Elizabeth Warren has called twice to apologize. Over a month later, Kamala Harris hasn't called back.

In a local Boston radio interview in late January, Warren was enthusiastic about President Joe Biden running for reelection but, asked if Biden should keep Harris as his running mate, she said, "I really want to defer to what makes Biden comfortable on his team."

The incident and its aftermath, different details of which were described to CNN by multiple people close to the Massachusetts senator and people close to the vice president, has fed an ongoing breakdown of accusations and purported misunderstandings. "Pretty insulting," is how one person close to Harris described the feelings of many in the vice president's office and in her wider orbit.

Several people close to Warren said the senator was calling to explain her statement as purely a mistake - a fumbling, unintentional attempt to avoid stepping on a campaign announcement from the president. A spokesperson for Warren pointed to the statement the senator issued hours after the original interview clarifying what she said, and an additional person close to Warren cited a personal and political relationship that goes back to being the first senator to endorse Harris for Senate and said of her support, "she didn't mean to imply otherwise". Warren made her case to Harris' chief of staff Lorraine Voles, who returned the senator's call in place of Harris, a source familiar with the callback told CNN.

But the Warren moment is infuriating many in Harris's circle: To them, it's the latest in a long string of snubs to a vice president whom they say has never gotten the respect or support she deserves. Warren's words sting even more, they say, because they came from a former rival who in 2020 hoped to be picked as Biden's running mate instead.

A long-delayed vote in Hungary's parliament on ratifying the NATO accession bids of Sweden and Finland will likely be postponed again following a proposal from a senior government official.

In a letter published Tuesday by Hungarian news website hvg.hu, Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjen requested that a parliamentary session scheduled to begin on March 20 — during which lawmakers were expected to vote on the two Nordic countries joining the military alliance — be postponed to a week later.

Semjen cited Hungary's ongoing negotiations with the European Union's executive branch over Budapest's alleged breaches of the bloc's rule-of-law requirements as the reason for the delay. The speaker of Hungary's parliament, himself a member of Semjen's ruling coalition, must approve the request for a postponement.

Hungary remains the only NATO member country — besides Turkey — that hasn't yet approved the two Nordic countries' bids to join the Western military alliance. The delay is the second in two weeks and only the latest of many that have come in succession since July 2022.

Last week, Saudi Arabia and Iran announced a landmark deal, brokered by China in Beijing, to formally restore diplomatic relations. The agreement saw the two sectarian arch rivals in the Middle East agree to put aside their differences and to normalize ties.

It was the first ever deal of its kind overseen by China, framing itself as a peacemaker, and showing that its commitment to have good relations with every country in the region is not just based on rhetoric but actual substance. Some have described it as a sign of a "changing global order."

To put it mildly, it is bad news for the United States and deals a massive blow to the near-unlimited geopolitical sway Washington has long held over the region via its strategic relationships with countries such as Saudi Arabia. Additionally, it effectively ruins a US led campaign to pressurize and isolate Iran and hinders American efforts to shape regional politics in Israel's favor via the Abraham Accords. It is no surprise that the Western media is calling the Chinese-brokered deal a "challenge" to the international order, but what order is that? The ability of the US to dominate the Middle East? Perhaps brokering peace is a good thing.

"Every cloud has a silver lining," is a familiar line of reassurance, and Russian President Vladimir Putin reached for it, recently, as he commented on the slew of sanctions imposed on Moscow by the West and its allies in recent years. They are "a powerful step towards greater economic and financial sovereignty, which is crucial," he ventured.

Moscow has long been accustomed to sanctions pressure, going back to the Soviet days, and the EU and US began to announce new waves of restrictions from 2014. However, that pressure reached a whole new level last year after Putin launched the military campaign in Ukraine, making Russia the most sanctioned country in the world, ahead of Iran. Moscow has been slapped with ten sanctions packages, from Brussels alone, since February of last year.

Disconnection from international finance systems has turned out to be "a blessing in disguise" for Moscow, Dmitry Peskov said

The Russian financial sector is practically immune to the effects of the unfolding US banking crisis largely thanks to Western sanctions, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Tuesday.

When asked about a spillover effect from the collapse of US lenders, which has led to a global stock rout, Peskov said problems in the American banking system cannot affect Russia in any way.

"Our banking system, of course, has, let's say, certain connections with some segments of the international financial system, but for the most part it is under illegal restrictions," he said.

Kiev's forces have lost most of their experienced fighters and ammunition is in short supply, the US paper has claimed

Kiev's forces have been so "degraded" by a year of fighting against Russia that some Ukrainian officials doubt their ability to execute a planned spring offensive, the Washington Post has reported.

The conflict has taken many of the most seasoned Ukrainian troops, with the arrival of inexperienced draftees changing the profile of the country's military, the US paper pointed out on Monday.

US and European officials have estimated that up 120,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or wounded since the launch of Russia's military operation last February, it added. Kiev keeps information abouts losses secret, even from its Western backers.

Becoming increasingly involved in the military confrontation between Ukraine and Russia is not a priority for the US, Florida's Republican governor Ron DeSantis wrote in response to a question posed by Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Monday.

Carlson asked several "2024 GOP hopefuls" whether opposing Russia in Ukraine was a "vital strategic interest" for the US and shared DeSantis' response on Twitter. The governor stated that the US had many "vital national interests," such as securing its borders, addressing the recruitment crisis within the US military, achieving energy security and independence, and "checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party."

However, becoming "further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them," DeSantis noted.

In Part 1 we noted that "money" is no more than a medium of exchange. If we cooperate in sufficient numbers, we could create an economy based upon an entirely voluntary monetary system. We don't need banks to control our exchange transactions and modern Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has made voluntary exchange on a global scale entirely feasible.

We contrasted the true nature of "money" with the proposed Central Bank Digital Currencies. CBDC is being rolled out across the world by a global public-private partnership . What we call money is actually fiat currency conjured out of thin air by central and commercial banks. Even so, CBDC is nothing like "money" as we currently understand it.

Prior to the pseudopandemic, fiat currency circulated in a split-monetary circuit. Only commercial banks could access a type of money called "central bank reserves" or "base money." In late 2019, the global financial institution BlackRock introduced a monetary plan that advocated "going direct" in order "to get central bank money directly in the hands of public and private sector spenders."

There has been an avalanche of information and numerous theories circulating the past few days about the fate of a bank in California know as SVB (Silicon Valley Bank). SVB was the 16^th largest bank in the US until it abruptly failed and went into insolvency on March 10^th. The impetus for the collapse of the bank is tied to a $2 billion liquidity loss on bond sales which caused the institution's stock value to plummet over 60%, triggering a bank run by customers fearful of losing some or most of their deposits.

There are many fine articles out there covering the details of the SVB situation, but what I want to talk about more is the root of it all. The bank's shortfalls are not really the cause of the crisis, they are a symptom of a wider liquidity drought that I predicted here at Alt-Market months ago, including the timing of the event.

First, though, let's discuss the core issue, which is fiscal tightening and the Federal Reserve. In my article 'The Fed's Catch-22 Taper Is A Weapon, Not A Policy Error', published in December of 2021, I noted that the Fed was on a clear path towards tightening into economic weakness, very similar to what they did in the early 1980s during the stagflation era and also somewhat similar to what they did at the onset of the Great Depression. Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke even openly admitted that the Fed caused the depression to spiral out of control due to their tightening policies.

In an exclusive interview with The Cradle, Russia's top macroeconomics strategist criticizes Moscow's slow pace of financial reform and warns there will be no new global currency without Beijing.
The headquarters of the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) in Moscow, linked to the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) is arguably one of the most crucial nodes of the emerging multipolar world.

That's where I was received by Minister of Integration and Macroeconomics Sergey Glazyev - who was previously interviewed in detail by The Cradle - for an exclusive, expanded discussion on the geoeconomics of multipolarity.

Glazyev was joined by his top economic advisor Dmitry Mityaev, who is also the secretary of the Eurasian Economic Commission's (EEC) science and technology council. The EAEU and EEC are formed by Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia. The group is currently engaged in establishing a series of free trade agreements with nations from West Asia to Southeast Asia.

Our conversation was unscripted, free flowing and straight to the point. I had initially proposed some talking points revolving around discussions between the EAEU and China on designing a new gold/commodities-based currency bypassing the US dollar, and how it would be realistically possible to have the EAEU, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and BRICS+ to adopt the same currency design.

Glazyev and Mityaev were completely frank and also asked questions on the Global South. As much as extremely sensitive political issues should remain off the record, what they said about the road towards multipolarity was quite sobering - in fact realpolitik-based.

Glazyev stressed that the EEC cannot ask for member states to adopt specific economic policies. There are indeed serious proposals on the design of a new currency, but the ultimate decision rests on the leaders of the five permanent members. That implies political will - ultimately to be engineered by Russia, which is responsible for over 80 percent of EAEU trade.

It's quite possible that a renewed impetus may come after the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to Moscow on March 21, where he will hold in-depth strategic talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin.