Saturday 30th of March 2024

pricing collateralised debt credibility...

risksrisks

If I was not sceptic nor a sarcastic old kook as I am, I would suggest that "the Chinese government had an influence on the collapse of the Western financial markets in 2008"... I know this is a long shot, but imagine that a bright young mathematician, called Li Xianglin, received a master's degree in economics from Nankai University, one of the most prestigious universities in China...

 

Li Xianglin left China in 1987 at the behest of the Chinese government to study capitalism from the West. There, he earned a MBA from Laval University in Quebec, a MMath in Actuarial Science and PhD in statistics from the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario in 1995 with the thesis title "An estimating function approach to credibility theory". This was done under the supervision of Distinguished Emeritus Professor Harry H. Panjer in the Statistics and Actuarial Science Department at the University of Waterloo. Gus says that actuaries are the most serious people who study and forecast risk for financial institutions, including insurance — and few of them do stand up comedy in their spare time...

 

 

From an Article published on 23 February 2009...:

 

In 2008, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists — even Wall Street Quants (the "Rocket Scientists of Wall Street") — have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li's work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field.

 

Today, though, as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all. Not that his achievement should be dismissed. He took a notoriously tough nut — determining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are related — and cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiquitous in finance worldwide.

 

For five years, Li's formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.

His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And it became so deeply entrenched — and was making people so much money — that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.

 

Then the model fell apart. Cracks started appearing early on, when financial markets began behaving in ways that users of Li's formula hadn't expected. The cracks became full-fledged canyons in 2008—when ruptures in the financial system's foundation swallowed up trillions of dollars and put the survival of the global banking system in serious peril.

 

From Wikipedia

David X. Li (Chinese: 李祥林; pinyin: Lǐ Xiánglín[1] born Nanjing, China in the 1960s) is a Chinese-born Canadian quantitative analyst and actuary who pioneered the use of Gaussian copula models for the pricing of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) in the early 2000s.[2][3][4] The Financial Times has called him "the world’s most influential actuary",[1] while in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, to which Li's model has been partly credited to blame,[1][2] his model has been called a "recipe for disaster" in the hands of those who did not fully understand his research and misapplied it.[2] Widespread application of simplified Gaussian copula models to financial products such as securities may have contributed to the global financial crisis of 2008–2009.[2][5] David Li is currently an adjunct professor at the University of Waterloo in the Statistics and Actuarial Sciences department.[6]

 

So Li isn't to be blamed for the 2008 financial mess, but those who used his formula to make a quicker buck. At some point on this site we have exposed the derivative market as a massive gambling den and the "Credit Default Swap" as an insurance — for your goods — as if devised by the Mafia. See "greed on credit ..... | Your Democracy". You might be able to find the link...

 

 

...

 

The WIRED article continues...:

 

David X. Li, it's safe to say, won't be getting that Nobel anytime soon. One result of the collapse has been the end of financial economics as something to be celebrated rather than feared. And Li's Gaussian copula formula will go down in history as instrumental in causing the unfathomable losses that brought the world financial system to its knees.

 

How could one formula pack such a devastating punch? The answer lies in the bond market, the multitrillion-dollar system that allows pension funds, insurance companies, and hedge funds to lend trillions of dollars to companies, countries, and home buyers.

 

A bond, of course, is just an IOU, a promise to pay back money with interest by certain dates. If a company — say, IBM — borrows money by issuing a bond, investors will look very closely over its accounts to make sure it has the wherewithal to repay them. The higher the perceived risk — and there's always some risk — the higher the interest rate the bond must carry.

 

Bond investors are very comfortable with the concept of probability. If there's a 1 percent chance of default but they get an extra two percentage points in interest, they're ahead of the game overall — like a casino, which is happy to lose big sums every so often in return for profits most of the time.

Bond investors also invest in pools of hundreds or even thousands of mortgages. The potential sums involved are staggering: Americans now owe more than $11 trillion on their homes [this figure has climbed to stratospheric height by 2021]. But mortgage pools are messier than most bonds. There's no guaranteed interest rate, since the amount of money homeowners collectively pay back every month is a function of how many have refinanced and how many have defaulted. There's certainly no fixed maturity date: Money shows up in irregular chunks as people pay down their mortgages at unpredictable times — for instance, when they decide to sell their house. And most problematic, there's no easy way to assign a single probability to the chance of default.

 

Wall Street solved many of these problems through a process called tranching, which divides a pool and allows for the creation of safe bonds with a risk-free triple-A credit rating. Investors in the first tranche, or slice, are first in line to be paid off. Those next in line might get only a double-A credit rating on their tranche of bonds but will be able to charge a higher interest rate for bearing the slightly higher chance of default. And so on.

 

The reason that ratings agencies and investors felt so safe with the triple-A tranches was that they believed there was no way hundreds of homeowners would all default on their loans at the same time. One person might lose his job, another might fall ill. But those are individual calamities that don't affect the mortgage pool much as a whole: Everybody else is still making their payments on time.

But not all calamities are individual, and tranching still hadn't solved all the problems of mortgage-pool risk. Some things, like falling house prices, affect a large number of people at once. If home values in your neighborhood decline and you lose some of your equity, there's a good chance your neighbors will lose theirs as well. If, as a result, you default on your mortgage, there's a higher probability they will default, too. That's called correlation — the degree to which one variable moves in line with another — and measuring it is an important part of determining how risky mortgage bonds are.

Investors like risk, as long as they can price it. What they hate is uncertainty — not knowing how big the risk is. As a result, bond investors and mortgage lenders desperately want to be able to measure, model, and price correlation. Before quantitative models came along, the only time investors were comfortable putting their money in mortgage pools was when there was no risk whatsoever — in other words, when the bonds were guaranteed implicitly by the federal government through Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.

Yet during the '90s, as global markets expanded, there were trillions of new dollars waiting to be put to use lending to borrowers around the world — not just mortgage seekers but also corporations and car buyers and anybody running a balance on their credit card — if only investors could put a number on the correlations between them. The problem is excruciatingly hard, especially when you're talking about thousands of moving parts. Whoever solved it would earn the eternal gratitude of Wall Street and quite possibly the attention of the Nobel committee as well.

 

To understand the mathematics of correlation better, consider something simple, like a kid in an elementary school: Let's call her Alice. The probability that her parents will get divorced this year is about 5 percent, the risk of her getting head lice is about 5 percent, the chance of her seeing a teacher slip on a banana peel is about 5 percent, and the likelihood of her winning the class spelling bee is about 5 percent. If investors were trading securities based on the chances of those things happening only to Alice, they would all trade at more or less the same price.

But something important happens when we start looking at two kids rather than one — not just Alice but also the girl she sits next to, Britney. If Britney's parents get divorced, what are the chances that Alice's parents will get divorced, too? Still about 5 percent: The correlation there is close to zero. But if Britney gets head lice, the chance that Alice will get head lice is much higher, about 50 percent — which means the correlation is probably up in the 0.5 range. If Britney sees a teacher slip on a banana peel, what is the chance that Alice will see it, too? Very high indeed, since they sit next to each other: It could be as much as 95 percent, which means the correlation is close to 1. And if Britney wins the class spelling bee, the chance of Alice winning it is zero, which means the correlation is negative: -1.

 

Read more:

https://www.wired.com/2009/02/wp-quant/

 

At this stage, the collapse of the financial market in the West, helped the Chinese... https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45493147...

 

Terence Yong Yew Tiek was on the frontline for the bank at the time and remembers how tough it was. 

 

But he says DBS - like so many other businesses in the region - was only momentarily affected, and recovered quickly because of the inherent strength in Asia's economies - and China.

"Fundamentally, there was broad-based growth across Asia," he says. "Whether that was in the auto sector, airlines, consumer goods, commodities, services - all of these things were actually growing because of middle-income growth in Asia. China was also increasingly a factor, and that drove demand across borders within Asia."

 

-------------

 

My GusHunch is that the Chinese government at the time of sending young Li had an inkling that GREED would overpower any formula that any young actuary could create. It seems to have been too easy too good too well. David Li Xianglin could have been an unknowing weapon (not the first one send to the US to study the Yankee methods — including technologies) in the demise of the West financial markets. I believe that some smart ACTUARIES working for the Chinese government in China had the same formula at hand, the Gaussian copula Li model, and had added the human element of GREED — and waited for the collapse. The Chinese would have been aware of which banks were playing the hardest — and the closest to the highest risk market. Adding a bit of "horoscopic" dimension to the caper, the Chinese could have predicted a September equinox crash — 2008.

 

This is some highly speculative food for thought... The Western financial market has never recovered and the Chinese economy has forged ahead since 2008. At the moment the West is trying to demolish the Chinese economy as much as possible, without wrecking its slavey status to manufacture Western goods... Hence the new CIA division, blah blah blah...

 

See also: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/41079

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

not sustainable...

SAVANNAH, Ga. — Like toy blocks hurled from the heavens, nearly 80,000 shipping containers are stacked in various configurations at the Port of Savannah — 50 percent more than usual.

The steel boxes are waiting for ships to carry them to their final destination, or for trucks to haul them to warehouses that are themselves stuffed to the rafters. Some 700 containers have been left at the port, on the banks of the Savannah River, by their owners for a month or more.

“They’re not coming to get their freight,” complained Griff Lynch, the executive director of the Georgia Ports Authority. “We’ve never had the yard as full as this.”

As he speaks, another vessel glides silently toward an open berth — the 1,207-foot-long Yang Ming Witness, its decks jammed with containers full of clothing, shoes, electronics and other stuff made in factories in Asia. Towering cranes soon pluck the thousands of boxes off the ship — more cargo that must be stashed somewhere.

 

“Certainly,” Mr. Lynch said, “the stress level has never been higher.”

It has come to this in the Great Supply Chain Disruption: They are running out of places to put things at one of the largest ports in the United States. As major ports contend with a staggering pileup of cargo, what once seemed like a temporary phenomenon — a traffic jam that would eventually dissipate — is increasingly viewed as a new reality that could require a substantial refashioning of the world’s shipping infrastructure.

As the Savannah port works through the backlog, Mr. Lynch has reluctantly forced ships to wait at sea for more than nine days. On a recent afternoon, more than 20 ships were stuck in the queue, anchored up to 17 miles off the coast in the Atlantic.

 

Such lines have become common around the globe, from the more than 50 ships marooned last week in the Pacific near Los Angeles to smaller numbers bobbing off terminals in the New York area, to hundreds waylaid off ports in China.

The turmoil in the shipping industry and the broader crisis in supply chains is showing no signs of relenting. It stands as a gnawing source of worry throughout the global economy, challenging once-hopeful assumptions of a vigorous return to growth as vaccines limit the spread of the pandemic.

 

The disruption helps explain why Germany’s industrial fortunesare sagging, why inflation has become a cause for concern among central bankers, and why American manufacturers are now waiting a record 92 days on average to assemble the parts and raw materials they need to make their goods, according to the Institute of Supply Management.

On the surface, the upheaval appears to be a series of intertwined product shortages. Because shipping containers are in short supply in China, factories that depend on Chinese-made parts and chemicals in the rest of the world have had to limit production.

 

But the situation at the port of Savannah attests to a more complicated and insidious series of overlapping problems. It is not merely that goods are scarce. It is that products are stuck in the wrong places, and separated from where they are supposed to be by stubborn and constantly shifting barriers.

The shortage of finished goods at retailers represents the flip side of the containers stacked on ships marooned at sea and massed on the riverbanks. The pileup in warehouses is itself a reflection of shortages of truck drivers needed to carry goods to their next destinations...

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/business/supply-chain-crisis-savannah-port.html

 

 

LONDON — Responding to an escalating crisis, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain reversed course this weekend and offered thousands of visas to foreign truckers to combat a driver shortage that has left some supermarket shelves empty and caused long lines at gas stations.

The decision, announced late Saturday, reflects the growing alarm within the government over a disruption to supplies that has prompted panic buying and, in some places, caused fuel to run out and gas stations to close.

So great is the concern that there has been speculation that the military could be called up to drive trucks. That has not yet happened, but Defense Ministry staff members will be asked to help speed up the process for truck licensing applications.

Late Sunday night, in a move underscoring the growing anxiety over the fuel shortage, the business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, said he was temporarily exempting fuel companies from the law regulating competition, so that they could share information and optimize supply at stations that need it most.

 

Since January, after Britain completed the final stage of Brexit, employers have been unable to freely recruit European workers, as was previously the case. The coronavirus pandemic has also exacerbated the crisis that stems from a long-term shortage of British truck drivers.

The British Department for Transport said in a statement that 5,000 fuel tanker and food truck drivers would be allowed to work in the country for three months in the prelude to Christmas to provide short-term relief for the commercial hauling industry. The department also noted that letters would be sent to truck drivers in Britain who hold licenses but are not currently working, appealing to them to return. The statement added that visas for 5,500 poultry workers would be made available for the same short period to reduce pressures on the food industry.

Until this weekend, many lawmakers who had backed the withdrawal from the European Union had argued that one of the positive consequences of Brexit was the pressure that it would place on employers to train more British truck drivers and improve the wages for an arduous job.

On Sunday, Grant Shapps, the transportation secretary, defended the move to bring in foreign workers. He told the BBC that while he did not want to “undercut” British workers, he could not stand by while lines formed outside gas stations. Mr. Shapps also said that Britain had adequate fuel supplies, and he appealed to motorists not to buy more than they normally would.

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/26/world/europe/trucker-shortage-britain-visas.html

 

assangezassangez

Chinese irredentism...

 

This from February 2021, by Thierry Meyssan...

 

The Biden administration will not adopt a definitive strategy against its Chinese rival until June. An ad hoc committee of the Pentagon will then have to present proposals to the White House.

Under the authority of President Xi Jinping, China has begun its deployment outside its borders. It has already placed 3,000 soldiers in the UN forces and opened a base in Djibouti. Logically, it should, as it did at the time of the historic Silk Road, set up military posts along the roads it is building to secure its international trade. Last but not least, it is relocating to the islets it abandoned in the 19th century in the China Sea.

China first intends to reclaim its living space, which it has been robbed by Western colonists. It is sure of its right and considers that it has every right to take its revenge.

However, in accordance with the strategy outlined in 1999 by General Qiao Liang and Colonel Wang Xiangsui [1], China intends to avoid any direct military confrontation with the United States. It prefers to bypass its adversary and has engaged in undeclared wars on the commercial, economic, financial, psychological, media and other levels.

Chinese irredentism implies excluding the Westerners who have occupied the Far East for a century and a half. It must be distinguished from the Chinese development strategy which has succeeded in a few years in lifting hundreds of millions of its citizens out of poverty.

New China’s economic strategy began in 1978 under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, but it only really bore fruit in 1994. By that time the Soviet Union had disappeared; the US army had been largely demobilised; President Bush Sr. had declared that the time to make money had come and his successor, President Clinton, had been asked by big companies to open up the Chinese labour market. Indeed, a Chinese worker, albeit untrained, cost about 20 times less than a US worker.

President Clinton would therefore decouple human rights negotiations (in the Anglo-Saxon sense) from trade issues. Then he would bring China into the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Within a few years, the big corporations would transfer their production plants to the Chinese coast for the benefit of consumers and to the detriment of US workers.

Two decades later, the US is consuming Chinese products massively, while its big corporations, which have become transnational, have seen their profits grow exponentially. But at the same time, US consumer goods factories have been relocated or closed while unemployment has spread. The distribution of wealth has been altered so that now there is hardly any middle class left, but mostly poor people and a few ultra-billionaires.

This phenomenon began to affect Europe when US voters chose Donald Trump as their president. He first tried to resolve the balance of payments issue with China (border adjustment tax), but was prevented from doing so by the Democrats and part of the Republicans. Unable to push through a relative border closure, it embarked on a tariff war in which Congress had no say.

In 2021, President Biden officially succeeded him. He was supported by the transnational corporations that derived their immense fortune from economic globalisation. Immediately, he declared his desire to normalise US-China relations. He called President Xi Jinping to talk to him about the situation of the Uyghurs [and] in Hong Kong, but he immediately admitted that Tibet and Taiwan were Chinese, which his predecessor had partially disputed. Above all, at a press conference, he said that each country had its "own standards" and that the political positions of China and the United States each had their own logic. Thus he was able to say, once in the White House, that he "understood" China’s repression of Uighur terrorism, whereas a few weeks earlier he had accused China of "genocide" of the Uighur people under the guise of repression of terrorism.

Over the next four years, the Biden administration should therefore continue the work of Presidents Clinton, Bush Jr. and Obama, to the benefit of the multi-billionaires and to the detriment of its people. It will rely on a ruling class deriving personal benefits from this system.

In order to understand this arrangement, we summarise the eight main personalities supporting the US-China trade alliance. First on the political level: one of the main Democratic icons and the head of the Republicans in the Senate; then on the economic level, the two most important distributors of consumer goods; finally on the governmental level, the decision-makers of the Biden administration.

 

Read more:

https://www.voltairenet.org/article212286.html

 

Read from top. China has known the game being played by the West, for a long time...

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOWWWWWWWW

 

is this payback from the west?...

 

BY John Ransom — a political and financial writer and editor whose work has appeared at Townhall.com, Newsmax, the Daily Caller and IBT. He splits his time between the US and Asia.

 

 

Bankruptcy proceedings have been issued in Germany against Evergrande, a Chinese real estate company which is now $300 billion in debt. Should it go under, there are potential repercussions for all the key global markets.

 

 

What is Evergrande? 

 

Evergrande, which builds and manages apartments, is the second largest residential real estate company in China.

 

With 1,300 residential projects, some of which have come to a dead stop because of cash concerns, Evergrande poses the most serious single, controllable risk to the recovery of China’s economic health, in part because it has debt of $300 billion – the largest amount of any private company in the world – that it can’t repay.

 

Nearly two years of pandemic-related slowdowns in China have combined with organic and government-imposed obstacles to growth to create an unprecedented recession in the real estate market there, hurting companies like Evergrande.

 

 

What are the obstacles to growth? 

 

China’s economy relies too much on real estate.

“Taking into account construction and other property-related goods and services, annual housing activity accounts for about 29% of China’s GDP,” said the UK’s Guardian, “far above the 10%-20% typical of most developed nations.”

 

 

As we saw from the 2008 mortgage meltdown in the US, overreliance on real estate can really devastate an economy when it can’t hold its value, as is the case today in China.

“About a fifth of China’s housing units now lie vacant,” added the Guardian, “often because they are too expensive for the population, 40% of whom earn barely 1,000 yuan (£115) a month. For second and third homes, the vacancy rates are higher still.”

 

China’s Communist Party Secretary Xi Jinping has taken steps to bring down housing prices under the slogan “Housing is for living, not for speculation” after a 40-year boom in real estate.

Xi says he’s concerned that housing prices are too far out of the reach of ordinary workers.

 

This means that some companies that are overleveraged with debt, like Evergrande, will probably have to go under to meet the new government goal to make houses affordable.

So far, Xi seems content to let the real estate market in China crash, perhaps in the belief the Communist Party can control its descent.

 

 

Why is Evergrande in the news now?

 

Evergrande narrowly missed default on some foreign-owned debt this week as it teeters on the edge of insolvency from the domestic real estate slump, according to the New York Times.

It has been joined by other companies, but Evergrande is the largest real estate developer in trouble by far.

 

“At least six Chinese property developers have defaulted on foreign bonds in recent weeks,” said the Times, “rattling domestic financial markets and raising the cost of borrowing for all Chinese companies. Property prices are slowing and fewer people are buying apartments, worsening the outlook for real estate.”

Because of the sheer volume of debt involved in Evergrande, observers are worried about how a default would affect other countries.

 

German creditor DMSA is preparing bankruptcy proceedings.

How will an Evergrande default affect world markets?

While an Evergrande default would be bad, the risk thus far that a bankruptcy would directly affect world financial markets in developed countries seems slim.

 

It would depend on local conditions, on how much business China does with each country and how much each country depends on Chinese debt to finance its activities.

 

For example, in the US, the risk of a systemic infection of the financial system like in the real estate meltdown of 2008 would be low, says the Federal Reserve. But a general downturn in China and the resulting loss of confidence and orders would spill over to the US, resulting in less business with China. That would negatively impact US GDP growth but probably by only a little.

 

“Stresses could, in turn, propagate to the Chinese financial system through spillovers to financial firms, a sudden correction of real estate prices, or a reduction in investor risk appetite,” said a recent report by the Federal Reserve about US financial stability. “Given the size of China’s economy and financial system as well as its extensive trade linkages with the rest of the world, financial stresses in China could strain global financial markets through a deterioration of risk sentiment, pose risks to global economic growth, and affect the United States.”

 

Some are concerned that China would stop buying US Treasuries, but Chinese holdings in US government debt are a manageable $1.1 trillion versus total US debt of $28 trillion.

Countries that are part of China’s massive Belt and Road initiative, however, which rely on the Communist government to finance massive infrastructure projects, could really suffer as China faces a mounting cash crunch.

 

China has often used Belt and Road as political leverage, but will have a tougher time pulling those levers as cash becomes scarce and fewer projects are completed.

 

 

But won’t the Chinese government just bail out Evergrande?

 

The correct answer is “maybe.” So far, the Communist government has been content to do nothing to bolster Evergrande. Instead, they are watching property prices fall domestically because lower prices meet the official government line of “Housing is for living, not for speculation.”

 

The government seems willing to allow, even nudge, banks and other property developers to buy out assets of Evergrande as a kind of reverse bailout by private companies, but it seems reluctant to get involved itself.

 

In China, it’s important to pay attention to the whole story, including the underlying message the government is trying to relay by its actions or inactions.

 

There has been a reprioritization, a Red Reset, going on in China from a market based-socialism – from growth at any cost – to a more traditional socialist, command-and-control economy.

Increasingly, the Communist Party is calling the shots on the economy, if often only from the shadows.

 

Under Xi Jinping, China has stepped up an anti-corporate campaign that has sought to bring some of the largest and most successful companies like Didi, Alibaba, Ant Group and Tencent firmly back under government control over the past two years.

 

It seems unlikely under these circumstances that it would bail out such a troubled company as Evergrande.

 

So far they like the optics of homebuyers protesting against domestic capitalists and speculators, while Xi – and the Party – rail against high home prices.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/539985-evergrande-crisis-germany-china-debt/

 

 

Read from top.

 

Note: Should Evergrande "collapse", it will hurt Western investors FAR MORE than the Chinese... Pay attention when I write something... READ FROM TOP. And see also: 

losing customers...

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW √√√√√√√√√√√

chaos in 2008...

Robert McCredie May, Baron May of OxfordOMACFRSFAAFTSEFRSNHonFAIB (8 January 1936 – 28 April 2020) was an Australian scientist who was Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK GovernmentPresident of the Royal Society,[8] and a professor at the University of Sydney and Princeton University. He held joint professorships at the University of Oxford and Imperial College London. He was also a crossbench member of the House of Lords from 2001 until his retirement in 2017.

May was a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and an appointed member of the council of the British Science Association. He was also a member of the advisory council for the Campaign for Science and Engineering.[9]

 

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_May,_Baron_May_of_Oxford

 

Why I mention Bob (sorry, SIR Bob) is that he was employed at some stage by the Bank of England to discover "what happened to the financial markets in 2008" (read from top). This does not seem to be mentioned in his Wikipedia biography...

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

 

 See also: 

is confucius winning?...

WW3?........

...

It was not clear if non-allied nations would pick the US side in the confrontation, he said. “I asked the president of an African country why he gets 5G technology from China and not from the West. He told me, we are a small country, so someone will spy on us anyway. Then, I might as well take the Chinese technology, it’s cheaper,” the economist revealed to Der Spiegel. 

The professor is concerned that the political systems in the US and Europe may not be able to deal with the problems, leading to a rise of right-wing governments.

Nouriel Roubini came to prominence for predicting the financial crisis of 2008-09 and was dubbed ‘Doctor Doom’ by Wall Street.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/news/565734-doctor-doom-world-war/

 

NOW IF YOU READ FROM TOP, YOU WOULD DISCOVER THE TRUE ORIGIN OF THE 2008-09 CRASH.... WHICH IS STILL HAUNTING THE "MARKET".... HOPEFULLY, YE GOOD PROFESSOR IS WRONG ON HIS PREDICTION THAT WE'RE ALREADY HAVING WW3...

THE RISE OF RIGHT-WING MOVEMENTS??? THE WEST HAS BEEN RIGHT-WING SINCE 59BC (Julius Caesar — Former Roman dictator, we are told). DEMOCRATICALLY, THE RIGHTWING-MOVEMENTS HAVE BEEN THE BREAD AND BUTTER OF THE US EMPIRE SINCE ITS INCEPTION IN 1776. IT'S MOST LIKELY THAT THE PRESENT STUPID DECEIT OF THE US GOVERNMENT ENGENDERS A LEFT-WING REVOLUTION, WITH SHARING, PEACE AND COMMUNITY SPIRIT TO THE FORE... 

I AM NOT HOLDING MY BREATH.

CONFUSION, ANARCHY AND VIOLENCE (LOCAL AND INTERNATIONAL) ARE MORE ON THE CARD WITH A SENILE GUY LEADING THE US PACK OF MONSTERS.

WE CAN DO BETTER, BUT WILL WE?

THE UKRAINE HAS TO GIVE UP FORMER RUSSIAN TERRITORIES TO ACHIEVE PEACE. END OF THIS STORY. 

THE US EMPIRE HAS TO SIGN A DEAL WITH RUSSIA RESPECTING ITS SOVEREIGNTY. END OF THIS STORY.

NATO HAS TO BE DISCARDED LIKE A SMELLY PAIR OF UNDERPANTS. END OF THIS STORY. 

TAIWAN HAS TO BECOME AN AUTONOMOUS CHINESE TERRITORY. END OF THIS STORY.

FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRIES NEED TO PACK UP AND RETOOL URGENTLY. END OF THIS STORY.

ECONOMISTS AND POLITICIANS HAVE TO BE REPLACED BY HUMANS. END OF THIS STORY.

 

AND ALL LIVED HAPPYLY EVERAFTER.....

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW. END THIS EFFING SAGA PLEASE!!!!!!!!

shipping cuz....

From the minute after the US Central Command (CENTCOM) and the UK Maritime Trade Organisation (UKMT) learned that the oil tanker MV Chem Pluto had been hit by an exploding drone in the Indian Ocean 1,600 kilometres east of the Red Sea and Yemen coast (lead image, left), they also knew why. Through a joint venture between a Japanese and a Singapore holding company operating through a Dutch management cutout, the vessel is owned by Idan Ofer, an Israeli shipping magnate (lead image, right).

The Chem Pluto strike is the second by a drone against one of Ofer’s vessels in the Indian Ocean. The first strike was on November 24, when the container carrier CMA CGM Symi was targeted in the northeastern sector of the Indian Ocean. The Symi is owned by Ofer’s Eastern Pacific Shipping in Singapore.

On December 18, drone strikes were reported by CENTCOM against the Swan Atlantic oil tanker and the bulker MV Clara. The first vessel is owned by a Norwegian company but management, with hidden equity, belongs to the Israeli Zodiac group, owned by Idan Ofer’s brother, Eyal Ofer. The second vessel, the Clara, is owned and managed by a German company, Johann MK Blumenthal; no Israeli trace has been found to date, but the Houthis have yet to make a mistake in spotting and hitting Israeli ships.

On November 19 they did more than that. On that day an Israeli-owned car carrier, Galaxy Leader, was captured by Houthi commandos in the Red Sea. Follow their operation as they filmed it; here is the vessel now receiving tourists at anchor off Al-Salif port, Yemen. Ownership by the Israeli Abraham Ungar was concealed behind by a Japanese ship management entity and a company registered under the Isle of Man-headquartered Ray Car Carriers, which in turn is owned by a Tel Aviv company called Ray Shipping.

Houthi political and military spokesmen have repeatedly made clear they are attacking Israeli shipping, as well as vessels of any nationality trading in and out of Israel’s ports. “Israeli ships are legitimate targets for us anywhere… and we will not hesitate to take action,” Major General Ali Al-Moshki, a Houthi military official, said on the group’s television station on November 20, following the capture of the Galaxy Leader

“If Gaza does not receive the food and medicine it needs, all ships in the Red Sea bound for Israeli ports, regardless of their nationality, will become a target for our armed forces,” a Houthi press statement declared on December 9.

CENTCOM and Pentagon releases to the press have also claimed to have intercepted Houthi drone and missile attacks on US warships in the Red Sea attempting to protect the Israeli-owned or Israel-bound shipping.

Less successful in hitting Israel’s Red Sea port of Eilat, the Houthi campaign has been effective in cutting off the port by striking at vessels in the Red Sea, and then extending the range of strikes to the eastern Indian Ocean. Eilat accounts for 45% of car imports to Israel and 5% of all the goods imported to Israel by sea. The Houthi campaign has cut Eilat’s port revenue by 80% since October 7.

The impact has expanded to all shipping in the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Indian Ocean if their management and ownership are based in the US and the European states allied with Israel in the Gaza war, and also with the US in the war against Russia in the Ukraine.

It is this coalition of states which US Secretary of Defense General Lloyd Austin attempted to rally for naval convoy and counter-threat operations on December 18, calling the plan  OPERATION PROSPERITY GUARDIAN. 

This operation is now coming apart in recriminations because commercial vessel owners in France, Spain, and Italy have accepted that if they negotiate Israel-boycott deals directly with the Houthis, they can continue to operate through the Red Sea. They resent the commercial competition from Russia and China which are operating oil tankers and dry-cargo carriers without hindrance or threat.

The obviousness of the targeting by the Houthis, and of Houthi deal-making by the Russians and Chinese, are being concealed, however, in the US and UK maritime industry media and the mainstream press. They are advocating maximum use of force by the Israel and US-led operation in the region to attack both Houthi and Iranian targets.

In the most recent strike, the Israeli oil tanker Chem Pluto was hit on Saturday, December 23, by a drone about 1,600 kilometres east of the Yemen coast; about 200 kilometres west of the Indian coast. Initial media reporting claimed the vessel was “affiliated” to Israel but emphasized that it was owned by a Japanese entity and managed by a Dutch one. The Indian media claimed the drone strike had come from the Iranian intelligence vessel MV Safiz reportedly 87 kilometres away from the Chem Pluto.

Late on Saturday evening, the Russian military blogger Boris Rozhin reported: “The Chem Pluto tanker hit by the drone belonged to Israeli oligarch Idan Ofer and was flying the flag of Liberia. The drone arrived 200 miles from the Indian port of Verawal. There was a fire on board, but the crew managed to put it out. This strike shows that attacks on Israeli vessels can be carried out not only in the Red Sea or the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, but also in the Indian Ocean. At the same time, the flags that the Houthis go after are ignored – ownership structure is the priority. If the owner is associated with Israel, the ship immediately becomes a potential target.” This Russian publication was datelined December 23 at 22:37 Moscow time.

TradeWinds, an Oslo-based maritime publication which used to be pro-Russian so long as it was receiving advertising and sponsorship money from Sovcomflot, the Russian state shipping company, picked up on the story a day later. According to TradeWinds, “the Chem Pluto is operated by Amsterdam-based Ace Quantum, according to data from Equasis. The company is a joint venture of Ace Tankers and Eastern Pacific Shipping, which is owned by Israeli billionaire Idan Ofer. The ship is listed as owned by Sansho Kaiun of Japan, with technical management by Fleet Management.” This disclosure was published on December 24 at 1804 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).

Equasis, the data source for tracing the Chem Pluto to Ofer, is the creation of the European Commission and the French Maritime Administration, which set up the website and database in 2000 to “promote the exchange of unbiased information and transparency in maritime transport and thus allow persons involved in maritime transport to be better informed about the performance of ships and maritime organisations with which they are dealing.” With the exception of Brazil, Equasis is a US-allied operation.

https://www.unz.com/article/russian-identification-of-houthi-tanker-target-in-indian-ocean/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

NOTE: THIS ITEM IS IN THIS LINE OF HISTORICAL POSSIBILITIES BECAUSE "everyone is hiding something"...

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW. END THIS EFFING SAGA PLEASE!!!!!!!!

 

 

pirates for justice.....

Yemen’s Houthis said on Tuesday that they fired missiles at a cargo ship in the waters of the Red Sea, after it ignored repeated warning messages. The Houthis have been shooting at “Israeli-linked” vessels for weeks.

MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company confirmed that one of their vessels came under fire and identified it as MSC United VIII, en route to Karachi, Pakistan from King Abdullah Port in Saudi Arabia. According to MSC, the incident happened at approximately 3:25 am local time.

“The vessel informed a nearby coalition task force warship of the attack and as instructed engaged in evasive maneuvers,” the company said in a statement. “Currently, all crew are safe with no reported injuries and a thorough assessment of the vessel is being conducted.”

Houthi spokesman Yahya Saree said that the Yemeni Armed Forces “carried out a targeting operation” against the commercial vessel after its crew did not respond to “repeated fiery warning messages.”

The Shia group that controls the Yemeni capital announced in late October that it would fire missiles at Israel and target ships in any way connected to the Jewish state to support the Palestinians of Gaza.

https://www.rt.com/news/589728-houthis-red-sea-ship-attack/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW.....................