- Saudis Open The Ultra-Conservative Kingdom To Tourists For First Time
Saudis Open The Ultra-Conservative Kingdom To Tourists For First Time
It’s 2019, and a mere couple months after lifting travel restrictions on their own women within the country, Saudi Arabia announced Friday it will offer tourist visas for the first time.
It’s part of broader efforts to diversity its economy away from oil, and interestingly comes at a time when tourism in the strict Wahhabi Islamic kingdom is no doubt the last thing on holidaymakers’ minds, given the Sept. 14 attack on Aramco facilities, and given there’s still a war raging across the southern border in Yemen.
Amid what’s been hailed as a gradual liberalization of Saudi Arabia’s repressive laws and social mores, Riyadh officials also announced an easing of its strict dress code for foreign women, which until now required the body-shrouding abaya robe, still demanded of its own female citizens however (with the more extreme Niqab covering the face). Tourists will still be required to be in “modest” attire, a definition not likely to include bikinis at the beach.
Saudi tourism file image According to a statement in the AFP:
“We make history” today, tourism chief Ahmed al-Khateeb said in a statement.
“For the first time, we are opening our country to tourists from all over the world.”
Citizens from 49 countries are eligible for online e-visas or visas on arrival, including the United States, Australia and several European nations, the statement said.
Currently westerners are primarily to be found in heavily protected Saudi Aramco planned communities, and have heavy restrictions placed on their movements outside compound walls.
Though part of crown prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 reform program to take the Saudi economy in a post-oil direction, we doubt there will be an influx of tourism anytime soon.
Though not required to wear a Burqa, foreign women will still be required to dress “modestly”. Image source: EPA Aside from the more obvious issues of the war in Yemen and ongoing proxy conflict and gulf standoff with Iran which would keep carefree travelers far away, it remains that the tourism ministry has insisted its blanket ban on alcohol will remain in effect.
The first instance of random Aussie or German backpackers being hauled off to jail after being caught with a little smuggled whiskey will sure to bring a chilling effect as well.
Via Arab Weekly The kingdom hopes to showcase its medieval Islamic sites (with Mecca and Medina continuing to be off-limits to all non-Muslims of course) and historic Bedouin culture.
Ad proposal: “Saudi tourism – come see what we saw.”
— Aron Lund (@aronlund) September 27, 2019
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But we doubt that Chop Chop Square in Riyadh — where beheadings and even the occasional crucifixion continue at record pace — will be high on visitors’ list of must see attractions.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 09/30/2019 – 02:45 - UK's Metro Bank Teeters after Bond Sale Fails. Shares Collapsed 95%
UK’s Metro Bank Teeters after Bond Sale Fails. Shares Collapsed 95%
Authored by Nick Courbishley via WolfStreet.com,
Hedge-fund manager Steven Cohen and Michael Bloomberg are among those ruing the day they bought the crushed shares of the UK bank touted as a “bargain”…
Even by its own recent standards, Metro Bank has had a torrid week. On Monday, shares of the British retail bank tumbled 5%, on Tuesday, 25%, on Wednesday, 5%, and on Thursday, 4.5%, before staging a brief comeback in the final hours of trading on Friday, to end the week 35% lower. By Friday morning, it was the second most-shorted stock on the FTSE all shares index, behind the collapsed travel & vacation-giant Thomas Cook.
The main trigger for this week’s rout was the bank’s failure on Monday to raise a much-needed £250 million by issuing non-preferred bonds that deeply skeptical investors spurned. Despite trying to lure buyers with an interest rate of 7.5%, double the rate of similar offerings, Metro only attracted £175 million worth of orders, prompting the embattled lender to pull the plug on the bond sale.
“Failure to get enough support for a product that is yielding 7.5% is quite remarkable when you consider how investors are struggling to find generous levels of income in the current market,” said Russ Mould, the investment director of AJ Bell.
“It suggests that investors don’t trust the bank or they believe the 7.5% yield is simply not high enough to compensate for the risks of owning such a product.”
Metro Bank opened for business in 2010, becoming Britain’s first new high street bank in over 100 years. One of a handful of so-called “Challenger Banks” — new retail lenders created after the crisis to provide a little more banking competition in a country where the five biggest banks control a staggering 85% of the market — Metro Bank proved particularly adept at luring disillusioned clients from the big banks.
A large part of its attraction was its focus on physical branches while the big boys were frantically closing theirs. It grew faster than any other high street bank while picking up accolades for its customer satisfaction along the way.
