- These Powder Kegs Are About To Blow: "Trump Needs To Halt The Downward Spiral That Obama Orchestrated"
President Trump just took a trip to Saudi Arabia in an effort to obsequiously “shore up” the ties. Expected. It is expected for any U.S. president to “recertify” the Petrodollar and the commitments to protect the House of Saud that were initiated by Kissinger and Nixon almost five decades ago. Times change, and administrations change; however, the systems in place are very slow and resistant to modification. The BRIC nations are shoring up their interests as the U.S. continues to send more naval “support” for South Korea in the form of another aircraft carrier.
In order to keep the MIC (Military Industrial Complex) happy, defense contracts have to be on the rise: A Republican administration is the foundation for this. The creation of a threat is ongoing. The creation of a threat (whether viable or not) is essential to justify the defense contracts and the ongoing deployments of U.S. troops that were initiated under Obama and are continuing under President Trump. The MIC is too deeply lodged within the framework of the government to extricate in one fell swoop. It is inexorably intertwined with the fragile (almost skeletal) domestic industrial base of the U.S. economy, as well as all of the foreign policy instituted at home and carried out abroad.
Europe is redefining itself with Britain’s exit from the EU, and NATO is trying to maintain ties and commitments with Britain even as she dumps the Eurodollar and cuts the economic ties to the other nations. Yes, the three super-states as outlined in Orwell’s “1984” are well on their way to taking shape: Eurasia, Eastasia, and Oceania (North American and Great Britain). The sides are posturing themselves both economically and militarily, with several “loose ends” to ties up. Those loose ends are none other than Syria and North Korea, around which there are two different lines forming: The U.S. and Western allies, and Russia with its Asian and Middle-Eastern alliances.
The U.S. Congress and the MIC want to invade Syria, and then Iran. They also want to “clear things up” in Korea. These nations are in the way of the establishment of a U.S.-controlled hegemony in the areas and a face-off with Russia. The first part of it is economic in nature: to attempt to stalemate Russia and China with sanctions and interference in trade (such as the maneuver previously mentioned in other articles to run a natural gas pipeline from Qatar into Eastern Europe).
The Russians have pretty much taken over the Arctic in terms of exploration and mining. This was enabled to be brought about by none other than Obama, along with the islands off the coast of Alaska that he magnanimously “gave away.” Obama has left us in very dire straits in our position with the rest of the world: The Middle East is still in a shambles from the “Arab Spring” and all of the debacles in Egypt and Libya; the Eastern European question is not yet solved in relation to Ukraine and the tug-O’-war over it between the U.S. and Russia; Syria and Iran are “powder kegs” about to blow; and the potential for war with North Korea is far from exhausted.
The President is going to need to take the initiative in order to halt the downward spiral that Obama orchestrated and began prior to his departure. To avert at (the minimum) a new Cold War, he’ll have to sit down and do a face-to-face with Putin instead of dispatching Tillerson to play ping-pong periodically with Lavrov. The time is now to head off these alliances between other nations that exclude the U.S. to a detriment. Such economic alliances eventually always turn into military alliances…based on the need to preserve the flow of money between the nations involved.
We do not need another Cold War to materialize. The way to stop it from occurring is through sound diplomacy and strength of position, not through imperialism and posturing. Therein lies the challenge: the restructuring of iron-clad policies and institutions so as to make a better deal and position for the U.S. and really “draining the swamp” of Washington. Saudi Arabia, eh? Well, why don’t we start out the “new deal” by going into all of that untapped oil that we have domestically? What are we waiting for? Or is it just a matter of not wanting to tick off the Saudis and changing the status quo of our worthless fiat Petrodollars? Only time will tell whether true actions will be taken and not another dog-and-pony show to enable the President to be reelected.
- How America Could End Up In An Unexpected War With China
Authored by Doug Bandow via The National Interest,
Three decades ago the People’s Republic of China was an economic backwater. Today the PRC sports the world’s second-largest economy. Shanghai most dramatically illustrates the country’s transformation. The city is filled with stylish office buildings, five-star hotels, luxury stores and foreign visitors.
Reflecting their success, the Chinese are increasingly confident as well. If not yet a great power, the PRC seems destined to eventually share global leadership with the United States. And its people know that.
Which means future U.S.-China relations could be rocky.
Ties turned confrontational under the Obama administration, which announced a “pivot” or “rebalance” to Asia. Washington officials unconvincingly claimed that the policy was not directed against Beijing. The Chinese may be many things, but they are not stupid.
Candidate Donald Trump sounded like he intended to pursue an even more truculent course, upgrading relations with Taiwan, launching a trade war, blockading Chinese possessions in the South China Sea and pressuring the PRC to “solve” the North Korea problem. But then came the bilateral summit and the president’s one-way love-fest with Chinese president Xi Jinping. All suddenly became sweet and light in Trumpland.
However, in the long-term the president’s pleasant words backed by an offer of unspecified trade concessions won’t go far in buffering relations between a unipower determined to preserve its dominance and a rising power equally determined to assert itself.
First, the Trump administration yielded Pacific economic leadership to the PRC. Beijing is likely to find new commercial opportunities, limiting Washington’s ability to do trade harm.
Second, nationalist passions are not easily cooled. The issue is not just a few obstreperous officials who don’t know their country’s proper place. The real challenge is posed by a population that believes in a much greater China.
So far North Korea has dominated discussions between the two governments. Even if cooperative efforts fail, any damage to the bilateral relationship likely will be contained. At most, application of secondary sanctions against Chinese financial institutions would lead to economic turbulence, not military confrontation.
Territorial disputes throughout the Asian-Pacific region pose a far tougher test. The Philippines’ unpredictable Rodrigo Duterte has been sparring with Beijing over Scarborough Reef. Tokyo has refused to even acknowledge a dispute over the status of the Senkaku Islands. But that has not prevented China from using air and naval patrols to challenge Japan’s claim.
America’s primary interest is navigational freedom, which so far the PRC has not attempted to impede. Washington has no territorial claims in the region. But both Manilla and Tokyo are treaty allies, their security guaranteed by America, which means any confrontation between them and China could draw in the United States. At his confirmation hearing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson suggested an even more active American role, barring PRC access to its claimed possessions. That would set up a clash at sea, guaranteeing a naval arms race and creating a trigger for war.
As pleasant memories from the Mar-a-Lago summit fade, deep disagreements likely will reappear. And the Chinese aren’t likely to back down. For the United States, dominance of a region so far from home is a convenience, an added benefit to America’s almost absolute security in its own hemisphere. For the PRC, preventing Washington’s encroachments along its border is a “core” interest, similar to what Americans have essentially claimed for their entire hemisphere for two centuries.
Last weekend I attended a conference on maritime issues in Shanghai. Participants were largely academic and policy, not political. However, the Chinese interlocutors were in no mood to compromise. They defended their government’s claims, advocated active measures to assert them, and disdained criticism of Chinese aggressiveness. No one wanted war, but none of them recommended that their nation back down if Washington chose confrontation.
Indeed, the participants well demonstrated the disparity of interest and intensity which disadvantages America. No one doubts that the U.S. possesses the stronger military. Nor is there any question that Washington would use its superior power if necessary to defend important interests closer to home.
But it would be far harder for America to use force to ensure its control of the waters along China’s borders and oversight of territorial disputes in which America has no serious stake—who gets to raise their flag over one or another set of barren rocks. And the price of doing so will only rise. It costs the PRC far less to threaten a U.S. carrier than it costs America to protect one. Just how much are Americans prepared to spend to assert what amounts to the convenience of empire rather than essentials of security?
Moreover, at a time when North Korea tops Washington’s Asian agenda, how much is the Trump administration willing to pay for Beijing’s assistance? According to President Trump, President Xi already has emphasized the limitations of China’s control. The PRC can hardly be expected to dismantle its one military ally if the United States is actively pushing military containment elsewhere in the region.
Indeed, while Americans tend to view themselves as being Vestal Virgins, attempting to do good in an evil world, citizens of other nations typically take a more cynical view. In Shanghai, as elsewhere, they see Washington speaking of principle while promoting interest, and refusing to apply to itself norms it seeks to impose on others. The Chinese are prepared to yield before superior force, but are not prepared to concede that America always will possess that edge.
Washington officials should reconsider their approach to China. Military confrontation would be a losing game. No victory would be permanent. An American success would be an invitation for the PRC to rebuild and expand its armed forces for a rematch. And conflict would aid the authoritarian regime in maintaining and expanding its control. A liberal, democratic China would be unlikely to emerge from any war.
The U.S. needs to prioritize its objectives vis-à-vis China. Washington wants Beijing to democratize, respect human rights, reduce trade and investment barriers, forswear cyberattacks, pressure North Korea, sanction other pariah regimes, abandon territorial claims, and accept permanent U.S. hegemony. No serious state, let alone a nationalistic rising power, could concede such a laundry list. American officials should decide what they most want and how much they are willing to pay.
Washington also should recalculate what is worth defending. For instance, there is a difference between preserving Tokyo’s and Manila’s control over territories contested by China and the two nations’ independence, which Beijing does not threaten. Indeed, while resolute backing of the former might deter China from acting, it also would ensure Washington’s involvement should an errant sea captain on one side or the other start shooting. Moreover, issuing blank defense checks would encourage friends to be more intransigent and prepare less for trouble.
Most important, American officials need to separate the objectives of defending America and containing China. The former is relatively easy and inexpensive. It is likely to be long into the future before the PRC is capable of projecting power against America’s Pacific possessions, let alone the homeland.
In contrast, it will grow ever more expensive for the United States to overcome the far more modest PRC build up necessary to deter outside intervention. How much are Americans prepared to spend to ensure that Washington can contest Chinese influence along China’s borders? The issue is not whether doing so has value. The issue is whether a highly indebted liberal republic can afford to continue doing so, especially when that responsibility more appropriately falls on other nations in the region.
Even after the ongoing campaign against Western influence, the PRC remains a far more open society than in the early days of the Communist revolution. Hope that political liberalization would follow economic liberalization has been stillborn, but Xi Jinping’s China remains very different from Mao Zedong’s China.
As such, the PRC might not be an ally, but there is no reason it should be an enemy. Yet attempting to dominate and contain China risks turning it into an angry and well-armed adversary. Instead, Washington should prepare to share global leadership. Far better to yield thoughtfully while shaping the future than to be forced to concede even more under pressure. Just as Great Britain successfully—if not always happily—accommodated the emerging United States of America.
- Does America Need A Northern Border Wall?
Keeping track of people legally entering and leaving the United States is a formidable task. Nevertheless, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has released figures on people who overstay their visas and other legal forms of admissions. Total overstays for 2016 stood at close to 740,000 people, of which up to 630,000 were suspected to still be in the country.
You will find more statistics at Statista
As Statista's Dyfed Loesche notes, Canadians and Mexicans are the biggest groups of people with non-immigrant admissions to the United States that overstayed their lawfully authorized time period. However, the DHS only counts in arrivals and departures by sea and air as stated in its report.
Unlike all other countries, the overwhelming majority of visitors from Canada or Mexico enter the United States by land. "The collection of departure information in the land environment is more difficult than in the air and sea", the DHS writes. While many Canadians or Mexicans could fly in ore arrive by boat they might leave the U.S. across the land border.
So, there's always a degree of uncertainty in the data.
While Canada and Mexico are the United States' direct neighbors the figures for the rest of the countries shown in the below above probably are more accurate. This overview includes countries that are taking part in the so-called visa waiver program (VWP) and those who don’t. It only shows data for leisure and business visas, not for students.
The DHS admits that there is a level of uncertainty in how accurate these numbers are and calls them a snapshot. For the air and sea arrivals and departures the department relies on data that commercial and private carriers need to provide.
Also, the figures include suspected in-country and out-of-country overstays. This means that some of the people who initially overstayed might have already left.
All of which raises the question – does America need a northern border wall also?
- The Conspiracy Mill
5/28/2017 – (GLOBALINTELHUB)– Ever since JFK the word ‘conspiracy theory’ has been used to discredit anyone holding a non-conventional view, such as based on facts regarding the CIA’s role in providing security at Area 51 (and the point being, what are they doing there?). But since the Trump election ‘conspiracy theorists’ like Alex Jones have been thrust to the forefront of the mainstream information curve.
It seems now the Democrats will stop at nothing to create their own ‘fake news’ and ‘conspiracies’ to destroy the fairly elected Donald Trump. But many of us remember it was recently Republicans creating ‘vast right wing conspiracies’ about leading Democrats. The fact is, there is little difference between the two parties, they are both funded by the same sponsors. This groundbreaking documentary explains how the world really works from the ground up; the tools used to manipulate the population into blind submission. This is a must watch – but bear in mind a few tidbits;
- JFK as an event is completely irrelevant today; however – as it was so deep in the past, it’s possible to analyze it better than more recent events like 911 (even though there is less forensic evidence). It isn’t just for history buffs, it explains how the world ‘really’ works. In the case of FX, it shows the simple path leading Nixon to office and finally the creation of a free floating FX regime. (THINK: If JFK survived, would we have FX?)
- The tools built by the military industrial complex post World War 2 have evolved only in technology, they are using the same bag of tricks. Thus, by understanding how this game works, we can better understand what’s going on today, whether it be how to improve your business, your finances, your portfolio, or understanding of the upside down pyramid structure that runs the world.
Importantly, the CIA has been engaged in the conspiracy mill in foreign countries for years. Part of winning any war, is first winning an information war. But this strategy was used in a domestic political election, clearly a violation of their mandate. And, logically – if they will violate their mandate once it is logical to assume they would for any other reason they deem necessary. Or who knows what lengths they may go through to justify their power and expanding budgets (i.e. Project Blue Beam).
Message for traders/investors: If you understand how significant events like 911 were rigged, as large scale Hollywood productions, you can understand how markets are rigged, and thus – see things for what they really are.
- Camille Paglia: Democrats Are Colluding With The Media To Create Chaos
By Emily Jashinky, originally in the Washingtonm Examiner,
Camille Paglia is much more worried about the media than about the steady string of Trump-related scandals they claim to be uncovering.
In a Tuesday interview with the Washington Examiner, Paglia excoriated the press for its coverage of Trump's decision to fire FBI Director James Comey and his alleged sharing of classified information with Russian officials.
Fresh off a spirited panel with Christina Hoff Sommers hosted by the Independent Women's Forum, the iconic feminist dissident, who serves as a professor of media studies at the University of the Arts, accused journalists of colluding with the Democratic Party in an effort to damage the Trump administration.
"Democrats are doing this in collusion with the media obviously, because they just want to create chaos," she said when asked to comment on the aforementioned stories.
"They want to completely obliterate any sense that the Trump administration is making any progress on anything."
The popular author, whose latest book was released in March, pointed to early struggles experienced by previous presidential administrations to illustrate the media's bias against Trump. "Obama's administration for the first six months was chaos," Paglia recalled. "Bill Clinton's was chaos for six months. Nobody holds that against a new person."
"Those two guys had actually been politicians!" she continued, noting Trump's relative inexperience with government operations.
Paglia's assessment of media bias in the Trump era leaves little room for optimism.
"I am appalled at the behavior of the media," she declared. "It's the collapse of journalism."
As the Examiner reported in April, Paglia, who cast her ballot for Jill Stein last November, is predicting Trump will win re-election in 2020.
"I feel like the Democrats have overplayed their hand," she said at the time.
Though the news cycle has moved through plenty of additional scandals in the past month, it appears as though Paglia's assessment of the president's prospects has not changed.
"I'm looking forward to voting Democrat again," the acclaimed philosopher explained. "But the point is I feel that the media has so utterly lost its credibility that I think people are going to vote against the media again."
- Yuan Funding Costs Spike As China Changes FX Rules
The effects of China's rules-change proposals around the Yuan Fix are already starting to show in the FX, money markets as one-week funding costs have exploded to the annualized equivalent of 14%…
As a reminder, we reported late last week that China announced it would introduce a new "counter-cyclical factor" to reduce exchange-rate volatility while undermining efforts to increase the role of market forces. In some ways this announcement was not unexpected: recall that after a period of eerie stability, on Thursday the Yuan surged shortly after China's downgrade by Moody's, which prompted speculation that the central bank was directly manipulating the currency as the PBOC’s daily fixings had "materially diverged" from the prescribed formula, resulting in a gap between the reference rate and currency’s spot value.
Roughly at the same time as a similar move was taking place on Friday, Bloomberg first reported and China later confirmed that policy makers would add a “counter-cyclical factor” to the yuan’s daily fixing, a move which "would give authorities more control over the fixing and restrain the influence of market pricing." Subsequent detailed revealed that authorities would change the daily $/CNY fixing mechanism, so that the change of the fixing from the previous day’s close would also take into account a “counter-cyclical adjustment factor” (how this is determined is not specified though), in addition to the USD’s movement against a basket of currencies.
While the practical consequence was a surge in both the onshore and offshore Yuan to three month highs, traders and commentators were left confused by this latest intervention by Beijing into what has become China's fulcrum security.
“The counter-cyclical adjustment factor sounds like an increased role for the fixing to be nudged away from where markets would set it,” Sean Callow of Westpac Banking Corp told Bloomberg. “The authorities’ actions give the impression that they are more worried about yuan stability than declared in their public statements.”
The reaction has been notable…
Offshore Yuan has spiked dramatically in the last few days – coinciding with apparent Fed dovishness in the minutes and PBOC rule changes…
And, as Bloomberg details, deliverable yuan funding costs have soared after the PBOC said it’s considering changing the way it calculates the yuan daily reference rate. One-week forward points have more than doubled to the equivalent of about a 14 percent annualized interest rate.
Though traders anticipate that funding costs will retreat after month-end, a policy shift may keep markets on edge — on two previous occasions the PBOC adjusted its fixing mechanism, in 2015 and earlier in 2017, costs remained elevated for weeks.
- They're Killing Small Business: The Number Of Self-Employed Americans Is Lower Than It Was In 1990
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
After eight long, bitter years under Obama, will things go better for entrepreneurs and small businesses now that Donald Trump is in the White House?
Once upon a time, America was the best place in the world for those that wanted to work for themselves. Our free market capitalist system created an environment in which entrepreneurs and small businesses greatly thrived, but today they are being absolutely eviscerated by the control freak bureaucrats that dominate our political system. Year after year, leftist politicians just keep piling on more rules, more regulations, more red tape and more taxes. As a result, the number of self-employed Americans is now lower than it was in 1990…
In April 1990, 8.7 million Americans were self-employed, but today only 8.4 million Americans are self-employed.
Of course our population has grown much, much larger since that time. In 1990, there were 249 million people living in the United States, but today there are 321 million people living in this country.
What this means is that the percentage of the population that is self-employed is way down.
In fact, one study found that the percentage of Americans that are self-employed fell by more than 20 percent between 1991 and 2010.
And if you go back even farther, the numbers are even more depressing. It may be hard to believe, but the percentage of “new entrepreneurs and business owners” declined by a staggering 53 percent between 1977 and 2010.
Sometimes I like to watch a television show called Shark Tank, and on that show they make it seem like entrepreneurship in America is thriving.
But the exact opposite is actually the case. In a previous article, I discussed how the number of new businesses being created in the United States has been steadily falling over the years. According to economist Tim Kane, the number of startup jobs per one thousand Americans has been declining for several consecutive presidential administrations…
- Bush Sr.: 11.3
- Clinton: 11.2
- Bush Jr.: 10.8
- Obama: 7.8
So why is this happening?
As I mentioned at the top of this article, self-employed Americans are being absolutely strangled by oppressive rules, regulations and taxes.
To illustrate this point, I would like to share with you some quotes from an open letter that was authored by a small business owner named Don Chernoff…
#1 I work for myself and have to pay my own medical expenses. Before the “affordable care act” I was paying about $200 per month for a high deductible policy. It was far from perfect but it got so much worse under the “Affordable” care act.
I now pay over $400 a month, my deductible went from $5,000 to over $6,000 and my out of pocket costs for care have skyrocketed.
#2 I have to spend dozens of hours and thousands of dollars for a tax accountant each spring to prepare my taxes because I cannot possibly understand how to do it myself, and I have a master’s degree in engineering.
#3 Many years ago when I quit a perfectly good job to start my own small business, I was shocked to learn that I had to pay both my share and what had been my employer’s share of Social Security.
#4 Between state, federal and local taxes you’ve probably paid 50% or more of your income in taxes, but that’s not enough for politicians.
If you’ve been lucky enough to have created a business you can sell, now you’ll get to enjoy paying another tax on the capital gain from the sale.
This is another reason why we need a conservative revolution in Washington. We should demand that our members of Congress lower tax rates dramatically, completely eliminate the self-employment tax, greatly simplify the tax code and get rid of as many regulations on small business owners as possible.
In fact, if it was up to me I would abolish a number of federal agencies completely.
What we are doing right now is not working. Small businesses have traditionally been one of the main engines of economic growth in this country, but thanks to the left they are unable to play that role at the moment.
It isn’t an accident that over the last ten years the U.S. economy has grown at exactly the same rate as it did during the 1930s.
If we want our economy to be great again, we need to go back and start doing the things that made it great in the first place. If we continue to suffocate our economy, we will continue to get the same results.
And with each passing day, we get more signs that the economy is heading into another major downturn. For instance, we just learned that Sears is closing 30 more stores on top of the 150 that had already been announced…
Sears Holdings, which wasn’t shy when it announced at the start of the year that it is closing 150 underperforming stores, has quietly added at least 30 more to the list.
Another 12 Sears stores and 18 Kmarts are among the locations that are closing, from Carson, Calif., to Hialeah, Fla., with most scheduled to shut their doors in July, based on calls to the stores, malls and confirmation in local media.
At the start of the year, the retailer pinpointed the 150 stores it said it would close. But it declined this week to provide a list of additional locations that are slated to shut since then, saying that it update store counts each quarter.
In addition, we just learned that new home sales in April were 11.4 percent lower than they were in March…
If you’re surprised by the collapse in new home sales in April, then you’re not paying attention.
The 11.4% MoM plunge in new home sales in April was 5 standard deviations below expectations and the biggest since March 2015.
Yes, the stock market is holding up for the moment, but for most Americans the “real economy” just continues to deteriorate. Just because we are at the end of a giant financial bubble does not mean that everything is going to be okay.
The numbers that I brought up in this article are just another example of our long-term economic decline. In a healthy economy, entrepreneurs and small businesses would be thriving. But instead, they are being systematically strangled out of existence by a political system that is wildly out of control.
- Russia And Iran Sign Oil-For-Goods Barter Deal; Escape Petrodollar
Iran signed an agreement with Russia under which it has broken free from the petrodollar, and will “sell”, or rather barter crude oil to Russia in exchange for products. The announcement was made by Iran’s Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh, as reported by Russia’s RIA and TASS news agencies.
“The deal has been concluded. We are just waiting for the implementation from the Russian side. We have no difficulties; we signed the contract, everything is coordinated between the parties. We are waiting for Russian oil companies to send tankers,” he said, as quoted by Russian news agencies. While sanctions against Iran have been lifted, restrictions on trade in US dollars for the country’s banks remain, making it difficult to sell oil on the open market.
As reported here just over three years ago, the $20 billion agreement was initially signed in April 2014 when Iran was under Western sanctions over its nuclear program. Russian traders were to participate in the selling of Iranian oil. In exchange, Iran wanted essential goods and technology from Russia.
This is what Reuters reported in April 2014 when the deal was first announced:
Iran and Russia have made progress towards an oil-for-goods deal sources said would be worth up to $20 billion, which would enable Tehran to boost vital energy exports in defiance of Western sanctions, people familiar with the negotiations told Reuters.
In January Reuters reported Moscow and Tehran were discussing a barter deal that would see Moscow buy up to 500,000 barrels a day of Iranian oil in exchange for Russian equipment and goods.
The White House has said such a deal would raise “serious concerns” and would be inconsistent with the nuclear talks between world powers and Iran.
Little did the US know back in 2014 that less than three years later, Russia would also be running the US, courtesy of wholesale manipulation of tens of millions of Americans, whom it hacked and convinced to vote for Trump.
Sarcasm aside, when the sanctions against Tehran were lifted in 2016, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said the deal was no longer necessary. However, Novak said in March 2017 that the plan was back on the table with Russia buying 100,000 barrels per day from Iran and selling the country $45 billion worth of goods, Russia Today reported.
Russia and Iran discussed energy, electricity, nuclear energy, gas and oil, as well as cooperation in the field of railways, industry, and agriculture.
Novak had announced in February that Russia’s state trading enterprise Promsirieimport has been authorized by the government to carry out the purchase of Iran’s oil through the oil-for-goods program under study by both countries. Meanwhile, Zanganeh had been quoted by the media as saying that Iran would be paid in cash for half of the oil that would be sold to Russia. The due payments for the remaining half would be made in goods and services, the Iranian minister had said.
A February report by the International Monetary Fund said that while Iran has been reconnected to SWIFT, significant challenges prevent Iranian banks fully-reconnecting to global banks still exist mostly due to remaining US sanctions.
“US primary sanctions apply to US financial institutions and companies, including their non-US branches (but not their subsidiaries). Moreover, with very limited exceptions, businesses and individuals related to the US continue to be generally prohibited from dealing with Iran, including with the government,” the IMF said.
“US dollar clearing restrictions have not been lifted and pose a significant challenge for non-US banks who may do business with Iran, but may not be paid in US dollars,” it added.
And since necessity is the mother of invention, what better way to bypass the world’s reserve currency than to go back to the way commerce was conducted before currencies were even created: through barter.
- New Home Prices Are Over 50% Higher In Canada Than The US
Authored by Kaitlin Last via BetterDwelling.com,
The price of new homes is quickly diverging in Canada and the US.
Data from the Canadian Housing and Mortgage Corporation (CMHC) show that new homes are selling for substantially more than the same time last year.
Meanwhile south of the border, data from the US Bureau of Census show that new home prices are on the decline.
This has lead to an even wider gap between the average price of a new home in Canada and the US.
Canadian New Construction Is Higher
The price of a new home across Canada is up for the second month in a row. The average sale price in April was CA$751,881 (US$559,123). This represents an 11% increase from the same time last year, when measured in Canadian dollars. When compared in US dollars, that increase drops to a much more conservative 2.64%. Even after factoring in the loonie’s decreased buying power in Canada, new home prices still climbed.
US New Construction Is Lower
American new home builders aren’t seeing such steep climbs in sale prices. Actually, they aren’t seeing climbs at all. The average price of a new home in the US was CA$495,271 (US$368,300). This represents a 3% decline from the same time last year, when measured in US dollars. In Canadian dollars, this was a 0.49% decline from the same time last year. Both forms of measurement show declining home prices in the US, curious since their economy is in a much better state than Canada right now.
US Vs. Canadian Prices
New homes are trading at substantially higher values in Canada than the US in April. The average new home in April 2017 was 51% higher in Canada than the US. The same time last year, prices in Canada were only 36% higher. It appears in a post-crash United States, new home buyers are taking much more conservative strides. In a hasn’t-crashed-in-decades Canada, new home buyers are optimistic about future values.
The gap between new home sale prices in Canada and the US is growing substantially. The US is a country with a booming economy, almost 10 times the population of Canada, and less land mass. Somehow, new home prices in the US are dropping compared to the same time last year. In sparsely populated Canada, prices are increasing – despite the precarious position of our economy.
Are Americans being overly cautious on homeownership, or are Canadians demonstrating irrational exuberance for homeownership, much like the US did in a pre-2006 America? Tell us your thoughts in the comments.
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