People turned crazy with phones
20130830
20130826
Brazil's current account deficit doubles in July from a year ago
Brazil's current account deficit doubles in July from a year ago
The current account is a country's broadest measure of foreign transactions encompassing trade, profit remittances, interest payments and other items.
In the first seven months of this year, the country has accumulated a current account gap of 52.472bn, nearly double the 28.99bn posted in the same period a year ago.
Even so, foreign direct investment during the same period this year totalled 35.239bn, lagging the 38.169bn of FDI in same period last year.
Unless there is a surge of FDI, it seems increasingly improbable that direct investment from abroad will cover the current account gap. FDI falls into the capital account of the balance of payments and has in past years offset current account deficits.
The widening current account helps explain the Brazilian currency's sharp depreciation over the last few months, which has been exacerbated by expectations of a scale back in US monetary stimulus that triggered an exodus of capital from emerging-market nations.
For July, FDI in the country fell to 5.212bn in July from 7.17bn in June. In the 12 months through July, the current account deficit was equivalent to 3.39% of GDP, up from 3.17% in May.
The current account is a country's broadest measure of foreign transactions encompassing trade, profit remittances, interest payments and other items.
In the first seven months of this year, the country has accumulated a current account gap of 52.472bn, nearly double the 28.99bn posted in the same period a year ago.
Even so, foreign direct investment during the same period this year totalled 35.239bn, lagging the 38.169bn of FDI in same period last year.
Unless there is a surge of FDI, it seems increasingly improbable that direct investment from abroad will cover the current account gap. FDI falls into the capital account of the balance of payments and has in past years offset current account deficits.
The widening current account helps explain the Brazilian currency's sharp depreciation over the last few months, which has been exacerbated by expectations of a scale back in US monetary stimulus that triggered an exodus of capital from emerging-market nations.
For July, FDI in the country fell to 5.212bn in July from 7.17bn in June. In the 12 months through July, the current account deficit was equivalent to 3.39% of GDP, up from 3.17% in May.
When Greece banks melted, the EU talked threatened to cut it loose... but have €10billion
When Greece banks melted, the EU talked threatened to cut it loose... but have €10billion
The secret plane stuffed full of cash that saved the euro: When Greece burned and its banks melted, the EU talked tough and threatened to cut it loose... but covertly flooded it with €10billion
The European bank Troika boosted Greek banks through secret flights
Billions of euros were flown to Greece and Cyprus to save the currency
To the casual observer there was nothing odd or even surprising in the sight of cargo planes lumbering east over the Adriatic or occasionally skimming southwards over the Alps towards the Balkans and beyond to Greece.
Some of these aircraft, giant Boeings, bore the distinctive livery of Maersk, the international carriers. Others, smaller, more discreet, were painted in the pale blue and white of the Greek military.
Had anyone bothered to pay attention, or even note down the serial numbers – such as the plane marked OY-SRH seen landing in Cyprus earlier this year – surely they would not have guessed at the purpose of these journeys or their extraordinary cargo.
Rescue mission: Maersk flights to Athens and Larnaca carried billions-worth of euros on each flight to save the Greek economy
Because the flights to Athens and Larnaca that began in 2011 were nothing short of a secret airlift.
The mission was neither to save lives nor even to preserve a fragile democratic freedom like the famous airlifts in post-war Berlin, but to protect and prolong the economic experiment of a multi-national currency. Billions in freshly minted euro notes made a clandestine journey to struggling Greece – a drama worthy of a John Le Carré novel but authored in Frankfurt am Main, known as Mainhattan, world headquarters of the euro.
It was well known that Greece was running out of cash, in metaphorical terms at least. In June 2011, after months of stalling on its economic reform programme, the foreign Troika that effectively controlled the country had run out of patience.
Consisting of the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the Troika made it clear that it would withhold the final instalment of a €110 billion bailout, agreed in May 2010. This last €12 billion payment of foreign funds was needed desperately – to pay pensions, public servants and interest on Greece’s huge debts. It was funding that Greece could raise neither in taxes from its own people, nor from the financial markets.
But what most people did not know was that Greece was running out of cash quite literally, too.
There were shortages of all denominations apart from the €10 note. Greeks had responded to the Troika’s threat to pull the €12 billion payment by withdrawing euros from their bank accounts at a record rate.
On the brink: Protesters clash with riot police in Athens, Greece, as its government was teetering on the edge of collapse over the austerity measures
Soon there would be not enough euro notes in the country to cope with the number of Greeks trying to get their hands on their money from cash machines and banks. And so a secret plan was activated. ‘We’re talking about June 2011,’ a senior official overseeing Greece’s bailout told me. ‘Greeks were taking about one to two billion euros a day from the banking system. The Greeks had to send military planes to Italy to get banknotes. It got to that point.’
A decade after it gave up the drachma, the world’s oldest existing currency, Greece faced the crushing reality that it did not have the sovereign authority to meet the demand for paper currency from its own citizens.
It could mint euro coins and there were also plates for the €10 note. But coins and small denomination paper were not going to satisfy the demand.
Only the German Bundesbank, the National Bank of Austria and the Luxembourgers have ever had the plates for the highly prized €500 note, the highest-value paper currency in the world. (This form of manufacturing would appear to have been confined to German-speaking countries.)
Intentionally or not, the ability of Greece to meet a huge surge in demand for banknotes had been effectively proscribed.
By June 2012, Greek demand for paper currency had nearly trebled and amid last summer’s electoral tumult, the secret missions started in 2011 were once again required.
The response was extraordinary. While issuing public threats to Greeks, in private the Troika authorised military and commercial cargo planes to feed them euros – billions-worth on every flight. They were intended not only to preserve Greece’s fracturing social stability, but also to preserve the single currency itself.
Greece’s European partners were worried, and no wonder. The Governor of the Bank of Greece, George Provopoulos, subsequently explained that if the demand for notes had not been met, an impression would have been created that the banks were unable to repay depositors.
‘It would have caused a collapse of confidence with dire consequences for financial stability and the general outlook of the country,’ he said.
A Northern Rock-style bank run in Greece could have spread quickly across the Mediterranean – investor concern had already spread to Italy.
A Troika figure told me: ‘There would have been complete and immediate panic. They had no time.
A billion, two billion per day in banknotes is a lot of money. This then becomes an industrial problem.’
The airlift was only the first stage of the mission. Scores, if not hundreds, of journeys by truck and boat spread the new notes across the mainland and the Greek islands, from Rhodes to Corfu, from Crete to Komotini. Staff worked through the night to ensure that bank branches across Greece had sufficient notes to meet depositor demand, and contain any incipient bank run.
Incredibly, this operation proceeded without anyone noticing. The Bank of Greece tracked demand for paper money through bank branch orders. It did not have to deploy teams of ‘bank-run spotters’ as the Bank of England did in the crisis of 2008.
As far as ordinary Greeks were concerned, the cash machines continued to function. However, underneath their very noses a monetary revolution was taking place.
The value of notes in circulation in Greece doubled from €19 billion in 2009 to €40 billion in September 2011. By the summer of 2012 the total had reached €48 billion, of which at least €10 billion – possibly much more – had been delivered through secret airlifts.
Typically, developed economies have cash in circulation worth between four and seven per cent of gross domestic product. In 2009 in Greece, the figure was 8.2 per cent. By 2012 it had trebled to 24.8 per cent.
On these numbers, in mid-2012, Greece had a greater value of euro notes in circulation than the Netherlands, even though the Dutch economy is four times that of Greece.
Tens of billions of euros were yanked from Greek banks in the bank runs of 2011 and 2012, yet the authorities estimate only a third of it was spent. Another third was taken abroad for investments in, for example, London property, and a third was ****** under mattresses and floorboards in Greek homes.
It was not long before Greece’s near neighbour and cultural sibling, Cyprus, found that it too was in crisis. This time, Berlin was determined that a large chunk of the bailout would come from savings deposited in Cypriot banks. Bedlam, bank holidays and bank runs were the predictable result. As dusk fell over Nicosia on March 27 this year, the shouts of protesters were drowned out by the angry buzzing of helicopters and deafening wail of police sirens.
The uproar seemed to be converging on the Central Bank. Had the previous day’s sit-down protest by bank workers turned into a riot?
The truth was much stranger.
At the Central Bank, tense meetings between international financiers, American management consultants, British Treasury advisers and Cypriot bankers suddenly broke off. Four very large green juggernauts laden with euros had arrived from the European Central Bank, just hours before Cyprus’s banks were due to reopen.
An historic just-in-time delivery. That afternoon a Maersk Star Air cargo plane had parked up at the end of the runway at Larnaca airport. Flight logs record that the plane, registration OY-SRH, had flown from Cologne to Munich in the early hours, and then, via Athens, to Larnaca. It was carrying €5 billion euros in notes – not a bailout, but an epic logistical effort to sate the Cypriot desire for paper money.
The cash had been transferred from the Bundesbank logistical reserve at the request of the ECB. But only after the Cypriot government had done its ‘homework’, complying with Troika demands for economic and financial reform.
After the notes had been loaded on to the trucks, their journey to Nicosia was accompanied by squads of police cars, while helicopters buzzed overhead. The cash had come courtesy of Cyprus’s real central bank, the one based in Frankfurt, 1,500 miles away – the European Central Bank. Effectively, the ECB’s threat made a week before to pull emergency liquidity funding to the island’s banks was a threat to withhold the cash that arrived on this plane. The consequences would have been dire.
It is perhaps understandable that this and the other cash flights remained clandestine but, in their secrecy and urgency, they offer a window to a still more extraordinary landscape of lies and half-truths told across the continent to keep the single currency alive.
Greece’s membership of the eurozone was, from inception, built on misleading data about the state of its economy. The Cypriot entry in 2008 was waved through, yet only now have the Cypriots been told that their main industry, an offshore banking sector, needs to be dismantled amid fears that it has aided tax evasion and money laundering.
But even these extraordinary lapses pale into insignificance against the two mega lies – untruths in the very structure of the euro – which persist even now, despite the seemingly calmer weather in the currency bloc. A blueprint for revival is being drawn up in the German headquarters of the European Central Bank. The ECB is in absolutely no doubt that the euro will survive.
But the people of the crisis countries – Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus, Italy and Ireland – are yet to be enlightened by their politicians about the price to be paid: in short, the survival of the euro means much lower wages for them.
To use the jargon, the Mediterranean countries must be ‘internally devalued’, which means pushing down average wages that had risen sharply, to regain competitiveness and promote growth. The existence of a common currency means, of course, that old-fashioned currency devaluation – the standard method of achieving these things in the past – is impossible.
I know for a fact that two ministers in charge of struggling Mediterranean economies (sadly, they must remain anonymous) are happy to boast about the scale of the cuts in workers’ wages when addressing international bond traders. Would they ever dream of saying this in public? Decisively not.
‘The public would not take it,’ one crisis economy minister tells me.
Meanwhile, even in the final weeks of a German election campaign (which Angela Merkel seems likely to win) the voters remain ignorant that they too must pay a price: that they are about to foot a bill of billions of euros as Greece heads inexorably for a third bailout.
It will happen safely after the votes are counted, of course.
Germany benefited the most from the introduction of the euro through trade within Europe, a cheaper currency for exports outside Europe, and ultra-low interest rates on its debts. But it now seems inevitable that northern European taxpayers, and German ones in particular, will bear a heavy share of the cost of rescuing the currency.
After all, the northern European taxpayer has effectively replaced bankers in funding Greece’s remaining debts. The first test will come from Greece, which will soon require a remarkable third bailout and yet another default on its debt, having already had the world’s biggest sovereign default in 2012.
This will be just the start of a process where public debts across the eurozone are shared. A de facto fiscal union and, soon enough, a form of ‘banking union’ will follow.
Underlying all of this will be political union – a super state.
The Maersk Star Air OY-SRH that landed in Larnaca five months ago was the equivalent of a printing press in a nation that had ceded its monetary sovereignty. Such planes are a visible symbol of the loss of national power necessary to prevent the currency itself from crashing.
After the German elections next month, this truth will be revealed. A resumption of the airborne rescue missions is possible; turbulence is guaranteed. Fasten your seatbelts.
The secret plane stuffed full of cash that saved the euro: When Greece burned and its banks melted, the EU talked tough and threatened to cut it loose... but covertly flooded it with €10billion
The European bank Troika boosted Greek banks through secret flights
Billions of euros were flown to Greece and Cyprus to save the currency
To the casual observer there was nothing odd or even surprising in the sight of cargo planes lumbering east over the Adriatic or occasionally skimming southwards over the Alps towards the Balkans and beyond to Greece.
Some of these aircraft, giant Boeings, bore the distinctive livery of Maersk, the international carriers. Others, smaller, more discreet, were painted in the pale blue and white of the Greek military.
Had anyone bothered to pay attention, or even note down the serial numbers – such as the plane marked OY-SRH seen landing in Cyprus earlier this year – surely they would not have guessed at the purpose of these journeys or their extraordinary cargo.
Rescue mission: Maersk flights to Athens and Larnaca carried billions-worth of euros on each flight to save the Greek economy
Rescue mission: Maersk flights to Athens and Larnaca carried billions-worth of euros on each flight to save the Greek - and the eurozone - economy
Because the flights to Athens and Larnaca that began in 2011 were nothing short of a secret airlift.
The mission was neither to save lives nor even to preserve a fragile democratic freedom like the famous airlifts in post-war Berlin, but to protect and prolong the economic experiment of a multi-national currency. Billions in freshly minted euro notes made a clandestine journey to struggling Greece – a drama worthy of a John Le Carré novel but authored in Frankfurt am Main, known as Mainhattan, world headquarters of the euro.
It was well known that Greece was running out of cash, in metaphorical terms at least. In June 2011, after months of stalling on its economic reform programme, the foreign Troika that effectively controlled the country had run out of patience.
Consisting of the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the Troika made it clear that it would withhold the final instalment of a €110 billion bailout, agreed in May 2010. This last €12 billion payment of foreign funds was needed desperately – to pay pensions, public servants and interest on Greece’s huge debts. It was funding that Greece could raise neither in taxes from its own people, nor from the financial markets.
But what most people did not know was that Greece was running out of cash quite literally, too.
There were shortages of all denominations apart from the €10 note. Greeks had responded to the Troika’s threat to pull the €12 billion payment by withdrawing euros from their bank accounts at a record rate.
On the brink: Protesters clash with riot police in Athens, Greece, as its government was teetering on the edge of collapse over the austerity measures
Soon there would be not enough euro notes in the country to cope with the number of Greeks trying to get their hands on their money from cash machines and banks. And so a secret plan was activated. ‘We’re talking about June 2011,’ a senior official overseeing Greece’s bailout told me. ‘Greeks were taking about one to two billion euros a day from the banking system. The Greeks had to send military planes to Italy to get banknotes. It got to that point.’
A decade after it gave up the drachma, the world’s oldest existing currency, Greece faced the crushing reality that it did not have the sovereign authority to meet the demand for paper currency from its own citizens.
It could mint euro coins and there were also plates for the €10 note. But coins and small denomination paper were not going to satisfy the demand.
Only the German Bundesbank, the National Bank of Austria and the Luxembourgers have ever had the plates for the highly prized €500 note, the highest-value paper currency in the world. (This form of manufacturing would appear to have been confined to German-speaking countries.)
Intentionally or not, the ability of Greece to meet a huge surge in demand for banknotes had been effectively proscribed.
By June 2012, Greek demand for paper currency had nearly trebled and amid last summer’s electoral tumult, the secret missions started in 2011 were once again required.
The response was extraordinary. While issuing public threats to Greeks, in private the Troika authorised military and commercial cargo planes to feed them euros – billions-worth on every flight. They were intended not only to preserve Greece’s fracturing social stability, but also to preserve the single currency itself.
Greece’s European partners were worried, and no wonder. The Governor of the Bank of Greece, George Provopoulos, subsequently explained that if the demand for notes had not been met, an impression would have been created that the banks were unable to repay depositors.
‘It would have caused a collapse of confidence with dire consequences for financial stability and the general outlook of the country,’ he said.
A Northern Rock-style bank run in Greece could have spread quickly across the Mediterranean – investor concern had already spread to Italy.
A Troika figure told me: ‘There would have been complete and immediate panic. They had no time.
A billion, two billion per day in banknotes is a lot of money. This then becomes an industrial problem.’
The airlift was only the first stage of the mission. Scores, if not hundreds, of journeys by truck and boat spread the new notes across the mainland and the Greek islands, from Rhodes to Corfu, from Crete to Komotini. Staff worked through the night to ensure that bank branches across Greece had sufficient notes to meet depositor demand, and contain any incipient bank run.
Incredibly, this operation proceeded without anyone noticing. The Bank of Greece tracked demand for paper money through bank branch orders. It did not have to deploy teams of ‘bank-run spotters’ as the Bank of England did in the crisis of 2008.
As far as ordinary Greeks were concerned, the cash machines continued to function. However, underneath their very noses a monetary revolution was taking place.
The value of notes in circulation in Greece doubled from €19 billion in 2009 to €40 billion in September 2011. By the summer of 2012 the total had reached €48 billion, of which at least €10 billion – possibly much more – had been delivered through secret airlifts.
Typically, developed economies have cash in circulation worth between four and seven per cent of gross domestic product. In 2009 in Greece, the figure was 8.2 per cent. By 2012 it had trebled to 24.8 per cent.
On these numbers, in mid-2012, Greece had a greater value of euro notes in circulation than the Netherlands, even though the Dutch economy is four times that of Greece.
Tens of billions of euros were yanked from Greek banks in the bank runs of 2011 and 2012, yet the authorities estimate only a third of it was spent. Another third was taken abroad for investments in, for example, London property, and a third was ****** under mattresses and floorboards in Greek homes.
It was not long before Greece’s near neighbour and cultural sibling, Cyprus, found that it too was in crisis. This time, Berlin was determined that a large chunk of the bailout would come from savings deposited in Cypriot banks. Bedlam, bank holidays and bank runs were the predictable result. As dusk fell over Nicosia on March 27 this year, the shouts of protesters were drowned out by the angry buzzing of helicopters and deafening wail of police sirens.
The uproar seemed to be converging on the Central Bank. Had the previous day’s sit-down protest by bank workers turned into a riot?
The truth was much stranger.
At the Central Bank, tense meetings between international financiers, American management consultants, British Treasury advisers and Cypriot bankers suddenly broke off. Four very large green juggernauts laden with euros had arrived from the European Central Bank, just hours before Cyprus’s banks were due to reopen.
An historic just-in-time delivery. That afternoon a Maersk Star Air cargo plane had parked up at the end of the runway at Larnaca airport. Flight logs record that the plane, registration OY-SRH, had flown from Cologne to Munich in the early hours, and then, via Athens, to Larnaca. It was carrying €5 billion euros in notes – not a bailout, but an epic logistical effort to sate the Cypriot desire for paper money.
The cash had been transferred from the Bundesbank logistical reserve at the request of the ECB. But only after the Cypriot government had done its ‘homework’, complying with Troika demands for economic and financial reform.
After the notes had been loaded on to the trucks, their journey to Nicosia was accompanied by squads of police cars, while helicopters buzzed overhead. The cash had come courtesy of Cyprus’s real central bank, the one based in Frankfurt, 1,500 miles away – the European Central Bank. Effectively, the ECB’s threat made a week before to pull emergency liquidity funding to the island’s banks was a threat to withhold the cash that arrived on this plane. The consequences would have been dire.
It is perhaps understandable that this and the other cash flights remained clandestine but, in their secrecy and urgency, they offer a window to a still more extraordinary landscape of lies and half-truths told across the continent to keep the single currency alive.
Greece’s membership of the eurozone was, from inception, built on misleading data about the state of its economy. The Cypriot entry in 2008 was waved through, yet only now have the Cypriots been told that their main industry, an offshore banking sector, needs to be dismantled amid fears that it has aided tax evasion and money laundering.
But even these extraordinary lapses pale into insignificance against the two mega lies – untruths in the very structure of the euro – which persist even now, despite the seemingly calmer weather in the currency bloc. A blueprint for revival is being drawn up in the German headquarters of the European Central Bank. The ECB is in absolutely no doubt that the euro will survive.
But the people of the crisis countries – Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus, Italy and Ireland – are yet to be enlightened by their politicians about the price to be paid: in short, the survival of the euro means much lower wages for them.
To use the jargon, the Mediterranean countries must be ‘internally devalued’, which means pushing down average wages that had risen sharply, to regain competitiveness and promote growth. The existence of a common currency means, of course, that old-fashioned currency devaluation – the standard method of achieving these things in the past – is impossible.
I know for a fact that two ministers in charge of struggling Mediterranean economies (sadly, they must remain anonymous) are happy to boast about the scale of the cuts in workers’ wages when addressing international bond traders. Would they ever dream of saying this in public? Decisively not.
‘The public would not take it,’ one crisis economy minister tells me.
Meanwhile, even in the final weeks of a German election campaign (which Angela Merkel seems likely to win) the voters remain ignorant that they too must pay a price: that they are about to foot a bill of billions of euros as Greece heads inexorably for a third bailout.
It will happen safely after the votes are counted, of course.
Germany benefited the most from the introduction of the euro through trade within Europe, a cheaper currency for exports outside Europe, and ultra-low interest rates on its debts. But it now seems inevitable that northern European taxpayers, and German ones in particular, will bear a heavy share of the cost of rescuing the currency.
After all, the northern European taxpayer has effectively replaced bankers in funding Greece’s remaining debts. The first test will come from Greece, which will soon require a remarkable third bailout and yet another default on its debt, having already had the world’s biggest sovereign default in 2012.
This will be just the start of a process where public debts across the eurozone are shared. A de facto fiscal union and, soon enough, a form of ‘banking union’ will follow.
Underlying all of this will be political union – a super state.
The Maersk Star Air OY-SRH that landed in Larnaca five months ago was the equivalent of a printing press in a nation that had ceded its monetary sovereignty. Such planes are a visible symbol of the loss of national power necessary to prevent the currency itself from crashing.
After the German elections next month, this truth will be revealed. A resumption of the airborne rescue missions is possible; turbulence is guaranteed. Fasten your seatbelts.
20130825
Unidentified 13ft-long sea monster with horns washes up on beach in Spain and has marine biologists stumped
Unidentified 13ft-long sea monster with horns washes up on beach in Spain and has marine biologists stumped
With its horns, long white body and slithery form, it looks like a mythical beast
But this four-metre long horned creature is only too real - as the stench from its decomposing flesh proved.
The mysterious sea creature was washed ashore in Villaricos, Spain - and tests are being done on the carcass to determine what it is.
An unfortunate swimmer stumbled across the head before coming across the rest of the body, the Huffington Post reported.
Civil Protection Coordinator Maria Sanchez said: 'We have no idea what it can be, but it smelled bad, because it was so badly decomposed', Digital Spy reported.
She added: 'A lady found one part, and we helped her retrieve the rest… We have no idea what it was. It really stank, as it was in the advanced stages of decomposition,' Inquisitr reported.
The extent of the deterioration of the creature meant most of the remains had to be buried for safety reasons.
Several theories have been suggested about what the creature is - ranging from it being a type of shark to it being an oar fish, but researchers are still examining it.
Programa en Defensa de la Fauna Marina (PROMAR) spokesman Paco Toledano was also puzzled, Yahoo reported.
He said: 'It's hard to know what we’re dealing with,' Mr Toldano told ideal.es.
'It is broken up and we can not identify what ii is. Maybe it's a bull fish', he joked.
'Perhaps if we were able to analyse the bones we might know more, but for this specific genetic analysis it is very expensive and who would pay?
'We've certainly never before seen anything like this.'
A spokesman for the Marine Biological Association said: 'A few people have said it could be the backbone of a shark with the rest of it decaying away.
'Really we would need a vertebrae to properly identify it. If it was a shark it would have cartilage skeleton as opposed to bone.
'As for the horns - it's pretty inconclusive. No one knows of anything with horns in the sea. From the picture you wonder if it is even part of the creature.'
- Spanish marine biologists mystified by the creature that was spotted dead in the shallows by a woman on the beach at Villaricos
- Puzzled marine official Paco Toledano said: 'We've certainly never seen anything like this around here before'
- Decomposing creature was giving off such a stench that it had to be buried
- It could be the backbone of a shark, suggest British marine biologists
With its horns, long white body and slithery form, it looks like a mythical beast
But this four-metre long horned creature is only too real - as the stench from its decomposing flesh proved.
The mysterious sea creature was washed ashore in Villaricos, Spain - and tests are being done on the carcass to determine what it is.
The four-metres long creature, seen with its head detached from its body, is in an advanced state of decomposition
A swimmer stumbled across the horn head and decayed body on a Spanish beach
Civil Protection Coordinator Maria Sanchez said: 'We have no idea what it can be, but it smelled bad, because it was so badly decomposed', Digital Spy reported.
She added: 'A lady found one part, and we helped her retrieve the rest… We have no idea what it was. It really stank, as it was in the advanced stages of decomposition,' Inquisitr reported.
The extent of the deterioration of the creature meant most of the remains had to be buried for safety reasons.
Several theories have been suggested about what the creature is - ranging from it being a type of shark to it being an oar fish, but researchers are still examining it.
Programa en Defensa de la Fauna Marina (PROMAR) spokesman Paco Toledano was also puzzled, Yahoo reported.
Several theories have been suggested about what the creature is - ranging from it being a type of shark to it being an oar fish
'It is broken up and we can not identify what ii is. Maybe it's a bull fish', he joked.
'Perhaps if we were able to analyse the bones we might know more, but for this specific genetic analysis it is very expensive and who would pay?
'We've certainly never before seen anything like this.'
A spokesman for the Marine Biological Association said: 'A few people have said it could be the backbone of a shark with the rest of it decaying away.
'Really we would need a vertebrae to properly identify it. If it was a shark it would have cartilage skeleton as opposed to bone.
'As for the horns - it's pretty inconclusive. No one knows of anything with horns in the sea. From the picture you wonder if it is even part of the creature.'
20130824
Hacked Emails Reveal ‘Washington-Approved’ Plan to Stage Chemical Weapons Attack in Syria
Hacked Emails Reveal ‘Washington-Approved’ Plan to Stage Chemical Weapons Attack in Syria
Obama administration complicit in war crime?
UPDATE: Britam has admitted that it was hacked but denied that the emails released by the hacker were genuine. Click here for a statement by a Britam spokesman.
The leaked emails, obtained by a hacker in Germany, feature an exchange (click here for screenshot) between Britam Defence’s Business Development Director David Goulding and the company’s founder Philip Doughty;
Last month, 29 different US-backed Syrian opposition groups pledged their allegiance to Al Nusra, an Al-Qaeda-affiliated group which, as the New York Times reported, “killed numerous American troops in Iraq.
Obama administration complicit in war crime?
UPDATE: Britam has admitted that it was hacked but denied that the emails released by the hacker were genuine. Click here for a statement by a Britam spokesman.
Alleged hacked emails from defense contractor Britam
reveal a plan “approved by Washington” and funded by Qatar to stage a
chemical weapons attack in Syria and blame it on the Assad regime,
fulfilling what the Obama administration has made clear is a “red line”
that would mandate US military intervention.
The leaked emails, obtained by a hacker in Germany, feature an exchange (click here for screenshot) between Britam Defence’s Business Development Director David Goulding and the company’s founder Philip Doughty;
PhilWe’ve got a new offer. It’s about Syria again. Qataris propose an attractive deal and swear that the idea is approved by Washington.We’ll have to deliver a CW to Homs, a Soviet origin g-shell from Libya similar to those that Assad should have. They want us to deploy our Ukrainian personnel that should speak Russian and make a video record.Frankly, I don’t think it’s a good idea but the sums proposed are enormous. Your opinion?
Kind regards
David
The fact that the plan involves delivering a CW
(chemical weapon) that is “similar to those Assad should have,” clearly
suggests that the idea is to stage a false flag chemical weapons attack
that could be blamed on Assad by Gulf states like Qatar and NATO powers.
If the claim that such as plot was “approved by
Washington” can be verified, then the Obama administration is complicit
in a war crime.
According to Cyber War News,
which details the process of how the emails were hacked and includes
screenshots of the leaked documents, the hack also uncovered, “extremely
personal information,” including copies of passports of Britam
employees, some of whom appeared to be mercenaries.
A full list of all the hacked documents can be found here. One software systems administrator who analyzed the ‘header’ details
from the email in question concluded, “I have to admit that the email
does indeed look genuine….all these facts check out. So with Mythbusters
objectivity I have to call this one plausible.”
Online business profiles confirm that both David Goulding and Philip Doughty work for Britam Defence.
Last year, reports began to circulate that
that US-backed rebel fighters in Syria had been given gas masks and
were willing to stage a chemical weapons attack which would then be
blamed on the Assad regime to grease the skids for NATO military
intervention.
Soon after in August, President Barack Obama warned that
the use or even transportation of chemical weapons by the Assad regime
would represent a “red line” that would precipitate military
intervention. French President Francois Hollande followed suit, stating that the use of such weapons “Would be a legitimate reason for direct intervention.”
At around the same time, a source told Syrian news channel Addounia that
a Saudi company had fitted 1400 ambulance vehicles with anti-gas &
anti-chemical filtering systems at a cost of $97,000 dollars each, in
preparation for a chemical weapons attack carried out by FSA rebels
using mortar rounds. A further 400 vehicles were prepared as troop
carriers.
The attack would be blamed on the Syrian Army and
exploited as an excuse for a military assault. A March 2012 Brookings
Institution report entitled Saving Syria: Assessing Options For Regime Change outlined this very scenario – where a manufactured humanitarian crisis would be cited as justification for an attack.
Yesterday, Israel’s vice premier Silvan Shalom told reporters that
if Syrian rebels obtained chemical weapons from stockpiles belonging to
the Assad regime, such a development would force Israel to resort to
“preventive operations,” in other words – a military strike on Syria.
In December, a shocking video emerged
of Syrian rebels testing what appeared to be a form of nerve gas on
rabbits, bolstering claims that the rebels had already obtained chemical
weapons.
As Tony Cartalucci also highlights,
“Mention of acquiring chemical weapons from Libya is particularly
troubling. Libya’s arsenal had fallen into the hands of sectarian
extremists with NATO assistance in 2011 in the culmination of efforts to
overthrow the North African nation . Since then, Libya’s militants led
by commanders of Al Qaeda’s Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) have armed sectarian extremists across the Arab World, from as far West as Mali, to as far East as Syria.”
Last month, 29 different US-backed Syrian opposition groups pledged their allegiance to Al Nusra, an Al-Qaeda-affiliated group which, as the New York Times reported, “killed numerous American troops in Iraq.
Numerous reports confirm that Al Nusra is the leading front line fighting force in Syria and
is commanding other rebel groups. Given their prominent role, allied
with the fact that the terror group has been responsible for numerous
bloody attacks in Syria, the notion that the Obama administration would
approve a plot that could see chemical weapons fall into the hands of
Al-Qaeda terrorists could represent a foreign policy scandal even bigger
than Benghazi-Gate.
In a related story, the Syrian Electronic Army, a separate hacktivist group, continues to release hacked files and emails from numerous sensitive foreign ministry and military websites belonging to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, including emails sent between these countries.
Italian Job Sneaks Factory to Poland Under Cover
Italian Job Sneaks Factory to Poland Under Cover
Earlier this month, Fabrizio Pedroni wished his employees a happy summer holiday and told them to return to work in three weeks. That night, he began dismantling his electric component factory in northern Italy and packing its machinery off to Poland.
The news that Firem Srl, based in Formigine near Modena, was shifting to Eastern Europe reached the 40 employees too late. On Aug. 13, 11 days after Pedroni activated his plan, a group of employees suspicious of the movements around the plant rushed to its gates just in time to stop the last of 20 lorries packed with machinery. Firem’s move became a national controversy and the fate of its workers is still unclear.
The loss of the factory highlights the struggle Italy faces to revive manufacturing and its economy, which remained in recession in the second quarter even as the broader euro area returned to growth. Italy ranks 128th in the World Economic Forum’s global pay and productivity table, one place behind Burkina Faso, compared with 39th for Poland.
Family Firm
Pedroni, 49, now lives in fear for his life after receiving multiple threats to himself and his family. He says he won’t change his mind about the choice he made for the company first opened by his grandfather after World War II. He’s not alone, with Italian companies from car firm Fiat SpA (FI) to Indesit Co. SpA (IND), the maker of ovens and fridges, moving production lines abroad to cut costs.Sneaking off “was certainly disputable and hopelessly harmed relations with his employees and community, but like many entrepreneurs before him, he abandoned the ship called Italy because it was the only way to survive,” said Carlo Alberto Carnevale Maffe, professor of business strategy at Milan’s Bocconi University.
“In Italy, most businesses like Firem have been posting losses for at least five years.”
According to Pedroni, whose factory is close to the headquarters of luxury carmaker Ferrari SpA, his decision was forced by factors ranging from foreign competition to labor costs and higher taxes.
Worker Tension
Firem had sales of about 3 million euros ($4 million) last year but hasn’t posted a profit since 2008, said Pedroni, who opened his new Polish factory this week and doesn’t plan to return to Italy anytime soon given the tensions with workers. He didn’t attend an Aug. 20 meeting with unions and local institutions in the Formigine town hall.Firem “implemented a move that I would call clandestine to say the least,” lawmaker Matteo Richetti, a member of Prime Minister Enrico Letta’s Democratic Party, told parliament on Aug. 19. “I am in favor of market freedom and that means that you can move your company wherever you want, but this must happen after notifying the staff and the local community.”
Richetti and a colleague from the opposition Five Star movement called on the government to report urgently to Parliament on Firem’s fate.
The government’s capacity to provide financial support is constrained by a debt ratio forecast to exceed 130 percent of output, the highest after Greece. At the same time, a cohesive response may be difficult from a government supported by a makeshift coalition of parties currently bickering on the judicial wrangles of former premier Silvio Berlusconi.
Italy’s economy shrank 0.2 percent in the second quarter. In contrast, Germany and the U.K. expanded 0.7 percent.
No Option
Cgil, the country’s biggest union, said this week it wants Firem to “find a solution to ensure production” stays in Italy.“The way to emerge from crisis cannot be to impoverish our industrial production, competing only in terms of cost reductions, particularly labor costs,” it said.
Pedroni said he had no option and that other potential solutions would likely have doomed his company.
“I don’t want to make more profit, I just want to start making profit again,” he said, adding that to show his good will, he brought five Italian workers he trusted to Poland, asking them not to tell others of the plan. In Italy, Firem will continue to exist on paper with 10 employees.
Company Transfer
In the ten years through 2011 about 27,000 Italian companies with annual sales of more than 2.5 million euros shifted production abroad, the Cgia association of small businesses said in a report in March. In 2011, the last year for which data is available, there were 737 companies in Poland controlled by Italians, employing more than 67,000, according to the Italian Foreign Trade Institute ICE.While larger companies may not have the ability to move at Pedroni’s speed, they too are shifting at least part of their production abroad. Indesit said in June it planned to cut 1,400 jobs, or a third of its workforce, as it moves production to Poland and Turkey. Fiat, no stranger to clashes with unions over job reductions and transfers, employs more than 4,000 workers at its Tychy Plant in Poland.
Poland’s economy, the only one in the EU to have avoided recession since 2009, will expand 1.1 percent this year, according to central bank projections published on July 8. By contrast, Italy’s economy is seen shrinking 1.8 percent, three times the euro-region average, according to a Bloomberg survey of economists.
“Many of my colleagues called me to say I was right and brave to do it,” Pedroni said of his move. “I’m not the first to go and won’t be the last.”
20130823
What Was Really Behind President Obama’s Meeting With Wall Street Regulators
What Was Really Behind President Obama’s Meeting With Wall Street Regulators
The Man Who Promised Change We Can Believe In
The White House issued a statement yesterday on the President’s meeting with the federal agencies that regulate Wall Street. Curiously, the phrase used to describe the agencies was “independent regulators.” The President’s Deputy Press Secretary, Josh Earnest, held a press briefing with reporters yesterday, taking questions on the meeting. In that briefing, Earnest referred to the regulators as “independent” seven times.
If the President now finds it necessary to attempt to brainwash the American public through endless repetition of the word “independent” to shore up sagging public doubt that there are any real cops on the beat when it comes to policing Wall Street, he has no one to blame but himself.
When President Obama appointed Mary Jo White to head the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Jack Lew for U.S. Treasury Secretary, and has floated the idea for weeks that Larry Summers could become Chairman of the Federal Reserve, he critically undermined the already low disregard the public holds toward Wall Street’s regulators.
White came to the SEC in April from the Wall Street legal powerhouse, Debevoise & Plimpton. She wasn’t just any lawyer there; she chaired the Litigation Department where she led a team of more than 200 lawyers defending Wall Street’s too-big-to-fail banks. It was understood that in most of the ongoing cases against the largest Wall Street firms, White would have to recuse herself at the SEC. Can you really call that an “independent” regulator?
