London continued to lead the pack amid the UK’s weakening property market at the start of 2019, according to Bloomberg, which reports that prices have fallen the most since the financial crisis a decade ago.
Values in the capital dropped 3.8% year-over-year according to the Nationwide Building Society, marking the seventh straight decline. The lackluster performance leaves London as the worst-performing region in Britain.
Some of weakness relates to Brexit, which is having an impact on sentiment. Consumer confidence remains close to its lowest level since 2013, according to GfK.
The Bank of England said on Friday that mortgage approvals dropped last month. Business investment fell for a fourth quarter at the end of last year, the statistics office said in a separate report.
The uncertainty over when and how the U.K. will leave the European Union has gotten worse this month as the government extended the deadline, having so far failed to get lawmaker approval for its exit deal. Still, a shortage of homes, record employment and low interest rates are preventing an even sharper downturn in the property market. –Bloomberg
It’s not all terrible, however. Nationwide property values rose 0.2 percent in March from February, while the annual rate of change improved to 0.7% from 0.4% – or relatively flat.
As we noted last August, UK house price growth slowed last June to the lowest annual rate in five years according to official figures, likely driven by falling prices in London, Brexit and increasing economic and geo-political uncertainty.
The UK’s annual house price growth rate has been on a downward trajectory since mid-2016.
Last week, the ECB announced the reintroduction of targeted long-term refinancing operations for the third time. TLTRO-III is scheduled to start from next September. The idea is to make yet more money available for the banks at attractive rates on condition they increase their lending to non-financial entities.
The policy is justified because the ECB sees growing signs the Eurozone economy is stalling, possibly badly. The weaker Eurozone economies are moving into outright recession, and Germany’s motor exports appear to have dramatically slowed, putting a constraint on her whole economy.
The ECB’s reintroduction of TLTRO is an offer of yet more monetary and credit inflation, despite the evidence that unprecedented waves of monetary inflation in the last ten years have failed in all the objectives for which they were designed, except two: governments have continued to get the funds to spend without meaningful restraint, and insolvent banks have been preserved.
Only two months after its asset purchase programme officially ended, the inflationists are at it again. But one wonders why the ECB bothers to delay TLTRO-III until September. If it is such a good thing, why not introduce it now?
There is another explanation, and that is the ECB is intellectually adrift with no economic compass. We do not know how many economists and monetary specialists are employed in the Eurosystem, which includes the ECB and the regional central banks, but they are certainly not economists, otherwise they would understand money. They may be technicians, which is not the same thing. If they were economists, or more precisely properly schooled in the human sub-science of catallactics (the theory of exchange ratios and prices) they would more fully appreciate the consequences of monetary inflation. They would understand Bastiat’s broken window fallacy: it’s not what you see, but what you don’t see. They see the supposed benefits of inflation but appear blind to the strangulating burden imposed on ordinary people who make up the productive economy.
The destruction and transfer of wealth from Eurozone savers to debtors and from the general public to the banks, government and large corporations are the principal and hidden consequences of monetary inflation. Monetary stimulation is progressively destroying Eurozone economies, which coupled with high taxes and excessive regulation has turned the Eurozone into one massive economic zombie. Any student of catallactics learns this early on. Yet, state-employed economists ignore the mathematics of dilution and are unaware of the changes in relative values people place on an unbacked currency, when they finally realise what the central bank is doing to it.
The ECB’s functionaries are similarly ignorant of catallactics as are their confrères in the other major central banks, but that must not excuse them from ignoring the contradictions inherent in their actions. They wield power, and that has responsibilities. Instead, they are trying for a third time a policy, that even if it appears to briefly succeed, emasculates the Eurozone’s economy even more.
Pumping yet more credit into the Eurozone is as effective as giving adrenalin to a dead horse. Lack of credit is not the problem. Put simply, there is a global momentum of economic contraction evolving, which any business and lending banker would be foolish to ignore. There is a developing crisis, the consequence of earlier monetary inflation in the credit cycle. Economic actors may not understand the origins of the crisis, but we can be certain they are becoming acutely aware of its looming presence. And as the crisis rapidly develops, those that require additional loans will already be insolvent.
The signal sent by the ECB to lending-bankers is likely to be misinterpreted when credit contraction is the looming threat: if TLRTO-III is the smoke, there must be a fire, possibly out of control. Better surely to call in existing loans to businesses rather than waiting to be repaid from profits unlikely to materialise. An encouragement to lend early in the credit cycle is more effective and less likely to be misunderstood than a similar encouragement later in the credit cycle. This is why a renewed TLTRO policy will almost certainly fail.
The inability of bureaucrats, with their heads buried in spreadsheets, to appreciate the role of human psychology is not the ECB’s only failing. Its executives do not even understand what interest rates represent, thinking it is simply the price of money. This is why it believes in keeping interest rates suppressed as a means of increasing credit. Earlier in the credit cycle, rate suppression does generate some credit expansion, mainly in financial rather than non-financial activities, because lower interest rates lead to higher prices for financial assets. That is basically a spreadsheet, almost non-human function. Large industrial corporations are opportunist, borrowing to fund buy-backs and to take over weaker rivals. Smaller and medium-sized business borrowers are usually offered credit only later in the cycle, when it is a mistake to accept it.
Consequently, in a zombie economy, such as that of the Eurozone, the only borrowers are wealth-destroying, socialising, debt-entrapped governments, taking full advantage of the Basel accords, which rates them for lending banks’ purposes as riskless borrowers.
The True Role of Interest Rates
Interest is not the price of money. It is a reflection of the difference between future values compared with present values. It has its origin in the human expression of time-preference. When a businessman agrees loan terms with a banker, they should reflect existing time-preference, so as to defer some consumption sufficient to fund investment. Anything else is a distortion with Bastiat-like consequences. Central banks have destroyed the basic function of capital intermediation based on time-preference by replacing savers with money and credit inflation as the principal source of investment capital.
This was wished for by Keynes in his General Theory, published in 1936. He wanted to see savers euthanised (his word) and for the state to provide the necessary capital to businessmen. He expected the entrepreneur to accept state direction of capital. Entrepreneurs “who are so fond of their craft that their labour could be obtained far cheaper that at present” should move from a risk-based approach to business to a socialising function.1
Keynes’s wish is granted posthumously, and ordinary people in the Eurozone and elsewhere are paying for it. Economic strangulation and wealth destruction are the consequence. Functionaries such as Mario Draghi and his fellow directors at the ECB are fully committed to pursuing these Keynesian objectives. Having promised their political masters economic salvation on Keynesian principals, they have delivered instead the Keynesian dream, but at the expense of the economy.
Yet, the deferral of TLTRO-III to September suggests that in the back of their collective minds, the panjandrums at the ECB suspect they may be on a path to perdition. Or perhaps it is the influence of the few sound-money men left at the Bundesbank, across the road in Frankfurt, whose families suffered two currency destructions in the twentieth century and vowed never again.
But even they have been silenced. The protests against the ECB in the German and European courts are in the past. If, as this writer expects, the global economy proves to be on the edge of an abysmal credit crisis, there will be no meaningful objection to a further acceleration of monetary inflation to the point where the euro becomes worthless. If so, Mario Draghi will be identified by future generations as a latter-day Rudolf Havenstein, who famously printed the Reichsmark out of existence.
Unlike the Reichsmark, the euro is a cut-and-shut of a number of fiat currencies with very different time preferences. A knowledge of catallactics would have advised against its creation, proof if it was needed of institutional ignorance in matters of money and exchange. If its origin had been one currency, we could expect its demise to follow the path of all fiat currencies in the past. A single state granting itself the sole right to issue the medium of exchange can never resist the temptation to use it as a source of finance until its destruction. But the euro is a compromise between states with track records of widely different rates of inflation. What suits Germany does not suit Italy. The euro could face a quicker destruction, simply by the Eurozone falling apart.
However, Germany and a few Northern states like her appear trapped, this time through TARGET2 imbalances whereby the Bundesbank is owed approaching a trillion euros by the system. Inflation of money and credit, ultimately the cause of these imbalances, has taken the ECB beyond a point of no return. Inevitably, at some future point, ordinary people will replace their wishful thinking, that the ECB and the national central banks have control over the purchasing power of the euro, with a growing realisation that they don’t. And when they awaken to that reality, they will dump all euros surplus to their essential requirements.
