”, with Neel Kashkari adding “unfortunately, my base case scenario is that we will see a second wave of the virus across the US, probably this fall.”
Two other noteworthy developments on the virus come from Germany where the infection rate has shot up to its highest level for weeks after more than 1,300 abattoir employees tested positive for the virus. The country’s R-naught rate soared to 2.88 on Sunday, from 1.06 on Friday. Meanwhile, China blocked some US poultry imports over clusters at Tyson Foods plants.
What to expect this week
According to Amplify, one of the most important data sets this week is the latest flash PMI data due on Tuesday. While a rising headline number may give some cheer that confidence is returning the data in itself is forward looking which brings about two interesting points.
- It could be highly subject to change depending on the developments of a second wave virus (a la Apple on Friday).
- As analysts at ING note, looking at other data, including Google’s mobility index, the economy still appears to be operating well below its pre-virus level.
Finally, here is a calendar of the week’s events courtesy of NewsSquawk
Monday
- Data: EZ Consumer Confidence US Existing Home Sales
- Events: China LPR, US & Russian Army Talks; Chinese, Russian & Indian Foreign Minister meeting
- Speakers: ECB’s de Guindos & Lane, Fed’s Kashkari, RBA Lowe
Tuesday
- Data: EZ, UK & US PMIs (Flash)
- Supply: UK, German & US
Wednesday
- Data: German Ifo
- Events: RBNZ Rate Decision, BoJ Summary of Opinions
- Speakers: ECB’s Lane, Fed’s Evans & Bullard, EU Commission Draft 2021 Budget presentation
- Supply: UK, German & US
Thursday
- Data: German GfK, US Durable Goods, GDP (Final), PCE Prices (Final), Initial Jobless Claims
- Speakers: ECB’s Schnabel & Mersch, BoE’s Haldane
- Supply: US
Friday
- Data: Japanese CPI, US PCE Price Index, Personal Income & University of Michigan Sentiment (F)
- Speakers: ECB’s Schnabel
- Sisi's 'Declaration Of War' Puts Egypt & Turkey On War Footing Over Libya
Sisi’s ‘Declaration Of War’ Puts Egypt & Turkey On War Footing Over Libya
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/21/2020 – 18:10Egypt and Turkey have long been on opposite sides of the raging battle for the fate of Libya, with Turkey providing major military support and backing for the UN-recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli, and with Egypt backing Gen. Khalifa Haftar.
The situation escalated over the weekend, amid a pullback of pro-Haftar forces from Tripoli after being defeated in the bid for the capital, when Egypt’s President Sisi announced from an airbase near the Libyan border that the Egyptian Army stands ready to intervene in Libya on behalf of Haftar.
Sisi declared that if GNA forces attempt to enter Haftar-controlled Sirte, pushing deeper into central Libya, this would be a ‘red line’ for Egypt, forcing it’s intervention. Crucially both Tripoli and its main ally Turkey on Sunday condemned what they called Sisi’s “declaration of war”.
Turkish state media recorded the GNA statement as follows: “This is a hostile act, direct interference, and amounts to a declaration of war” – in condemnation of Sisi’s statements. It added that for the Libyan state, “interference in its internal affairs, attacks on its sovereignty, whether by declarations… like those of the Egyptian president or by support for putschists, militias, and mercenaries, is unacceptable.”
The heated rhetoric, and with Egypt potentially beefing up forces and military hardware along its border with Libya, has some regional sources saying that Turkey and Egypt are headed for direct war in a rapidly intensifying situation.
“Now Egypt’s president is signaling possible red lines in Libya,” The Jerusalem Post writes. “This line could keep the Turkish-backed GNA from Sirte and a strategic airfield at Jufra. The country would be split down the middle. Egypt has a massive army, but it is also an army mostly untested on foreign battlefields.”
Tripoli is now calling on the international community, especially the UN, to step in should Egypt’s army get involved.
Surveying the prospects for major war between Turkey and Egypt over Libya, The Jerusalem Post explains further:
On paper Turkey’s armed forces and Egypt’s are well matched. Both have F-16s and hundreds of fighter aircraft. Egypt’s army is the 9th strongest in the world on paper with thousands of tanks. Turkey’s armed forces are thought to be the 11th strongest in the world. Both countries use western weapons systems linked to the US or NATO. Turkey’s work with NATO likely makes it more effective than Egypt.
Both countries are bogged down in counter-insurgency campaigns. Egypt is close to Libya and can easily move an armored brigade or troops to the frontline. Turkey would have to fly them in and it likely prefers using Syrian rebel mercenaries to do its dirty work.
In short, the Libya situation – a country on fire since Gaddafi’s toppling and death due to the 2011 US-NATO military intervention, or what many have called “Obama’s Iraq” – is set to get a lot messier.
Haftar with President Sisi last year, AFP via Getty. There are already unverified reports that Egypt may be sending jets to Haftar airbases in eastern Libya in support of his LNA.
If so, Turkey will certainly increase its own aerial patrols, which has already involved ample use of drone warfare in and around Tripoli. But no doubt this would give Erdogan greater excuse to get Turkish fighter jets involved.
- WHO Reports Record Single-Day Jump In Coronavirus Infections Led By Brazil, US: Live Update
WHO Reports Record Single-Day Jump In Coronavirus Infections Led By Brazil, US: Live Update
Tyler Durden
Sun, 06/21/2020 – 17:56Summary:
- WHO reports record single-day jump in cases
- Brazil tops list, with US second
- California reports record jump in cases
- German “R” rate nears 3 as meat processing plant outbreak intensifies
- Tulsa reports record jump in infections day after Trump rally
- At least 12 states report 7-day averages at record highs
- Spain lifts restrictions on tourism as economy reopens
- South Korea bars travelers from Pakistan, Bangladesh
* * *
Update (1740ET): Building on Dr. Tedros’s warning that the global outbreak was “accelerating”, the WHO has reported the largest single-day increase in virus infections by its count, at more than 183,000 new cases in the last 24 hours. Brazil saw the biggest spike, contributing a stunning 54,771 cases, a new record daily total for any country, eclipsing the record 49k daily total reported out of the US back in April. With daily totals at or near record highs in more than a dozen states, the US was the second-largest contributor with 36,617.
Since the outbreak began, the WHO has counted a total of 8,708,008 cases and 461,715 deaths worldwide, with a daily increase of 4,743 deaths in the past day (which is, thankfully, well below the peak level from April). However, more than two-thirds of these new deaths were reported in the Americas.
In other news, Mexico hit a new record with 50% of the cases tested in the last 24 hours coming back positive as Mexico has become the second-worst outbreak in Latin America.
As we noted a day ago, Germany’s reproduction rate has been on the rise in the past few weeks. After ticking slightly higher during the opening weeks of Germany’s reopening, the reproduction rate – known as “R0” or just “R” – a critical metric aiming to measure the average number of infections caused by each carrier, which is representative of the virus’s rate of spread. The 7-day average rate for “R”, which is a critical metric in the eyes of Germany’s public health officials at the Robert Koch Institute, climbed to 2.88 on Sunday after a daily reading of 2.03 on Sunday. The RKI stressed that the increases were mainly due to local outbreaks in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where more than 1,300 meat processing plant workers tested positive in what has been one of the country’s biggest clusters.
As we noted earlier, California’s new cases rose by a record on Sunday and Florida infections jumped more than the weekly average, though not quite surpassing the record daily total set yesterday, the latest evidence of a possible resurgence in the sun belt states as the number of cases reported in the US increased by 1.2% on Sunday to 2,275,000.
* * *
Update (1400ET): After reporting another record total yesterday during the hours before President Trump’s campaign rally began, public health officials in Tulsa said Sunday that the city had reported another record jump in new cases.
