- Volcano Experts To Monitor Canary Islands After Hundreds Of Earthquakes Recorded
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
It certainly seems like volcanoes are erupting all over the world right now, and the newest region to attract scientists’ attention, is the Canary Islands.
After hundreds of mini-earthquakes were this week, experts were called in to monitor a potential eruption.
According to The Daily Mail UK, the situation could quickly become volatile. Seismic experts have been called in to carry out tests on the Canary Island of La Palma after fears that an active volcano may erupt. Hundreds of mini-earthquakes have been recorded on the island in the past few weeks, and scientists are now monitoring the seismic activity on La Palma 24 hours-a-day. Tests will be carried out on the slopes of the island’s active volcano, Cumbre Vieja, to attempt to calculate any potential risk of an eruption.
Cumbre Vieja, on the volcanic ocean island of La Palma, near Tenerife, last erupted in 1971. But the hundreds of mini-earthquakes are prompting fears that it could go again – and soon. A slew of tiny tremors beneath the volcano’s surface in just a matter of hours this week have reportedly caused lava to rise up from beneath. Scientists will sample underground water, measure PH levels, conductivity, temperature, and radon dissolved gas activity, according to The Express.
All of this new testing was launched as a “hydrogeochemical monitoring program,” will see tests conducted three times a week at four different points on the volcano. The 350 mini-earthquakes have prompted scientists to probe deeper into the volcanoes eruption potential. The National Geographic Institute (NGI) notes that a team is to be sent to La Palma to carry out CO2 profiles and structural studies of Cumbre Vieja.
A majority of the tremors were so small, that they could not be detected by scientists and were not felt by any residents on La Palma. Between October 6 and 7, more than 40 tremors were recorded, with the most powerful hitting 2.7 on the Richter scale and located at a depth of 17.4 miles. A few days without any tremors followed. Then, between October 10 and 13, seismographers on La Palma picked up another swarm of tremors, taking the total to 352 in just ten days. On October 13 alone, some 44 quakes were recorded at depths of between 9.3miles and 13.6miles, the most powerful at 2.1 on the Richter scale.
In a report published on Saturday, the NGI adds that one of the reasons for the high number of tremors could be the three new monitoring stations in the area.
The Director of the National Geographic Institute, MarÃa José Blanco, told Canarias7 that while "seismic swarms" are nmot abnormal, she added that they had "never recorded a similar swarm" since monitoring began.
- CDC, IBM Announce Research Partnership Focused On Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence
In what we imagine will become one of the most quickly realized use-cases for blockchain technology, the CDC and IBM have partnered to research how the former can develop a blockchain-based system to allow health-care providers to more easily share information about individual patients, and data about burgeoning pandemics.
Since finding new possible applications for blockchain seemingly became the obsession of a legion of entrepreneurs and corporate technology chiefs in recent years, its potential to revolutionize the storage and dissemination of health records has received quite a bit of attention.
While the partnership will focus on developing the technology for use by the federal government, the research will help aid in the creation of health-care solutions for the private market, said IBM’s chief science officer, Shahram Ebadollahi. Ebadollahi made the announcement alongside IBM’s chief health officer, Kyu Rhee, during Watson Health’s panel discussion at the Fast Company Innovation Festival.
And by combining blockchain technology with breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, the creation of home units that perform diagnostic functions in lieu of a doctor may not be far off.
Rhee said he believes AI applications in healthcare will eventually enable consumers to purchase a home health system as easily as they can now acquire a home security system. “Think about where we were with the internet in 1993,” he said. “That’s about where we are today with AI.”
Rhee and Ebadollahi explained what many health insurers and health-care providers have already acknowledged: That blockchain is particularly well suited for sharing a patient’s sensitive medical records among multiple providers. Considering that most medical practices still store patient information in a paper chart that isn’t easily shared, many have identified medical records as an area ripe for blockchain disruption.
“Blockchain is very useful when there are so many actors in the system,” Ebadollahi said. “It enables the ecosystem of data in healthcare to have more fluidity, and AI allows us to extract insights from the data. Everybody talks about Big Data in healthcare but I think the more important thing is Long Data.”
As Rhee, who began his career practicing pediatric medicine, said healthcare professionals are swamped by data. “There are more than 8,000 healthcare publications each day,” he said.
“Nobody can keep up. We need a system to translate all the data into key insights that can be applied to a patient, and that’s where AI systems can support a clinician.”
And the security features of blockchain technology make it particularly well suited for storing sensitive health records.
“Privacy and security come first,” Rhee said. “Patients own their data, and you can’t share data with people you don’t trust.”
Of course, AI's potential stretches far beyond the health-care industry.
“When a bunch of physicists collaborated and created this thing called the World Wide Web a few decades ago, nobody imagined Facebook and Google and Amazon,” he said. “With blockchain we can collect data and extract insights through AI, and the future will have an economy around that we can hardly even imagine right now.”
However, anybody who expects these breakthroughs to arrive in the near term should probably reconsider. As we recently reported, some experts believe the hype surrounding AI and machine learnings is rapidly approach the “peak of inflated expectations…"
…And as AI evangelists recognize that the technology could take decades to develop, public expectations will soon move toward the “trough of disillusionment."
- China's Rise, America's Fall
Will the rise of China mean the fall of America? In a word, yes. Although decline might be more accurate.
Why do I think this? Because China is about to launch the PetroYuan and when it does the demand for dollars and for dollar denominated debt will shrink. When it does, I question whether the world will be so sanguine about the level of debt that America carries. If that happens then the value of the dollar is in question.
At the moment no matter what level of debt America carries, other countries need dollars. Dollars to pay for oil, since oil is traded in dollars. Dollars for their financial system so their banks can settle contracts for goods and services traded in dollars.
But over the last few years China has been systematically putting in place everything it needs to launch the Yuan as not only a rival to the dollar in trading and settling oil contracts but as a rival to the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. At the moment the only rival to the dollar is the Euro. I think it fair to say the relationship between the two currencies and their issuing powers, has been… ‘delicate’. The news that Sadam Hussein was going to start trading his oil in Euros came just a few months before America and its lap dog GB, decided Sadam was a threat to world peace and went to war with him. Something similar happened to Colonel Qaddafi.
Under Qaddafi Libya’s currency was backed by the country’s large holdings of gold and silver. This had allowed Qaddafi to finance, for example, the entire construction of the Great Man Made River without going to Western banks for a single loan. Libya was debt free and owned its own resources and infrastructure. Obviously a very unsatisfactory state of affairs for any third world country to get ideas so far above their station. Worse, he had a very public plan which he had laid before the Pan African Congress, to create a pan African currency backed by gold and silver to be launched by 2023. It was not too long before Hilary Clinton arrived in a freshly bombed Libya and crowed to CBS, “We came, we saw, he died.” Charming woman. I was only surprised she didn’t say “Mission accomplished.”
Libya and Iraq were small enough, that their pretensions to threaten the hegemony of the dollar and have the jumped up arrogance to think they could trade their own resources in their own currency or a currency of their choice, could be dealt with by shock, awe and death. I think China might not be so easily dealt with.
China’s plans for the replacement of the dollar and the positioning of their own currency are very like Libya’s. China too has had the idea to back its new settlement and perhaps one day its reserve currency, with gold. And China is not alone. Russia has been a part of the BRIC group with an interest in the plan. Russia, like China has been a very large buyer of gold.
As reported just a few weeks ago by the Irish Independent,
…the Bank of Russia has more than doubled the pace of gold purchases, bringing the share of bullion in its international reserves to the highest of Mr Putin’s 17 years in power, according to World Gold Council data.
In the second quarter alone, it accounted for 38pc of all gold purchased by central banks.
The article goes on to explain how purchasing gold has meant that Russia has not had to buy foreign currencies. For foreign currencies think Dollars.
The gold rush is allowing the Bank of Russia to continue growing its reserves while abstaining from purchases of foreign currency for more than two years.
China and Russia have very large holdings of gold between them. China actually produces 12% of the world’s gold and keeps much if not most of what it produces. The new Petro Yuan will be backed by Gold, Something the IMF decades ago, said no paper currency should have. A clear break with the Bretton Woods Dollar-world agreement.
Who will use this new currency? Over the past few years a network of bilateral agreements has been created around China and Russia. Back in 2012, in an article called A new Reserve currency to challenge the dollar – What’s really going on in The Straits of Hormuz, I pointed out that not only had China and Russia agreed to bypass the dollar and trade direct in their own currencies but that,
the India Times reported that India was talking to Iran about moving out of dollar settlements so as to be able to buy Iranian oil despite a US embargo. India said it was discussing settling in Gold. Remember, India has just signed a settlement agreement with China to use the Yuan.
Remember also, Russia recently eclipsed Saudi as the number one supplier of China’s oil. And if I remember correctly Angola was number two. Promoting perhaps the recent state visit this year of Saudi’s King Salman to see Mr Putin. As The Guardian put it,
Saudi king’s visit to Russia heralds shift in global power structures
King Salman agrees new areas of cooperation with Vladimir Putin on first official trip by Saudi monarch to Moscow
In addition Japan and China have agreed to trade in Yuan, by-passing the dollar, as has Iran. They are now trading their oil in Yuan or euros, but not the dollar. Ever wondered why Iran is ‘the axis of evil? It’s because they don’t use the dollar.
Then came the news in 2015 that Qatar had opened the first and so far only financial centre in the Middle East, for trading and clearing oil, gas and anything else, in Yuan. China’s ICBC is the central banking concern in the hub, allowing any Middle Eastern country to trade oil and gas and settle in Yuan. In the previous few years China’s trade with Qatar had tripled. And now, guess what? Qatar has been declared by the US to be a sponsor of terrorism and US allies in the gulf , led by Saudi, have begun to blockade Qatar’s trade. Hmm. Any pattern emerging?
The problem for the US is how much debt is too much for any country or business? Clearly it is not any magic figure or particular debt to GDP ratio. America and China carry huge debts and no one has balked…yet. How much debt you can carry is a function of debt to the estimated future productive capacity of the country in question. That creates the demand for its currency and the demand for the currency creates a market and demand for debt denominated in that currency.
At the moment the US can carry a huge debt load because everyone needs dollars to trade oil. And China can carry a huge debt because everyone needs yuan to buy the goods whose production was off-shored to China by our globalist leadership.
But what happens to demand for Dollars and dollar debt when, not if, oil starts to be traded less and less in dollars? I suggest the world’s appetite will diminish quite quickly. As it does so, the world will start to see US debt in a different light. While the opposite will happen to China. And this is what interests me and makes me think China has a plan.
At the moment China also has a very large debt load. I have argued that the Central Chinese authorities have not got the control they would like to have over the growth of that debt. Of course I have no inside information. But the on again/ off again attempts of the Chinese central authorities to deflate its housing-debt bubble and its quite out-of-control shadow banking lending suggests, to me at least, that the central authorities have not and can not control the level of debt being accumulated by provincial governments, their off-book, arm’s length financial vehicles, regional banks, property developers and the vast, largely unregulated trade in wealth management vehicles.
Chinese debt already overflowed once back in the 90’s. Four companies were created to take the debt off the banks’ books and trade it away. Decades later these companies still exist and still have the bad debts from the 90’s hanging around. You will see headlines telling you how those companies have been doing well, making money. Suggesting their trade in bad chinese debt has been going well. The reality, if you dig a little deeper, is that those companies lobbied for and were given permission to engage in ‘proper’ banking activities. Which meant they began to make their own loans – to property developers. As the property bubble continued to inflate over the last decade and a half they have ridden it and that, not trading the old bad-debt, is why they have made a profit. But now those ‘bad’ banks, have themselves started to find some of their own loans going bad. In any hard-landing or financial paroxysm the ‘bad-banks’ will need to be rescued by a new bad banks. Bad banks for bad banks is not really a solution.
I think the Chinese authorities can see this. It doesn’t take a genius after all. What can they do? Well if you already have a huge debt problem and know many of them are going to go bad and will do so overnight in the event of another global banking crisis, and know you are not able to reign it all in, then a very tempting alternative would be to get the world to agree that you can carry more debt – a lot more. And what could help convince the world? Well if your currency could become far more sought after, that would be peachy.
And so I think the long standing Chinese goal of making the yuan an important international currency which China, and Hong Kong in particular, have been working towards for years, has now taken on a far greater import and urgency. I think the Chinese central government’s best way of avoiding a politically disastrous domestic debt implosion is to get the Yuan to be used as a settlement currency for oil and not long after that to become a de facto rival to the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
Recently I argued at length with a military analyst who disagreed that China would risk such a break with America. Too dangerous he felt. China, he pointed out has such huge holdings of American debt. He argued that the Chinese would prefer to work alongside the dollar. I feel that even if the Chinese would prefer to ‘work alongside’ the dollar, this will prove very difficult if not impossible. Once a flow of countries and trade moves away from the dollar there will be a momentum the Chinese will not be in control of. Cooperation between dollar and Yuan as clearing and reserve currency, especially for oil, will be like trying to dock two super-tankers in a high sea. In theory possible. In practice – not going to work.
As for Chinese holdings of US debt – I think the advantages of avoiding a domestic debt implosion and projecting the Yuan to world centre stage, will outweigh the losses. I also think, If I were the Chinese, I would imagine a scenario where the dollar does begin to look vulnerable. Its value begins to be questioned, nations holding dollars and dollar debt will feel America’s profligate indebtedness is a global danger. They will blame America. How wonderful then, for China to arrive and say to a worried world, on the edge of a huge crisis, “Fear not, we have thought ahead and can offer you the use of a new currency – one backed by GOLD not paper debts. We are here to save you. To offer a ride on a sound ship as an alternative to the rotten and leaking ship you have been riding on.” China will be able to position their rise not as an aggressive act, not as trying to destabilise the world, but as trying to save it, from the collapse of an internally divided, corrupt, aggressive and indebted America.
America’s decline will be both financial and political. Financial due to the recalibration of what the world thinks of America’s debt load, and therefore their confidence in and need for the dollar. Political, because America has got used to being able to enforce its foreign policy through sanctions and embargoes. But once oil and other goods and the nations trading in them, no longer need the dollar for their trade, and do not have to use US clearing or custodial banks, then this power evaporates.
Try to imagine the shift in power when Wall Street’s banks are no longer guaranteed top position as the world’s custodial banks and Manhattan’s Southern District Court (Wall Street’s court) is no longer in a position to dictate to whole nations via decisions upon Wall Street Custodial banks, what debts those nations and their custodial banks must pay and to whom. The whole edifice of Bilateral Investment Treaties and the trade agreements they sit inside, depends for enforcement upon the US banks being the custodial banks and the Southern District court’s rulings being able to tell those banks what they must do. Take that power away, which will happen if the dollar is no longer pre-emininent, and America will no longer be able to enforce its foreign policy or world view via economic sanction.
I think the main US banks will be positioning themselves to try to bridge this decline by having a major presence in Hong Kong. They are all already there but will be working to be part of the new Yuan-world of trade and clearing.
Of course this is speculation. But it seems to me the underlying evidence of the previous decade makes it worth thinking about.
If I am in any way correct then I think other things follow.
I think the House of Saud knows it’s future is in question. I have written a lot about how I see Qatar rising to rival Saudi. Qatar not Saudi has the Yuan clearing house. Saudi is late to the party. Can Saudi risk being seen to move away from its traditional ally, America? If it does, too quickly, and signs yuan trade deals it risks falling as soon as Americal turns its back. If it doesn’t move quickly enough it risks being completely eclipsed by Qatar, having to go to Qatar cap in hand to trade its oil with Russia and China.
I see the political changes within the House of Saud as signs of the internal struggles to decide which way to go. I personally think the House of Saud will fall.
I also think the position of Israel under its present leadership is also very fragile. Israel needs Saudi. While they may seem to be on opposite sides, in many ways they are on the same side. If the House of Saud falls or changes allegiances from America to Russia/China then Israel will become even more isolated than it is. And of course if America is eclipsed and does enter a period of decline, then Israel will go with it.
If any of the above is near the mark, will it mean the end of America? Of course not. American’s will still work and sleep and raise their children like everyone else. But the pre-eminence of the dollar and American finance will decline as the stock of dollar denominated bonds and debt agreements expires, and with it the power and wealth of many of America’s elite. How that decline will sit alongside America’s still overwhelming military power I don’t know.
Of course what I have suggested above is merely speculation but personally I think another debt crisis will happen, because never ending QE and Central Bank debt buying cannot go one for ever, and what China does in the next few months could very well destabilise the whole unstable system. Many people will suffer and lives will be blighted. But I wonder if, when we all look back from a decade or a generation after, if we won’t think it lucky the crisis did finally come and the system we have been slaving under since 2007 as well as those who have forced it upon us for their own enrichment, were called to account.
It is difficult to accept that such historic changes could occur. But history has not ended despite what some have claimed.
Rumours of History’s end have been, in my opinion, greatly exaggerated. History is very much alive and happening to us, now. We are, as the Chinese saying goes, living in interesting times.
- Einstein's Scribbled Theory On Happiness Sells For $1.6 Million – 195x Highest Expectations
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mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;}A scribbled note by Albert Einstein which described his theory on the key to happy living was sold at auction in Jerusalem for $1.56m.
According to The Telegraph, the winning bid for the note far exceeded the pre-auction estimate of between $5,000 and $8,000, according to the website of Winner's auction house.
"It was an all-time record for an auction of a document in Israel," Winner's spokesman Meni Chadad told AFP…Bidding in person, online and by phone, started at $2,000. A flurry of offers pushed the price rapidly up for about 20 minutes until the final two potential buyers bid against each other by phone. Applause broke out in the room when the sale was announced.
The newspaper reports that Einstein was on a lecture tour of Japan in 1922 and had recently been awarded the Nobel prize. Einstein didn’t have cash to pay a tip to a bellboy in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, so he gave him two notes, predicting they would be worth more than a tip. He is reported have said.
“Maybe if you're lucky those notes will become much more valuable than just a regular tip.”
The Telegraph continues, Einstein dedicated his life to science, but suggested in the notes that fulfilling a long-term ambition doesn't necessarily guarantee happiness.
The note said.
“A quiet and modest life brings more joy than a pursuit of success bound with constant unrest.”
The anonymous buyer was from Europe.
The notes were sold by an anonymous Hamburg resident who commented "I am really happy that there are people out there who are still interested in science and history and timeless deliveries in a world which is developing so fast."
On the second note was written “where there’s a will, there’s a way”. It sold for $240,000.
- The United States Of Toxins
Every year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) requires most large industrial facilities to report the volume of toxic chemicals they release into the environment.
The EPA takes this data and consolidates it into the Toxic Releases Inventory (TRI), which is then used to set environmental policies in place.
We analyzed this data along with Priceonomics customer, Ode, a company that creates environmentally-conscious cleaning products. So, we got interested in the information buried in these massive, hard to understand reports. What are the most commonly released toxins? In which states and cities are the most chemicals emitted? Which industries contribute the most to this pollution?
Summary of findings:
- As a state, Alaska produces the most toxins (834 million pounds)
- Zinc and lead compounds (common products of the mining industry) are the most common toxins
- Metal mining accounts for 1.5 billion pounds of toxins, while chemicals (515 million) ranks second
- On a county level, the Northwest Arctic of Alaska leads the list, but multiple Nevada counties round out the top 5
- Kotzebue, AK produces the most toxins as a city (756 million pounds), and Indianapolis, IN (10.9 million) produces the most out of the top 100 most populous cities
A note on methodology
For this analysis, we looked at the EPA’s most recent TRI report, looking at data from 2016.
This includes data reported from more than 18,000 facilities across the U.S., spanning major industries like manufacturing, mining, chemicals, and utilities. It includes total releases (in pounds) of roughly 650 different toxins which are determined to have a significant adverse effect of humans and/or the environment. And in this report, “release” means that a chemical was “emitted to the air or water, or placed in some type of land disposal.”
More information about the report and the methodology used by the EPA can be founds here.
The United States of Toxins
We began by tallying total toxin releases by state. This includes all toxins across all industries. In the map below, darker colors indicate a higher total volume of toxins (in pounds).
Original source: Ode
On the mainland, we can see that Nevada and Utah facilities are especially detrimental to the environment — but a strip of states in the Rust Belt (Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio), along with Texas and Louisiana, are also major players.
Alaska, though, handily outranks every other state by nearly 3x.
Original source: Ode
A closer look, at a county level, reveals that 91% of Alaska’s toxin releases come from one county: Northwest Arctic, AK:
Original source: Ode
In fact, taking this one step further, we see that nearly all of these toxins originate from one city: Kotzebue, AK — a tiny town that is home to 7,500 people.
Original source: Ode
Why? Just 90 miles from Kotzebue is Red Dog Mine, the largest source of zinc in the world, and a significant source of America’s lead. In operation since 1987, the mine is estimated to contain 77.5 million tons of zinc, lead, and silver — and each year, its activities release 756 million pounds of toxins into the environment.
But these county and city lists have other stories to tell.
Three of the top 5 cities — Humboldt, Lander, and Eureka — are in Nevada. All are known to contain multiple, active gold mines that collectively release hundreds of millions of pounds of toxins.
The 50 most populous cities
It’s likely you haven’t heard of a lot of the cities on these lists — and that’s because most of the major industrial facilities in the U.S. are set up outside the limits of most major cities, far from large populations.
So, let’s take a look just at the 100 most populous cities in the U.S. (according the Census data). The list below is sorted by population size.
Original source: Ode
Interestingly, you’ll see that two of the largest cities in the U.S. — New York and San Francisco — have no data listed. Only certain “qualifying” facilities are required to submit data (those that release over a certain threshold of particular toxins), so we hypothesize that this is either because: A) These cities don't have qualifying facilities within city limits, since real estate is so valuable there, or B) The facilities that exist there just don't meet the minimum emissions required to report data.
In any case, of the 50 most populous cities, Indianapolis, IN leads the pack with 10.9 million pounds. The city has long been cited for its poor air quality, a result of steel mills, auto plants, and numerous coal-powered power plants that spew out arsenic, lead, and mercury at alarming rates.
But some of these cities are bigger than others, so it makes sense that they’d produce more toxins. Sticking with the 100 most populous cities, let’s look at toxins per square mile.
Original source: Ode
Baton Rouge, Louisiana tops the list here, partly thanks to Exxon Mobile’s massive oil refinery there — the second largest in the country, and one of dozens of plants that skirt the outer limits of the city.
Henderson, Nevada, which ranks second here, was once a wastewater dump that took 18 years and more than 500,000 environmental tests to get building approval for.
Per capita, we see the same cities top the list, with a few extra additions (Cleveland, Wichita).
Original source: Ode
The biggest aggressors
Looking over the lists above, you’ll notice that most of the top cities and counties are in areas known for mining. It comes as no surprise then, that mining is the industry responsible for the highest percentage of toxins released in the United States.
Original source: Ode
At 1.52 billion pounds, metal mining produces triple the next category, the broadly-defined “chemicals,” which includes such toxins as sulfuric acid, propylene, and sodium carbonate. (The EPA exhaustively lists its industry classifications here).
Electric utilities (368 million pounds), paper (170 million), and hazardous waste (146 million) also contribute large amounts of toxins industry-wide.
But how does this break down on a more specific scale?
Original source: Ode
Zinc compounds (739 million pounds), and lead compounds (650 million) — both products of mining — dominate the list of top individual toxins released. Nitrate compounds, which are a common byproduct of fertilizers and human excrement, rank in at 193 million pounds, and another water pollutant, Ammonia (163 million), also ranks high.
Certain companies, we find, are also largely to blame for mass percentages of the toxins released in the United States.
Original source: Ode
Metal mining corporations dominate this list, but we also see a number of larger holding corps here (Koch Industries, Berkshire Hathaway), as well as government operations (U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Tennessee Valley Authority).
* * *
Collectively, industries in the United States released more than 3.54 billion pounds of toxins into the environment in 2016. That’s the equivalent weight of about 25.3 million American adults — or roughly 8% of the entire U.S. population. Nearly half of all Americans live in a county with unhealthy levels of air pollution, and 46% of America's lakes are too polluted to fish or swim in.
- "Of Course It's A Bubble" – Ethereum Founder Says He's Not Worried About Digital Currency Valuations
As technology stocks and securitized mortgages have demonstrated all too recently, just because a bubble pops doesn’t mean it’s the end of the market. Hell, it doesn’t even necessarily preclude that another bubble won’t emerge years later.
Wall Street analysts trying to figure out if JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and Bridgewater Associates’ Ray Dalio are right about bitcoin – i.e. that digital currencies are frauds doomed to fail – should consider this phenomenon as they try to game out different scenarios for the future of the digital-currency market, said Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin.
When asked by Quartz about his thoughts on whether digital currencies are in a bubble, Lubin responded with an unequivocal yes.
“Of course it’s a bubble. Hopefully it’s one in a series of increasingly larger bubbles,” Lubin said. “These bubbles bring attention, they bring value into the ecosystem. That value is recognized by software developers and business developers, and they create fundamental value and projects that grow the new architecture.”
The popularity of Ethereum’s platform, which is widely celebrated for pioneering the development of smart contracts, has helped grow the digital currency’s valuation and market capitalization. It has also helped attract a legion of volunteer developers who help maintain and update Ethereum’s code, helping to make Ethereum the de facto industry standard for ICOs, many of which are built atop Ethereum’s platform.
Lubin says that a Gartner analyst recently pegged Ethereum’s developer base at 30 times larger than the IBM-backed Hyperledger project, a competitor in the blockchain space that enjoys all the benefits of having the support of a legacy computing company that has already won the trust of business.
Turning the conversation toward the volatility in digital currencies, Lubin said it will continue to subside as bitcoin becomes more widely used.
Speaking to the volatility of cryptocurrencies, Lubin says that it’s just a matter of fewer people using them compared to traditional currency systems, and that it’s an addressable problem.
“As they get a larger and larger monetary base, I think the volatility will decrease significantly. There are many state-issued currencies on this planet that are as volatile or more volatile than bitcoin or ether,” he said.
As Quartz points out, analysts from Credit-Suisse have found that bitcoin is 11 times more volatile than the post-Brexit exchange rate between the British pound and US dollar, and three times more volatile than the price of oil.
Of course, this hasn’t prevented bitcoin from rocketing to a fresh all-time high above $6,000 a coin earlier this week. Even a third hard-fork of the bitcoin blockchain has had only a marginally negative impact on the price.
Ethereum hasn’t reclaimed an all-time high reached early in the summer, but has managed to hold on to most of its year-to-date gains.
- The Time Has Come: Venezuela May Be In Default In Under 48 Hours
This past weekend, Venezuela failed to make $237 million in bond coupon payment, blaming “technical glitches” when in reality it simply did not have the money (or wish to part with it). Adding the $349 million in unpaid bond interest accumulated over the past month as of last Friday, that brings Caracas’ unpaid bills to $586 million this month, just days before the nation must make a critical principal payment. And, as BofA sovereign debt analyst Jane Brauer writes, while the bank’s base case assumption is that Venezuela will make its debt service payments this year, “the probability of a short term default has increased substantially with coupon delays” and it could come as soon as this Friday, when an $842 million PDVSA principal plus interest payment is due, and which unlike typical bond payments does not have a 30 day grace period but instead is followed by a second $1.1 billion PDVSA coupon on Nov 2, also without a 30 day grace period.
As Brauer writes, Venezuela has been in as similar situation of payment uncertainty in the recent past, with bond prices plummeting right before a big payment. For example, just before a big principal payment was due in April 2017 Venezuela received a $1bn loan from Russia just one week before the due date. At that time Ven 27s dropped 16% in a month (from $52 to $45) and recovered completely within a month. Ven 27 has fallen to $35, as Venezuela has demonstrated that it will be a challenge to make all payments on time. The difference between now and April is that coupon payment delays then came after, not before the payment.
Meanwhile, Venezuela has managed to redefine the concept of payment “on time” which now means “by the end of the grace period”
As we keep track of missed payments, the 5 missed payments, so far totaling $350mn all have a 30 day grace period, as did the $237mn payments over the weekend.
The concern is that the principal payments coming up have:
- No grace period in the bond indenture for an event of default
- Three business day grace period before triggering CDS
The concerning principal due dates are coming up, the first of which is this coming Friday, which means in less than 48 hours Venezuela could be in default unless it can find $842 million:
- Friday, Oct 27 PDVSA 2020 $842mn
- Thursday Nov 2 PDVSA 17N $1,121mn
The collateral against the first bond is PDVSA’s Houston-based refining and retail subsidiary, and in just a few hours, the bondholders may be the (un)happy new ownders of said subsidiary.
“This weekend, there’s either going to be a lot of bond holders and traders drinking champagne, or there’s going to be a lot of stressed fund managers,” said Russ Dallen, managing partner at Caracas Capital Markets
And to help everyone involved, here are some key tables, courtesy of BofA:
- Table 1. Ordered by due dates, missed payments and payments due today for Venezuela sovereign and wholly-owned quasi sovereign issuers.
- Table 2. Sorted by grace period end dates for missed payments and those due today
- Table 3. Debt service due dates for the next 9 months
- Table 4. Bond Attributes and face needed to block CACs
Table 1
Table 2
Table 3
Table 4
- The FBI's Forgotten Criminal Record
Authored by James Bovard via The Future of Freedom Foundation,
President Trump’s firing of FBI chief James Comey on May 9 spurred much of the media and many Democrats to rally around America’s most powerful domestic federal agency.
But the FBI has a long record of both deceit and incompetence. Five years ago, Americans learned that the FBI was teaching its agents that “the FBI has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the freedom of others.” This has practically been the Bureau’s motif since its creation in 1908.
The bureau was small potatoes until Woodrow Wilson dragged the United States into World War I. In one fell swoop, the number of dangerous Americans increased by perhaps twentyfold. The Espionage Act of 1917 made it easy to jail anyone who criticized the war or the government. In September 1918, the bureau, working with local police and private vigilantes, seized more than 50,000 suspected draft dodgers off the streets and out of the restaurants of New York, Newark, and Jersey City. The Justice Department was disgraced when the vast majority of young men who had been arrested turned out to be innocent.
In January 1920, J. Edgar Hoover – the 25-year-old chief of the bureau’s Radical Division – was the point man for the “Palmer Raids.” Nearly 10,000 suspected Reds and radicals were seized. The bureau carefully avoided keeping an accurate count of detainees (a similar pattern of negligence occurred with the roundups after the 9/11 attacks). Attorney General Mitchell Palmer sought to use the massive roundups to propel his presidential candidacy. The operation took a drubbing, however, after an insolent judge demanded that the Justice Department provide evidence for why people had been arrested. Federal judge George Anderson complained that the government had created a “spy system” that “destroys trust and confidence and propagates hate. A mob is a mob whether made up of government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals, loafers, and the vicious classes.”
After the debacle of the Palmer raids, the bureau devoted its attention to the nation’s real enemies: the U.S. Congress. The bureau targeted “senators whom the Attorney General saw as threats to America. The Bureau was breaking into their offices and homes, intercepting their mail, and tapping their telephones,” as Tim Weiner recounted in his 2012 book Enemies: The History of the FBI. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was illegally targeted because the bureau feared he might support diplomatic recognition of Soviet Russia.
Hoover, who ran the FBI from 1924 until his death in 1972, built a revered agency that utterly intimidated official Washington. The FBI tapped the home telephone of a Supreme Court clerk, and at least one Supreme Court Justice feared the FBI had bugged the conference room where justices privately discussed cases. In 1945, President Harry Truman wrote in his diary, “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction…. This must stop.” But Truman did not have the gumption to pull in the reins.
The bureau’s power soared after Congress passed the Internal Security Act of 1950, authorizing massive crackdowns on suspected subversives. Hoover compiled a list of more than 20,000 “potentially or actually dangerous” Americans who could be seized and locked away at the president’s command. Hoover specified that “the hearing procedure [for detentions] will not be bound by the rules of evidence.” “Congress secretly financed the creation of six of these [detention] camps in the 1950s,” noted Weiner. (When rumors began circulating in the 1990s that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was building detention camps, government officials and much of the media scoffed that such a thing could never occur in this nation.)
From 1956 through 1971, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program conducted thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to portray innocent people as government informants, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, white racist, and anti-war organizations. FBI agents also busied themselves forging “poison pen” letters to wreck activists’ marriages. The FBI set up a Ghetto Informant Program that continued after COINTELPRO and that had 7,402 informants, including proprietors of candy stores and barbershops, as of September 1972. The informants served as “listening posts” “to identify extremists passing through or locating in the ghetto area, to identify purveyors of extremist literature,” and to keep an eye on “Afro-American type bookstores” (including obtaining the names of the bookstores’ “clientele”).
The FBI let no corner of American life escape its vigilance; it even worked to expose and discredit “communists who are secretly operating in legitimate organizations and employments, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association and Boy Scouts,” as a 1976 Senate report noted. The FBI took a shotgun approach to target and harass protesters partly because of its “belief that dissident speech and association should be prevented because they were incipient steps toward the possible ultimate commission of an act which might be criminal,” the Senate report observed. That report characterized COINTELPRO as “a secret war against those citizens [the FBI] considers threats to the established order.” COINTELPRO was exposed only after a handful of activists burglarized an FBI office in a Philadelphia suburb, seized FBI files, and leaked the damning documents to the media. The revelations were briefly shocking but faded into the Washington Memory Hole.
FBI haughtiness was showcased on national television on April 19, 1993, when its agents used 54-ton tanks to smash into the Branch Davidians’ sprawling, ramshackle home near Waco, Texas. The tanks intentionally collapsed 25 percent of the building on top of the huddled residents. After the FBI pumped the building full of CS gas (banned for use on enemy soldiers by a chemical-weapons treaty), a fire ignited that left 80 children, women, and men dead. The FBI swore it was not to blame for the conflagration. However, FBI agents had stopped firetrucks from a local fire department far from the burning building, claiming it was not safe to allow them any closer because the Davidians might shoot people dousing a fire that was killing them. Six years after the assault, news leaked that the FBI had fired incendiary tear-gas cartridges into the Davidians’ home prior to the fire’s erupting. Attorney General Janet Reno, furious over the FBI’s deceit on this key issue, sent U.S. marshals to raid FBI headquarters to search for more Waco evidence. From start to finish, the FBI brazenly lied about what it did at Waco — with one exception. On the day after the Waco fire, FBI on-scene commander Larry Potts explained the rationale for the FBI’s final assault: “These people had thumbed their nose at law enforcement.”