Lew came to the U.S. Treasury from Citigroup – the bank that had received the largest taxpayer bailout assistance of any bank in the 2008 Wall Street crash. On his way out the door, Lew accepted a $940,000 bonus from the insolvent bank, which was paid with taxpayer money. Lew was Chief Operating Officer of the division that brought down the bank. According to public records, on January 14 of this year, just four days after Lew was nominated for Treasury Secretary, Citigroup completed a mortgage refinancing for Lew, lowering his mortgage rate to 3.625 percent for a 30-year mortgage of $610,000. At the same time, Citigroup provided Lew a $200,000 home equity loan at an unstated amount of interest.
Another issue for Lew in his confirmation hearing was his employment contract with Citigroup. It provided a bonus guarantee based on the specific requirement that he leave the bank for a “high level position with the United States government or regulatory body.” Lew succeeded in meeting that outcome. As U.S. Treasury Secretary, Lew Chairs the Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC) which plays a key role in overseeing too-big-to-fail banks. Lew was in attendance at the President’s meeting yesterday with the “independent” regulators.
Summers, of course, would round out the team of not-so-independent regulators if he were appointed by the President to lead the Federal Reserve. Summers was one of the key individuals that pushed for the deregulation of Wall Street in the Clinton administration. Summers is also currently on the payroll of Citigroup as a consultant at an undisclosed amount of compensation.
The idea of infusing the concept of “independent regulator” may also have something to do with the recent charges that big Wall Street firms effectively control the London Metal Exchange and its rules committee as they simultaneously go about keeping aluminum off the market in metal warehouses that the Federal Reserve gave them carte blanche to own.
Or possibly it’s the revelations of a big bank cartel controlling the setting of Libor interest rates that impacted trillions of dollars in interest rate futures trading, swaps, student loans and mortgages while the not-so-independent British Bankers Association set at the helm.
The President may well have other things on his mind in calling the high profile meeting. One of those is that members of his own party think the Dodd-Frank reform legislation is a bust and are pushing to restore the Glass-Steagall Act, separating Wall Street casinos from banks holding insured deposits. There are now two separate pieces of legislation in the Senate and House calling for the restoration of this depression era investor protection act.
There is also that pesky problem that real experts on the financial markets are increasingly testifying before Congress on just how dangerous Wall Street remains to the health of the U.S. economy, despite Dodd-Frank. The President may be worrying about his legacy if Wall Street crashes again.
At a June 26 hearing before the House Financial Services Committee, Thomas Hoenig, former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and now Vice Chair of the FDIC, stated that the biggest banks are “woefully undercapitalized.” He said the U.S. has a “very vulnerable financial system.” Hoenig also believes Dodd-Frank is a failure and he is strongly advocating the restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act.
Hoenig told the Committee that “The largest eight U.S. global systemically important financial institutions in tandem hold $10 trillion of assets under GAAP accounting, or the equivalent of two-thirds of U.S. GDP, and $16 trillion of assets when including the gross fair value of derivatives, which is the equivalent of 100 percent of GDP.”
At the same hearing, Richard Fisher, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said “I don’t think we have prevented taxpayer bailouts by Dodd-Frank.” Fisher said the legislation “enmeshes us in hyper bureaucracy.” According to studies, less than 40 percent of the rules required under Dodd-Frank have been enacted.
One of the most important of those rules is the Volcker Rule which would prevent Wall Street firms from engaging in proprietary trading, i.e., gambling with its own capital to make profits for the house, and frequently using inside information to make those gambles – effectively a flawlessly honed wealth transfer system.
As the regulators delay in formalizing that rule, what the public has learned is that the real danger is not that Wall Street continues to gamble with its own money but that, as we learned from the JPMorgan London Whale episode, its not-so-independent regulators are allowing Wall Street to gamble with the insured deposits of ordinary folks and lose $6.2 billion along the way.
The Man Who Promised Change We Can Believe In
The White House issued a statement yesterday on the President’s meeting with the federal agencies that regulate Wall Street. Curiously, the phrase used to describe the agencies was “independent regulators.” The President’s Deputy Press Secretary, Josh Earnest, held a press briefing with reporters yesterday, taking questions on the meeting. In that briefing, Earnest referred to the regulators as “independent” seven times.
If the President now finds it necessary to attempt to brainwash the American public through endless repetition of the word “independent” to shore up sagging public doubt that there are any real cops on the beat when it comes to policing Wall Street, he has no one to blame but himself.
When President Obama appointed Mary Jo White to head the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Jack Lew for U.S. Treasury Secretary, and has floated the idea for weeks that Larry Summers could become Chairman of the Federal Reserve, he critically undermined the already low disregard the public holds toward Wall Street’s regulators.
White came to the SEC in April from the Wall Street legal powerhouse, Debevoise & Plimpton. She wasn’t just any lawyer there; she chaired the Litigation Department where she led a team of more than 200 lawyers defending Wall Street’s too-big-to-fail banks. It was understood that in most of the ongoing cases against the largest Wall Street firms, White would have to recuse herself at the SEC. Can you really call that an “independent” regulator?
Lew came to the U.S. Treasury from Citigroup – the bank that had received the largest taxpayer bailout assistance of any bank in the 2008 Wall Street crash. On his way out the door, Lew accepted a $940,000 bonus from the insolvent bank, which was paid with taxpayer money. Lew was Chief Operating Officer of the division that brought down the bank. According to public records, on January 14 of this year, just four days after Lew was nominated for Treasury Secretary, Citigroup completed a mortgage refinancing for Lew, lowering his mortgage rate to 3.625 percent for a 30-year mortgage of $610,000. At the same time, Citigroup provided Lew a $200,000 home equity loan at an unstated amount of interest.
Another issue for Lew in his confirmation hearing was his employment contract with Citigroup. It provided a bonus guarantee based on the specific requirement that he leave the bank for a “high level position with the United States government or regulatory body.” Lew succeeded in meeting that outcome. As U.S. Treasury Secretary, Lew Chairs the Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC) which plays a key role in overseeing too-big-to-fail banks. Lew was in attendance at the President’s meeting yesterday with the “independent” regulators.
Summers, of course, would round out the team of not-so-independent regulators if he were appointed by the President to lead the Federal Reserve. Summers was one of the key individuals that pushed for the deregulation of Wall Street in the Clinton administration. Summers is also currently on the payroll of Citigroup as a consultant at an undisclosed amount of compensation.
The idea of infusing the concept of “independent regulator” may also have something to do with the recent charges that big Wall Street firms effectively control the London Metal Exchange and its rules committee as they simultaneously go about keeping aluminum off the market in metal warehouses that the Federal Reserve gave them carte blanche to own.
Or possibly it’s the revelations of a big bank cartel controlling the setting of Libor interest rates that impacted trillions of dollars in interest rate futures trading, swaps, student loans and mortgages while the not-so-independent British Bankers Association set at the helm.
The President may well have other things on his mind in calling the high profile meeting. One of those is that members of his own party think the Dodd-Frank reform legislation is a bust and are pushing to restore the Glass-Steagall Act, separating Wall Street casinos from banks holding insured deposits. There are now two separate pieces of legislation in the Senate and House calling for the restoration of this depression era investor protection act.
There is also that pesky problem that real experts on the financial markets are increasingly testifying before Congress on just how dangerous Wall Street remains to the health of the U.S. economy, despite Dodd-Frank. The President may be worrying about his legacy if Wall Street crashes again.
At a June 26 hearing before the House Financial Services Committee, Thomas Hoenig, former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and now Vice Chair of the FDIC, stated that the biggest banks are “woefully undercapitalized.” He said the U.S. has a “very vulnerable financial system.” Hoenig also believes Dodd-Frank is a failure and he is strongly advocating the restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act.
Hoenig told the Committee that “The largest eight U.S. global systemically important financial institutions in tandem hold $10 trillion of assets under GAAP accounting, or the equivalent of two-thirds of U.S. GDP, and $16 trillion of assets when including the gross fair value of derivatives, which is the equivalent of 100 percent of GDP.”
At the same hearing, Richard Fisher, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said “I don’t think we have prevented taxpayer bailouts by Dodd-Frank.” Fisher said the legislation “enmeshes us in hyper bureaucracy.” According to studies, less than 40 percent of the rules required under Dodd-Frank have been enacted.
One of the most important of those rules is the Volcker Rule which would prevent Wall Street firms from engaging in proprietary trading, i.e., gambling with its own capital to make profits for the house, and frequently using inside information to make those gambles – effectively a flawlessly honed wealth transfer system.
As the regulators delay in formalizing that rule, what the public has learned is that the real danger is not that Wall Street continues to gamble with its own money but that, as we learned from the JPMorgan London Whale episode, its not-so-independent regulators are allowing Wall Street to gamble with the insured deposits of ordinary folks and lose $6.2 billion along the way.
20130822
German Utility Revolts Against Renewable Energy, Threatens To Relocate In Turkey
German Utility Revolts Against Renewable Energy, Threatens To Relocate In Turkey
The politics of electric power are getting nasty in Germany.
E.ON, Germany’s largest gas, electric and water utilities, has threatened to relocate to Turkey if the continues to prevent the profitability of its nuclear and fossil-fired power plants, according to AFP reports.
