Abdulaziz added that Saudi Arabia “will be the last and biggest producer of hydrocarbon even then,” referring to 2050.
But is Saudi Arabia’s the world’s leading hydrocarbon producer now? And what is its legitimate prospect for being the largest hydrocarbon producer in 2050?...Oilprice
“It’s the first time you’ve had back-to-back (quarters) like this since the 1930s,” said Willie Delwiche, investment strategist at Baird. “It’s pretty unprecedented.”
…The quarter’s gains were ignited by promises of massive amounts of aid from the Federal Reserve and Congress.Fortune
The real bounty hunters in this high-risk game are not Russian operatives allegedly directing militant assassins. Rather, it is domestic political enemies of Donald Trump directing US media outlets to hobble his presidency or chances of re-election.
One can read this most recent flurry of Russia, Russia, Russia paid the Taliban to kill GIs as an attempt to pre-empt the findings into Russiagate’s origins.
Dr. Wilmer Leon is joined by Ray McGovern, who works for Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington, DC. During his 27 years as a CIA analyst, he led the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and prepared the President’s Daily Brief for US Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan.
On Monday, Pentagon spokesman Johnathan Hoffman claimed that the US Department of Defense has no facts to recognize the alleged Russian actions as credible.
An assertion made by spooks is as far from evidence as you can possibly get. Really dumb that this needs to be said.Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue Journalist
The WSJ points out that it was primarily the NSA's firm dissent that kept the Russian bounties allegation out of the president's daily briefing — which both further confirms the White House's denials of the initial Friday Times reporting, as well as contradicts the NYT "revelation" itself.
"Because of that [NSA dissent], President Trump was never personally briefed on the threat, the White House said, although a key lawmaker said the information apparently was included in written intelligence materials prepared for Mr. Trump," WSJ underscores.
No details were given as to precisely how the NSA differed in its assessment of the Russian bounty allegations. For those keeping score, this marks the third major formal distancing from the substance of the NYT reporting by US intelligence agencies and intel community leadership.
Also recall this isn't the first instance of significant NSA pushback concerning explosive charges aimed at Russia.…Zero Hedge
With tectonic changes, reflected largely through a massive decline in Saudi influence, taking place within the ‘Muslim world’, a potent struggle for new dominance has already begun.
The symbolic and actual battlefield is Libya, gateway to a big part of the Muslim world in Africa. While a number of countries—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Russia, France—are involved directly and indirectly in the ‘Libyan saga’, Turkey’s involvement is not only deeper than all but also the most ambitious one.
Turkey, unlike other countries, is not merely a supporter of a particular regime or a political faction; its presence is rooted in its ambitions to reassert and re-establish Turkey’s Ottoman era dominance and become the leader of the entire ‘Muslim world.’ This leadership has both political and religious dimensions rooted in Turkey’s support for a particular brand of Islam expressed widely through the Muslim Brotherhood....Erdogan is an Ottoman revanchist.
For Erdogan, Libya and other countries of North Africa are the heritage of his forefathers and the legacy of his country. In a recent speech, he said: “Turkey has a vast historical and civilisational basin. The Mediterranean and North Africa are an important part of that basin. Libya is the legacy of our Ottoman Empire.”...Catch the term "civilisational." Turkey, Russia, Iran, China, Japan, India (and some others)) are civilizational states. This is becoming a "thing" geopolitically. They see themselves in opposition to Western (European) civilization and its traditions, culture and values, if not in conflict with it owing to the attitude of the West regarding civilizational superiority.
Heated discussions have erupted online after a number of insiders familiar with the contents of US President Donald Trump's phone conversations with foreign heads of state offered rather unflattering accounts of how POTUS allegedly conducted himself during those calls, according to a CNN report penned by legendary journalist Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame.History records that Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein took down President Nixon using information provided by "Deep Throat" who could as well have been characterized as "Deep State." Woodward and Bernstein later confirmed that Deep Throat had been FBI Associate Director Mark Felt.
During Lam’s video message, she accused foreign governments and politicians who had raised objections to the legislation of double standards.
“All those countries which are pointing their fingers at China have their own national security legislation in place,” she said.
“We can think of no valid reason why China alone should be inhibited from enacting a national security legislation to protect every corner of its territory and all of its nation,” she said.I think this is right. Having observed the "protests" and "demonstrations" from a distance through the global media, I conclude that the great majority of participants were peaceful. This was reflected in the results of subsequent elections in which the opposition did very well.
Things are obviously getting desperate out there in financial media commentary land. If one could express written text in graphical terms then there are a number of financial journalists out there that look – like a rabbit caught in the headlights – that is in a state “of paralyzing surprise, fear, or bewilderment.” A good example of this increasingly observed syndrome is an article in The Australian newspaper today (June 30, 2020) by Adam Creighton – Never forget that governments have no money – it is always ours (subscription required). This sort of journalism is becoming an almost daily occurrence as it becomes obvious that capitalism is now on state life support systems and the extremities of government intervention are demonstrating very clearly what Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) economists have been saying – and the only ones that have been saying it – for 25 years or so. I often note that Japan has already pushed the fiscal and monetary policy parameters beyond the limits most countries have explored in peacetime and mainstream economists have systematically predicted various scales of disaster and have always been wrong. Now all countries are at extremes and still no fiscal disaster. But the mainstream mouthpieces – these financial journalists who seem to think the stuff they read in first-year text books from mainstream economics programs are in same way the basis for expertise and knowledge – are in advanced states of dissonance. Drivel follows.Calling it "drivel" may be too generous. The alternative view is that these screeds are not simply reflexive reactions by the ignorant but rather are intentional attacks on straw men mounted by propagandists for the status quo.
In a Monday news release, the WFP warned that tens of millions of people will most likely go hungry this year due the COVID-19 pandemic. The agency’s estimates show that around 270 million people will face food insecurity before the year ends, which represents an 82% increase from before the pandemic swept across the globe....Sputnik International
He added that similar work is being carried out by the United States of America, in particular for its F35 fighter jets.
In addition, Murakhovsky said, so far neither Russia nor the United States have been able to build such a unified information system for managing all types of troops due to difficulties in creating a single data format for different types and branches of the armed forces.The operative term is "information system."
National security concerns are cited for the reason the Indian Ministry is shutting down access to 59 Chinese apps.
TikTok, ShareIt, WeChat, and 56 other Chinese apps have been banned in India over what the government called national security concerns.
China’s state-owned oil companies—Sinopec, CNOOC, PetroChina, and Sinochem—are discussing an arrangement to buy crude oil together instead of individually, to avoid bidding wars and gain more bargaining power, unnamed sources in the know told Bloomberg.
The group has already secured the support of the central government and its first step as a collective buyer would be to bid on Russian and African oil cargos on the spot market, the Bloomberg sources said.
If the group bidding pans out, it could indeed give the four quite a lot of bargaining power: Bloomberg notes that Sinopec, CNOOC, PetroChina, and Sinochem together import more than 5 million bpd of crude oil, which is more than 20 percent of OPEC’s total daily production. That stood at a little over 24 million bpd as of May....The swing buyer cartel.
In May 2020, the IMF published a new Working Paper (No 20/73) – Hysteresis and Business Cycles – which provides some insights into what happens during an economic cycle. The IMF are somewhat late to the party as they usually are. We have known about the concept and relevance of hysteresis since the 1980s. In terms of the academic work, I was one of the earliest contributors to the hysteresis literature in the world. I published several articles on the topic in the 1980s that came out of my PhD research as I was searching for solutions to the dominant view in the profession that the Phillips curve constraint prevented full employment from being sustained (the inflation impacts!). The lesson from this literature in part – especially in current times – is that governments should do everything possible to avoid recessions. The hysteresis notion tells us clearly that the future is path dependent. The longer and deeper the recession, the more damaging the consequences and the longer it takes to recover while enduring these elevated levels of misery. Organisations like the IMF have never embraced that sort of reasoning, until now it seems. They certainly didn’t act in this way during the Greek disaster. But, better late than never....Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Review of The Case For a Job Guarantee, by Pavlina Tcherneva (Wiley, 2020).An idea whose time has come.
The demand for some version of a federal job guarantee is not new in US politics. Tcherneva highlights that the idea was part of the UN Declaration of Human Rights and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights, as well as a key issue raised during the Civil Rights Movement. Though there were some impressive federal job programs mounted during the New Deal, the author calls the Job Guarantee “the missing piece of the Roosevelt Revolution.”...
After having previously been ignored and disparaged for decades by mainstream economists and politicians, MMT has been making the headlines and finding its way into a growing public conversation.
Two significant publications over the last few weeks are challenging the very basis upon which government policy is determined; ‘does it fit with our political agenda, is it affordable’ and ‘how can it be paid for?’
‘The Deficit Myth’ by Stephanie Kelton was described by Professor Hans G Despain in a review in the LSE blog as a ‘triumph’ challenging, as he explained, the false idea that ‘deficits are irresponsible and ruinous towards the productive political activity of deciding which spending programmes should be prioritised’.
Hot on its heels came Pavlina Tcherneva’s book ‘The case for A Job Guarantee’ described by James K Galbraith as the ‘next big, common-sense idea for economic reform’. And in the words of Paul Prescod in the Jacobin Mag, the Job Guarantee ‘offers an inspiring vision of what society would look like if we utilized the various talents and skills working people possess’
Both these publications have stirred an already growing interest in that hitherto boring subject of economics, showing that far from being irrelevant to people’s lives it is critical to them in terms of human and planetary well-being....
China is doing no less than building a new model in FinTech that will make the old model obsolete and in this way they are simply leapfrogging the current financial systems distributing the dollar with fast, lean and modern systems supporting the Financial Silk Road...Kick ass tech.
Quite rightly the Asiatimes is asking .. Who is actually decoupling from Whom? And I can add, and using modern FinTech to do so with solutions appropriate contextually to our modern world....
So, it is clear that both inside and outside of hard FinTech which this writing is about, the trajectory of recreating systems and simply leaving the US out, is alive and well....Excellent backgrounder.
The West is 20 years behind this technology, because China decided to leapfrog and not follow the accepted development trajectory and as such has reconfigured the potentials for the entire planet.
It is high time and in the words of Michael Hudson: “So the United States, through the World Bank, has become I think the most dangerous, right-wing, evil organization in modern history — more evil than the IMF. That’s why it’s almost always been run by a Secretary of Defense. It has always been explicitly military. It’s the hard fist of American imperialism.”
The world is leapfrogging, and elegantly zig-zagging around current imperial financial systems, for a true birth of a new post capitalist post industrial order, without going to war for it.The Vineyard of the Saker
Yuen Yuen Ang, political science professor at University of Michigan, has written an ambitious book. “China’s Gilded Age: The Paradox of Economic Boom and Vast Corruption” is much more than an observer might infer from its title. Its goal is to redefine corruption, reexamine the relationship between corruption and economic growth, and analyze (often empirically) the role of corruption in China’s development during the past 40 years.
Ang begins with two important points: to better understand it, corruption needs to be unbundled into different types because they are likely to have different effects on economic growth. Second, it needs to be weened away from a Western-centric view that, in part because of inability to distinguish between different types of corruption, tends to overlook typical Western corruptions (say, in lobbying or revolving doors between private and public sectors) and present a biased view whereby corruption exists only in less developed economies. That view, Ang argues, leads to a mistaken view that corruption is bad for growth (despite dearth of confirming empirical evidence) and to an idealized view of development characterized by “inclusive institutions” (Acemoglu-Robinson) or “open-access societies” (Douglass North). They are both criticized by Ang.
The concluding sentence is most interesting.She proposes a four-type breakdown of corruption. First, petty theft (pay bribe rather than fine); second, speed money: street-level corruption (get a shop license faster); third, grand theft (embezzlement on a large scale—Nigeria’s Abacha); fourth, access money (giving permissions to capitalists to engage in big projects). Only the latter, in Ang’s view, is desirable....
Eventually, one hopes, economists will move from their faux-moralizing attitude toward corruption and begin to treat some forms of it as rental income.Global Inequality
It is an act of criminal malfeasance that the United States’ federal government has not eased the tremendous fiscal pressure on states and municipalities, enabling them to prioritize public health and long-term economic wealth over immediate maintenance of tax revenue. Misgovernance of the United States presently rises to the level of war crime (and that is not just Donald Trump).
A recent article by Rohan Grey, aptly titled Monetary Resilience, highlights one way this national misgovernance might be circumvented. Municipalities could issue complementary currencies:...Rohan Grey is an MMT lawyer.
Nobody briefed or told me, @VP Pence, or Chief of Staff @MarkMeadows about the so-called attacks on our troops in Afghanistan by Russians, as reported through an “anonymous source” by the Fake News @nytimes. Everybody is denying it & there have not been many attacks on us.....
...Nobody’s been tougher on Russia than the Trump Administration. With Corrupt Joe Biden & Obama, Russia had a field day, taking over important parts of Ukraine - Where’s Hunter? Probably just another phony Times hit job, just like their failed Russia Hoax. Who is their “source”?
This will be presented in 3 sections and in 3 different blog postsBackgrounder with lots of economic history in addition to social and political history. While the author is a committed socialist, which is a matter of choice based largely on values (normative), the history (positive) seems to me to factual and well-researched. It's a tightly packed summary that covers centuries, so it is a fairly long read, but worthwhile. Increasingly, world history is being made in Eurasia.
By profession I’m an Engineer and Consultant, but my first love was and is History and Political Science. In retired life, I’m pursuing higher study in Economics.See also
I’m one of the few decade-old members of The Saker blog-site. Hope that this website will continue to focus on truth and justice in public life and will support the struggle of common people across the world.
An Indian by nationality, I believe in humanity.
Yves here. Michael Hudson discusses the deflationary impact of the coronacrisis and how modern, misguided approaches to unsustainable debt loads are making matters worse.
Remarks given at the 1st ASECU Teleconference ‘Systematic Crises Triggered the Current Pandemic & Progressive Way-Outs,’ May 8, 2020
So what of the concern that the rapid growth of bank reserves will prove inflationary? This concern is misplaced. The Fed can adjust the interest rate it pays on bank reserves, controlling the cost of credit and influencing whether the reserves are lent out.
Only when the bank reserves are lent out does the expansionary credit multiplier process start to work. The Fed controls this process because it controls short-term interest rates.
The Fed is pumping huge amounts of money into the economy. A former New York Fed chief takes a look at what it means (via @bopinion) https://t.co/fDqrFnAYQL
— Bloomberg Economics (@economics) June 22, 2020
As a result of NATO’s "soaring" military activity an unpredictable military-political situation is unfolding, according to the chief Russian delegate"Unstable" is probably a better term than "unpredictable."
"We see the NATO countries’ attempts at gaining military superiority. There is not a hint at restraint in military spending. The alliance’s overall military budget is 20 times Russia’s defense budget," Vorobyov said.Russia will make it continually more costly for NATO to "dominate." Actually, according to military analyst Andrei Martyanov, NATO already lost dominance some time ago, even disregarding MAD, owing to advanced weaponry.
Over fifty years after his death, Henry A. Wallace, America’s Vice President from 1941-1945 and an independent candidate for president in the 1948 election, continues to evoke strong emotions. On the left, Wallace remains a figure of veneration for his progressive ideals and promotion of world peace, while among conservative and centrist Democrats, he is considered a naïve dupe of communists who underestimated the Soviet “threat.”
John Nichols’ latest book, The Fight For the Soul of the Democratic Party: The Enduring Legacy of Henry Wallace’s AntiFascist, Antiracist Politics(Verso, 2020) offers a convincing case that those on the left were correct: that Wallace was indeed a visionary who was ahead of his time in warning about a right-wing drift in American politics and danger of corporate fascism and whose policy of cooperation with the Russians might have averted the Cold War.
According to Nichols’, Wallace’s removal from the Democratic Party ticket due to back-door machinations at the 1944 Democratic Party convention in Chicago, was a major turning point in American political history. It began the Democratic Party’s trajectory away from the progressive ideals underlying Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and towards the embrace of neoliberalism. Nichols in turn believes that the time is ripe for a new generation of Democratic Party leaders to reclaim Wallace’s legacy, and revitalize his political platform, which centered on promoting racial and gender equality and the interests of American working people, and advancing a peaceful foreign policy....Perhaps the sharpest blow to the US strategically in the past hundred year was the replacement of Henry Wallace with Harry Truman in what would be FDR's last term in office. There is a temptation to view America's "problems" as recent. They began back then and now are coming to a head with nuclear war looming abroad and incipient civil war brewing at home. Neither the Cold War nor the Civil War ever actually ended.
We cannot know for sure if things would have turned out better if Wallace had won the re-nomination and succeeded FDR as President. It is quite possible that there would have been a conservative backlash against Wallace that would have thwarted many of his plans or led to his removal from power. However, there is also the possibility that Wallace could have governed effectively and built a consensus around his ideals and changed America’s political landscape in a more progressive direction....Nichols also points out that many of today's "progressives" are not traditional progressives in the vein of Henry Wallace or George McGovern, but rather exhibit neoliberal and neoconservative tendencies.
The latest book by Stony Brook’s Stephanie Kelton, The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy, has been named to The New York Times best seller list for hardcover nonfiction. A professor of economics and public policy in the College of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Kelton is a leading authority on Modern Monetary Theory, an approach to economics that is drawing great interest worldwide.Stony Brook University News
In The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy, Stephanie Kelton dispels six key myths that have shaped the conventional understanding of deficits as inherently bad, instead arguing that deficits can strengthen economies and lead to faster growth. This book is a triumph, writes Professor Hans G. Despain, shifting normative grounds of government spending away from the false and unproductive idea that deficits are irresponsible and ruinous towards the productive political activity of deciding which spending programmes should be prioritised.LSE Blog
'One day in April, he visited the morgue in the capital, Belém. “There were 120 bodies, scattered everywhere. It’s something you’d see in a war.”Bloomberg
My thought bubble: There's a paradox here. The people who want to print money to avoid adding to the national debt are also the people who say that the size of the national debt doesn't matter. The hope is that monetization would placate the deficit hawks, but that seems unlikely.Yes, it is only a paradox and not a contradiction. A paradox appears to be a contradiction but it not on analysis.
...radical thinking is required now or the rental sector is itself going to collapse...Debt deflation creeping up?
State and local policymakers are waiting as long as they can to impose cuts, partly because they hope that the President and Congress will deliver more aid, and partly so they can get a better sense of the crisis’ magnitude. The economic collapse happened fast and some tax revenue isn’t due yet; most states delayed income tax filing deadlines to at least July 15 (to conform to the federal delay), with others also delaying deadlines for businesses to remit sales tax.
With business closures and layoffs sharply reducing states’ expected income and sales tax revenues, we estimate that state budget shortfalls will total about $615 billion over the current fiscal year (which ends June 30 in most states) and the next two. States must balance their budgets every year, even in recessions, setting the stage for layoffs and punishing cuts to essential services....Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Some wrongly argue that federal policymakers should “wait and see” before giving states more fiscal aid to help address their huge, recession-driven revenue shortfalls, in part because they haven’t spent all the aid they’ve received so far. States, however, have good reasons not to spend all of that aid just yet. And, in any case, they’ll need far more to address their extraordinary shortfalls and avoid further layoffs and other cuts that would hamper an economic recovery.
Business closures and lost income and jobs — including some 1.5 million furloughs and layoffs of state and local workers — have severely shrunk states’ sales and income tax revenues. All 39 states (plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico) that have released new revenue projections are reporting shortfalls, generally very large ones. Nationwide, we estimate, these shortfalls total about $615 billion over the next three fiscal years, not including the added costs of fighting COVID-19.
The federal aid to states thus far includes only about $70 billion to address these revenue losses. That’s far too little to help states avoid layoffs and impose school funding and other cuts that would harm families and communities while making the recession worse and delaying a recovery. States undoubtedly will spend all of that aid and still fall far short of meeting needs....
With governments spending on a massive scale to save industries and mitigate the economic fallout from COVID-19, they should be positioning their economies for a more sustainable future. Fortunately, far from remaining taboo, using state aid to change private-sector behavior has become common sense.Managed capitalism for public purpose versus neoliberalism as government favoring capital accumulation and preservation for unlimited growth and expecting "trickle down."
Insolvency is a corporate term which refers to a situation where a company is unable to pay contractual liabilities when they become due. From a balance sheet perspective, it means that the assets are valued below the liabilities. The term cannot be applied to a national government that does not issue liabilities in foreign currencies. Such a government can always meet its nominal liabilities irrespective of institutional arrangements it might have put in place to create contingent flows of numbers from one ‘box’ (account) to another ‘box’. Those arrangements do not override the intrinsic capacity of the legislator. So when the British press went crazy the other day reporting comments made by the Bank of England governor that the British government was on the cusp of insolvency, they did the British public a disservice. Donald Trump would have been finally justified in accusing the media of pushing out ‘fake’ news....Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Alan Kohler sits down with Professor Stephanie Kelton, author of the NYT Bestseller 'The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy' to take a deep dive into modern monetary theory and why inflation, not deficits themselves, are evidence of overspending, the idea of a job guarantee, plus much more.Eureka Report
For the second consecutive year, the US has been dethroned as the world's most competitive economy, thanks partially to President Trump's trade war. The US now ranks 10th (3rd in 2019), according to the Institute for Management Development's (IMD) new report on the ranking of most competitive world economies.Trade war.
In the latest revision to the IMF's economic outlook published this morning, the fund warns that the world is facing "a crisis like no other", and now expects global growth to shrink -4.9% in 2020, 1.9% below the April 2020 forecast of -3.0%.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a more negative impact on activity in the first half of 2020 than anticipated, the IMF said, adding that the recovery is projected to be more gradual than previously forecast. In 2021 global growth is projected at 5.4% down from 5.8%, a number which will also be revised lower, with China's expected 1.0% growth (down from 1.2%) the big wildcard....Zero Hedge
No less than two new separate reports in The South China Morning Post are warning of a coming US-China military conflict, saying the prospect is now higher than ever given that amid a rising number of naval incidents, including a recent near-collision incident, communication channels used for deconfliction have fallen silent.
The observation is based in large part on new studies by China's National Institute for South China Sea showing a steep drop-off in intergovernmental communications channels between the two sides....Zero Hedge
