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Friday 08th of October 2021
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Morning
Africa
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Register and it's all Free.
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The Fed is trapped @TaviCosta
World Of Finance
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Mirrors on the ceiling, The Pink champagne on ice
World Of Finance
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The lights must never go out, The music must always play
Misc.
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Love Fellini. So brave, with that whiff of insanity. @DiAmatoStyle Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 @tcm
Misc.
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"The market is like a large movie theater but with a small door." Dynamic Hedging, 1996 @nntaleb
World Of Finance
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Natural Gas @PriapusIQ
Commodities
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The Markets Are Wilding
World Of Finance
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Title: Bar, Las Vegas, Nevada Artist: Robert Frank
Misc.
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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 than on one day than was lost in those preceding 364 days
World Of Finance
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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.
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There is no training – 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. @ptj_official
World Of Finance
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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.
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“Derivatives,” Alvin said. “I don’t speculate about the future, I trade it.” @NewYorker
World Of Finance
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And they were cross‑linked and interwoven and resold in large bundles, “future on future,” Alvin said
“Forget about the forces of the free market, my friend. Commodity prices no longer refer to any value, past or present—they’re just ghosts from the future.”
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Look up @McConaughey
Misc.
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‘’At the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing’’. The moment of Vision’’ is in essence a non-linear thing, its a moment of deep insight.
Misc.
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The 2021 #NobelPrize in Literature is awarded to the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah @NobelPrize
Misc.
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The 2021 #NobelPrize in Literature is awarded to the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”
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BOOK REVIEW / Of earthly delights: 'Paradise' - Abdulrazak Gurnah
Misc.
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IN Muslim east Africa in the early years of this century, a boy who dreams strange dreams is taken to work for his 'uncle', a prosperous merchant on the coast.
One of the first things he learns is that the merchant is not his uncle: Yusuf has been sold into bondage to pay his father's debt.
It is the beginning of a harsh apprenticeship to life, tempered by haphazard kindness and glimpses of beauty.
Unasked, just for the love of it, Yusuf tends his master's garden, hidden behind high walls and watered by four streams.
Both the garden and the great world outside it are equally mysterious.
The world is a dazzling but dangerous place civilised only by religion; savagery lurks below the surface and in the interior of the country, where the pagan peoples live.
Tales are told of what lies beyond the known world: seas that freeze, a wall built by the giants Gog and Magog, the earthly paradise with its gate of fire.
From time to time ferocious and demanding alien figures move across this brilliant, part-real and part-imagined backcloth.
They are want everything and seem incomprehensible. They are known as 'the Europeans'.
When he is 17, Yusuf accompanies his master on an ambitious trading venture into the interior.
The journey, an act of hubris, assumes epic proportions as sickness, wild animals and predatory local rulers take their toll.
Yet as they reach what will be the scene of the expedition's disaster,
Yusuf, the dreamer, glimpses the fiery walls and turbulent waters that are said to guard paradise.
Or perhaps paradise is the garden he has tended? As he returns to that garden, and his master's house, he learns their unhappy secret.
It contains a threat to him, but it frees him to make a desperate choice in a direction for which the book has subtly prepared us.
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Zanzibar in the 1900s @rhaplord
Africa
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The way "one story contains many and how they belong not to us but are part of the random currents of our time, and about how stories capture us and entangle us for all time"
Misc.
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My daughter’s photo from earlier this evening @YYonnette
Misc.
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Luminous and Fairy Tale
Misc.
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Foto astronómica del día! "Sunrise at the South Pole " via NASA @IssSantiago
Misc.
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In Roberto Bolano’s poem titled, Godzilla en Mexico, his son asks "who are we?" after experiencing an earthquake in Mexico sometime in the 80s. @NatGeo
Misc.
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"We are human beings...birds, almost in flight." Bolano responds, "public heroes and secrets."
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“We never stop clinging to life because we are life.” -Roberto Bolaño @poe_a_tree
Misc.
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My Roberto Bolaño shelf is at overflow. @MatthewAsprey
Misc.
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“Nothing is ever behind us.” ― Roberto Bolaño, 2666
Misc.
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“I kept having dreams all night. I thought they were touching me with their fingers. But dreams don't have fingers, they have fists, so it must have been scorpions.” ― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives
Misc.
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Check out our epic search about 52-Hertz now on VOD. The LA Times calls it "a modern-day “Moby Dick” @joshzeman
Misc.
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“It is not down on any map; true places never are.” ― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Misc.
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“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.” ― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure.”
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Lost Frequencies - Are You With Me
Misc.
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Political Reflections
Law & Politics
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U.S. troops have been in Taiwan for at least a year secretly training its military, officials say, as concern over potential Chinese aggression mounts @WSJ
Law & Politics
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That big thing may be that he who rules Taiwan rules the world @bopinion @nfergus
Law & Politics
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He has brought Hong Kong to heel, he is prowling around Taiwan like a Lion prowled around our Tent one night in the Tsavo
Law & Politics
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“Complete reunification of the motherland is an inevitable trend..no one and no force can ever stop it!”
Law & Politics
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“Unity is iron and steel; unity is a source of strength,”
Law & Politics
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23-AUG-2021 :: Xi Jinping is on a winning streak ever since he started salami slicing his then adversary President Obama.
Law & Politics
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It is inevitable he will roll the dice on Taiwan and imminently.
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US should send 240 servicemen publicly, in US military uniform, and make public where they are stationed. See whether the PLA will launch a targeted air strike to eliminate those US invaders! @HuXijin_GT
Law & Politics
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Why just two dozen members? Why secretly? The US should send 240 servicemen publicly, in US military uniform, and make public where they are stationed. See whether the PLA will launch a targeted air strike to eliminate those US invaders!
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Xi told a new class of mid-career cadres to "discard illusions" and "dare to struggle" in the world. @neilthomas123
Law & Politics
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The ‘’Wolf Warrior’’ Strategy #Wuheqilin
Law & Politics
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Xi hasn't set foot outside China for one year and nine months and will skip even the Rome G-20 summit. @Chellaney
Law & Politics
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Biden sought an in-person bilateral summit with Xi, but Xi has agreed to just an online meeting. Is it the fear of a coup in his absence that is deterring Xi from leaving China?
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The World in the c21st exhibits viral, wildfire and exponential characteristics and feedback loops which only become obvious in hindsight.
Law & Politics
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Europe Gas Crisis Hands Putin a Birthday Gift @business
Law & Politics
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Vladimir Putin is 69 today and the German-speaking former KGB agent is enjoying some birthday schadenfreude over Europe’s gas crisis.
An “erroneous” push by European Union officials for spot-market gas trading over the long-term contracts Russia favors is partly to blame for soaring prices, the Russian president declared yesterday.
“It was very difficult to talk with the so-called experts, because they do it with a certain amount of snobbery,” he said.
European nerves are so jangled that Putin’s offer to “think over a possible increase in supply” was enough to ease prices.
His intervention against “speculative excitement” was also a reflection of Russian concerns that an unstable market may harm its long-term interests as an energy supplier if nations respond by accelerating a shift to greener alternatives.
Yet Putin doesn’t do altruism even for his birthday, and cold political calculation lies behind the offer.
He ruled out increasing supplies through Ukraine — where Moscow backs separatist fighters — to focus on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline linking Russia and Germany that’s awaiting certification after years of U.S. attempts to scuttle the project.
Putin spoke a day after some EU lawmakers questioned the pipeline’s compliance with the bloc’s laws.
Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak noted that rapid certification of the project would send a “positive signal” to the market.
Even as he’s taking climate change more seriously (out of economic pragmatism if not true belief), Putin also couldn’t resist a dig at Europe for seeking carbon neutrality at “our expense” with a border levy that will hit energy-rich Russia.
With winter approaching, Europe suddenly needs Putin after years of confrontation and sanctions. That strengthens his hand in seeking concessions and deterring new penalties.
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5 OCT 15 :: Putin is a GeoPolitical GrandMaster
Law & Politics
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5 DEC 16 :: The Parabolic Rebound of Vladimir Putin,
Law & Politics
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In the Middle East, it is Putin who is calling the shots in Aleppo, and in a quite delicious irony it looks like he has pocketed Opec as well.