We know that attempts by the authorities to side-step successive credit crises ultimately fail, and it is in that light we should look at TLTRO-III. We must conclude that it is a diversion, window dressing for the shop-front of a failing ECB. It will achieve nothing, because the banks do not want to lend to non-financials, with the exception perhaps of the most credit-worthy large corporations, the corporations that have the political class in their pockets.
It is not just the ECB following economically destructive policies, but an unholy alliance between big business and politicians, which is what Brussels and the ECB is all about.
Ukrainian elections are in full farce mode, with a comedian – Volodymyr Zelenskiy – who plays the president on TV leading in the polls (according to exit polls cited by the BBC receiving 30.4% of the vote), and current president Petro Poroshenko is in a distant second with just 17.8%.
Poroshenko’s fortune totaled 1.56 billion hryvnia (US$57 million) over 12 months through March 31, which is 95 times as much as he reported in the same period a year ago. In 2017, Poroshenko’s gains reportedly reached 16.3 million hryvnia ($600,000).
Meanwhile, his official paycheck totals $12,400.
However, as RT reports,most of Poroshenko’s income – around $40.4 million – reportedly comes from return on investment in Zurich-based Rothschild Trust Schweiz, a trust subsidiary of Rothschild Bank AG.
As no candidate received an absolute majority in the first round of elections, the Ukrainian Central Election Commission is set to hold the second round on April 21.
Of course, none of this matters, as we await to discover who Washington wants installed.
Trump and the Russians has created an army of “Mueller Truthers,” demanding additional investigations. But Republicans are also demanding to know more, specifically how the FBI came to look into collusion, and what that tells us about the tension between America’s political and intelligence worlds. In Rudy Giuliani’s words “Why did this ever start in the first place?”
The primordial ooze for all things Russia began in spring 2016 when the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee, through a company called Fusion GPS, hired former MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele to compile a report (“the dossier”) on whatever ties to Russia he could find for Donald Trump.
Steele’s assignment was not to investigate impartially, but to gather dirt aggressively – opposition research, or oppo. He assembled second and third hand stories, then used anonymous sources and Internet chum to purported reveal Trump people roaming about Europe asking various Russians for help, promising sanctions relief, and trading influence for financial deals. Steele also claimed the existence of a “pee tape,” kompromat Putin used to control Trump.
Creating the dossier was only half of Steele’s assignment. The real work was to insert the dossier into American media and intelligence organizations to prevent Trump from winning the election. While only a so-so fiction writer, Steele proved to be a master at running his information op against America.
In July 2016 Steele met with over a dozen reporters to promote his dossier, with little success. It could not be corroborated. Steele succeeded mightily, however, in pushing his information deep into the FBI via three simultaneous channels, including the State Department, and via Senator John McCain, who was pitched by a former British ambassador retired to work now for Christopher Steele’s own firm.
But the most productive channel into the FBI was Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr. Ohr’s wife Nellie worked for Fusion GPS, the front company for Steele, having previously done contract work for the CIA. Nellie passed the dossier to her husband, along with her own paid oppo research, so that he could use his credibility at DOJ to hand-carry the work into the FBI. Bruce Ohr, despite acknowledging it broke all rules of protocol and evidence handling, did just that on July 30, 2016. He stressed to then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe the material was uncorroborated and had been compiled by Christopher Steele, who wanted it used to stop Trump.
The dossier landed in welcoming hands. The FBI immediately opened an unprecedented investigation called Crossfire Hurricane into the Trump campaign. It sent agents to London to meet Australian ambassador Alexander Downer, who claimed to have evidence George Papadopoulos, one of Trump’s junior-level advisers, was talking to Russians about Hillary’s emails. The FBI’s timing of the new investigation into Trump – only days after they closed their investigation into Clinton’s email server – can be considered a coincidence by those of good heart.
Peter Strzok, the senior FBI agent managing the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, and Lisa Page, a lawyer on his team (the two were also lovers), purposefully kept investigation details from political appointees at DOJ to the extent that only five people actually knew the full measure of what was going on, ostensibly to prevent leaks.
