Steve Bull's Blog, page 1246
November 25, 2017
China’s Corporate Debt Unexpectedly Rises At Fastest Pace In Four Years, As A New Risk Emerges
Have you heard the one about the priest, the rabbi and China’s deleveraging? We forget how it goes, but it’s pretty damn funny, especially the last part after a Reuters report that following China’s repeated vows by Beijing it would reduce the country’s unprecedented sovereign, municipal, corporate and household leverage, China’s debt is not only rising, but growing at the fastest pace in four years.
It’s especially funny because for years China’s top officials have – well – lied, touting their ambitious policy priority to wean the world’s second-largest economy off high levels of debt, but there is not much to show for it. On the contrary, the debt pile at Chinese firms has been climbing in that time, with levels at the end of September growing at the fastest pace in four years.
As shown in the chart below, a Reuters analysis of 2,146 China listed firms showed their total debt at the end of September jumped 23% from a year ago, the highest pace of growth since 2013. The analysis covered three-fifths of the country’s listed firms, but excluded financials, which have seen the brunt of government de-risking and deleveraging efforts so far.
The analysis revealed that debt in the real estate sector increased the most over last five years, followed by industrials, with the share of industrials in China’s total corporate debtload going up by 3% psince the end of 2012, while relative real estate debt rose by 7%.
In September, as shown here before, state-owned enterprises also reported a much faster pace of growth in their debt, as the government quietly backstopped quasi-private companies. In addition, last month we reported that as part of China’s latest bailout of the financial sysmte, Beijing was set to buy 24% of all residential real estate offered for sale in 2017.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
There Is Just One Thing Preventing Elon Musk’s Vision From Coming True: The Laws Of Physics
When Elon Musk stepped on stage at Tesla’s product-launch event earlier this month, he knew the market’s confidence in Tesla’s brand had sunk to an all-time low since he took over the company a decade ago. So, he resorted to a tactic that should be familiar to anybody who has been following the company: Shock and awe.
While the event was ostensibly scheduled to introduce Tesla’s new semi-truck – a model that won’t make it’s market debut for another two years, assuming Tesla sticks to its product-rollout deadline – Musk had a surprise in store: A new model of the Tesla Roadster that, he bragged, would be the fastest production car ever sold.
Musk made similarly lofty claims about the battery life and performance of both vehicles. The Tesla semi-trucks, he said, would be able to travel for 500 miles on a single charge. The roadster could clock a staggering 620 – more than double the closest challenger.
There was just one problem, as Tesla fans would later find out, courtesy of Bloomberg: None of it was true.
In fact, many of the promises defy the capabilities of modern battery technology.
Elon Musk knows how to make promises. Even by his own standards, the promises made last week while introducing two new Tesla vehicles—the heavy-duty Semi Truck and the speedy Roadster—are monuments of envelope pushing.To deliver, according to close observers of battery technology, Tesla would have to far exceed what is currently thought possible.
Take the Tesla Semi: Musk vowed it would haul an unprecedented 80,000 pounds for 500 miles on a single charge, then recharge 400 miles of range in 30 minutes. That would require, based on Bloomberg estimates, a charging system that’s 10 times more powerful than one of the fastest battery-charging networks on the road today—Tesla’s own Superchargers.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
We Don’t Trust Each Other Anymore
To channel Tina Turner briefly, what’s trust got to do with keeping a nation?
Everything, it turns out.
Despite an uptick over the past year, Americans’ trust in the key institutions is fading. Congress, big business, national news outlets, the criminal justice system–the organizations that influence our public life most are those the least trusted.
The presidency, now presided by over by the trash-talking and tweeting Donald Trump, continues to see its confidence rating plummet. The media’s near-constant negative reporting doesn’t help Trump’s image.
Events in recent days are guaranteed to worsen domestic relations. Truth in character is a diminishing trait. Blame, as ever, lies on both sides.
The Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson’s latest offering highlights the abundance of lies coming from the White House. Everything from failed campaign disclosures to clumsy press hearing answers get Gerson’s goat. A swamp scribbler par excellence, the Post writer embodies establishment opinion on Trump. And while his criticisms are overwrought—the Trump Administration no more frames facts to create a more favorable image than its predecessor—they represent how many liberals view the President.
Still, Gerson isn’t all wrong. One of his targets—Christian support for Alabama Senate candidate accused lecher Roy Moore—is on the mark. The accusations lobbed against Moore haven’t been fully verified, but it’s hard to think so many similar stories would emerge, all depicting the same scenario. Moore hasn’t denied his predilection for minors, either.
Moore’s behavior doesn’t automatically bar Christian support. But it should cause concern. Yet Christian evangelicals have embraced the godlyjudge even more since the allegations were put in print. “Many of the people who should be supplying the moral values required by self-government have corrupted themselves,” Gerson writes.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
US State Department Admits Plans To Meddle In Hungary’s Democracy
As we noted last week, hypocrisy may be the only consistent guiding principle of US foreign policy.
The Rex Tillerson State Department will pump $700,000 into Hungarian media to remove Viktor Orban.
TheDuran’s Alex Christoforou writes:
When another nation state uses media to communicate it’s point of view, its flagged as a foreign agent, a “bad actor”, and often declared as an “act of war (i.e. RT).
When the US government uses its petrodollar strength to insert its agenda into another country’s politics it’s branded “democracy and human rights programming”.
According to The Gateway Pundit, Rex Tillerson State Department is spending over $700,000 to defeat PM Orban in Hungary.
The deep state is vehemently opposed to Orban’s nation statism…his conservatism and his stance against open borders. For the neo-liberal cabal under the watchful eye of George Soros, Orban must go.
In his speech accepting his party’s endorsement, Orban said he was fighting against “globalist” views that threaten the EU’s Christian nations and their moral foundations, for which he blamed Soros.
“Some countries in Europe decided to transcend Christianity and their own national character,” he said. “They want to step into a post-Christian, post-national era.”
“To execute Soros’s plan they want to root out governments which represent national interests around Europe, and that includes us,” he said. “They act like Soviet agitprop agents once did. We old war-horses know them by their smell.”
Breitbart.com reports…
The U.S. State Department has courted controversy by announcing it will plough $700,000 into Hungarian media, angering the country’s anti-globalist, conservative government.
The funding was announced by U.S. Chargé d‘Affaires David Kostelancik, who has previously appeared to openly criticise the Trump administration by alluding to “apparent inconsistencies in [U.S.] foreign policy” and remarking that “not every criticism of the government is ‘fake news’.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
More than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments were Likely Faked
I used natural language processing techniques to analyze net neutrality comments submitted to the FCC from April-October 2017, and the results were disturbing.
Spot the fake comment. Surprise — they’re all fake.
NY Attorney General Schneiderman estimated that hundreds of thousands of Americans’ identities were stolen and used in spam campaigns that support repealing net neutrality. My research found at least 1.3 million fake pro-repeal comments, with suspicions about many more. In fact, the sum of fake pro-repeal comments in the proceeding may number in the millions. In this post, I will point out one particularly egregious spambot submission, make the case that there are likely many more pro-repeal spambots yet to be confirmed, and estimate the public position on net neutrality in the “organic” public submissions.¹
Key Findings:²
One pro-repeal spam campaign used mail-merge to disguise 1.3 million comments as unique grassroots submissions.
There were likely multiple other campaigns aimed at injecting what may total several million pro-repeal comments into the system.
It’s highly likely that more than 99% of the truly unique comments³ were in favor of keeping net neutrality.
Breaking Down the Submissions
Given the well documented irregularities throughout the comment submission process, it was clear from the start that the data was going to be duplicative and messy. If I wanted to do the analysis without having to set up the tools and infrastructure typically used for “big data,” I needed to break down the 22M+ comments and 60GB+ worth of text data and metadata into smaller pieces.⁴
Thus, I tallied up the many duplicate comments⁵ and arrived at 2,955,182 unique comments and their respective duplicate counts. I then mapped each comment into semantic space vectors⁶ and ran some clustering algorithms on the meaning of the comments.⁷ This method identified nearly 150 clusters of comment submission texts of various sizes.⁸
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The ‘End of Dreams’, and the Saving of Appearances
Zao Wu-Ki The red sun 1950Once again, to my delight, we’re back with former British diplomat and MI6 ‘ranking figure’ Alastair Crooke and his Conflicts Forum organization. We posted a few of his articles this year and last. This time, Alastair writes a reaction to one of his own articles posted at Consortium News, which I included in the November 18 Debt Rattle at the Automatic Earth. My short comment then: “Former (and current?!) TAE contributor Alastair Crooke draws his conclusions.” This morning, the Conflicts Forum reached out again:
Dear Raul, We took the hint on a recent posting your site that referred to one of Alastair’s articles! …. and below is a comment piece he has done. It is an attempt to be strategic at where we’re going.
Anytime, guys! My first reaction to that piece was that Alastair makes Donald Trump and Jared Kushner’s role in the Saudi crackdown seem very large, which makes the role played by deep state America look small in comparison. And I’m not so sure about that. The riddle of ‘who’s playing who?’ is not a straightforward one. But that’s by no means a criticism (I ain’t criticizing no MI6!). It’s a question.
First, here are two paragraphs of that article to ‘get in the mood’:
Aaron Miller and Richard Sokolsky, writing in Foreign Policy, suggest “that Mohammed bin Salman’s most notable success abroad may well be the wooing and capture of President Donald Trump, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner.” Indeed, it is possible that this “success” may prove to be MbS’ only success. “It didn’t take much convincing”, Miller and Sokolski wrote: “Above all, the new bromance reflected a timely coincidence of strategic imperatives.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The End of the Age of Benevolence
The history of democracy, Marxism and feminism is the history of the snake, which, being hungry for more, stalks its own tail and consumes itself.
Some evenings I sit on the sofa in the family room with my teenage daughter and watch a TV program with her. I leave the choice of the show to her, it matters little to me, and when she finds something she likes she sits next to me, puts her head on my shoulder, and snuggles up for the hour it takes to watch whatever it is she’s chosen.
It’s our time.
Occasionally we’ll sneak in another twenty or thirty minutes to the objection of her mother but I like my time with her so I put up with the raised eyebrows and the, “She’s got school tomorrow,” scoldings. It’s important to me that she knows I love her, that I want to spend time with her and that she feels safe when she is with me. Someday, when she is a grown woman I want her to find a man that will take care of her and protect her like I do. I expect no less from a suitor and neither should she.
There will be women who read this who will object to my stance. They will say, “She doesn’t need a man to feel safe or validated or content,” but I would disagree. When she gets older she’ll need a good man, not just any man, and that’s as true today as much as it was ten years, twenty years, fifty years, one hundred years and even one thousand years ago. And it will become even more so as time goes on.
Indeed, we have reached peak denial in our civilization and whether we like it or not reality is about to make a come back.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Old Songs
What if the fun and games of 2017 are over? The hidden message behind the sexual harassment freak show of recent weeks is that nothing else is sufficiently serious to occupy the nation’s attention. We’re living in the Year of Suspended Reality, stuck in the sideshow and missing the three-ring circus next door in the big tent.
It probably all comes down to money. Money represents the mojo to keep on keeping on, and there is probably nothing more unreal in American life these days than the way we measure our money — literally, what it’s worth, and what everything related to it is worth. So there is nothing more unreal in our national life than the idea that it’s possible to keep on keeping on as we do.
The weeks ahead may be most illuminating on this score. The debt ceiling suspension runs out on December 8, around the same time that the tax reform question will resolve one way or another. The debt ceiling means that the treasury can’t issue any more bonds, bills, or notes. That is, it can’t borrow any more money to pretend the government can keep running. Normally these days (and it’s really very abnormal), the treasury pawns off paper IOUs to the Federal Reserve and the Fed makes digital entries on various account ledgers that purport to be “money.” And, by the way, the Fed is a consortium of private banks not a department of government — which is surely one of a thousand ways that the public is confused and deceived about what condition our condition is in, as the old song goes.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
November 24, 2017
The US-Saudi Starvation Blockade
Our aim is to “starve the whole population — men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound — into submission,” said First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill.
He was speaking of Germany at the outset of the Great War of 1914-1918. Americans denounced as inhumane this starvation blockade that would eventually take the lives of a million German civilians.
Yet when we went to war in 1917, a U.S. admiral told British Prime Minister Lloyd George, “You will find that it will take us only two months to become as great criminals as you are.”
After the Armistice of Nov. 11, 1918, however, the starvation blockade was not lifted until Germany capitulated to all Allied demands in the Treaty of Versailles.
As late as March 1919, four months after the Germans laid down their arms, Churchill arose in Parliament to exult, “We are enforcing the blockade with rigor, and Germany is very near starvation.”
So grave were conditions in Germany that Gen. Sir Herbert Plumer protested to Lloyd George in Paris that morale among his troops on the Rhine was sinking from seeing “hordes of skinny and bloated children pawing over the offal from British cantonments.”
The starvation blockade was a war crime and a crime against humanity. But the horrors of the Second World War made people forget this milestone on the Western road to barbarism.
A comparable crime is being committed today against the poorest people in the Arab world — and with the complicity of the United States.
Saudi Arabia, which attacked and invaded Yemen in 2015 after Houthi rebels dumped over a pro-Saudi regime in Sanaa and overran much of the country, has imposed a land, sea and air blockade, after the Houthis fired a missile at Riyadh this month that was shot down.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Bitcoin Mining Now Consuming More Electricity Than 159 Countries Including Ireland & Most Countries In Africa
The map above shows which countries consume less electricity than the amount consumed by global bitcoin miningBitcoin’s ongoing meteoric price rise has received the bulk of recent press attention with a lot of discussion around whether or not it’s a bubble waiting to burst.
However, most the coverage has missed out one of the more interesting and unintended consequences of this price increase. That is the surge in global electricity consumption used to “mine” more Bitcoins.
According to Digiconomist’s Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, as of Monday November 20th, 2017 Bitcoin’s current estimated annual electricity consumption stands at 29.05TWh.
That’s the equivalent of 0.13% of total global electricity consumption. While that may not sound like a lot, it means Bitcoin mining is now using more electricity than 159 individual countries (as you can see from the map above). More than Ireland or Nigeria.
If Bitcoin miners were a country they’d rank 61st in the world in terms of electricity consumption.
Here are a few other interesting facts about Bitcoin mining and electricity consumption:
In the past month alone, Bitcoin mining electricity consumption is estimated to have increased by 29.98%
If it keeps increasing at this rate, Bitcoin mining will consume all the world’s electricity by February 2020.
Estimated annualised global mining revenues: $7.2 billion USD (£5.4 billion)
Estimated global mining costs: $1.5 billion USD (£1.1 billion)
Number of Americans who could be powered by bitcoin mining: 2.4 million (more than the population of Houston)
Number of Britons who could be powered by bitcoin mining: 6.1 million (more than the population of Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, Bradford, Liverpool, Bristol, Croydon, Coventry, Leicester & Nottingham combined) Or Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.
Bitcoin Mining consumes more electricity than 12 US states (Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming)
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