But that was before a misreporting scandal in January this year decimated investor confidence in the bank. Investors — led perhaps by well-connected insiders — had already been smelling a rat since March 2018. From March 2018 until just before the initial disclosure on January 22, 2019, shares got whacked down in bits and pieces by 45%. Upon the disclosure, shares plunged. And they have gotten crushed every step along the way since then. As of today, they’re down 95% from March 2018, and the sell-off over the past few days reduced the shares from nearly nothing to almost nothing, from 288 pence to 192 pence, giving it market capitalization of just £332 million:
Metro blamed this week’s failed bond sale on tough market conditions. To a certain extent, it has a point: selling unsecured bank bonds just a month before another Brexit deadline is hardly ideal. Bank of Ireland was already forced to cancel a £300 million bond in early September due to the low level of demand; and luxury automaker Aston Martin — which S&P downgraded to deep-junk CCC+ over concerns about its ability to service its big pile of debts debts — had to offer interest rates as high as 12% to convince investors to buy $150 million of bonds due in 2022.
Most of Metro’s problems have been self-inflicted. By assigning a lower risk weight to its mortgage lending portfolio, whether by accident or intentionally, Metro left investors thinking it was safer than it actually is. Once trust is broken, it’s hard to win it back. Flagged up by regulators in January, the “error” left a gaping £900 million hole on its balance sheet, prompting managers to announce plans for a £350 million rights issue. The cash call was successful at 500 pence a share.
But the sell-off continued, leaving some very rich investors, including hedge fund manager Steven Cohen and Bloomberg-founder Michael Bloomberg, nursing heavy losses after they bagged shares at 500 pence during the cash call in May, which had been touted as a “bargain.” And now they’re at 192 pence.
In May, Metro Bank suffered a mini-bank run at some of its London branches. Big business clients withdrew some £2 billion of deposits in the first half, though last week’s bond prospectus showed it recovered much of that over the summer. In July, the lender reported an 80% drop in pre-tax profits for the first half of 2019. Then, last week it disclosed that a Financial Conduct Authority investigation into the bank’s mis-categorization of risk-weighted assets had been widened to include “certain senior members of management”.
Now, it has a new problem on its hands: How to raise fresh capital by the end of the year without having to pay interest rates it can’t afford, just as markets are, by its own admission, getting tougher. It needs the money for two main reasons: First, to comply with the first stage of the so-called MREL (minimum requirement for own funds and eligible liabilities) directive; and second, to roll over the £3.8 billion it drew from the Bank of England’s Term Lending Scheme in 2016. The scheme was ostensibly intended to boost affordable loans to families and businesses.
The interest rate on those extra-cheap loans is around 0.25%. Given that Metro this week failed to raise more than £175 million of four-year senior non-preferred bonds, despite offering 7.5% interest, it’s evidently going to have its work cut out rolling over the loans it took out from the Bank of England. At the very least, it needs more time to get its finances in order. To do that, it will probably need to sell some of its more valuable assets, including part of its mortgage book, which will hit its profitability.
According to the Financial Times, speculation is already growing that Metro could end up being bought by one of its more established rivals. In the ultimate irony, the first British high street bank to be handed a license in over 100 years in the hope it would provide a little extra competition to the big five banks that dominate the sector, may end up being bought out by one of those big banks.
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Tyler Durden
Mon, 09/30/2019 – 02:00 - CIA, Climate, And Conspiracy: More Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
CIA, Climate, And Conspiracy: More Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,
Take off the revolutionary’s mask, and it’s the CIA.
Take off the terrorist’s mask, and it’s the CIA.
Take off the news man’s mask, and it’s the CIA.
Take off the filmmaker’s mask, and it’s the CIA.
Take off the professor’s mask, and it’s the CIA.
Take off the billionaire’s mask, and it’s the CIA.
Take off the whistleblower’s mask, and it’s the motherfucking CIA.
These monsters are raping our sense-making faculties.
Never call anyone from the CIA a “whistleblower” unless they are actually whistleblowing on the CIA, without the CIA’s permission, in a way that inconveniences the CIA.
The deployment of a bomb or missile doesn’t begin when a pilot pushes a button, it begins when propaganda narratives used to promote those operations start circulating in public attention. If you help circulate war propaganda, you’re as complicit as the one who pushes the button.
Many believe that the mass media just tell whole-cloth, outright lies all the time, but that’s not usually how it works. What they do is selectively omit inconvenient facts, disproportionately amplify convenient facts, and uncritically report on dubious government assertions. Basically they only tell the truth when it’s convenient for them, and when it’s inconvenient they are silent. Only telling the truth when it’s convenient for you is effectively the same as lying all the time, only you can get away with it a lot easier.
How to solve the climate crisis:
— End the economic system which requires infinite growth on a finite planet.
— Let people get more relaxed and less busy.
— End corporate influence in politics.
— End militarism.
— End patents.
— Kill the capitalist propaganda engine known as the mainstream media.
Any environmentalism which adamantly ignores the need for a complete overhaul of the economic system which created this mess is just feel-good PR for capitalism.
Trying to solve the climate crisis with plutocrat-driven tech consumption is like trying to put out a house fire with a flamethrower.
Perhaps the greatest advantage the ruling class has over us is that they’ve got a crystal clear idea of exactly what they want and exactly what they’re pushing for, and we, on average, do not. It’s easy for us to be manipulated in unwholesome directions when we don’t know where we’re going.
When it comes to our future, the ruling elites have compelling narratives worked up by teams of talented creatives to sell us the products they want us to buy. They know exactly where they want to herd us. We just have a notion of “No, not that!” and some very vague, amorphous ideas about what we do want. Without a clear, positive vision of what we want, we cannot succeed. With a clear, positive vision of what we want, we can’t be stopped.
The fun thing about revolution in the US-centralized empire is that everything everyone has tried has failed, so your guess as to what we should be doing is literally as good as anyone else’s.
Whenever anyone tells you that a vastly better, saner world is impossible, they’re fulla shit. This is the only world any of us have ever lived in; nobody’s going around observing a bunch of other worlds and seeing that they’re all insane like this one. They have no authority to make such a proclamation. As far as any of us know, anything is possible.
One mark of an adept conspiracy analyst is comfort with the unknown in a world where information is greatly obscured by secrecy. By this I don’t mean they’re okay with government opacity, I just mean that they’re comfortable acknowledging what is unknown and unknowable instead of pretending to know. I point this out because it seems like a lot of people self-censor and remain silent on their ideas about what’s going on in the world due to some embarrassment that they don’t understand it all. It’s okay: no one does. Many pretend to, but no one actually does.
The dynamics of this world are extremely complex, too complex for any individual to fully make sense of. One way to ease the burden on your sensemaking tools is to reduce your own inner complications by getting very clear on how your own perception and cognition are happening. Dedicated inner work will reveal that your conscious experience is actually happening in a much simpler way than the mind imagines: a field of consciousness appearing before an imperceptible witness. This eliminates needless cognitive twists and roadblocks in your sensemaking. Our mental narratives add mountains of needless layers of complexity.
Once you see that none of those narratives apply to your true identity, you’re able to bypass all those distortions in the way you process information and simply use thought as a tool; otherwise you’re just ingesting highly manipulated narratives about an already complex world through your own distorted perceptual filters which are based on unconscious believed assumptions about what you are, what the world is, etc. Inner clarity eliminates those distortions. There are many approaches to the inner work one can do to find this inner clarity, but here’s one way.
Anyone who claims to oppose Trump and support the free press, yet doesn’t aggressively fight the Trump administration’s agenda to imprison a journalist for exposing US war crimes, is a lying hypocrite.
The US government and its lackey allies are torturing a journalist for telling the truth. This amounts to a full confession on their part that you are living in a totalitarian empire. They are telling you exactly what kind of world you live in, and exactly what role they play in it. A society is only as free as its most inconvenient political dissident. Free Assange to free yourself.
It’s really weird how getting money out of politics isn’t a bigger agenda than it is. It should be bigger than healthcare or any other issue, and everyone across the political spectrum agrees it’s important except the rich and their puppets. That’s something tangible to push for.
If a tree falls in the woods, and no one’s around to hear it, is it still Susan Sarandon’s fault?
~ Old liberal koanI will not be authoring any essays about impeachment because it’s an impotent political side show and much too boring to write about.
All Democrats know these impeachment shenanigans will never result in his removal from office, regardless of what they pretend. Trump’s “opposition” only ever attacks him in ways they know won’t actually hurt him. It’s like pro wrestling.
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May 2019: Progressives get to choose between Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard and Marianne Williamson.
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September 2019: Progressives get to choose between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
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May 2020: Progressives get to choose between Elizabeth Warren and fuck you.
The Democratic presidential primary will be rigged by the DNC and the mass media; in fact this is happening already. I talk about the candidates and the race a lot not because I believe the DNC has real primaries, but because the dance the narrative managers need to do to ensure an establishment nominee keeps exposing them.
Ninety-nine percent of political arguments and activism are happening inside lines that have been set by the narrative-dominating, Overton window-shrinking plutocratic class and their underlings. If you want to fight a real fight, you need to color outside those lines.
The US Department of State was originally intended to be a peace/diplomacy-focused counterpart to the Department of War (later falsely renamed the “Department of Defense”), but what actually ended up happening was the creation of two war departments.
Putting someone on a pedestal is just guaranteeing that you’ll have to knock them off it one day. It’s actually a rather violent thing to do to somebody, if you think about it. Best to skip it entirely.
Don’t take life advice from people who are miserable. Don’t take career advice from people whose careers aren’t where you want to be. Don’t take creative advice from people who don’t create things. Don’t take foreign policy advice from people who supported the Iraq invasion.
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Tyler Durden
Mon, 09/30/2019 – 00:00 -
- San Francisco Neighbors Install 'Anti-Homeless Boulders' Along Sidewalk
San Francisco Neighbors Install ‘Anti-Homeless Boulders’ Along Sidewalk
The San Francisco poop patrol may have one less street to clean.
Neighbors in the Mission Dolores neighborhood raised approximately $2,000 to place two-dozen boulders along the sidewalk to deter homeless people from camping out and shooting up drugs along their block.
Photo: Julian Mark “They’ll shoot up and stay overnight,” resident David Smith-Tan told KTVU, adding “A bunch of my neighbors, we all chipped in a few hundred dollars and I guess this is what they came up with.”
A man named Hugh — who like many on the street wanted to be identified only by his first name for fear of retaliation — said that in the six years he’s lived in the neighborhood, he has seen people dealing methamphetamine there. Other times, he said, he’s witnessed drug dealers carrying knives.
Hugh said he could empathize with residents who see the rocks as a way to curb criminal activity. He said drug dealing has “definitely gotten worse” in the past couple of years. –SF Chronicle
Meanwhile, attempts to have the boulders removed have been thwarted after Craigslist removed several ads by SF-based artist Danielle Baskin offering them for free.
Some neighbors pooled together $2000 to dump 24 boulders into the sidewalk as a form of “anti-homeless decoration”.
The city won’t remove them, so I put their rocks on the Craigslist free section. pic.twitter.com/yv5fsfodJ4
— Danielle Baskin (@djbaskin) September 27, 2019
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My efforts were quickly flagged for removal, even after I posted many times.
I imagine the Clinton Park block now has a Craigslist alert for “rocks”. pic.twitter.com/KRbJTFA3tl
— Danielle Baskin (@djbaskin) September 27, 2019
Not everyone thinks the boulders are such a hot idea.
“I don’t think this is totally going to work — it’s going to backfire a little bit,” resident Audrey Soule told Mission Local, adding “It’s going to be this great camping hangout because there are awesome rocks to sit on.”
“What I had noticed is the campers are still squeezing it in here … Then it forces people to walk all the way around the sidewalk.”
Standing near the new boulders, Phillip Bulicek, who is homeless, agreed with Soules. These rocks are inconvenient — but not a real deterrent. “They take up space the tent can take,” he said, explaining that tents will be pitched anyway. “It actually taking up space a person might be able to use.”
“I would like to see [San Francisco Public Works] take these boulders away like they take people’s tents away,” he added. –Mission Local
On Saturday, public works employees hoisted several boulders back onto the sidewalk after people had pushed them into the street.
City workers return boulders to the sidewalk after they were rolled into the street. Neighbors installed the rocks to deter homeless encampments.Photo: Nick Otto / Special to The Chronicle
Tyler Durden
Sun, 09/29/2019 – 23:30 - The Ukraine Boomerang
The Ukraine Boomerang
Authored by Brian Cates via The Epoch Times,
Because their strategy to remove Trump from office by getting a Special Counsel appointed to find evidence to use for impeachment so utterly failed, Democrats frantically searched for the past several months trying to find something that could replace it.
It now seems Democrats think they have at last found a real scandal they can use to move forward with impeachment hearings in the House.
The new fake Trump scandal rolled out last weekend by the Democrats involves a phone call held on July 25 between President Trump and the newly installed President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky.
An anonymous government official, described inaccurately as a ‘whistleblower,’ made an official complaint to the Intelligence Community’s Inspector General’s Office about some of the things Trump supposedly said during this call.
According to the complaint that was filed, Trump tried to strong-arm Zelensky into agreeing to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Biden is currently the frontrunner and favorite to win the Democratic nomination to run against Trump next year.
To pressure Zelensky into agreeing to investigate the Bidens, the anonymous leaker claimed Trump threatened to withhold military aid that had already been approved to Ukraine.
So if true, this would indeed be a huge scandal, if a sitting President tried to coerce a foreign government into investigating or manufacturing a criminal probe of his political opposition.
It is being reported that Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) had the information from this so-called “whistleblower” complaint back in August and he held it back while dropping vague, ominous hints.
Failure To Launch
Of course, as with a multitude of other fake attacks on Trump and his administration, this manufactured scandal started falling apart almost immediately.
Trump moved to quickly declassify both the transcript of the phone call and the “whistleblower” complaint, catching his enemies flat-footed with their pants down.
It is already becoming apparent, now that both documents are public and everyone can read them, that the fake whistleblower complaint is replete with errors, mischaracterizations, and outright falsehoods.
The same players in the Russiagate hoax were trying to launch a Ukrainian hoax using the exact same strategy: vague leaks based on anonymous sources so story after story could be rolled out in the fake news media alleging Trump crimes.
Only this strategy was instantly blown up this time, and in quite a savage fashion by this president.
Trump now has his people in place and all the evidence has been collected. He didn’t need to wait to completely blow up this new Ukrainian narrative.
This tells me Trump had his own counter-narrative all ready and waiting to launch whenever the Democrats and their DNC Media Complex allies tried this futile Ukrainian gambit.
And unlike the fake Trump-Ukrainian Corruption narrative, the Biden-Ukrainian Corruption narrative isn’t based on anonymous leaks from shadowy government officials speaking off the record while filing complaints full of 2nd and 3rd hand hearsay. It’s based on solid evidence found in documents as well as video and audio recordings.