USA: Tulsa County, Oklahoma reports 143 new coronavirus cases in last 24 hours.
Tulsa’s largest daily increase so far.
— Norbert Elekes (@NorbertElekes) June 21, 2020
Of course, it’s probably too early for them to be tied to last night’s rally…
Source: NYT
…plus, cases in the area had already been on the rise, which is why the city’s mayor wasn’t exactly thrilled about the president’s decision.
Meanwhile, California – one of 12 states that saw its 7-day average hit a new record high over the past week, per NYT – reported another record jump in new cases on Sunday, with 4,515 new cases, and 71 new deaths. That’s compared with 3,932 cases and 67 deaths yesterday.
Source: NYT
The new numbers brought the statewide total north of 175k.
* * *
With only a few more hours to go until US equity futures open on Sunday night, it appears the dire situation across the American south and West has gone from bad to worse. According to a Washington Post tally of coronavirus data released by each state on Saturday, 8 states on Saturday reported their highest single-day case counts since the pandemic began, and the pan-US tally of new infections surpassed 30,000 for the second straight day (both Friday and Saturday). The US hasn’t regularly reported 30k COVID-19 cases a day in seven weeks. And while New York and the surrounding states that caught the brunt of the outbreak – or the first wave, at least – haven’t seen the feared upsurge in new cases.
States across the South and West, including Florida, Texas, Georgia, South Carolina, Utah, Washington, Nevada and Missouri, set records for single-day confirmed cases, and 13 states set new highs for their 7-day averages.
On Sunday, Florida reported another 3,494 new cases, bringing the statewide total to 97,291. Though Sunday’s number broke a streak of daily records, it is still well above the 7-day average seen in recent weeks, leaving the state on track to pass the 100k case mark tomorrow.
Florida would become the 7th state to pass 100k behind New York, California, New Jersey, Illinois, Texas, Massachusetts.
Source: NYT
According to the NYT, 22 states were listed under the “increasing” tab of its coronavirus tracker.
Furthermore, while the Washington Post reported that the first iterations of the COVID-19 tests distributed nationwide in March and April by the CDC were so inaccurate as to be practically useless, a chorus of Democratic critics led by Joe Biden has spoken out against President Trump over a remark he made during last night’s rally in Tulsa, when he suggested that he pressed the CDC to hold back on the testing during the early days of the outbreak.
Even if Trump was telling the truth (the president, of course, has a widely acknowledged tendency to exaggerate when speaking extemporaneously at these rallies), a surge in testing during the early days of the outbreak may have only created more confusion. But many of the president’s Democratic critics claimed Trump’s remarks further cemented the notion that he put the economy before safeguarding the lives of the most vulnerable Americans.
“The President said tonight that he slowed down testing so the public death toll wouldn’t be worse,” Elizabeth Warren tweeted. “We still don’t have a national testing strategy & Trump’s plan is to bury his head. This is a deadly failure.”
Outside of the US, Spain officially entered the next phase of its reopening plan on Sunday, which included allowing tourists from most of Europe, but warning that social distancing measures must be followed to avoid a second wave. Speaking just before the three-month-old measures expired at midnight Saturday, Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez asked the country to keep its guard up.
“We will leave behind the state of alarm and we will enter the new normality…our economy is starting to beat. We are in a situation where we can move forward. We can’t drop our guard,” he reportedly said.
After finally wrestling a surprisingly virulent outbreak under control, Saudi Arabia on Sunday removed curfews and other restrictions imposed to fight its spread after 73 days of w relatively restrictive lockdown that also kept millions of Muslim pilgrims out of the Holy Cities as pilgrimmages were put on hold.
Over in East Asia, South Korea reported 48 new cases of the virus, 8 of which were imported, half from Bangladesh and half from Pakistan. In response, South Korea announced Saturday that it would restrict travel from both countries.
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