In the wake of the Fukushima crisis, Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged to phase-out nuclear power in Germany by the end of the decade and fill the resulting gap in power supply by generating up to 80% of the nation’s electricity from renewable energy by 2050.
Under current regulations, electricity generated by renewable energy resources are given priority access to the grid. As a result, electricity generated by coal and gas-fired plants is only used “to make up for any shortfalls,” according to the AFP.
Many power plants in E.ON’s fleet are thus operating at a loss, which has taken a steep financial toll.
In the second quarter, E.ON saw its net profit plunge by 22% as the result of weak demand and strong subsidies for renewable energy.
Meanwhile, RWE, Germany’s second-largest utility, said last week that it would shut down six power plants, which collectively represent about 4,300 megawatts of capacity, in Germany and the Netherlands.
Per the AFP:
“Following the boom of solar power in recent years, nourished by generous subsidies, the capacity of renewable sources of energy is such that, if the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, Germany can actually do without its conventional power plants.
“In the period from April to June, a number of RWE’s plants were operating at less than 10 percent of capacity, said finance chief Guenther.
“And with wholesale electricity prices at the current lows in Europe, that means substantial losses. That was the case with gas-fired plants until recently, but coal-fired generators are now barely profitable as well, he said.
“. . . At the moment, E.ON’s plants ‘are working for nothing,’ raged chief executive Johannes Teyssen last week, who is eyeing other closure scenarios and a possible relocation to Turkey where the group already has a solid presence.
The politics of electric power are getting nasty in Germany.
E.ON, Germany’s largest gas, electric and water utilities, has threatened to relocate to Turkey if the continues to prevent the profitability of its nuclear and fossil-fired power plants, according to AFP reports.
In the wake of the Fukushima crisis, Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged to phase-out nuclear power in Germany by the end of the decade and fill the resulting gap in power supply by generating up to 80% of the nation’s electricity from renewable energy by 2050.
Under current regulations, electricity generated by renewable energy resources are given priority access to the grid. As a result, electricity generated by coal and gas-fired plants is only used “to make up for any shortfalls,” according to the AFP.
Many power plants in E.ON’s fleet are thus operating at a loss, which has taken a steep financial toll.
In the second quarter, E.ON saw its net profit plunge by 22% as the result of weak demand and strong subsidies for renewable energy.
Meanwhile, RWE, Germany’s second-largest utility, said last week that it would shut down six power plants, which collectively represent about 4,300 megawatts of capacity, in Germany and the Netherlands.
Per the AFP:
“Following the boom of solar power in recent years, nourished by generous subsidies, the capacity of renewable sources of energy is such that, if the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, Germany can actually do without its conventional power plants.
“In the period from April to June, a number of RWE’s plants were operating at less than 10 percent of capacity, said finance chief Guenther.
“And with wholesale electricity prices at the current lows in Europe, that means substantial losses. That was the case with gas-fired plants until recently, but coal-fired generators are now barely profitable as well, he said.
“. . . At the moment, E.ON’s plants ‘are working for nothing,’ raged chief executive Johannes Teyssen last week, who is eyeing other closure scenarios and a possible relocation to Turkey where the group already has a solid presence.
20130820
Debt Could be Killing Young Americans
Debt Could be Killing Young Americans
2009: Female Homeowners Sadder, Fatter Than Renters
Having a buttload of student debt as you enter the job world is not only bad for your pocketbook, making you feel like you're running on a financial hamster wheel, but it might also be bad for your health.
A new Northwestern University study headed for publication in the August issue of Social Science and Medicine found that higher debt in young adults was associated with higher blood pressure and ...
... poorer general health and mental health.
The study looked at the psychology and health of 8,400 people aged 24 to 32 via data gathered from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.
One out of 5 subjects said if they sold everything they had they'd still be in debt, according to a summary of the research.
And researchers found that the higher the debt of the subject, the more likely they were to report stress, bad health and high blood pressure (a 1.3 percent increase), the academics say.
Such an increase in high blood pressure correlates to greater risk of stroke and hypertension, the researchers noted.
Lead author Elizabeth Sweet:
You wouldn't necessarily expect to see associations between debt and physical health in people who are so young. We need to be aware of this association and understand it better. Our study is just a first peek at how debt may impact physical health.
Of course, there are politicians who believe that investing in education is a waste of money and that y'all can "bootstrap" yourselves to success.
There are politicians who believe in protecting the interests of big banks while betraying the rest of us. We hope for your health's sake that you are not voting for these people.
2009: Female Homeowners Sadder, Fatter Than Renters
Female Homeowners Sadder, Fatter Than Renters
Female homeowners were also carrying around more aggravation, making less time for leisure, and were less likely to spend time with friends.
"Home ownership can be a much more complex idea than just a straightforward expression of what we call the American dream," says Grace Wong Bucchianeri, an assistant professor of real estate at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. The story was reported on Canada.com
But what about all the good stuff that comes with owning a home? Aren't homeowners benefiting from the security and independence of owning. Not really. The research shows that when you control for things like childbirth and income, the difference in contentment vanishes.
"I don't see any strong evidence that homeowners are any happier than renters," says Bucchianeri, whose 600-woman study is under review for publication in the Journal of Urban Economics. "On the other hand, they consistently report a higher level of pain — or what you might call negative feelings — connected to their home, and that's after controlling for all kinds of demographic characteristics, their financial situation, how many children they have and so on."
20130818
New fundraising rules will hurt startups
https://angel.co/sec
http://www.sec.gov/rules/proposed/2013/33-9416.pdf
The SEC's proposed rules will defeat their goals in letting startups raise money publicly. Startups will be forbidden from raising money at all if they accidentally break the rules—effectively putting the startup out of business. Or startups will decide that these rules are so difficult to follow that they will raise money privately; lowering their chances of raising money and moving their conversations to forums that can't be tracked by the SEC.
Either outcome defeats the purpose of letting startups raise money publicly. And it will have the unintended consequence of putting large numbers of otherwise promising startups (and most of the job growth in the U.S.) out of business. The proposal appears to be targeted to the way startups raised money 20 years ago: with long prospectuses designed by bankers who were facilitating the deal. Today, startups raise money without bankers, through informal conversations with investors. It is unfeasible to notify the SEC in advance, file documents every time there is a new communication with investors and include boilerplate with every communication. Worse, since everything is public, startups will see other startups break the rules and assume there are no rules. So startups will either accidentally break the rules or decide to raise money privately. The stated purpose of these rules is to help the SEC track investment activity so they can adjust general solicitation regulations over time. There are ways to this without putting good startups out of business or moving investment activity underground. First, allow third parties like AngelList to do the filing on the startup's behalf, with a simple URL that is delivered via API. Second, only require boilerplate when startups are communicating financing terms. Finally, remove the 1-year ban for noncompliance—it is incommensurate with any harm.
20130809
The Builders of This Spanish Skyscraper Forgot the Elevator
The Builders of This Spanish Skyscraper Forgot the Elevator
The Intempo skyscraper in Benidorm, Spain—standing proud in this image—was designed to be a striking symbol of hope and prosperity, to signal to the rest of the world that the city was escaping the financial crisis. Sadly, the builders forgot to include a working elevator.
In fairness, the entire construction process has been plagued with problems, reports Ecnonomia. Initially funded by a bank called Caixa Galicia, the finances were recently taken over by Sareb – Spain’s so-called "bad bank" – when the mortgage was massively written down.
In part, that was a function of the greed surrounding the project. Initially designed to be a mere 20 storeys tall, the developers got over-excited and pushed the height way up: now it boasts 47 storeys, and will include 269 homes.
But that push for more accommodation came at a cost. The original design obviously included specifications for an elevator big enough for a 20-storey building. In the process of scaling things up, however, nobody thought to redesign the elevator system—and, naturally, a 47-storey building requires more space for its lifts and motor equipment. Sadly, that space doesn't exist.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the architects working on the project have resigned, and it remains unclear exactly how the developers will solve the problem. Can we recommend the stairs?
The Intempo skyscraper in Benidorm, Spain—standing proud in this image—was designed to be a striking symbol of hope and prosperity, to signal to the rest of the world that the city was escaping the financial crisis. Sadly, the builders forgot to include a working elevator.
In fairness, the entire construction process has been plagued with problems, reports Ecnonomia. Initially funded by a bank called Caixa Galicia, the finances were recently taken over by Sareb – Spain’s so-called "bad bank" – when the mortgage was massively written down.
In part, that was a function of the greed surrounding the project. Initially designed to be a mere 20 storeys tall, the developers got over-excited and pushed the height way up: now it boasts 47 storeys, and will include 269 homes.
But that push for more accommodation came at a cost. The original design obviously included specifications for an elevator big enough for a 20-storey building. In the process of scaling things up, however, nobody thought to redesign the elevator system—and, naturally, a 47-storey building requires more space for its lifts and motor equipment. Sadly, that space doesn't exist.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the architects working on the project have resigned, and it remains unclear exactly how the developers will solve the problem. Can we recommend the stairs?
20130808
EasyFood: next item on Stelios Haji-Ioannou's menu
EasyFood: next item on Stelios Haji-Ioannou's menu
The ground floor of an empty life insurance office in Croydon seems an unlikely setting for the first of what could be a new chain of food stores, but it is here that easyJet billionaire Stelios Haji-Ioannou is planning to test his latest venture – a super-cheap grocery outlet to be branded easyFoodstore.