Terrorism
FBI counterterrorism spending soared in the mid to late 1990s. But the FBI dismally failed to connect the dots on suspicious foreigners engaged in domestic aviation training prior to the 9/11 attacks. Though Congress had deluged the FBI with almost $2 billion to upgrade its computers, many FBI agents had ancient machines incapable of searching the web. One FBI agent observed that the bureau ethos is that “real men don’t type…. The computer revolution just passed us by.” The FBI’s pre–9/11 blunders “contributed to the United States becoming, in effect, a sanctuary for radical terrorists,” according to a 2002 congressional investigation. Former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft groused that “the safest place in the world for a terrorist to be is inside the United States; as long as they don’t do something that trips them up against our laws, they can do pretty much all they want.” Sen. Richard Shelby in 2002 derided “the FBI’s dismal recent history of disorganization and institutional incompetence in its national security work.” (The FBI also lost track of a key informant at the heart of the cabal that detonated a truck bomb beneath the World Trade Center in 1993.)
The FBI has long relied on entrapment to boost its arrest statistics and publicity bombardments. The FBI Academy taught agents that subjects of FBI investigations “have forfeited their right to the truth.” After 9/11, this doctrine helped the agency to entrap legions of patsies who made the FBI appear to be protecting the nation. Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, estimated that only about 1 percent of the 500 people charged with international terrorism offenses in the decade after 9/11 were bona fide threats. Thirty times as many were induced by the FBI to behave in ways that prompted their arrest.
In the Liberty City 7 case in Florida, FBI informants planted the notion of blowing up government buildings. In one case, a federal judge concluded that the government “came up with the crime, provided the means, and removed all relevant obstacles” in order to make a “terrorist” out of a man “whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope.”
The FBI’s informant program extended far beyond Muslims. The FBI bankrolled a right-wing New Jersey blogger and radio host for five years prior to his 2009 arrest for threatening federal judges. We have no idea how many bloggers, talk-show hosts, or activists the FBI is currently financing.
The FBI’s power has rarely been effectively curbed by either Congress or federal courts. In 1971, House Majority Leader Hale Boggs declared that the FBI’s power terrified Capitol Hill: “Our very fear of speaking out [against the FBI] … has watered the roots and hastened the growth of a vine of tyranny…. Our society cannot survive a planned and programmed fear of its own government bureaus and agencies.” Boggs vindicated a 1924 American Civil Liberties Union report warning that the FBI had become “a secret police system of a political character” — a charge that supporters of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would have cheered last year.
The FBI has always used its “good guy” image to keep a lid on its crimes. The controversy swirling about Comey’s firing should spur the American people, media, and Congress to take the FBI off its pedestal and place it where it belongs – under the law. It is time to cease venerating a federal agency whose abuses have perennially menaced Americans’ constitutional rights. Otherwise, the FBI’s vast power and pervasive secrecy guarantee that more FBI scandals are just around the bend.
- Here's How Much Your Obamacare Rates Are Going Up In 2018 (Hint: It's A Lot And It's All Trump's Fault)
A new study conducted by Avalere and released earlier today found that Obamacare rates will surge an average of 34% across the country in 2018. Of course, this is in addition to the 113% average premium increase from 2013 and 2017, which brings the total 5-year increase to a staggering 185%.
Meanwhile, and to our complete shock no less, Avalere would like for you to know that the rate increases are almost entirely due to the Trump administration's "failure to pay for cost-sharing reductions"…which is a completely reasonable guess if you're willing to ignore the fact that 2018 premium increases are roughly in-line with the 29% constantly annualized growth rates experienced over the past 4 years before Trump ever moved into the White House…but that's just math so who cares?
New analysis from Avalere finds that the 2018 exchange market will see silver premiums rise by an average of 34%. According to Avalere’s analysis of filings from Healthcare.gov states, exchange premiums for the most popular type of exchange plan (silver) will be 34% higher, on average, compared to last year.
“Plans are raising premiums in 2018 to account for market uncertainty and the federal government’s failure to pay for cost-sharing reductions,” said Caroline Pearson, senior vice president at Avalere. “These premium increases may allow insurers to remain in the market and enrollees in all regions to have access to coverage.”
Avalere experts attribute premium increases to a number of factors, including elimination of cost-sharing reduction (CSR) payments, lower than anticipated enrollment in the marketplace, limited insurer participation, insufficient action by the government to reimburse plans that cover higher cost enrollees (e.g., via risk corridors), and general volatility around the policies governing the exchanges. The vast majority of exchange enrollees are subsidized and can avoid premium increases, if they select the lowest or second lowest cost silver plan in their region. However, some unsubsidized consumers who pay the full premium cost may choose not to enroll for 2018 due to premium increases.
Of course, not all residents are treated equally when it comes to premium hikes. So far, Iowa is winning the award for greatest percentage increase at 69%, with Wyoming, Utah and Virginia close behind.
On an absolute basis, Wyoming wins with the average 50 year old expected to drop nearly $1,200 per month (or roughly the cost of a mortgage) on health insurance premiums.
So what say you? Have we finally reached the tipping point where enough full-paying Obamacare customers will simply forego insurance that they can no longer afford and cause the whole system to come crashing down?
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