Don DeLillo, who is a prophetic 21st writer, writes as follows in one of his short stories:
The specialist is monitoring data on his mission console when a voice breaks in, “a voice that carried with it a strange and unspecifiable poignancy”.
He checks in with his flight-dynamics and conceptual- paradigm officers at Colorado Command:
“We have a deviate, Tomahawk.”
“We copy. There’s a voice.”
“We have gross oscillation here.”
“There’s some interference. I have gone redundant but I’m not sure it’s helping.”
“We are clearing an outframe to locate source.”
“Thank you, Colorado.”
“It is probably just selective noise. You are negative red on the step-function quad.”
“It was a voice,” I told them.
“We have just received an affirm on selective noise... We will correct, Tomahawk. In the meantime, advise you to stay redundant.”
The voice, in contrast to Colorado’s metallic pidgin, is a melange of repartee, laughter, and song, with a “quality of purest, sweetest sadness”.
“Somehow we are picking up signals from radio programmes of 40, 50, 60 years ago.”
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Deleted $FB
World Of Finance
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“One of the defining bifurcations of the future will be the conflict between information masters and information victims.”
World Of Finance
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Latest study suggests: in 2021 the richest two deciles (top 20 percentiles together) on average are expected to recover nearly half of their 2020 losses, while the poorest two deciles on average are expected to further lose 5% of their income. @world
World Of Finance
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Volatility always hurts the poor more than the rich @fibke
World Of Finance
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JUN-2020 :: It is about the Haves and the Have Nots. Its about the moment of Epiphany when the Have Nots appreciate the predicament in which they have been placed
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.@WHO #COVID19 weekly Epi Update @mvankerkhove
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.@WHO Weekly epidemiological update on COVID-19 - 5 October 2021
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Globally, the number of weekly COVID-19 cases and deaths continued to decline. This is a trend that has been observed since August.
Over 3.1 million new cases and just over 54 000 new deaths were reported during the week of 27 September to 3 October 2021.
Cases this week decreased by 9% as compared to the previous week, while deaths remained similar.
All regions reported a decline in the number of new cases this week apart from the European Region which remained similar to the week before.
The largest decrease in new weekly cases was reported from the African Region (43%),
The highest numbers of new cases were reported from
United States of America (760 571 new cases; similar to the number reported in the previous week)
United Kingdom (239781 new cases;similar to the number reported in the previous week)
Turkey (197 277 new cases; similar to the number reported in the previous week)
Russian Federation (165 623 new cases; 13% increase)
India (161 158 new cases; 21% decrease).
Conclusions
The Lowest weekly case count for 12 weeks.
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19-JUL-2021 Many Folks seem to feel we are in the final Act of the COVID-19 Play. I would be limit short that particular narrative.
Misc.
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New global case growth seems to be bottoming out. The cubic trend suggests increases are on their way. @video4me
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Russia reports 27,550 new coronavirus cases, the biggest one-day increase since December, and 924 new deaths @BNODesk
Misc.
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Over 40,000 Covid cases were reported today. @Dr_D_Robertson
Misc.
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"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." - Professor Allen Bartlett
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―They fancied themselves free, wrote Camus, ―and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences
Misc.
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23-AUG-2021 :: But Holmes was startled. “This virus has gone up three notches in effectively a year and that, I think, was the biggest surprise to me”
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As to the goal of reaching herd immunity— “With the emergence of Delta, I realized that it’s just impossible to reach that,” says Müge Çevik University of St. Andrews. Via @ScienceMagazine @kakape
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#COVID19 vaccines may have to be "adapted" to new virus variants in 2022, says BioNTech chief Ugur Sahin (FT) @disclosetv
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23-AUG-2021 :: We have now crossed peak Vaccine Euphoria
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What happens next depends not only on vaccination, but also on how the virus might mutate. @derspiegel
Misc.
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"This virus keeps surprising us," agrees Mary Bushman, a mathematician and population biologist at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
"No one expected such large jumps in contagiousness.”