In fact, the point seems to have been to avoid oversight, given how weak the evidence was supporting something as grave as the Republican nominee committing treason. If you are looking behind the headlines for why Trump fired Andrew McCabe, besides his personal sympathies for Hillary, look there. Strzok and Page appear to have had an agenda of their own. In a text they wrote “Page: ‘[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Strzok: ‘No. No he’s not. We’ll stop it.’”
With a wave of a hand the dossier the FBI was warned was partisan bunk was transformed into evidence. Steele himself morphed from paid opposition researcher to paid clandestine source for the FBI, with the fact that he had recently retired from a foreign intelligence service, British or not, ignored. It was all just an excuse anyway to unleash the vast intelligence machine against Trump, the imagined Manchurian Candidate.
Papadopoulos, the man in London, as a linchpin was also preposterous. He was a kid on the edges of the campaign, who “bumped into” a shady Russian professor who just happened to dangle the most explosive thing ever, Hillary’s emails. Papadopoulos then met the Aussie ambassador to Britain, Alex Downer. Papadopoulos gets drunk, tells the tale, which then falls whole into the FBI’s lap. Ambassador Downer, by the way, had previously arranged a $25 million donation to the Clinton Foundation. Papadopoulos was introduced to Downer by an Australian intelligence agent who knew him through her boyfriend, stationed at the Israeli embassy as a “political officer.”
Carter Page’s case was more of the same. Page, as a key actor in the Steele dossier, wold serve as an early excuse to get FISA surveillance eyes and ears on the Trump campaign. The FBI had a paid CIA asset, University of Cambridge professor and American citizen Stefan A. Halper, contact Page and dangle questions about access to Clinton emails.
Halper had earlier been trying separately to entrap Papadopoulos (the professor offered the inexperienced campaign aide $3,000 and an all-expenses-paid trip to London to write a white paper about energy), and also met with Trump campaign co-chair Sam Clovis in late August, offering his services as an adviser. Clovis declined. Ultimately both Papadopoulos and Page also rebuffed Halper, though both would later encounter a young woman in London claiming to be Halper’s assistant who tried to reinterest the boys.
Though to obtain multiple FISA warrants the FBI characterized him as an “agent of a foreign power,” Carter Page was never charged with anything. Halper dropped off the media’s radar, but is almost certainly a US intelligence asset. He had earlier worked with British intelligence to pay for Michael Flynn to visit the UK. Halper’s main US-based funding source is an internal Pentagon think tank. The Washington Post reported Halper had in the past worked for CIA directly. Halper was implicated in a 1980s spying scandal in which CIA officials gave inside information on the Carter administration to the GOP. Halper also married into a senior CIA official’s family.
It is clear the FBI was desperately trying to infiltrate Halper into the Trump campaign as part of a full-blown intel op, recruiting against Trump’s vulnerable junior staff. Even though the recruitment failed, the bits and pieces learned in the process were good enough for government work. At issue was that Steele’s dossier formed a key argument in favor of a FISA warrant to spy on Trump personnel. The dossier was corroborated in part in the warrant application by citing news reports that later turned out to be themselves based on the Steele dossier. In intelligence work, this is known as cross-contamination, a risky amateur error the FBI seems to have taken a chance on hoping the FISA judge would not know enough to question it. The gamble worked.
Had Hillary won the story would have ended there, in fact, likely would never have come to light. But with Trump’s victory, the dossier had one more job to do: prep the public for all to come.
There has been no discussion as to why, in possession of information the FBI seemed to believe showed the Russians were running a global full-court press to themselves recruit inside Trump’s inner circle, Trump was never offered a defensive briefing. Such a warning – hey, you are in danger – is common inside government. But in Trump’s case it never happened. Instead, in echo of the dark Hoover years, the FBI used its information to try and take down Trump, not protect him.
Though the dossier had already been widely shared inside the media, the State Department, and the intelligence community, it was only on January 6, 2017 Comey briefed it to president-elect Trump. No one really knows what was said in that meeting, but we do know after holding the dossier since summer 2016, only four days after the Trump-Comey meeting Buzzfeed published the document and the world learned about the pee tape. Many believe someone in the intel community gave “permission” to the media, signaling Brennan, Clapper, Hayden, et al, would begin making publicstatements the dossier “could be true.”
John Brennan was a regular on television and other media claiming over two years there was evidence of contacts between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, pimping off his time as CIA director to suggest he had inside information. He went as far as testifying before Congress in May 2017 that there was evidence of contacts between Russian officials and Trump campaign figures, though now says he might have been given “bad information.”
After that, no item that could link the words Trump and Russia was too small to add to the pile of pseudo-evidence.
It would be easy to dismiss all this as a wacky conspiracy theory if it wasn’t in fact the counter-explanation to the even wackier, disproved theory Donald Trump was a Russian asset. It is possible to see Russiagate as a political assassination attempt, using law enforcement as the weapon. Someone might do well to double-check if Christopher Steele was in Dealey Plaza during the Kennedy assassination.
As Beijing tries to convince Washington to lift all of the trade war-inspired tariffs on Chinese goods as part of a sweeping trade accord, it has offered two concessions on Monday as trade czar Liu He heads to the US for another round of talks. China is reportedly planning to extend a suspension of retaliatory auto tariffs imposed last year during the trade debacle, and reiterating a promise made by President Xi’s during his meeting with Trump in Buenos Aires late last year to tighten controls of the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl.
Though neither of the purported concessions are anything new, Beijing is hoping they will help foster a “positive atmosphere” for talks this week. Beijing initially scrapped the 25% tariff on vehicles as a tit-for-tat measure on Jan. 1, after the White House delayed a planned tariff increase from 10% to 25% on $200 billion of Chinese goods, per BBG.
Beginning on May 1, Beijing said it will change the categorization of fentanyl to make it more difficult to export, as both sides try to keep the momentum going as trade talks enter their final stretch.
Chinese officials also pledged to tighten regulation on fentanyl from next month, a promise President Xi Jinping already made to President Donald Trump at a December meeting in Argentina. The inclusion of the drug as a controlled substance in a category of non-medicinal narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances will start May 1, according to the China National Narcotics Control Commission.
The moves signal China is trying to keep momentum in trade talks going as they enter what could be the final stretch before Trump and Xi are presented with a text to finalize or sign. Beijing is determined to prevent an escalation of the frictions that have hurt its economy and roiled markets, even as enforcement measures remain a sticking point in negotiations.
China also promised to crack down on criminal networks responsible for trafficking fentanyl. American law enforcement agencies have blamed these networks for causing the surge in opioid overdose deaths in recent years, as fentanyl is increasingly used to lace heroin sold on the street.
However, Chinese officials refused to accept responsibility for the crisis, saying it was largely “self-created” and can’t be blamed on China.
In addition to putting fentanyl on the controlled substance list, China said it will crack down on underground networks who sell the drug online and ship them to the U.S by disrupting their cyber communication channels and stepping up checks on private packages at its customs borders. The synthetic opioid is sold by online distributors across China and is blamed for thousands of overdose deaths in the U.S.
Chinese officials also emphasized that the U.S. opioid crisis is largely self-created and cannot be blamed on supply from China.
China “exercised great restraint and did its very best” with the recent moves, compared with the U.S. only mulling to suspend some of its tariffs, said Li Yong, a senior fellow at the China Association of International Trade in Beijing. “Blame does not help to solve the problem. The right attitude should be to enhance cooperation and have construction communication.
One analyst said the concessions would help enhance mutual trust between the world’s two largest economies.
“What matters is not whether these are big concessions or not, but that they are a quick response to the U.S. concerns,” said Gai Xinzhe, a senior analyst at Sino Ocean Capital in Beijing. “It’s not like in the past when issues raised in bilateral dialogues dragged on without solution. This is good for enhancing mutual trust in the negotiations.”
Of course, as we’ve pointed out before, the authorities in Beijing have the unilateral ability to turn off the fentanyl tap any time they want, and the notion that they have been helpless to stop fentanyl trafficking is simply misguided. Local governments have allowed fentanyl production because it brings in badly needed tax revenue – and they are also thoroughly corrupt.
That Beijing touted these as new concessions, even though they merely represent a doubling-down of Beijing’s previous promises, suggests that reports on Friday that China is unwilling to cede any more ground to the US, and that Xi remains “wary” of a summit with Trump, should be taken seriously.
The Gestapo power that the state now wields over parents is a creation of “child advocates” who believe that it is the function of government to protect children from parents. One consequence has been to erode parental control and to effectively end it in the case of rebellious children who respond to punishment by calling CPS and reporting their parents. CPS has powerful incentives to seize children as it justifies the agency’s existance and brings a federal payment for each child seized.
There are reports that many of the seized children end up in the hands of pedophiles, but governments seldom want to hear that they are doing harm rather than good.
Why has child safety changed so much over my lifetime that children need a police agency to protect them? Why could I and my 5 year old classmates walk alone to our neighborhood schools, for example, but such a thing is unthinkable today. Could the destruction of homogenuous neighborhoods by “diversity” have anything to do with it? Could the redefinition of the parental control of my day as child abuse have anything to do with it? Could all the forces that have broken up the family have anything to do with it?
When I grew up children had parents, two sets of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins all in the same geographical area. There was tremendous support for marriages and children. Divorce was rare compared to today. Families went to church, an important mission of which was to inculcate and reinforce moral and ethical standards of behavior. The father’s income was enough to support the family, so mothers were at home to provide child and household services. Today both parents have to work.
The support systems have been swept away. Corporations have transferred employees to relative-free geographical locations, thus increasing the stress on marriages. Divorce has broken up families, creating animosity where once there was support. Mass immigration has brought “multiculturalism” where once were shared standards. Identity Politics has produced a disunited population.
Over the course of my lifetime I have watched the destruction of America’s social capital – the shared norms, understandings, values, cooperation, and trust that make a society functional. In the dysfunctional society in which Americans live today, government tries to glue things back together by exercising more power, regulating speech, controlling explanations, and imposing more constraints on human action.
The consequence is the death of liberty and individual responsibility and the erasure of a nation.
Back in November 2017, “Salvator Mundi,” a painting of Jesus that was controversially attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, was driving the art world crazy. Aside from its sky high price of $450 million and its sale to a bidder that many thought represented Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the painting’s authenticity was also called into question.
Which is why when the Louvre Abu Dhabi cancelled a planned showing of the work this week, it caught the eye of art world yet again. Not only that, but the museum’s culture department has deflected questions about the work and other museum workers have said that they “do not know where the painting is,” according to Inquisitr.
The bottom line: the painting appears to have vanished into thin air.
French officials at the Louvre in Paris expected to get the painting for an exhibition later this year that will mark the 500th anniversary of Da Vinci’s death. They hoped that the painting would surface prior to then, but so far, it hasn’t.
Dianne Modestini, an art professor at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts said: “It is tragic. To deprive the art lovers and many others who were moved by this picture — a masterpiece of such rarity — is deeply unfair.”
The Abu Dhabi arrangement to show the painting is also cloaked in mystery: nobody knows how the agreement was arranged, leading many to believe that it was indeed Crown Prince Mohammed that bought it. Some believe he may have changed his mind and may be simply keeping the painting to himself now. Others have speculated that the painting purchase may have simply been a relatively easy way to launder half a billion dollars.
The last known stop for the painting was Zurich, when it was inspected by an insurance company before being shipped to “an unknown location”. After Switzerland, “the trail goes completely cold” Modestini said.
Martin Kemp, an Oxford art historian told the NY Times that the painting was “a kind of religious version of the ‘Mona Lisa’ and Leonardo’s strongest statement of the elusiveness of the divine.”
“I don’t know where it is, either,” he said. Hopefully at least the Saudi Crown Prince does.
A hefty case can be made that the Empire of Chaos currently has no allies; it’s essentially surrounded by an assortment of vassals, puppets and comprador 5th columnist elites professing varied degrees of – sometimes reluctant – obedience.
The Trump administration’s foreign policy may be easily deconstructed as a crossover between The Sopranos and late-night comedy.
While the U.S. empire’s existed in various states of decline for much of the 21st century, I’ve been opining on the topic with far more frequency and urgency since the election of Donald Trump. This isn’t because he’s fundamentally much different from the imperial managers (aka presidents) that came before him on foreign policy, but because his personality, style and overall boorishness serve to accelerate the pace of decline.
As many astute observers have noted, what really bothers establishment types on the “NeverTrump” right and the “Russiagate conspiracy theory” left is not so much what Trump does, but how he does it. These political cliques may disagree on many issues, but what they have in common — aside from Trump derangement syndrome — is a love affair with U.S. empire and an unwavering dedication to the maintenance of American geopolitical dominance at all costs.
This is called weaponization of the financial system.
If a global financial system can be weaponized by one nation (empire) it fails to serve a neutral function and is on its last legs. Very dumb move. https://t.co/HJjPFQhFUh
Both the NeverTrump right and the Russiagate conspiracy theory left are concerned that Trump, unlike Obama, is a poor global salesman for empire. Obama had the rare quality of being able to bailout bankers and keep them out of prison, pass healthcare “reform” only an insurance company could love, and expand American wars across the globe and still be revered around much of the world and celebrated as a liberal at home. That’s the sort of person you need in charge to keep a corrupt and violent empire running smoothly.
It keeps the mask on a while longer and allows everyone to pretend the status quo still works. In contrast, there’s no lipstick on the imperial pig under Trump and his band of creepy recycled neocons. It’s just an endless stream of threats and sanctions, and most importantly, an increased willingness to use the U.S. dollar and the global financial system as a weapon, even against allies.
What’s most interesting is that as the U.S. runs around sanctioning and trying to regime-change any sovereign state that dares to be anything less than an obsequious poodle, many traditional allies have begun to bristle. We saw it with the opening of a new trade channel earlier this year by France, Germany and Britain to avoid U.S. sanctions on Iran following Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA last May. We saw it again recently with the European Commission decision to allow individual countries to decide for themselves on Huawei’s participation in the 5G buildout, despite the Trump administration calling for a ban. We also saw it with Italy recently signing up for China’s belt and road initiative despite U.S. objections, as well as Xi Jinping signing a variety of deals with France last week while the U.S. remained in the midst of a trade war.
Am I the only one noticing that as the U.S. runs around sanctioning half the planet, China’s going around the world signing deals.
The mere fact that America’s European allies have been so glaringly dismissive of U.S. demands on a variety of fronts recently makes me consider that perhaps a multi-polar world isn’t coming at some point in the distant future, but is in fact already here. In other words, it seems the world as it stands today is already being shaped and influenced by a variety of geopolitically significant powers as opposed to just one. The only faction that doesn’t seem to understand this yet is the U.S. government itself, which is of course a very dangerous situation. The rest of the world doesn’t know how to break reality to those in charge of the levers of power in America. No one wants to tell them bluntly, because it’s become pretty clear that many diehard imperialists are still willing to double down on some very evil and stupid things in order to maintain an illusion of world dominance.
With the failed regime change attempt in Syria and now the flailing coup in Venezuela, it’s become clear the U.S. can’t easily get whatever it wants anymore despite its gigantic defense budget and 800 formal military bases in 80 countries. The most effective weapon the U.S. empire still currently has at its disposal is a dominance of the global financial system and the core role of the USD in it. This is why the Trump administration’s been flexing these financial tools so aggressively, but of course, this abuse of America’s exorbitant privilege is precisely what will ultimately lead to a serious decline in the global position of USD down the road (I expect it to play out by 2025).
If you’re an American reading this and find it depressing, don’t despair. The U.S. empire as it stands today is exceedingly corrupt, violent and works against the interests of the average American citizen, both economically and from a civil liberties perspective. Although the transition from being the unipolar power to just one of several major powers will be challenging, we should see it as an opportunity. Our government and our culture spends far too much of its energy and wealth trying to dominate the world that we’ve collectively lost sight of caring about the country we actually live in.
Our media’s a joke and bridges are crumbling as I write this, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Trump pledged to change this, but his campaign promises are being brushed aside as he fills foreign policy positions with wild-eyed neocons focused on making imperial dominance great again. Nothing will get better until we stop spending all our time playing Game of Thrones with the world, and transition our domestic affairs away from the corrupt and unaccountable oligarchy we have today, into a robust, creative, entrepreneurial, and freedom-loving society.
It’s very possible, we just have to get out of our own way.
* * *
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A high-security VIP prison in China is deploying an AI monitoring system to surveil convicts – tracking their every move to ‘learn’ their behavioral patterns and flag abnormal activity, according to SCMP.