Haji-Ioannou has bought the freehold to the old MetLife office block opposite East Croydon station. It will house various existing easy-branded ventures: the top floors will be an easyHotel, the middle floors will offer short-term office space and perhaps a gym. But the ground floor is reserved for the first branch of his ultra-budget grocery store, to open this autumn. If it succeeds, the entrepreneur could turn it into a national chain.
The aim is to sell basic grocery items, such as tinnned and dried food and washing powder, at rock-bottom prices: lower even than the so-called hard discounters Aldi and Lidl that have thrived in hard-times Britain.
News of the venture leaked out earlier than Haji-Ioannou wanted and so, he said, he can only give a broad outline of what the business will be like. There will be 50 to 100 items on the shelves, with no fresh or frozen food apart from, possibly, bread and eggs.
He is not going into partnership with a big retailer and he does not claim any great innovation. He will source non-branded goods from wholesalers.
"There is no business plan. I don't know what the shop will look like. If you ask me to rank the risks, the biggest is that nobody turns up. It's a freehold property so I can afford to experiment for a year or longer," he said on the phone from Monaco.
Haji-Ioannou said the idea came from two sources: his Food from the Heart project in Cyprus and the growth of food banks in the UK.
Food from the Heart hands out cheese and salami sandwiches to Cyprus's needy people at lunchtime. The pilot site in Limassol has given out more than 7,800 snacks in a month. Haji-Ioannou plans to extend it to more sites on the bailed-out island.
"In simple terms, I realised that food is the most fundamental need for a person. In difficult economic times, people's priorities change and they might be willing to do something that secures for them the lowest possible weekly food bill."
EasyFoodstore will be a kind of non-convenience store. It will open, he says, maybe six hours a day, five days a week, to keep costs and prices down.
"Food from the Heart is open two hours a day, five days a week but that hasn't made it unpopular. Are people saying 'I'm not coming back because I've had enough halloumi'? We haven't had any evidence that is how they think."
But easyFoodstore will not be a charitable venture. The billionaire thinks he can make money while providing cheaper food. "There is a place and a time for philanthropy and there is only so much money you can give away. If you are going to make it more scalable than that you have to find a commercial formula."
Croydon is not one of London's poorest boroughs but it has pockets of extreme poverty and its town centre has boarded-up shops, a branch of pawnbroker Albermarle & Bond and other signs of austerity UK. Less than a mile from Haji-Ioannou's building, on an industrial estate, is Croydon's own food bank, in the Praise Baptist church.
Grace Saah, the church's administrator, said: "You don't have to go far in Croydon to see what is going on. There is a lot of homelessness, people begging for money and you see a lot of single-parent families. With changes in benefits, many people are suffering."
At a busy lunchtime session, people pick up food donated by the public, sometimes just for themselves and sometimes for their family.
Will easyFoodstore fill a gap in the market for people struggling in Croydon?
"Yes and no," said Saah. "Those that come to us don't have a great deal but there are people who slip through the net because of pride and things like that, and they will take whatever they can."
Adam Phillips is 18 and has filled his backpack with cereal, frankfurters, tinned fruit and other staples from the food bank. He is there because his benefit has been cut off temporarily.
When he has money, he shops at Asda, Poundland and 99p stores.
Phillips said the idea of EasyFoodstore sounded "good – because I'm always looking for cheaper places to go". But he pointed out that the supermarkets have their budget ranges. "How cheap is he going to sell it?"
Bill Grimsey, a veteran retailer, thinks Stelios will struggle: "Stelios's formula when he went into the airline business worked extremely well because none of the big boys had anything to compare with it or the competency to do it. But that competency exists at Aldi, Lidl and in a specialised form at Iceland. Where do you get the buying strength from to get prices down? The barriers are huge and I don't think he's going to make it."
Haji-Ioannou argues his ability to buy property gives him a key advantage. He already holds the cheaply bought freehold of the Croydon building so the shop does not need to be that profitable to give him a healthy return.
"One of the reasons I'm interested in retail is because it's the only sector in the UK that is depressed. Retail shops are empty and there must be bargains in retail property."
Chris Mould, chief executive of the Trussell Trust, which sets up and backs food banks nationally, argues that basic food could be cheaper in Britain. He cites Uswitch figures from 2011 that showed the UK was the most expensive country in Europe for a basket of staples.
"What that tells us is that there is room for something to happen. We want to see the industry in general do everything it can to provide nutritionally balanced food at lower prices."
For Haji-Ioannou, easyFoodstore is a hunch that may or may not pay off – another in a line of ventures he has tried since making his fortune with easyJet.
"Luckily I have enough resources so I can do a simple experiment like this. If we don't make a lot of money, but we help people put food on the table, that is fine."
The ground floor of an empty life insurance office in Croydon seems an unlikely setting for the first of what could be a new chain of food stores, but it is here that easyJet billionaire Stelios Haji-Ioannou is planning to test his latest venture – a super-cheap grocery outlet to be branded easyFoodstore.
Haji-Ioannou has bought the freehold to the old MetLife office block opposite East Croydon station. It will house various existing easy-branded ventures: the top floors will be an easyHotel, the middle floors will offer short-term office space and perhaps a gym. But the ground floor is reserved for the first branch of his ultra-budget grocery store, to open this autumn. If it succeeds, the entrepreneur could turn it into a national chain.
The aim is to sell basic grocery items, such as tinnned and dried food and washing powder, at rock-bottom prices: lower even than the so-called hard discounters Aldi and Lidl that have thrived in hard-times Britain.
News of the venture leaked out earlier than Haji-Ioannou wanted and so, he said, he can only give a broad outline of what the business will be like. There will be 50 to 100 items on the shelves, with no fresh or frozen food apart from, possibly, bread and eggs.
He is not going into partnership with a big retailer and he does not claim any great innovation. He will source non-branded goods from wholesalers.
"There is no business plan. I don't know what the shop will look like. If you ask me to rank the risks, the biggest is that nobody turns up. It's a freehold property so I can afford to experiment for a year or longer," he said on the phone from Monaco.
Haji-Ioannou said the idea came from two sources: his Food from the Heart project in Cyprus and the growth of food banks in the UK.
Food from the Heart hands out cheese and salami sandwiches to Cyprus's needy people at lunchtime. The pilot site in Limassol has given out more than 7,800 snacks in a month. Haji-Ioannou plans to extend it to more sites on the bailed-out island.
"In simple terms, I realised that food is the most fundamental need for a person. In difficult economic times, people's priorities change and they might be willing to do something that secures for them the lowest possible weekly food bill."
EasyFoodstore will be a kind of non-convenience store. It will open, he says, maybe six hours a day, five days a week, to keep costs and prices down.
"Food from the Heart is open two hours a day, five days a week but that hasn't made it unpopular. Are people saying 'I'm not coming back because I've had enough halloumi'? We haven't had any evidence that is how they think."
But easyFoodstore will not be a charitable venture. The billionaire thinks he can make money while providing cheaper food. "There is a place and a time for philanthropy and there is only so much money you can give away. If you are going to make it more scalable than that you have to find a commercial formula."
Croydon is not one of London's poorest boroughs but it has pockets of extreme poverty and its town centre has boarded-up shops, a branch of pawnbroker Albermarle & Bond and other signs of austerity UK. Less than a mile from Haji-Ioannou's building, on an industrial estate, is Croydon's own food bank, in the Praise Baptist church.
Grace Saah, the church's administrator, said: "You don't have to go far in Croydon to see what is going on. There is a lot of homelessness, people begging for money and you see a lot of single-parent families. With changes in benefits, many people are suffering."
At a busy lunchtime session, people pick up food donated by the public, sometimes just for themselves and sometimes for their family.
Will easyFoodstore fill a gap in the market for people struggling in Croydon?
"Yes and no," said Saah. "Those that come to us don't have a great deal but there are people who slip through the net because of pride and things like that, and they will take whatever they can."
Adam Phillips is 18 and has filled his backpack with cereal, frankfurters, tinned fruit and other staples from the food bank. He is there because his benefit has been cut off temporarily.
When he has money, he shops at Asda, Poundland and 99p stores.
Phillips said the idea of EasyFoodstore sounded "good – because I'm always looking for cheaper places to go". But he pointed out that the supermarkets have their budget ranges. "How cheap is he going to sell it?"
Bill Grimsey, a veteran retailer, thinks Stelios will struggle: "Stelios's formula when he went into the airline business worked extremely well because none of the big boys had anything to compare with it or the competency to do it. But that competency exists at Aldi, Lidl and in a specialised form at Iceland. Where do you get the buying strength from to get prices down? The barriers are huge and I don't think he's going to make it."
Haji-Ioannou argues his ability to buy property gives him a key advantage. He already holds the cheaply bought freehold of the Croydon building so the shop does not need to be that profitable to give him a healthy return.
"One of the reasons I'm interested in retail is because it's the only sector in the UK that is depressed. Retail shops are empty and there must be bargains in retail property."
Chris Mould, chief executive of the Trussell Trust, which sets up and backs food banks nationally, argues that basic food could be cheaper in Britain. He cites Uswitch figures from 2011 that showed the UK was the most expensive country in Europe for a basket of staples.
"What that tells us is that there is room for something to happen. We want to see the industry in general do everything it can to provide nutritionally balanced food at lower prices."
For Haji-Ioannou, easyFoodstore is a hunch that may or may not pay off – another in a line of ventures he has tried since making his fortune with easyJet.
"Luckily I have enough resources so I can do a simple experiment like this. If we don't make a lot of money, but we help people put food on the table, that is fine."
20130806
Swedish Left Party Chapter Wants To Make Urinating While Standing Illegal For Men
Swedish Left Party Chapter Wants To Make Urinating While Standing Illegal For Men
Take a stand -- and sit down for what you believe in.
Male representatives on the Sormland County Council in Sweden should sit rather than stand while urinating in office restrooms, according to a motion advanced by the local Left Party.
Known as a socialist and feminist organization, the party claims that seated urination is more hygienic for men -- the practice decreases the likelihood of puddles and other unwanted residue forming in the stall -- in addition to being better for a man's health by more effectively emptying one's bladder, The Local reported.
But not everyone agrees.
"Men scatter urine not so much during the actual urination as during the 'shaking off' that follows," John Gamel, a professor at the University of Louisville, wrote while addressing the issue in 2009. "As a result, forcing men to sit while emptying their bladders will serve little purpose, since no man wants to shake himself off while remaining seated on the toilet."
A representative from the party said he hopes to move toward sitting only bathrooms.
Take a stand -- and sit down for what you believe in.
Male representatives on the Sormland County Council in Sweden should sit rather than stand while urinating in office restrooms, according to a motion advanced by the local Left Party.
Known as a socialist and feminist organization, the party claims that seated urination is more hygienic for men -- the practice decreases the likelihood of puddles and other unwanted residue forming in the stall -- in addition to being better for a man's health by more effectively emptying one's bladder, The Local reported.
But not everyone agrees.
"Men scatter urine not so much during the actual urination as during the 'shaking off' that follows," John Gamel, a professor at the University of Louisville, wrote while addressing the issue in 2009. "As a result, forcing men to sit while emptying their bladders will serve little purpose, since no man wants to shake himself off while remaining seated on the toilet."
A representative from the party said he hopes to move toward sitting only bathrooms.
20130805
'Havoc' as HSBC prepares to close diplomatic accounts
'Havoc' as HSBC prepares to close diplomatic accounts
HSBC bank has reportedly asked more than 40 diplomatic missions to close their accounts as part of a programme to reduce business risks.
The Vatican's ambassadorial office in Britain, the Apostolic Nunciature, is among those said to be affected.
The head of the UK's Consular Corps told the Mail on Sunday the decision has created "havoc".
The Foreign Office has been in touch with HSBC, stepping in to help diplomats open other bank accounts.
HSBC said embassies were subject to the same assessments as its other business customers. They need to satisfy five criteria - international connectivity, economic development, profitability, cost efficiency and liquidity.
A spokesman said: "HSBC has been applying a rolling programme of "five filter" assessments to all its businesses since May 2011, and our services for embassies are no exception.
"We do not comment on individual customer relationships."
The Mail on Sunday reported that the High Commission of Papua New Guinea and the Honorary Consulate of Benin have also been asked to move their accounts within 60 days.
Bernard Silver, head of the Consular Corps, which represents consuls in the UK, told the paper: "HSBC's decision has created havoc.
"Embassies and consulates desperately need a bank, not just to take in money for visas and passports but to pay staff wages, rent bills, even the congestion charge."
John Belavu, minister at the Papua New Guinea High Commission, said: "We've been banking with HSBC for 22 years and for them to throw us off in this way was a bombshell."
Lawrence Landau, honorary consul of Benin, told the paper his mission had been having trouble finding a new bank.
He said: "We have been trying everyone but all the UK banks are clamming up."
Suspicious accounts
Embassies are treated like business customers by banks as they generally use services like cash and payroll management and can take out loans.
They also have to pay for ambassadorial accommodation and costs such as school fees for the children of diplomats - expenses that are difficult to meet without a valid UK bank account.
They are sometimes considered to be at risk of money laundering activities because of their political exposure and banks have been warned in the past for failing to flag up suspicious accounts.
The Riggs National Bank in Washington was fined and later sold off after a 2004 US Senate report revealed executives in its embassy business had helped Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet hide millions of dollars.
HSBC was fined $1.92bn (£1.26bn) by US authorities last year after it was blamed for alleged money laundering activities said to have been conducted through its Latin American operations by drug cartels.
The bank admitted at the time that it had failed to effectively counter money laundering.
HSBC bank has reportedly asked more than 40 diplomatic missions to close their accounts as part of a programme to reduce business risks.
The Vatican's ambassadorial office in Britain, the Apostolic Nunciature, is among those said to be affected.
The head of the UK's Consular Corps told the Mail on Sunday the decision has created "havoc".
The Foreign Office has been in touch with HSBC, stepping in to help diplomats open other bank accounts.
HSBC said embassies were subject to the same assessments as its other business customers. They need to satisfy five criteria - international connectivity, economic development, profitability, cost efficiency and liquidity.
A spokesman said: "HSBC has been applying a rolling programme of "five filter" assessments to all its businesses since May 2011, and our services for embassies are no exception.
"We do not comment on individual customer relationships."
The Mail on Sunday reported that the High Commission of Papua New Guinea and the Honorary Consulate of Benin have also been asked to move their accounts within 60 days.
Bernard Silver, head of the Consular Corps, which represents consuls in the UK, told the paper: "HSBC's decision has created havoc.
"Embassies and consulates desperately need a bank, not just to take in money for visas and passports but to pay staff wages, rent bills, even the congestion charge."
John Belavu, minister at the Papua New Guinea High Commission, said: "We've been banking with HSBC for 22 years and for them to throw us off in this way was a bombshell."
Lawrence Landau, honorary consul of Benin, told the paper his mission had been having trouble finding a new bank.
He said: "We have been trying everyone but all the UK banks are clamming up."
Suspicious accounts
Embassies are treated like business customers by banks as they generally use services like cash and payroll management and can take out loans.
They also have to pay for ambassadorial accommodation and costs such as school fees for the children of diplomats - expenses that are difficult to meet without a valid UK bank account.
They are sometimes considered to be at risk of money laundering activities because of their political exposure and banks have been warned in the past for failing to flag up suspicious accounts.
The Riggs National Bank in Washington was fined and later sold off after a 2004 US Senate report revealed executives in its embassy business had helped Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet hide millions of dollars.
HSBC was fined $1.92bn (£1.26bn) by US authorities last year after it was blamed for alleged money laundering activities said to have been conducted through its Latin American operations by drug cartels.
The bank admitted at the time that it had failed to effectively counter money laundering.
20130804
A 'Perfect Storm' Could Cause A Collapse In Oil Prices That Hits The Stock Market Too
U.S. Total Stocks of Crude Oil and Petroleum Products
A 'Perfect Storm' Could Cause A Collapse In Oil Prices That Hits The Stock Market Too
Oil Price Collapse Could Hit Stocks Too - Business Insider
Deutsche Bank strategists Rocky Fishman, Salil Aggarwal, and Lon Parisi are out with a note warning clients that a "perfect storm" of structural, demand, and supply-driven factors could conspire to cause a "major pullback" in oil prices, with the potential to derail the rally in the U.S. stock market as well.
"A major pullback in oil prices could have a concentrated effect on the S&P energy and industrials sectors, with perhaps further sentiment knock-on effects," write the strategists. "After WTI's brief pullback from its peak last month, it may be time to at least consider this possibility."
West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil prices have rallied from a low of $84.05 a barrel on November 7 to $106.88 at Friday's close, returning 27.2% over the past nine months.
"Oil is now, according to our commodities team, the most richly traded commodity in the world in real terms after massive appreciation over a multi-year horizon," says the Deutsche Bank team. "However, structural, demand-driven, and supply-driven catalysts exist for a near-term pullback – and a 'perfect storm' of a multiple of these factors could cause an even more significant move."
Fishman, Aggarwal, and Parisi bullet the three factors that could come together to cause a perfect storm for oil prices:
Structural: Falling inventory levels in the Cushing complex start leveling off or even turning up – whether driven by increased Bakken-to-Cushing transport or infrastructure concerns. The huge net long speculative futures position also could set up downside volatility if unwound.
Demand: Another leg down in China growth impairs Brent pricing, or US economic data disappoint and limit demand for WTI. Low refining margins are indicative of weakening demand.
Supply: Most supply events would be bullish oil, but we wonder if resolution of one or more stress points (e.g. the incoming Iranian regime negotiates an end to its embargo) could materially drive up supply.
Deutsche Bank chief U.S. equity strategist David Bianco hiked his year-end price target for the S&P 500 in mid-July, citing "recent WTI oil price strength despite the climb in Treasury yields and the dollar."
Bianco also spelled out the logical inverse of his call: "A surge in yields or oil price collapse has long been the chief risks to our strategically bullish view."
Fishman, Aggarwal, and Parisi say Bianco "sees [the S&P 500] as always long oil."
"As a weak [S&P 500] ex-financials quarter unfolds, we are starting to believe further 'earnings power bad news' could make the market revisit its recent multiple expansion altogether," write the strategists. "This could doubly impact selected energy names, so we think that hedges in the energy complex – services, [exploration and production], integrateds – may be especially efficient going forward. In a sense, the [S&P 500's] overall multiple could start to be weakened by the oil complex’s earnings potential."
The Deutsche Bank team stresses that it is in fact bullish on oil in the near term, but says low price volatility in both oil and energy sector equities makes now a good time to hedge those bullish bets, given the structural, demand, and supply-driven factors highlighted in the note.
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