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Thursday 09th of November 2017 |
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For years, Riyadh watched its regional influence recede while Iran seemed to grow stronger. @FT Law & Politics |
“All of the activity has to do with an effort at restructuring the geopolitics and geo-economics of the region,” says Theodore Karasik, senior adviser at Gulf State Analytics, a US-based consultancy. “This Saudi-Emirati programme has been in the works for a couple of years . . . Their view is that Iran has its Shia pincer around them and they are going to push back, really hard. It is part of a regional project that includes Syria, Libya, Yemen and also Palestine.”
“It is not just Saudi Arabia whose actions seem unpredictable; the US is not predictable either,” said one Beirut-based European diplomat. “My fear is over what kind of green light Mohammed bin Salman was given, and that he will go too far.”
Riyadh is expected to hit back at Iran via Lebanon and its ally Hizbollah. Theories range from the raising of new militias to instigating a conflict between Hizbollah and Israel, who fought each other to a standstill in 2006.
Yoel Guzansky, a research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Israel, says it is still unlikely that Israel or Hizbollah are looking for a fight but expressed concern that a destabilised Saudi Arabia could drag the two into conflict. “If this happens, we will bring Lebanon back to the stone age,” he warns.
“The Yemen war was meant to be a demonstration of Saudi Arabia’s ability to push back against Iran’s role in the region,” says Peter Salisbury, a researcher at Chatham House, the think-tank. “The opposite has happened though — the Iranian role has expanded and the Houthis have dug in.”
Such assessments may explain why regional allies such as Egypt have shown little appetite for Saudi Arabia’s new offensive. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt’s president, said in a recent interview with CNBC that he was not planning any measures against Hizbollah.
“This region can’t take any more turmoil,” he said.
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The Russians are running a reality show through Facebook and Twitter, and their contestants are all of us @nytimestech Law & Politics |
In May 2016, a Facebook page called Heart of Texas urged its nearly 254,000 followers to rise up against what it considered to be an urgent cultural menace. A mosque in Houston had opened up a new library, and Heart of Texas planned to protest. “Stop Islamization of Texas,” it warned.
Word of the protest spread quickly, but supporters of the mosque were also ready to mobilize. “Bigots are planning to intimidate through weaponized fear this Saturday at noon,” one of them wrote on Reddit. The post linked to a Facebook page for United Muslims of America, a group that said it was planning a counterprotest for the same time and place.
By now you might be able to guess the punch line here. Heart of Texas wasn’t a real group, as Business Insider later reported. United Muslims of America is a real organization, but the Facebook page promoting the counterprotest was not run by the actual group, as The Daily Beast found. Instead, according to documents made public last week by the Senate Intelligence Committee, both the pro- and anti-mosque protests had been planned and promoted by Russian trolls.
As I watched these videos recently, I had an epiphany about the Russia influence campaign. The Houston protest videos depicted a bunch of Americans duped into fighting one another in public, all at the whim of an unseen force that, through expert and surreptitious cajoling, had gotten them to lose control of themselves on camera. I’d seen this show many times before, and you’ve probably have, too. It’s called “The Bachelor.”
And not just the “The Bachelor,” but every other show like it. The Russians are running a reality show through Facebook and Twitter, and their contestants are all of us.
Over the past few days, I reached out to several reality show producers, asking them to compare the Russian digital influence campaign to the world of unscripted TV. The more they told me about reality shows, the more the metaphor seemed to explain Russia’s trolling campaign — how it worked, what it aimed to do and why campaigns like it will be so difficult to fight.
On reality TV, producers can do that because they keep detailed dossiers on everyone on set. But guess what? Russian trolls had detailed dossiers too — and they could consult them at scale. Using Facebook’s exquisitely detailed ad-targeting and viral propagation systems, trolls could create content that perfectly matched your fears, passions and ego.
“Facebook pages are veritable instruction manuals for someone who wants to exploit you,” Ms. Shapiro said. Given these tools, the Russian plan was simple: “You just poke the bears, put them in a cage and let them fight.”
This gets to what’s really pernicious about the Russian campaign. It so deftly blended artifice and reality — for so many people, across so many issues, in so many places — that it is impossible, now, for any of us to tell where reality and fakery begin and end.
Is it the trolls’ world, or is it ours?
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Currency Markets at a Glance WSJ World Currencies |
Euro 1.1597 The euro was little changed at $1.1594 EUR= and in sight of a 3-1/2-month low of $1.1553 set at the week's start Dollar Index 94.90 The dollar index against a basket of six major currencies was steady at 94.899 .DXY, staying below a three-month high of 95.150 set in late October. Japan Yen 113.70 Swiss Franc 0.9995 Pound 1.3121 Aussie 0.7681 India Rupee 64.935 South Korea Won 1113.65 Brazil Real 3.2547 Egypt Pound 17.6425 South Africa Rand 14.1550
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Is Venezuela Fooling Bond Traders? Two Experts Raise the Alarm Emerging Markets |
As Venezuelan bond prices sink toward a mere 20 cents on the dollar, a pair of sovereign debt specialists are publicly asking questions that many people are wondering in private: Is President Nicolas Maduro fooling the bond market? Was last week’s debt restructuring announcement simply a ruse to spark a panic, push down prices and then buy them back on the cheap?
“Maduro drove the secondary market prices of the bonds off a cliff,” Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton’s Lee Buchheit and Duke University’s Mitu Gulati wrote Wednesday in an opinion piece in the Financial Times.
There’s been radio silence from Caracas since the unveiling of the plan last week -- including when Bloomberg News called the Finance Ministry seeking comment on this theory -- but such a move isn’t without precedent. A decade ago, Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador and a close ally of Maduro and his mentor Hugo Chavez, implemented a similar tactic, announcing he was defaulting on a series of foreign bonds and then scooped them up in the secondary market at depressed prices.
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Angola's new president defies critics to shake up dos Santos elite @FT Africa |
When José Eduardo dos Santos, the man who ran Angola with near-absolute authority for 38 years, made João Lourenço his chosen successor last year, Mr Lourenço swore he would not be anyone’s puppet.
Few took him at his word. Mr dos Santos, who remains head of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), would, most believed, continue to run the oil-rich nation for the benefit of the elite in general and his family in particular.
Yet less than three months after the national elections that sealed Mr Lourenço’s ascendancy, the new president of sub-Saharan Africa’s third-biggest economy appears to be keeping his promise. So sweeping are some of the changes the 63-year-old has wrought that there is even speculation that he has the dos Santos power structure in his sights — including billionaire daughter Isabel, who heads Sonangol, the state oil company cash machine.
If that proves the case, it could have big implications both for the global oil industry and for Angola’s 13m people, many of whom live in poverty despite the country’s vast, if dwindling, oil wealth.
Mr Lourenço’s bold moves have involved personnel changes and a rhetorical laying down of the gauntlet. In his inauguration speech in September, he hit out at monopolies in telecoms and cement, a barely disguised attack on Ms dos Santos, who has become Africa’s richest woman on the back of these, among other, industries. In another apparent swipe at the dos Santos clan, he abolished a government communications department through which money had been funnelled, via lucrative contracts, to one of the former president’s other daughters.
Last week, the new president disposed of the central bank governor, in what may be an attempt to clamp down on illicit flows of money overseas. He has brought in his own loyalist as presidential secretary for economic affairs.
Even more significant for a government that derives the bulk of its revenue from petroleum, this month Mr Lourenço appointed Carlos Saturnino as his secretary of state for oil. Mr Saturnino had been sacked by Ms dos Santos from Sonangol last year. Now he has popped up again in a position of oversight and in charge of a 30-day review of the sector.
“Lourenço cannot govern without controlling the finances, particularly the oil revenues,” said Paula Roque, a political analyst at Oxford university specialising in Angola, adding that this helped explain his apparent circling of Ms dos Santos. “I think he will push for her to leave, but there will be furious resistance.”
Ms dos Santos could not be reached for comment.
Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, an expert on Angola, also at Oxford, said that initial disappointment at Mr Lourenço from civil society had given way to cautious expectation. “A lot of people who were critical of João Lourenço are now holding their breath,” though the new president hadn’t “touched dos Santos’s children at Sonangol or the sovereign wealth fund” he said, referring to Isabel and her brother, José Filomeno, who runs the country’s $5bn sovereign fund.
It was, he cautioned, “premature to assume that Lourenço has a broader development agenda”.
Ms Roque agreed matters could not be taken at face value. “Everything in Angola has a shadow. And the shadow here is that Lourenço and a lot of the elite have intertwined business and economic interests. So they can’t do much without harming themselves.” Some of the changes had almost certainly been negotiated with Mr dos Santos, she said, given his linchpin constitutional position as MPLA president.
Others are more sceptical still that anything substantive has changed. Rafael Marques de Morais, an Angolan investigative journalist and activist, called Mr Lourenço’s government “a redux of the dos Santos one”. There had, he said, been no move to bolster anti-corruption laws, nor to respond to allegations in the leaked Paradise Papers over the alleged transfer of four-fifths of the $5bn sovereign wealth fund’s assets to a Swiss-based investment manager who is a friend of José Filomeno. “For someone who talked about fighting corruption for months, the silence is deafening.”
Piers Pigou, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, said some changes might have been orchestrated to appease ordinary Angolans, who in August voted for the MPLA in record low numbers.
“Things may have been choreographed to give the impression that things are changing and that there’s a new broom,” he said. “It’s possible that much of this is theatre.”
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Mugabe Guts Zimbabwe Security State With Deputy's Dismissal Africa |
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s decision on Monday to fire former spy chief Emmerson Mnangagwa as his deputy is wrecking the very security apparatus that has kept him in power for almost four decades in the southern African nation.
Mnangagwa, who received military training in Nanjing, China, had been a pillar of a military and security apparatus that helped Mugabe emerge as the nation’s leader after independence from the U.K. in 1980. Mnangagwa, 75, was Zimbabwe’s first national security minister.
Now Mugabe, 93, has broken with most of his comrades who fought in the liberation war, leaving the so-called Generation 40 faction of younger members of the ruling party championed by his wife, Grace, in the ascendancy. The final outcome of the power struggle could be determined by the military and the stance of the 61-year-old commander of the army, Constantine Chiwenga, who traditionally supported Mnangagwa.
“I don’t think the army guys will take it lying down,” Annie Chikwanha, a Zimbabwean professor of political science at the University of Johannesburg, said Wednesday. “Other than the presidential guard, I don’t think Mugabe really has control over the rest of the armed forces. There is also massive disillusionment with the state of the economy. I don’t think we can rule out a major show of force by the army.”
The Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association condemned Mnangagwa’s dismissal and said it was breaking with the ruling party.
“The party and indeed the nation is being traumatized by one person, Robert Gabriel Mugabe, who is bent on maintaining his hold on power and ensuring that he passes on this power to his wife in a dynastic fashion,” the group said in a statement Wednesday. “We are stating in no uncertain terms that we have completely disowned Mugabe. He is no longer one of us.”
Mnangagwa’s firing and his expected expulsion from the ruling party come amid growing tensions before elections next year when it may face a seven-party opposition coalition that’s capitalizing on public anger over cash shortages, crumbling infrastructure and a collapse in government services. The economy has halved in size since 2000.
“Mnangagwa has been consumed by a monster he helped create -- the so-called one center of power giving Mugabe powers to do what ever he pleases without consulting anyone,” said University of Zimbabwe political science professor Eldred Masunungure.
Supporters of Grace Mugabe, 52, gathered outside the headquarters of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front on Wednesday with banners calling for her to be named vice president. Mnangagwa’s dismissal came after she accused him of plotting against her husband. Similar allegations she made against then Vice President Joice Mujuru, who also fought in the liberation war, led to her ouster three years ago.
“Grace has always had this agenda to get rid of this entire cohort of liberation struggle people,” said Chikwanha. “She is almost succeeding -- the war veterans have been alienated.”
While Mugabe is the party’s candidate for the elections, Grace, the president’s former secretary whom he wed in 1996 after the death of his first wife, said on Sunday that she’s ready to succeed him.
Her announcement came as Zanu-PF is planning to amend its constitution at a congress next month to ensure that a woman is appointed to its top body, known as the presidium. It currently comprises the president, Mnangagwa and Zimbabwe’s other vice president, Phelekezela Mphoko.
“We’re experiencing what’s clearly the unraveling of the state under Mugabe and, more significantly, the un-bundling of the securo-state in which Mnangagwa and defense force commander Chiwenga are a part,” said Ibbo Mandaza, head of the Southern African Political Economic Series Trust in the capital, Harare.
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CS Rotich defends new Eurobond issue to repay Sh77bn loan @bd_africa Kenyan Economy |
Treasury secretary Henry Rotich has defended the government’s decision to issue another Eurobond whose proceeds will partly be used to repay a Sh77.3 billion ($750 million) syndicated loan issued in 2015. Mr Rotich, in an interview Wednesday, said the fresh Eurobond and the Treasury’s negotiations with international investors to delay debt repayments did not indicate that the government was struggling to service its loans. The Treasury says that it is considering tapping the international debt markets to either finance infrastructure developments or for “liquidity management”. The rapid rise in Kenya’s public debt to more than Sh4.4 trillion at a time when the taxman is struggling to meet his targets has raised fears over sustainability of the loans. A Reuters story on Tuesday quoted Mr Rotich saying that most investors in the syndicated loan had agreed to extend its maturity by six months from October this year to April 2018, meaning the fresh Eurobond could be floated before then.
Conclusions
The Eurobond Market is attractive at this moment.
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@KCBGroup reports Q3 2017 Earnings see below Kenyan Economy |
Par Value: 1/- Closing Price: 40.75 Total Shares Issued: 3066056647.00 Market Capitalization: 124,941,808,365 EPS: 6.46 PE: 6.308
KCB Group Q3 results through 30th September 2017 vs. 30th September 2016 Q3 Kenya Government securities available for sale 60.388247b vs. 46.967903b +28.573% Q3 Loans and advances to customers (net) 419.494427b vs. 364.332066b +15.141% Q3 Total Assets 643.832809b vs. 562.302261b +14.499% Q3 Customer Deposits 496.305024b vs. 429.321388b +15.602% Q3 Total shareholders’ funds 103.193001b vs. 91.313956b +13.009% Q3 Total interest income 46.764414b vs. 48.496025b -3.571% Q3 Total interest expenses [11.091349b] vs. [12.446856b] -10.890% Q3 Net interest income 35.673065b vs. 36.049169b -1.043% Q3 FX trading income 3.631784b vs. 3.529540b +2.897% Q3 Total operating income 53.156900b vs. 50.818418b +4.602% Q3 Loan loss provision [3.136905b] vs. [3.400445b] -7.750% Q3 Total other operating expenses [30.739464b] vs. [29.075228b] +5.724% Q3 Profit before tax and exceptional items 22.417526b vs. 21.743190b +3.101% Q3 Profit after tax and exceptional items 15.076294b vs. 14.353622b +5.035% Basic and diluted EPS 6.56 vs. 6.24 +5.128% Gross NPL and Advances 34.731290b vs. 31.096578b +11.688% Total NPL and Advances 30.969484b vs. 26.540155b +16.689% Net NPL and Advances 9.226531b vs. 13.055209b -29.327% Liquidity ratio 37.7% vs. 38.0% -0.300%
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