A 2016 photo shows prisoners engaged in sporting activity at the jail. Photo: SCMP
State-run Yancheng prison has installed a network of cameras in every cell and every corner of the building, which some experts believe will make escape impossible even if inmates are able to bribe the guards (who we expect the system to be used to monitor as well).
After months of intensive construction, the upgrade of surveillance system at the 40-hectare facility in Yanjiao, Hebei is nearly finished, several sources involved in the project confirmed to the South China Morning Post this month.
The new “smart jail” system involves a network of surveillance cameras and hidden sensors that reach out like “neuron fibres”, as one of the sources put it, through the compound with a blanket coverage extending into every cell.
The network collects and streams data to the “brain”, a fast, AI-powered computer that is able to recognise, track and monitor every inmate around the clock, without blinking. –SCMP
The system will produce a comprehensive report at the end of each day, which will include behavioral analysis on each prisoner, using various AI functions such as facial recognition and movement analysis. The reports will be archived, while any abnormalities will be flagged.
“For instance,” said project representative Meng Qingbiao, “if an inmate has been spotted pacing up and down in a room for some time, the machine may regard the phenomenon as suspicious and suggest close-up checks with a human guard.”
The AI system was developed through a joint collaboration between numerous public research institutions, including surveillance technology company Tiandy and Tianjin University.
Meng, a Tiandy employee, claimed the system would knows where a each particular person was and what he or she was doing, no matter how large the inmate population – and there would be no need for a human guard to watch the monitors.
This is in part thanks to advanced facial recognition technology which is capable of handling a huge amount of surveillance targets at the same time. –SCMP
“The cutting edge technology allows each camera to track up to 200 faces at the same time,” said Meng, who added: “Prison breaks will be history.”
VIP treatment
Aside from the whole AI tracking thing, Yancheng has been described as a “luxury prison” due to its host of VIP inmates and relatively comfortable conditions.
Some of the high-profile residents include Gu Kailai, the wife of disgraced former Chongqing party chief Bo Xilai, who is serving life for murdering a British businessman; Rui Chenggang, a former China Central Television anchor who was detained in 2014 for reasons that remain unclear; and a number of high-profile figures who were snared for corruption, such as Zhang Shuguang, the former high-speed rail network’s chief engineer and Nan Yong, former deputy chairman of the national soccer association. –SCMP
Gu Kailai is one of the prison’s most high-profile inmates. Photo: Reuters
Aside from high-profile Chinese citizens, the prison also houses an unspecified number of foreigners, which has been visited by diplomats from many countries who have checked up on inmates.
That said, a team of Chinese government inspectors warned in December that the jail did not fully understand “its political nature in the new era,” and noted that some guards had been engaging in “frequent violations of the rules.”
As a result – the new AI network will now keep a close eye on what’s going on.
Yancheng prison held more than 1,600 prisoners last year, according to a report by Shanghai-based news website Thepaper.cn.
That number has been increasing rapidly in recent years due to the massive anti-corruption campaign launched by President Xi Jinping and many fallen senior officials have ended up inside the jail. –SCMP
Tiandy, meanwhile, has been in discussions with some South American countries to introduce similar technology into prisons which have a history of violence and security breaches.
Ethical questions
The 24-hour surveillance has raised ethical questions among some.
Rules from the UN high commissioner for human rights state that prisoners “shall be treated with the respect due to their inherent dignity and value as human beings”.
Zhang Xuemin, a professor of physiology who has studied human behaviour in extreme environments at Beijing Normal University, said the cameras and AI would “definitely affect” the prisoners’ lives and their mental state.
He also argued that the authorities must consider that supervising humans with machines may backfire in unexpected ways. –SCMP
It’s also possible that some prisoners may find ways to cheat the AI and exploit its weaknesses – though escape through traditional means such as cutting through walls, digging tunnels or squeezing through tiny holes – should be impossible with the AI.
Ding Zhenyang, assistant professor of electric engineering with Tianjin University who had took part in the project, said the prisoners could not beat the AI.
Even if they someone managed to convince the camera that they were not doing anything untoward, they would not be able to leave the prison.
The system was linked not only to cameras but sensors such as optical fibres capable of detecting and locating many types of ground movements. –SCMP
“You may cheat the camera. You may cheat the sensor. But you will not cheat both,” said Zhenyang.
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