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We stand by hoping that it will work to reflate markets collapsing from a catastrophic mispricing of assets. At least some of us do. I don't.
I hope it fails and it's because those inflated prices fuel the very global political order that is anathema to human advancement.
President Trump is finally happy with his FOMC chair, Jerome Powell, after he opened the door to unlimited quantitative easing, nearly unlimited liquidity injections via the repo markets, and taking interest rates to the zero-bound.
It's clear that the Keynesians at the Fed and the U.S. Treasury Dept. have no answers to the problems in front of them. They are simply doing what they always do when a crisis hits. Print money and hope someone still believes the new money is worth buying.
The sudden supply and demand side shock to the global economy thanks to the COVID-19 coronavirus is outside of their frame of reference.
© Reuters / Nick OxfordPump jacks operate in front of a drilling rig in an oil field in Midland, Texas.
The so-called 'Shale Revolution' in the US in recent years has deprived the Saudis of a huge chunk of the American oil market, but Riyadh is now using the coronavirus crisis to win back its lost position.
After failing to find common ground with Russia on how to respond to the pandemic, Saudi Arabia began pumping oil at such an intense rate that the prices saw the sharpest drop, unseen since the Gulf War in 1991.
Comment:
- Empire of Illusions: Washington's shale boom, fuelled by Wall Street cheap money, going bust
- US shale producers have $150bn in debt - prices too low to sustain production
- US-Russia agree to oil talks; Trump says price war is 'crazy'
- In the "Oil War", Washington's survival meant blinking first
© Sputnik/Anton Denisov
Russia's dominance of the EEU is both a positive and a negative for Eurasian integration. Russia's large market forms the basis of the integration potential of the EEU, however, limited economic growth, sanctions and its participation in global geopolitics create risks for the Eurasian integration process. However, Eurasian integration would be in the interest of EU as it will connect European states to new markets in Central and East Asia far more efficiently and quickly then by other means. The EU claims that it works towards common markets and efficiency but does not seriously consider connecting Lisbon on the Atlantic Ocean to Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean.
The EU is losing its position as a top trading partner of the EEU, and it's not just because of China's growing importance. As a trading partner of the EEU, China has already surpassed most of Europe. The role of the EU as a trading partner of the whole EEU is due to the important role of the EU for Russia. However, Russia has been slowly turning eastward from the EU for years now as the future leading economies of the world will shift from the West to Asia.
© Associated PressMichael Atkinson, the inspector general of the intelligence community, leaves the Capitol after closed doors interview about the whistleblower complaint that exposed a July phone call the president had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, at the Capitol in Washington, Friday, Oct. 4, 2019.
Trump formally notified the intelligence committees of both the Senate and House in a letter dated Friday. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., posted the letter online.
"This is to advise that I am exercising my power as President to remove from office the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community, effective 30 days from today," the president wrote.
Comment:
- ICIG Michael Atkinson, top Mueller hoax operative, turned in the partisan CIA whistleblower complaint
- IG Atkinson can't explain 18-day window between Trump's Ukraine call and whistleblower complaint
- Devin Nunes: 'Republicans have active investigation into (IG Michael) Atkinson' for his whistleblower complaint
© Neil Hall / ReutersKeir Starmer
Starmer, a former director of public prosecutions who was known for a forensic attention to detail when opposing the country's exit from the European Union, won with 56% of the vote.
The comprehensive defeat of an ally of the outgoing leader Jeremy Corbyn, and the election of Angela Rayner as Starmer's deputy, heralds the end of the party leadership's embrace of a radical socialism that was crushed in the December election.
Starmer, who takes over immediately, said he would work constructively with government when it was the right thing to do, while testing Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson's arguments and challenging the failures.
© unknownBanished from the Garden of Eden
Facts matter less than our ache for an unpolluted globe. We yearn for a lost world of childhood innocence, and so project our hope onto juvenile activists. But there clearly are benefits in the reduced use of fossil fuels as flights are cancelled and car journeys shrink to levels last seen on distant Sundays when the shops were shut. Some are reporting easier breathing during an epidemic which attacks the lungs.
Surely this will strengthen the current insistence to turn thirty, even fifty, percent of the globe into "protected areas" (PAs)? We're told this is the answer to climate chaos and protecting biodiversity - no people, no pollution, problem solved?
© EPA-EFE/Francois LenoirEuropean Commission President Ursula von der Leyen holds a news conference detailing EU efforts to limit economic impact of the coronavirus disease.
The president of the European commission said she was confident the 27 member states would back her scheme, describing the EU's budget as the Marshall plan for the crisis, in reference to the post-second world war fund that rebuilt Europe.
The EU's executive branch is proposing to borrow from the international markets and make loans to member state governments to allow them to fund short-time working schemes, under which employees work reduced hours with some of their salary paid by the state.
Comment: EU borders; feedback from Italy
"We are in consultation with member states on how to proceed beyond Easter," Ursula von der Leyen told Europe 1 radio.EU's inaction followed by 'coronabonding'
German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer wants to expand his country's border controls to include more states as well as the airports.
Feedback to Von der Leyen's apology to Italy for Brussels' muted response to the pandemic has been less than optimistic. Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said that he welcomed the news, but that the bloc would need to create a "European lifeboat" in order to overcome the crisis. "European solidarity ... was not felt in the first days of this crisis and now there is no more time to waste."
Matteo Salvini, head of the opposition League, said in response to von der Leyen's apology that it was "understandable" why Italians would want to leave the European Union entirely. He said that the bloc must take broad and immediate action to help his country.
The coronabond idea has been supported by the countries affected the most by the virus, namely Italy, Spain, and France. Other, more well-off EU members, like Germany and the Netherlands, strongly oppose the idea of issuing bonds together with heavily indebted nations.
Italy and Spain were offered use of the European Stability Mechanism, which grants conditional financial assistance to countries in dire financial straits, to which Salvini responded that he doesn't want the Germans and the Dutch to "come to demand money from our children," and later calling the ESM a "mortgage on the future of Italians."
© Aruba Network
Matt Hancock announced plans to wipe out historic debts to let hospital trusts channel their resources into battling the outbreak, rather than balancing the books.
In his first public appearance after self-isolating for seven days, Mr Hancock also paid an emotional tribute to NHS staff who have lost their lives, including doctors who had come to work in the British health service and "paid the ultimate price".
The health secretary told the daily Downing Street briefing that he would ease financial pressures on trusts that have built up significant debts after years of austerity.
Comment: Is it a loop? How does government bookkeeping interfere with government hospitals when the trusts are owned and funded by the government via taxation of the people? Does this handy dandy government write-off merely serve itself?
The left saw it as proof that the NHS debt has been a "a pernicious fiction" all along, blaming it on Tory austerity policies, and argued it was time to fully re-nationalize the health service they say was "privatized" by a succession of Conservative cabinets.
© Reuters
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud also commented on the ongoing dispute with Russia, saying that a statement attributed to Russian President Vladimir Putin about the kingdom's withdrawal from the OPEC+ deal was not correct, and that Russia was the one that withdrew, SPA reported.
Russia and Saudi Arabia have been at odds since failing last month to agree on a deal to curb output as the coronavirus pandemic spread around the globe. The pandemic has worsened since, freezing economic activity worldwide and sending oil prices into a steep decline.
The world's oil-producing countries in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and allies such as Russia have been discussing a deal to cut production in hopes of reversing the crash.
Comment: See also: