Igniting an inflationary environment is the path of least resistance.

Conclusions

Or it will happen so fast that they won't be able to staunch the deflationary pressures.

19-JUL-2021 ::  Mirrors On The Ceiling

The Markets
In one of his books Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb described his Trading Strategy as one which lost money 364 days of the year but made more on one day than was lost in those preceding 364 days. 

He makes the point that Few People or Trading Desks have the mental stamina to last those 364 days for that extreme one day pay out.

I think we have reached this point now where we are picking up nickels and dimes in front of an oncoming Train.

Paul Tudor-Jones

"I love trading macro. If trading is like chess, then macro is like 3D chess. You never have a complete information set or information edge the way analysts can have when trading individual securities." Paul Tudor Jones @NeckarValue
"When it comes to macro, you cannot rely solely on fundamentals; you have to be a tape reader, something of a lost art form''
''While I spend a significant amount of my time on analytics and fundamental information, at the end of the day, I am a slave to the tape and proud of it."
While I'm a staunch advocate of higher education, there is no training – classroom or otherwise.. that can prepare for trading the last third of a move, whether it's the end of a bull market or the end of a bear market. There's typically no logic to it; irrationality reigns supreme, and no class can teach what to do during that brief, volatile reign.
"This is the BIGGEST bubble I have seen in my career."— Stanley Druckenmiller @TihoBrkan

"As a macro investor, my job for 30 years was to anticipate changes in the economic trends that were not expected by others - and therefore not yet reflected in securities prices". Stanley Druckenmiller 
I think we are the Cusp of the Moment
The Music has been playing for Eternity and its about to stop
tabla wizard, Aref Durvesh @thenitinsawhney

TEN years ago, Octavio Paz told an interviewer there was not one Carlos Fuentes, but two, the European voice and the Mexican voice. Since then, more have emerged. 

Carlos Fuentes has been the palimpsest of Mexican history and culture separated into its discrete layers: Indian, Spanish, French, revolutionary, aristocratic, leftist, centrist, expatriate. 

In this analyzed presentation of the person, this soul shown after the centrifuge, Mr. Fuentes demonstrates the complexity of the Mexican character and the artistic difficulties peculiar to the novelist born in the Navel of the Universe, which is where the Aztecs placed Mexico.

The pattern of the Mexican character was set early in the 16th century: When the Spaniards came to Mexico, they put the conquest of the population in the hands of the priests, and those wily psychologists chose to overlay Christianity on pagan religions like paper on a wall. 

Near the city of Tenochtitlan, at the shrine of Tonantzin (Our Mother), the Virgin Mary miraculously appeared to Juan Diego, a recent convert. 

On the very hill where the Temple of Tonantzin had been, the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexico, was erected; the soul of a nation in the form of a palimpsest was carved in stone, and the problems of the Mexican in life and art were forever complicated.

The intellectual and social life of France was then piled on the converted Indian during the brief reign of Maximilian, who arrived in 1864 and was executed in 1867. 

Yet the positivism of Auguste Comte was the main philosophical influence in the oppressive government of Porfirio Diaz, which was overthrown in the revolution of 1910. 

The Socialist constitution of 1917 added another layer. Then came the betrayal of the revolution by a class of robber barons like Artemio Cruz, the dying monster of Carlos Fuentes's best known novel. 

But in all these changes nothing disappeared; there were only additions: Every Mexican knows that we live in the fifth and final age, quinto sol, and that the world will end in earthquake and fire; every Mexican has a nahual, an alter ego, a magical twin, a mirror image; 

no Mexican can help but be awed by the figure of Coatlicue, she who exists between life and death, reaching into both, mother of the moon and the stars, the goddess who swallowed a white feather and gave birth to Huitzilopochtli, the warrior sun, 

Coatlicue the earth and Our Mother; and every Mexican knows what lies to the north and how behemoth America affects every moment of his days and nights for as long as it suffers him to live.

But who knows the fate of his bones
or how often he is to be buried?
Sir Thomas Browne

What they call dying
is merely the last pain.
Ambrose Bierce

Old gringo: that’s what they called the man the Colonel was remembering now as young Pedro followed every move of the men laboring in the desert night; again, the boy saw a bullet piercing a silver peso in midair.
“It was pure chance that we met that morning in Chihuahua. He never told us, but we all knew why he’d come. He wanted us to kill him, us Mexicans. That’s why he was here. That’s why he’d crossed the frontier, back in the days when very few of us ever left the place where we were born.”
The spadefuls of dirt were like red clouds strayed from the sky: too low, too near the lantern light. They did, said Colonel García, yes, the gringos did. 

They spent their lives crossing frontiers, theirs and those that belonged to others, and now the old man had crossed to the south because he didn’t have any frontiers left to cross in his own country.
“Easy there.”
“And the frontier in here?” the North American woman had asked, tapping her forehead. “And the frontier in here?” General Arroyo had responded, touching his heart. 

“There’s one frontier we only dare to cross at night,” the old gringo said. “The frontier of our differences with others, of our battles with ourselves.”
But maybe he was carrying a different fear, one he voiced as he crossed the frontier: “I’m afraid that each of us carries the real frontier inside.”

That night he tied his horse to an enormous organ-pipe cactus and fell into a famished sleep, thankful for his woolen underwear. 

He dreamed about what he had seen before falling asleep: new bluish stars and dying yellow ones. 

He tried to forget his dead children, wondering which of the stars were already quenched, their light nothing more than his own illusion: a heritage from the dead stars to human eyes that would continue to praise them centuries after their extinction in an ancient catastrophe of dust and flames.

The General pulled out a long Colt .44. The old man didn’t stir in his saddle. Then the General threw him the pistol and the old man caught it on the fly.
They waited again. The General thrust his hand into the deep pocket of his white peasant’s trousers, pulled out a shiny silver peso, big as an egg and flat as a watch, and tossed it straight and high in the air. 

The old man waited without moving until the coin fell to within a foot of the General’s nose; then he fired; the women screamed; La Garduña looked at the other women; the Colonel and Inocencio looked at their chief; only the boy looked at the gringo.
The General barely flicked his head. The boy ran to look for the coin; he picked it out of the dust, rubbed the barely bent surface against his bandolier, and returned it to the General. A perfect hole pierced the body of the eagle.
“Keep the coin, Pedrito, you brought him to us,” the General said, smiling, and the silver piece almost burned his fingers. 

“I don’t think anything but a Colt .44 could have pierced a peso like that. It was my first treasure. You won it, Pedrito, you keep it.”

The Miranda ballroom was a miniature Versailles. The walls were two long rows of mirrors, ceiling to floor: a gallery of mirrors destined to reproduce in a round of perpetual pleasures the elegant steps and movements of couples from Chihuahua, El Paso, and other haciendas, come to dance the waltz and the quadrille on the elegant parquet Señor Miranda had had brought from France.

the hour of the crimson sunset.

23-AUG-2021 ::  ZigZag The Optics spoke its own narrative 

https://j.mp/384Arar

A Taliban commander sat in the control tower of what was once the nerve centre of America’s war in Afghanistan, momentarily king of all he surveyed.
Maulawi Hafiz Mohibullah Muktaz, a religious leader and fighter from Kandahar aged 35, leaned back in his seat laughing, twiddled some dials on a control console, stared out across the multibillion-dollar base the size of a small city and picked up a phone to summon an imaginary jet.
“Never in our wildest dreams could we have believed we could beat a superpower like America with just our Kalashnikovs,” he beamed, staring across the two runways beneath him. 

Close by were a hundred revetted holding bays for attack jets, the airbase passenger lounge, a fifty-bed hospital and in the middle distance hangars, accommodation blocks, abandoned American armoured vehicles and the prison area that was the scene of some of the darkest episodes of the US-led occupation.

“When you do jihad all doors open,” he added, unable to stop smiling. “Our lesson is that we defeated America with our faith and our guns and we hope now that Bagram can be a base for jihad for all Muslims.”

No other US base in Afghanistan epitomises the rise and crashing fall of this 20-year mission than Bagram. 

Once the coalition’s principal transport and logistics hub, as well as the primary airbase for attack missions by coalition aircraft, it was abandoned overnight on July 1, the departing American troops merely turning off the electrical and water supplies before fleeing without telling their Afghan allies what they were intending to do.

It was a moment that increased the growing sense of betrayal that Afghans felt. 

Later President Biden, whose chaotic evacuation operation from Kabul international airport concludes today, was heavily criticised for having left Bagram, which had both the capability and security to better undertake the evacuation. 

For the Taliban now picking through the vastness of the abandoned US base, however, Bagram is a tangible peak of triumph.

“For any foreign power considering attacking Afghanistan then look at Bagram now and learn your lesson well before embarking on foolish endeavour,” Muktaz continued. “See the West’s mighty technology humbled here by mujahidin.”

His mood changed from delight to befuddlement as he drove out into the base to take The Times on a tour. 

“I’ve been here ten days and it is so huge I still can’t orientate myself,” he murmured, driving past a dozen armoured vehicles in his Toyota pickup, the Taliban’s preferred war machine.

He paused briefly on the runway to examine an abandoned helicopter as, near by, a Taliban fighter rolled a bullet-perforated medicine ball left by the Americans, trilling “basketball” as he he threw it to a comrade who was felled as he caught the 15kg weight. 

“No matter,” the man laughed, getting back to his feet. “We still beat them even though they were stronger than us.”

Muktaz gazed down a 3,600m runway, completed in 2006 at a cost of $68 million and capable of landing the Lockheed C-5 Galaxy transporters and Boeing C-17 Globemasters, and said: “Victory still seems like a dream, from which any minute we could wake.”

The base, 90 minutes north of Kabul on the Shamali Plain, once a bastion of resistance to the Taliban before the 2001 US invasion, was finally abandoned by Afghan security forces on August 15 as units of the Islamists swept into the capital. 

The Taliban freed hundreds of prisoners held in the infamous detention facility here, including scores of Isis-K prisoners.

An earlier detention facility at Bagram was notorious for the abuse of prisoners by their captors: at least two were beaten to death in December 2002.

A new facility was built in 2009 that later became the main jail for Afghans arrested by American forces during the war. 

At its peak in 2011 more than 3,000 detainees, including Taliban fighters and high-ranking terrorists, were held here: more than 18 times the prisoner population of Guantanamo Bay.

It was always shadowed by controversy. In a leaked 2009 report, 

General Stanley McChrystal, one of the most respected and visionary US commanders in Afghanistan, described Bagram detention facility as a place where “committed Islamists are indiscriminately mixed with petty criminals and sex offenders, and they are using the opportunity to radicalise and indoctrinate them . . . Hundreds are held without charge or without a defined way ahead.”
Overall, he noted that the Afghan prison system had become an uncontrolled recruiting and planning ground for the insurgents. 

“There are more insurgents per square foot in corrections facilities than anywhere else in Afghanistan,” he wrote. 

“Unchecked, Taliban/al-Qaeda leaders patiently co-ordinate and plan, unconcerned with interference from prison personnel or the military.”

The facility was transferred to Afghan control inside the base in 2012, although the Americans are believed to have kept a smaller underground jail known as the “Black Jail”.

The full details of this site, run by US Defence Intelligence Agency and special forces operatives, have never been disclosed and its existence has now moved into contemporary myth. 

I met several Taliban fighters in Bagram yesterday scouring the airbase for proof of its existence, after rumours that high-level captives had been abandoned by their Afghan guards and were dying locked in their maximum security cells. 

Given that the Taliban leadership have never mentioned the story, it seems unlikely to be more than legend, but was no less dearly held in the minds of those there.
Among the main detention centre’s many top-level prisoners was Anas Haqqani, younger brother of Sirajuddin Haqqani, commander of the network that bears his name and one of the most powerful men in Afghanistan. 

Anas Haqqani was 20 when he was arrested in Bahrain in 2014 and was held in Bagram until he was released in a prisoner exchange in the build-up to a round of peace talks four years later.
Driving through the heavily fortified gates and squeezing his form through a steel section that had been prised from the wall of the prison complex, Muktaz led the way into the dim-lit bowels of the vast American facility: a dystopian gloom of cages, interrogation rooms and surveillance screens that was littered with restraints, handcuffs and riot control gear. 

Here was the dark underbelly of America’s war.
A huge central corridor formed the spine of the prison. Off one side of it were warehouse-sized cage systems, with grilled roofs once patrolled by guards, spot-lit to deprive prisoners of sleep when required.
A Helmandi commander, Maulawi Ahmed Shah, 44, appeared through a breach in the wall behind us with his bodyguards and entourage. 

He had been held in Bagram twice: once in 2002 in the original prison and once again after 2009 in the newer detention facility, where he was kept in a cage for three and a half years, initially by the Americans and later by the Afghans. 

He said he returned on the eve of the final US withdrawal to see his place of captivity at the moment of final victory.
“The first time I was tortured repeatedly by the Americans,” he said. “I was stripped and hosed with cold water naked; suspended in chains and beaten. I was humiliated in ways I cannot describe and often filmed while they were doing it.

“The second time I was held, though longer, the regime was not as bad, but still brutal.”
Stepping among the sections of one cage complex, each of which had between 24 and 30 mattresses inside, he briefly examined the pictures on the walls drawn by prisoners and stirred the abandoned orange and cream prison overalls with his foot.

 “It was hard to imagine when I was held here — with American guards walking on the grills above our heads staring down at us, turning bright spotlights upon us whenever they wished, looked at all the time, interrogated and humiliated — that this day would ever come,” he said.
Other cells, smaller and without windows, spoke of harsher conditions. In several, prisoners had left finger marks in ash thick on the walls in an unmistakable graffiti of desperation and hopelessness, and beside one tiny cell marked Interview Room lay abandoned leather limb restraints that included finger tethers.
In the Grand Guignol gloom, as Muktaz stepped over abandoned guards’ helmets, piles of handcuffs and sets of body armour, amid the stench of rotten rations and the stale sweat of abandoned prison garb, his final reflection of victory was one the West may least wish to hear.
“In 15 years as a mujahid fighting the Americans I wondered often if I may fail or die,” he mused. 

“Yet here is proof of the power of faith and God and jihad. On the back of victory I hope we can use Bagram as a place to spread jihad further into the region and Muslim world.”

The World in the c21st exhibits viral, wildfire and exponential characteristics and feedback loops which only become obvious in hindsight.

Latest @WHO #COVID19 Epi Update  Key take aways: 4.5 million new cases & >68,000 deaths reported last week. @mvankerkhove

UK findings suggest new variants could emerge sooner than earlier estimated

28-MAR-2021  we are seeing a sustained acceleration in mutant viruses.

Each successive variant has proven to be slightly more vaccine-evading than the last. @yaneerbaryam

Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has collided with economic reality. His crackdown on private enterprise has been a significant drag on the economy. 

The most vulnerable sector is real estate, particularly housing. China has enjoyed an extended property boom over the past two decades, but that is now coming to an end. 

Evergrande, the largest real estate company, is over-indebted and in danger of default. This could cause a crash.
The underlying cause is that China’s birth rate is much lower than the statistics indicate. 

The officially reported figure overstates the population by a significant amount. 

Xi inherited these demographics, but his attempts to change them have made matters worse. 

One of the reasons why middle-class families are unwilling to have more than one child is that they want to make sure that their children will have a bright future. 

As a result, a large tutoring industry has grown up, dominated by Chinese companies backed by US investors. 

They were recently banned from China and this became an important element in the sell-off in New York-listed Chinese companies and shell companies. 

The crackdown by the Chinese government is real. Unnoticed by the financial markets, the Chinese government quietly took a stake and a board seat in TikTok owner ByteDance in April. 

The move gives Beijing one seat on a three-person board of directors and first-hand access to the inner workings of a company that has one of the world’s largest troves of personal data. 

The market is more aware that the Chinese government is taking influential stakes in Alibaba and its subsidiaries.
Xi does not understand how markets operate. As a consequence, the sell-off was allowed to go too far. 

It began to hurt China’s objectives in the world. Recognising this, Chinese financial authorities have gone out of their way to reassure foreign investors and markets have responded with a powerful rally. But that is a deception. 

Xi regards all Chinese companies as instruments of a one-party state. Investors buying into the rally are facing a rude awakening. 

That includes not only those investors who are conscious of what they are doing, but also a much larger number of people who have exposure via pension funds and other retirement savings.
Pension fund managers allocate their assets in ways that are closely aligned with the benchmarks against which their performance is measured. 

Almost all of them claim that they factor environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) standards into their investment decisions.
The MSCI All Country World Index (ACWI) is the benchmark most widely followed by global equity asset allocators. 

An estimated $5tn is passively managed, which means that it replicates the index. 

A multiple of this amount is actively managed, but it also closely tracks the MSCI index.
In MSCI’s ACWI ESG Leaders Index, Alibaba and Tencent are two of the top 10 constituents. 

In BlackRock’s ESG Aware emerging market exchange-traded fund, Chinese companies represent a third of total investments. 

These indices have effectively forced hundreds of billions of dollars belonging to US investors into Chinese companies whose corporate governance does not meet the required standard — power and accountability is now exercised by one man who is not accountable to any international authority.
The US Congress should pass a bipartisan bill explicitly requiring that asset managers invest only in companies where actual governance structures are both transparent and aligned with stakeholders. 

This rule should obviously apply to the performance benchmarks selected by pensions and other retirement portfolios.
If Congress were to enact these measures, it would give the Securities and Exchange Commission the tools it needs to protect American investors, including those who are unaware of owning Chinese stocks and Chinese shell companies. 

That would also serve the interests of the US and the wider international community of democracies.
SEC chair Gary Gensler has repeatedly warned the public of the risks they take by investing in China. 

But foreign investors who choose to invest in China find it remarkably difficult to recognise these risks. 

They have seen China confront many difficulties and always come through with flying colours. 

But Xi’s China is not the China they know. He is putting in place an updated version of Mao Zedong’s party. 

China’s government is LOOTING TENCENT SHAREHOLDERS in what is likely to amount to well over 50% of their profits, the government is forcing over $15 billion to go to ‘common prosperity’ to achieve the CCP’s ‘national policy’. Hat tip to  @realKunalAShah

27-MAY-2019 :: In one fell swoop, President Xi Jinping was President for Life. President Xi is on a Pedestal #國慶節 #国庆节

The lights must never go out, The music must always play

Love Fellini. So brave, with that whiff of insanity. @DiAmatoStyle Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 @tcm

Turning to Africa

We are getting closer and closer to the Virilian Tipping Point
“The revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street''
Political leadership in most cases completely gerontocratic will use violence to cling onto Power but any Early Warning System would be warning a Tsunami is coming

10 NOV 14 : African youth demographic {many characterise this as a 'demographic dividend"} - which for Beautiful Blaise turned into a demographic terminator

Martin Aglo, a law student from Benin, told Reuters: “After the Arab Spring, this is the Black Spring”.We need to ask ourselves; how many people can incumbent shoot stone cold dead in such a situation – 100, 1,000, 10,000?
This is another point: there is a threshold beyond which the incumbent can’t go. Where that threshold lies will be discovered in the throes of the event.
The Event is no longer over the Horizon.

Conclusion: So, expect many youthquakes in the horizon unless things improve significantly on the ground. @hervegogo

Africa is currently reporting a million new infections about every 27 days @ReutersGraphics

Drinking the Kool-Aid 

The death toll represents an increase of 309,733 from the same period a year earlier, the Association for Savings and Investment South Africa said in a statement on Tuesday. 

The statistics reflect claims from various types of life cover and funeral policies.
“These are staggering numbers and there is no doubt that Covid-19 has caused many of these additional deaths,” Hennie de Villiers, deputy chair of the Asisa’s Life and Risk Board Committee, said. 

“The hard lockdown conditions, curfews and alcohol bans would have reduced violent and accidental deaths.”

“As an industry we expect the death claims statistics for the current financial year to tell a grim story as they will reflect the severity of the current Covid-19 third wave,” De Villiers said.

The government has admitted that villages have many unreported Covid-19 deaths.
The ministry also noted the lethal Delta variant is now dominant in Kenya, accounting for 96.7 per cent of all sequenced coronavirus cases.

On Monday, Mochache told a parliamentary committee that the government was unable to track all village deaths given the lack of pathologists in the rural counties.
Mochache said the daily figures being released by the government only capture deaths in hospitals.
“What we can confirm are the deaths happening in hospitals, and where there have been community deaths an autopsy must be conducted. We have been working very hard with counties and the national administration to monitor community deaths, but one of the challenges we have is counties have not invested in pathologists and morticians, so that area has a gap,” Mochache told MPs.
“So you are not able to have a county ascertain to you 100 per cent the cause of death.”

MPs Eseli Simiyu (Tongaren) and Aden Duale (Garissa Township) disputed the statistics on Covid deaths being released by the government, saying Kenya was actually going "the Indian way".
“This Delta variant is lethal. I have a feeling that the way people were dying in China is the same way people are dying in our villages. There are lots of deaths in Kiambu, Kirinyaga and other parts of the country,” Duale said.
“I have a constituency vehicle that helps in carrying bodies for burial. The driver used to ferry seven bodies a day but he is now carrying at least 15 bodies in a single day for burial''
“Let us tell the country the truth. It is like you (MoH) have also given up.”

The ministry said 96.7 per cent of all sequenced Covid-19 samples in Kenya are positive for Delta variant.

Conclusions 

I expect this turnaround to gain traction

The regional businesses contributed 24% of the Group’s gross earned premiums. #BritamH1Results2021 @BritamEA

Par Value:                  
Closing Price:           5.22
Total Shares Issued:          23600000.00
Market Capitalization:        123,192,000
EPS:              1.395
PE:                3.74

Nairobi Business Ventures reports FY Earnings through 31st March 2021

FY Revenue 45.381014m 

FY Cost of Sales [41.814014m]

FY Gross Profit 3.567m

FY Other Income 41.746759m versus [18.008729m]

FY Administrative expenses [12.279556m] versus [21.184878m]

FY Profit [Loss] after Tax 32.940384m versus [39.448260m]

FY Cash and Cash Equivalents 21.036982m versus [18.473155m]

Commentary 

Delta International FZE acquired a majority shareholding 

Nairobi Business Ventures Plc - Audited Financial Statements for the Year Ended 31-Mar-2021. @tradingroomke

Par Value:                  5/-
Closing Price:           10.40
Total Shares Issued:          12868124.00
Market Capitalization:        133,828,490
EPS:             0.44
PE:                 23.636

Kenya Orchards reports 6 months through 30th June 2021 versus 6 months through 30th June 2020

HY 2021 Revenue 24.814967m versus 28.329634m 

HY Cost of Sales [27.743921m] versus [27.024688m]

HY Gross Profit [2.928954m] versus 1.304946m

HY Admin Expenses [1.379352m] versus [1.443868m]

HY Selling and Distribution expenses [665.871m] versus [438.144m]

HY Finance Costs [246.628m] versus [286.474m]

HY Profit [Loss] before Tax [5.247335m] versus [887.088m]

HY Profit [Loss] after Tax [3.673135m] versus [620.961m]

HY EPS -0.29 versus -0.05

Par Value:                  
Closing Price:           0.36
Total Shares Issued:          405255320.00
Market Capitalization:        145,891,915
EPS:             -0.68
PE:                 -0.529

Home Afrika reports HY Earnings through 30th June 2021 versus 30th June 2020

HY 2021 Revenue from contracts with Customers 28.200m versus 43.022219m

HY 2021 [cost of Sales] [31.906519m] versus [28.871055m]

HY Gross Profit [3.706519m] versus 14.151164m

HY Selling and Distribution expenses [8.133012m] versus [14.758147m]

HY Administrative expenses [122.683755m] versus [98.837399m]

HY Other Operating expenses [19.137883m] versus [20.952607m]

HY Operating [Loss] [147.943458m] versus [113.161837m]

HY Finance Costs [74.858725m] versus [129.997466m]

HY Loss before Tax [222.802183m] versus [243.159303m]

HY Loss for the Year [228.840570m] [243.201198m]

HY EPS [0.45] versus [0.49]

Total Equity [2.504269195b] versus [2.281428625b]