These People Are Stupid
The launch of Spygate was successful back in 2016 because the plotters were in key positions within the federal government’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies, lying in wait as the Trump administration came into office. They held back the Steele Dossier and used their media allies to leak selective allegations.
This time? The new Trump-Ukrainian strategy counted on the Trump administration “hiding” the phone call transcript and the filed complaint, giving the plotters and the media room and license to lie about what the documents said.
Somehow these morons were led to believe the documents wouldn’t be instantly declassified and placed in the public square.
You are getting a preview right now of how the rollout of the Horowitz report and the results of U.S. Attorneys John Durham and John Huber’s investigations are going to go.
One side will be desperately leaking bombshell stories based on anonymous sources making all kinds of allegations while the other side will be holding press conferences in which DOJ officials will speak publicly on the record and proffering newly declassified documents for the public to read.
Guess who’s going to win that fight?
Trump had to wait and hold fire for more than two years because he needed to give Jeff Sessions, Mike Pompeo, William Barr, Michael Horowitz, John Huber, and John Durham time to do their important work and collect and catalog all of the evidence.
But we’re past that stage now.
You’re about to see a presidential campaign unfold over the next year like nothing you have ever seen before.
The DNC Media will try to spin or bury Spygate news as it breaks over the next year that is damaging to itself and the Democrats, but here’s how Trump is going to thwart this: the over 100 rallies he’s going to hold between now and Nov. 3, 2020.
Trump knows exactly what buttons to push with these media people. He’s been carefully and diligently studying them for over fifty years, the entire time they thought he was just being a swaggering macho blowhard.
They are all going to wish they’d never tried this.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 09/29/2019 – 23:00 - Which Countries Support Marijuana Legalization?
Which Countries Support Marijuana Legalization?
Earlier this week, Canberra – or the Australian Capital Territory, which functions as a state – legalized the recreational use of marijuana for inhabitants 18 years and older. The new law is supposed to come into effect at the end of January. Adult Canberrans will be able to possess 50 grams of cannabis and will be allowed to grow two marijuana plants for personal consumption.
Much like in the U.S., Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes, the possession of cannabis and cannabis plants will remain a federal offense, but that is not expected to make a difference “in practice”, according to ACT attorney-general Gordon Ramsay. ACT shadow attorney-general Jeremy Hanson from the Liberals said the bill would lead to “perverse outcomes”.
Looking at an international survey comparing attitudes towards marijuana legalization in different countries, Australia ranks quite high.
You will find more infographics at Statista
In the U.S. and Canada, where marijuana was legal at least in part of the countries when the survey was carried out in late 2018, 80 percent of the population were in favor of some type of legalization (medical or recreational). In Australia, this number was at approximately 70 percent even though a larger proportion of respondents favored medical marijuana legislation over legalization for recreational use.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 09/29/2019 – 22:30 - Limbaugh: We're In The Middle Of "A Cold Civil War"
Limbaugh: We’re In The Middle Of “A Cold Civil War”
The Democrats have declared war against President Trump and those who support him. Instead of bullets, they use lies.
“The media is not media. It’s just Democrats who work in the media, and the whole group of ’em is aligned. And what we are in the middle of now, folks, is a Cold Civil War,” Rush Limbaugh said said on his radio show.
Limbaugh put forth that the “Cold Civil War” encompasses overturning “the election results of 2016” and “protecting and defending” the Washington establishment.”
“Their careers, their fortunes, their corruption. There are terribly big stakes involved here for these people. And Trump is on the cusp of overturning it and exposing it,” Limbaugh said.
Limbaugh called the latest developments involving Ukraine “nothing more than the Steele dossier 2.0,” alluding that it is an extension of the Russia investigation.
“It’s the same people, it’s the same scam, it’s the same objective,” Limbaugh said.
The whistleblower complaint is the latest stage of this war. Limbaugh correctly notes that the report is manufactured political opposition research, just as Christopher Steele’s dossier was. And the entire Democratic Party, including the media, is acting as if it’s real.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 09/29/2019 – 22:00 - Visualizing The Megaregions Driving The Global Economy
Visualizing The Megaregions Driving The Global Economy
If you’ve ever flown cross-country in a window seat, chances are, the bright lights at night have caught your eye. From above, the world tells its own story – as concentrated pockets of bright light keep the world’s economy thriving.
Today’s visualization relies on data compiled by CityLab researchers to identify the world’s largest megaregions. The team defines megaregions as:
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Areas of continuous light, based on the latest night satellite imagery
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Capturing metro areas or networks of metro areas, with a combined population of 5 million or higher
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Generating economic output (GDP) of over $300 billion, on a PPP basis
The satellite imagery comes from the NOAA, while the base data for economic output is calculated from Oxford Economics via Brookings’ Global Metro Monitor 2018.
As Visual Capitalist’s Iman Ghosh details below, each megaregion may not be connected by specific trade relationships. Rather, satellite data highlights the proximity between these rough but useful regional estimates contributing to the global economy – and supercities are at the heart of it.
(click image for huge legible version)
From Megalopolis to Megaregion
Throughout history, academics have described vast, interlinked urban regions as a ‘megalopolis’, or ‘megapolis’. Economic geographer Jean Gottman popularized the Greek term, referring to the booming and unprecedented urbanization in Bos-Wash—the northeast stretch from Boston and New York down to Washington, D.C.:
This region has indeed a “personality” of its own […] Every city in this region spreads out far and wide around its original nucleus.
By looking at adjacent metropolitan areas rather than country-level data, it can help provide an entirely new perspective on the global distribution of economic activity.
Where in the world are the most powerful urban economic clusters today?
The Largest Megaregions Today
The world’s economy is a sum of its parts. Each megaregion contributes significantly to the global growth engine, but arguably, certain areas pull more weight than others.
Altogether, these powerhouses bring in over $28 trillion in economic output.
Unsurprisingly, Bos-Wash reigns supreme even today, with $3.6 trillion in economic output, over 13% of the total. The corridor hosts some of the highest-paying sectors: information technology, finance, and professional services.
The largest city in Brazil, São Paulo, is the only city in the Southern Hemisphere to make the list. The city was once heavily reliant on manufacturing and trade, but the $780 billion city economy is now embracing its role as a nascent financial hub.
On the other side of the world, the cluster of Asian megaregions combines for $8.7 trillion in total economic output. Of these, Greater Tokyo in Japan is the largest, while Shandong might be a name that fewer people are familiar with. Sandwiched between Beijing and Shanghai, the coastal province houses multiple high-tech industrial and export processing zones.
The data is even more interesting when broken down into economic output per capita—Abu-Dubai churns out an impressive $86,200 per person. Meanwhile, Delhi-Lahore is lowest on the per-capita list, at $14,946 per person across nearly 28 million people.
Where To Next?
This trend shows no sign of slowing down, as megacities are on the rise in the coming decade. Eventually, more Indian and African megaregions will make its way onto this list, led by cities like Lagos and Chennai.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 09/29/2019 – 21:30 -
- Marc Cohodes On Joe Nocera And MiMedx: "An Unholy Alliance"
Marc Cohodes On Joe Nocera And MiMedx: “An Unholy Alliance”
Submitted by Marc Cohodes
I’ve been a short seller for over 30 years. Mostly, I identify companies that are engaged in fraud, illegal conduct, or questionable accounting, I investigate, and I go public with what I’ve learned. I put my money where my mouth is: I sell the shares short knowing that I will lose money if I’m wrong, but also knowing I’ll make money if I’m right. I’ve got a very good track record at uncovering frauds. You don’t have to take my word for it – you can read about me in Bloomberg and elsewhere.
MiMedx is a company that sells wound care treatments made from placentas to patients, many of whom are at veterans hospitals. In 2017, I learned MiMedx was forcing products on its distributors in phony sales (“channel stuffing”), manipulating revenue, selling products that were unsafe or ineffective, coaching doctors on how to charge Medicare for its unnecessary treatments, improperly paying doctors to promote its products, discriminating against employees, and bullying, intimidating, and retaliating against employees who came forward to demand that illegal behavior stop. After I challenged the CEO Pete Petit, management, and the board with the information I had gathered, they responded with more false statements and personal attacks on me.
When you expose people who are doing bad things, they often lash out. MiMedx, Petit, company management, and their backers were no exception, and they weren’t the first, either. I expect that and it’s part of the job. But I admit I was surprised to see Joe Nocera and Bloomberg pick up the MiMedx flag on behalf of people trying to make money off of unsuspecting investors, and by doing so, they have neutralized the previous Bloomberg news articles documenting the illegal and unscrupulous conduct at MiMedx.
On August 19 and August 22, Nocera wrote a couple of articles about me and MiMedx. The first article claimed that I was basically wrong about MiMedx, the company wasn’t so bad, and I went too far. The second claimed that the company has now cleaned up its act, but that I am still conducting a “smear campaign” to destroy the company unfairly.
Nocera’s two articles were sloppy, shallow, and consistently wrong. I sent detailed letters pointing out the factual errors, but Bloomberg refused to correct the articles and even refused to publish this Op-Ed piece.
I’m not going to try to correct every mistake Nocera made. There are length limits for Op-Ed pieces, and we are talking about a reporter so careless that he once wrote an entire Bloomberg article headlined “Correction: A Column Based on the Wrong Memo,” and who was reprimanded by The New York Times’s Public Editor for a serious ethical lapse in failing to disclose a conflict of interest. But I’ll point out some of the big mistakes.
For starters, I was right about MiMedx all along. MiMedx has admitted that six years of financial statements could not be relied on, three VA employees were indicted for taking bribes from MiMedx, the company’s CEO Petit, CFO Senken, COO Taylor, and Controller Cranston all were fired (and the Board is suing them to return their bonuses), MiMedx’s auditors at E&Y abruptly resigned, the stock was de-listed, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reported that MiMedx had lied to the FDA about correcting thirteen health and safety violations; and the VA announced it would stop buying certain MiMedx products because they do not appear to be effective.
On top of all that, in May 2019 the company filed a summary of an independent investigation, which confirmed senior management knowingly deviated from its distributor contracts in ways that caused the company to inflate revenue; the company knowingly manipulated revenue to meet guidance; Petit, Senken, Taylor, and Cranston all made material false statements to the SEC and auditors about the company’s revenue recognition practices; and the company engaged in a pervasive course of retaliation against employees who raised concerns about those unlawful practices.
That’s a lot of evidence you don’t see in Nocera’s articles, yet he opines that I overstated things and it wasn’t so bad at MiMedx. According to him, the company’s investigation “strongly implied” some channel stuffing, but there was “no proof that MiMedx officials had bribed doctors, as Cohodes had alleged. Nor was there any evidence of Medicare fraud.” Likewise, Nocera relies on someone named Eiad Asbahi, who told Nocera “the company’s critics had ‘failed to produce any smoking guns to support their claims of massive fraud.’” (More on the undisclosed relationship between Asbahi and Nocera below.)
Nocera would know better if he read the public summary of the company’s own investigation. That report – in addition to all the really bad stuff I described above – says MiMedx’s lawyers are still investigating allegations that the company violated the Anti-Kickback (a form of bribery) statute, the lawyers have already identified “certain customer accounts that present potential compliance risks and warrant additional review,” the lawyers are still evaluating the company’s “legal risk,” and the company “expects there to be additional departures in connection with the Investigation.”
Nocera would also know better if he read, well, Bloomberg, which reported last year that, “MiMedx Group Inc. paid bribes to three Veterans Affairs Department health-care workers to promote the biotech firm’s products” according to the federal indictment. Nocera also could have read that indictment, which charged the VA employees under the federal bribery statute. Or Nocera could have read the company’s prospectus from May, which discloses that there are still ongoing federal investigations by the SEC, the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, the VA Office of the Inspector General, the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Georgia, as well as two separate pending False Claims Act lawsuits, brought by former employees. And then there’s the Bloomberg and WSJ reports that the company lied to the FDA about the safety and efficacy of its products, and the VA’s decision to stop buying them. So yeah, it was really bad at MiMedx, and it’s still really bad.
So, did I go too far, like Nocera says? No. I accused people at MiMedx of doing very bad things, and while the original bad actors are gone, there are still bad actors at the company – and there are still whistleblowers working at the company who say so. Originally, Petit and his cohorts tried to intimidate the brave employees who spoke out, as well as the professional skeptics like me. For example, Petit sued analysts who reported the facts that the company itself has now admitted. Petit boasts about his political connections, and especially to his local Senator Jonny Isakson, and then convinced Isakson to convince the FBI to send agents to my home to try to intimidate me. Actual Bloomberg reporters wrote about Petit’s intimidation attempt and how extraordinary it was. A real journalist would take a dim view of that sort of thing, but Nocera leaves out the details and tells the story like Petit was a victim of a mugging, scared for his own safety (Nocera also never mentions Petit’s secret video surveillance system designed to retaliate against whistleblowers.)
Did I scare off MiMedx’s auditors at Ernst & Young, like Nocera says? Seriously? It’s silly to suggest that an auditor as large and experienced as E&Y would be scared off by a letter I wrote, or that it wouldn’t do its own investigation. But more importantly, the company and E&Y explained why E&Y resigned in an 8-K. E&Y had a disagreement with MiMedx’s (by then fired) senior management. E&Y could not rely on statements by those discredited executives or even statements by their successors, because the new executive team “would have needed to rely on representations from certain legacy management personnel still in positions that could affect what is reflected in the Company’s books and records.” E&Y was out because it realized it couldn’t trust MiMedx, not because I told them – correctly – that MiMedx couldn’t be trusted.
So, is everything fine at MiMedx now? According to Nocera and Asbahi, it is. And who is Asbahi, anyway? Asbahi controls a groups of companies (Prescience Point) that together now own about 7% of MiMedx. Bloomberg readers would want to know there is a relationship between Nocera and Prescience Point. Zach Kouwe is Prescience Point’s public relations agent in matters related to MiMedx. Kouwe previously worked as Nocera’s researcher on a book and co-wrote articles with Nocera at The New York Times (prior to Kouwe’s abrupt resignation in a plagiarism scandal). Journalists are expected to disclose these kinds of relationships, as Nocera knows, since he was criticized for violating them when he was at the Times. Nocera didn’t mention his relationship with Prescience Point’s PR agent, probably because he figured it would interfere with his anti-Marc Cohodes thesis.
So, Asbahi has his own bias, and Nocera has a connection to Asbahi’s firm, but is Asbahi wrong? Yes. Nocera talks about a “research report” Asbahi published in January 2019 that supposedly found that “MiMedx products were ‘legitimate and sustainable’; that it had positive cash flow; and that, while ‘channel stuffing’ to improperly boost revenue at the end of the quarter had taken place, the company’s critics had ‘failed to produce any smoking guns to support their claims of massive fraud.’” Before he wrote his articles, I told Nocera there were many reasons why the Asbahi report was wrong, and I could explain it to him. He wasn’t interested. Here’s what I would have told him.
There are at least four big problems with Nocera’s reliance on the Asbahi report.
One, when Asbahi published it in January, there were no MiMedx financial statements that anyone could rely on. Even in May 2019, E&Y resigned saying it could not rely on the successor CEO and CFO because they were still dependent on unreliable statements by “legacy management personnel.”
Two, at the same time that Asbahi said the company’s products were “legitimate and sustainable” (and it is never a good sign that people feel the need to say that), the company’s regulatory consultant, Lachman Consultants, found that MiMedx had failed to correct thirteen health and safety violations for which the FDA had cited it. Lachman recommended that MiMedx admit its failure to address violations identified by the FDA, but MiMedx refused to do so, and continued to market and sell noncompliant products. The company has now admitted that it falsely told the FDA that it had resolved those defects.
Three, it was premature at best to say there was “no smoking gun” four months before MiMedx’s audit committee released its damning report; but to repeat that statement, three months after the report, is false and misleading to investors. When the company admits that its C-Suite lied to the SEC, it will have to restate six years of financials, its auditor has abruptly resigned, it had a secret surveillance program to punish whistleblowers, it has identified accounts that pose risk for violations of the Anti-Kickback law, and it expects additional terminations as a result of its ongoing internal investigations; and the company’s own consultants find (and the company admits) the company lied to the FDA about correcting safety violations; and there are multiple federal agencies with active ongoing investigations; and there are multiple False Claims Act lawsuits pending; and the VA has stopped buying MiMedx products because there is insufficient evidence they are effective – I’d say the gun is smoking.
Four, Nocera ignored the suspicious timing of Asbahi’s January 2019 report. Prescience Point purchased millions of shares of MiMedx between August and December 2018, drove the price up with a large block purchase late in the day on December 31, 2018, and then, when the stock had been delisted, published a glowing report saying the stock could exceed $18 per share. Then Prescience Point sold about 2.25 million MiMedx shares in January 2019. When somebody publishes a report that says everything is rosy despite the company’s own disavowal of its prior financial statements, that contradicts what the company’s own consultants were saying about the products’ safety and efficacy, and that contradicts the findings by the company’s own lawyers of widespread unlawful conduct – right before dumping millions of shares – that’s reason alone to be skeptical.
And that brings me to my last point. I’ve been critical of Asbahi and his report, and I have accused Prescience Point of engaging in a “pump and dump” scheme. On behalf of his old colleague’s client, Nocera says that’s “ludicrous.”
So, is it ludicrous? Nope. Nocera ignores the main reasons I actually gave him for concluding this was a pump and dump (like the implausibility of the report, and the timing of Prescience Point’s trades). Instead, he tried to prove that I was way off when I said I understood Prescience Point bought stock at $6-10 per share prior to January 2019. I was right; Nocera was wrong (again). Nocera claims that Prescience Point’s current cost basis for its MiMedx common stock holdings is about $2.60 based on a 13D from May 6, 2019. That may be true, but it’s irrelevant because my point was that in 2018, Prescience Point purchased millions of dollars’ worth of shares on days that the stock traded at prices above $6. (You can see that in the Schedule 14A Prescience Point filed May 29, 2019.) By pumping up the stock in late December 2018 and in January 2019, Prescience Point reduced its losses somewhat when it sold about 2.25 million shares at about $2.50. Then it bought back in at the lower prices reflected in the 13D that Nocera reviewed with his blinders on. As a result, Prescience Point’s current cost basis is lower than what it was in January 2019, but the MiMedx share price has to rise significantly above that cost basis for Prescience Point to realize any gain from its total MiMedx common stock purchases. That’s why it looks to me that Asbahi was engaged in a pump and dump scheme in January, and that’s why I suspect Nocera’s sloppy, poorly researched articles only help Asbahi’s manipulation.
All of this winds up with an accusation by Asbahi, adopted by Nocera, that I am engaged in a “smear campaign” to destroy MiMedx. That’s false. I’m engaged in a campaign to get at the truth about MiMedx, and I’m winning. This company’s troubles are far from over, and with defenders like Nocera and Asbahi, they can only get worse fast.
Marc Cohodes
Penngrove, CA
September 26, 2019
Tyler Durden
Sun, 09/29/2019 – 21:00
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