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International Markets
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Currency Markets At A Glance
World Currencies
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Euro 1.1546
Dollar Index 94.296
Japan Yen 111.91
Swiss Franc 0.9297
Pound 1.3595
Aussie 0.7295
India Rupee 75.004
South Korea Won 1195.37
Brazil Real 5.5185
Egypt Pound 15.7035
South Africa Rand 14.97
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Dollar Index Chart INO 94.296 [I expect it higher from here]
World Currencies
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Euro versus the Dollar Chart 1.1548
World Currencies
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Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions? @BW
World Of Finance
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In July, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen summoned the chair of the Federal Reserve, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and six other top officials for a meeting to discuss Tether.
The absurdity of the situation couldn’t have been lost on them: Inflation was spiking, a Covid surge threatened the economic recovery, and Yellen wanted to talk about a digital currency dreamed up by the former child actor who’d missed a penalty shot in The Mighty Ducks.
But Tether had gotten so large that it threatened to put the U.S. financial system at risk.
It was as if a playground snowball fight had escalated so wildly that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were being called in to avert a nuclear war.
Tether is what’s come to be known in financial circles as a stablecoin—stable because one Tether is supposed to be backed by one dollar.
But it’s actually more like a bank. The company that issues the currency, Tether Holdings Ltd., takes in dollars from people who want to trade crypto and credits their digital wallets with an equal amount of Tethers in return.
Once they have Tethers, people can send them to cryptocurrency exchanges and use them to bet on the price of Bitcoin, Ether, or any of the thousands of other coins. And at least in theory,
Tether Holdings holds on to the dollars so it can return them to anyone who wants to send in their tokens and get their money back.
The convoluted mechanism became popular because real banks didn’t want to do business with crypto companies, especially foreign ones.
Exactly how Tether is backed, or if it’s truly backed at all, has always been a mystery.
For years a persistent group of critics has argued that, despite the company’s assurances, Tether Holdings doesn’t have enough assets to maintain the 1-to-1 exchange rate, meaning its coin is essentially a fraud.
But in the crypto world, where joke coins with pictures of dogs can be worth billions of dollars and scammers periodically make fortunes with preposterous-sounding schemes, Tether seemed like just another curiosity.
Then, this year, Tether Holdings started putting out a huge amount of digital coins. There are now 69 billion Tethers in circulation, 48 billion of them issued this year.
That means the company supposedly holds a corresponding $69 billion in real money to back the coins—an amount that would make it one of the 50 largest banks in the U.S., if it were a U.S. bank and not an unregulated offshore company.
On Twitter, on business TV, and on hedge fund and investment bank trading floors, everyone started asking why Tether was minting so many coins and whether it really had the money it claimed to have.
An anonymous anti-Tether blog post titled “The Bit Short: Inside Crypto’s Doomsday Machine” went viral, and CNBC host Jim Cramer told viewers to sell their crypto. “If Tether collapsed, well then, it’s going to gut the whole crypto ecosystem,” he warned.
As far as the regulators are concerned, the size of Tether’s supposed dollar holdings is so big that it would be dangerous even assuming the dollars are real.
If enough traders asked for their dollars back at once, the company could have to liquidate its assets at a loss, setting off a run on the not-bank.
The losses could cascade into the regulated financial system by crashing credit markets.
If the trolls are right, and Tether is a Ponzi scheme, it would be larger than Bernie Madoff’s.
So earlier this year I set out to solve the mystery. The money trail led from Taiwan to Puerto Rico, the French Riviera, mainland China, and the Bahamas.
One of Tether’s former bankers told me that its top executive had been putting its reserves at risk by investing them to earn potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of profit for himself.
“It’s not a stablecoin, it’s a high-risk offshore hedge fund,” said John Betts, who ran a bank in Puerto Rico Tether used. “Even their own banking partners don’t know the extent of their holdings, or if they exist.”
A green pentagon emblazoned with a white T represents the Tether coin on the company’s website, which promises “Digital money for a digital age.”
The logo doesn’t look like much, but it’s probably the most normal thing about Tether Holdings, which is weird in almost every way imaginable.
Only a dozen employees are listed on LinkedIn, a tiny number for a company with $69 billion under management.
Tether’s website also touts a settlement with New York’s attorney general, but the announcement of that settlement made it sound like the company had been up to some horrible stuff.
Tether Holdings had been “operated by unlicensed and unregulated individuals and entities dealing in the darkest corners of the financial system,” Letitia James, the attorney general, said in a statement.
Elsewhere on the website, there’s a letter from an accounting firm stating that Tether has the reserves to back its coins, along with a pie chart showing that about $30 billion of its dollar holdings are invested in commercial paper—short-term loans to corporations.
That would make Tether the seventh-largest holder of such debt, right up there with Charles Schwab and Vanguard Group.
To fact-check this claim, a few colleagues and I canvassed Wall Street traders to see if any had seen Tether buying anything. No one had.
“It’s a small market with a lot of people who know each other,” said Deborah Cunningham, chief investment officer of global money markets at Federated Hermes, an asset management company in Pittsburgh.
“If there were a new entrant, it would be usually very obvious.”
It wasn’t clear which regulatory body is responsible for overseeing Tether.
On a podcast, a company representative said it was registered with the British Virgin Islands Financial Investigation Agency.
But the agency’s director, Errol George, told me in an email that it doesn’t oversee Tether. “We don’t and never have.”
The chief executive officer listed on Tether’s website, J.L. Van der Velde, is a Dutchman who lives in Hong Kong and seems never to have given an interview or spoken at a conference.
The chief financial officer is Giancarlo Devasini, a former plastic surgeon from Italy who was once described on Tether’s website as the founder of a successful electronics business.
The only reference to him that turned up in a search of Italian newspapers showed he was once fined for selling counterfeit Microsoft software.
He didn’t respond to emails or messages on Telegram, where he goes by Merlinthewizard.
“There’s no agenda or plot. They are not Enron or Madoff. When there’s a problem, they fix it honorably”
Tether’s lawyer, Stuart Hoegner, told me by phone that Van der Velde and Devasini prefer to avoid the limelight.
He called Tether’s critics “jihadists” set on the company’s destruction. “We maintain a clear, comprehensive, and sophisticated risk management framework for safeguarding and investing the reserves,” he said, adding that no customer had ever asked for money back and been refused.
But when I asked where Tether was keeping its money, he declined to say.
Nor was I reassured when he told me the company had more than enough cash to cover the most money it had ever had to pay out in a single day. Bank runs can last longer than 24 hours.
Hoegner later responded to follow-up questions with an emailed statement saying my reporting was “nothing more than a compilation of innuendo and misinformation shared by disgruntled individuals with no involvement with or direct knowledge of the business’s operations.” He added: “Success speaks for itself.”
It was hard to believe that people had sent $69 billion in real U.S. dollars to a company that seemed to be practically quilted out of red flags.
But every day, on cryptocurrency exchanges, traders buy and sell Tether coins as if they’re just as good as dollars. Some days, more than $100 billion in Tether changes hands.
It seemed the people with the most at stake in the crypto markets trusted Tether, and I wanted to know why. Luckily, in June, 12,000 of them were gathering in Miami for what was billed as the biggest crypto conference ever.
At the Mana Wynwood Convention Center, I found the usual cringey crypto signifiers. Models walked the floor body-painted with Bitcoin’s logo.
A podcast host screamed, “F--- Elon.” A dumpster full of Venezuelan bolivars was labeled “cash is trash.” The place was full of people who held Tether.
Sam Bankman-Fried, a 29-year-old billionaire who was in town to rename Miami’s basketball arena after his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, told me he’d bought billions of Tethers, using them to facilitate trading other coins.
“If you’re a crypto company, banks are nervous to work with you,” he said.
His explanation doesn’t make much sense if you still think of Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer currency, an ingenious way to transfer value without an intermediary.
But most people aren’t using cryptocurrencies to buy stuff. They’re trading them on exchanges and betting on their value, hoping to make a real money score by picking the next Dogecoin, which spiked 4,191% this year after Elon Musk started tweeting about it, or Solana, up 9,801% in 2021 for seemingly no reason at all.
Think of crypto exchanges as giant casinos. Many of them, especially outside the U.S., can’t handle dollars because banks won’t open accounts for them, wary of inadvertently facilitating money laundering.
So instead, when customers want to place a bet, they need to buy some Tethers first. It’s as if all the poker rooms in Monte Carlo and the mahjong parlors in Macau sent gamblers to one central cashier to buy chips.
The biggest traders on these exchanges told me they routinely bought and sold hundreds of millions of Tethers and viewed it as an industry standard.
Even so, many had their own conspiracy theories about the currency. It’s controlled by the Chinese mafia; the CIA uses it to move money; the government has allowed it to get huge so it can track the criminals who use it. It wasn’t that they trusted Tether, I realized.
It was that they needed Tether to trade and were making too much money using it to dig too deeply.
“It could be way shakier, and I wouldn’t care,” said Dan Matuszewski, co-founder of CMS Holdings LLC, a cryptocurrency investment firm.
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Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions? @BW [continued]
World Of Finance
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The Start of Stablecoin
In the 1800s the hunters, trappers, and cowboys on the American frontier faced a currency shortage.
The U.S. government didn’t issue paper money at the time, only gold and silver coins, because its early leaders were fearful of inflation—“an infinity of successive felonious larcenies,” according to John Adams.
So some states allowed banks to print their own notes, redeemable for U.S. coins on demand. But certain banks didn’t bother to hold the corresponding reserves.
These institutions came to be called “wildcats,” supposedly because they discouraged borrowers from bringing notes in to exchange by locating branches in remote areas where wild animals roamed.
Many of these banks failed. One in Michigan filled boxes with nails and glass, then covered them with a thin layer of silver coins to fool examiners, who weren’t fooled. “What a temptation was this for the unscrupulous speculator, the adventurer, dreaming only of wealth, and ready to hazard all in pursuit of it,” Alpheus Felch, a state bank commissioner at the time, later wrote.
Almost two centuries later, the same temptation appeared before Brock Pierce, a former child actor who’d played the younger version of Emilio Estevez’s character in the Mighty Ducks films.
Now Pierce wears loud hats, vests, and bracelets, like Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, and speaks in riddles, like Johnny Depp in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
After founding a successful brokerage for buying and selling video game items—at which he employed, of all people, future Trump consigliere Steve Bannon—Pierce was one of the few early Bitcoiners with real money to invest.
“I’m not an amateur entrepreneur throwing darts in the dark,” he told me by phone as he prepared for a trip to promote Bitcoin in El Salvador. “I’m a doula for creation. I only take on missions impossible.”
Pierce said he came up with the idea for a stablecoin in 2013, along with programmer Craig Sellars.
To run the company, Pierce recruited Reeve Collins, who holds the dubious distinction of inventing pop-under web browser ads.
They teamed up with Phil Potter, an executive at an offshore Bitcoin exchange, Bitfinex, who was working on a similar project, and adopted his name for it: Tether.
Working from a bungalow in Santa Monica, Calif., they pitched the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and others. No one was interested.
The problem was that Tether, like other cryptocurrencies, broke just about every rule in banking. Banks keep track of everyone who has an account and where they send their money, allowing law enforcement agencies to track transactions by criminals.
Tether Holdings checks the identity of people who buy coins directly from the company, but once the currency is out in the world, it can be transferred anonymously, just by sending a code.
A drug lord can hold millions of Tethers in a digital wallet and send it to a terrorist without anyone knowing.
The concern isn’t theoretical. Zhao Dong, a prominent Tether trader in China, is serving three years in prison there for using the currency to launder $480 million for illegal casinos.
And in May 2013 the creator of a proto-stablecoin, Liberty Reserve, was arrested in Spain and eventually pleaded guilty to a money-laundering conspiracy charge.
Prosecutors said the anonymous online currency appealed to scammers, credit card thieves, hackers, and other criminals.
“The U.S. will come after Tether in due time,” Liberty Reserve founder Arthur Budovsky wrote me in an email from a Florida federal prison where he’s serving a 20-year sentence. “Almost feel sorry for them.”
This prospect caused Pierce and Collins to give up on Tether after about a year in 2015. But Potter, the exchange executive, was less worried about its legality, because, as he said on a 2019 podcast, his exchange was already operating in a gray area.
His boss there was Devasini, the former plastic surgeon. (Devasini is CFO on paper, but people who have dealt with the company say he’s in charge.)
Potter and Devasini agreed to buy their partners out of Tether for about what they’d put into it, less than $1 million. Pierce said he handed over his shares for free.
Then 50, Devasini was almost elderly by cryptobro standards. Property records show he split his time between Milan and Monaco, where his home overlooks the Mediterranean.
Pictures show a tall, handsome man with long, curly hair and a scarf wrapped around his neck.
He modeled for a photo exhibition at an art gallery in Milan in 2014, appearing in front of a mirror, his face half covered with shaving cream, looking into his own eyes with an expression that suggested he didn’t recognize himself.
The show was about turning points, and in an accompanying interview he said that his came in 1992, when he walked away from his career as a plastic surgeon. “All my work seemed like a scam, the exploitation of a whim,” he said.
He got into the low end of the electronics business, founding a series of tech companies that imported memory chips and set-top TV boxes.
He started an ping site in Italy and licensed a copy protection technology for adult DVDs, according to a press release announcing a special bonus scene in the 2008 film Young Harlots: In Detention.
In 2012 he invested in Bitfinex, then a nascent exchange that had been built by a young Frenchman who’d copied the source code from a defunct one. He soon became the de facto head of the company.
In early posts on the forum bitcointalk, Devasini called complaining customers whiners. “Are [you] just blowing hot air out of your mouth or you forgot to switch your brain on?” he asked one.
But compared with other exchanges, which tended to collapse after stealing or losing customers’ funds,
Bitfinex was pretty reliable. After about a third of its money was stolen in a hack in 2016, the exchange repaid customers.
Bitfinex and Tether struggled from the start to gain access to the regulated financial system. They’d resorted to a series of shaky workarounds to keep their bank accounts open—“lots of sort of cat-and-mouse tricks,” as Potter put it during an online chat with traders.
But as more people traded on Bitfinex, and other exchanges started accepting Tether’s currency, it got harder to fly under the radar.
By March 2017 more than $50 million in Tether was in circulation. The following month, the banks in Taiwan that Tether and Bitfinex had been using closed their accounts, which left Devasini’s executives so desperate that they considered chartering a jet and flying pallets of cash out of the country, according to a person with knowledge of the plan.
Eventually they found a startup in Puerto Rico, called Noble Bank International LLC, that was willing to work with them.
Its founder, John Betts, whom I met in Manhattan, puffed on a vape pen as he explained that Tether was a legitimate business, or at least had been when he was its banker:
“During the time Tether banked with Noble, we held in excess of 98% of their cash reserves and received and validated monthly statements from their other account.”
The Bitfinex Connection
From the start, cryptocurrencies have attracted skeptics who are just as fervent as the boosters I met in Miami, and in April 2017 they started coming for Tether.
That month, an anonymous critic on Twitter who goes by Bitfinex’ed claimed Tethers weren’t backed by anything at all.
He asked where the company was keeping its money and why it hadn’t produced audited financial statements.
“They are literally Dave & Busters/Chuck-e-Cheese Tokens,” Bitfinex’ed tweeted of the coins.
These claims, and others like them, circulated around the cryptocurrency world and eventually in Washington, where the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the FBI opened investigations.
Meanwhile, crypto trading boomed and the stablecoin grew more popular, with more than $1 billion worth in use by the end of 2017. That year, according to an investor presentation, Bitfinex made a $326 million profit.
Devasini’s share would have been more than $100 million. That made Tether and Bitfinex Noble’s biggest customers, and Betts felt Devasini was putting the bank at risk by allowing rumors about Tether’s reserves to spread.
He told me he urged Devasini to hire an accounting firm to produce a full audit to reassure the public, but Devasini said Tether didn’t need to go that far to respond to critics.
Devasini may have had reason to be cagey. Tether’s website had long displayed a pledge: “Every Tether is always backed 1-to-1, by traditional currency held in our reserves.”
But, according to Betts, Devasini wanted to use those reserves to make investments. If the $1 billion in reserves Tether said it had at the time earned returns at, say, 1% a year, that would be $10 million in annual profit.
Betts saw this as a conflict of interest for Devasini, since any investment gains would go to Devasini and his partners, but Tether holders would potentially lose everything if the investments went bad.
When Betts objected, Devasini accused him of stealing. “Giancarlo wanted a higher rate of return,” Betts said. “I repeatedly implored him to be patient and do the work with auditors.”
Tether’s leader wanted to pull the company’s cash from Noble. Potter disagreed, so Devasini and his other partners bought him out in June 2018, for $300 million.
That same month, Betts stepped down from his position at Noble for what he said were health and family reasons.
His partners would later accuse him in court of spending company funds on high-end hotels and trips on private jets; he said the travel was for work. In any event, Devasini got his way and withdrew his deposits, and the bank failed soon after.
Devasini faced another crisis that summer. His Bitfinex exchange had entrusted $850 million to a Panamanian money-transfer service, Crypto Capital Corp., one of the workarounds for its banking issues, according to documents later revealed in a lawsuit filed by New York’s attorney general.
But suddenly, Crypto Capital refused to send the money back to Bitfinex, leaving it unable to pay customers who wanted to withdraw their cash, the documents show.
It was a dangerous situation—if the public found out, it could set off a bank run.So Devasini made various excuses to customers, while begging Crypto Capital to send some cash.
His chats were published as part of the lawsuit. “We are seeing massive withdrawals and we are not able to face them anymore unless we can transfer some money,” Devasini wrote to Crypto Capital’s founder in 2018.
Another time, he said: “Please understand all this could be extremely dangerous for everybody, the entire crypto community.”
It turned out that prosecutors in Poland had seized Crypto Capital’s accounts.
They’d later allege that Crypto Capital laundered money for customers, including Colombian drug cartels. U.S. prosecutors would charge Oz Yosef, one of its principals, with bank fraud.
He hasn’t responded to the charges in court. (Hoegner, the lawyer for Tether and Bitfinex, said the firms were tricked by Crypto Capital and believed it was following regulations.)
Rather than disclose that Bitfinex was insolvent, Devasini filled the hole with loans from Tether’s reserves, which left the stablecoin partially unbacked.
In February 2019, Tether revised its 1-to-1 pledge, changing its website to read:
“Every Tether is always 100% backed by our reserves, which include traditional currency and cash equivalents and, from time to time, may include other assets and receivables from loans made by Tether to third parties, which may include affiliated entities.”
That change signaled that Tether was lending from its reserves, but few noticed at the time. The loans only became known to the public in April 2019, when New York sued Tether, seeking to force it to turn over documents.
Surprisingly, given that Devasini had lost much of his customers’ money, the cryptocurrency world didn’t lose confidence in him.
In May 2019 a coalition of major traders bailed out Bitfinex, investing an additional $1 billion in the business.
The exchange used the money to pay back the loans to Tether Holdings.
The next year, when crypto trading took off during the pandemic, the company grew exponentially, selling 17 billion Tethers. It has sold more than 48 billion so far this year.
In February, Tether agreed to pay $18.5 million to settle the New York suit without admitting wrongdoing.
Supporters spun this as an endorsement of Tether—would the state attorney general settle if Tether were a massive fraud?—but in Washington, investigations continued.
Earlier this year, prosecutors from the U.S. Department of Justice sent letters to Devasini and other Tether executives informing them that they’re targets of a criminal bank fraud investigation.
The government is examining whether they deceived banks years ago to open accounts.
“Tether routinely has open dialogue with law enforcement agencies, including the DOJ, as part of our commitment to cooperation and transparency,” the company said in a statement.
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Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions? @BW [conclude]
World Of Finance
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The Paper Trail
Tether still hasn’t disclosed where it’s keeping its money. The only financial institution I could find that was willing to say it’s currently working with the company was Deltec Bank & Trust in the Bahamas.
I met the bank’s chairman, Jean Chalopin, in Deltec’s office, on the top floor of a six-story building ringed with palm trees in a nice part of Nassau.
In a past life, Chalopin co-created the cartoon Inspector Gadget, and a painting of the 1980s trenchcoat-wearing cyborg policeman hung on his office door.
Magazine covers featuring Chalopin’s wife, a former model, and his daughter, a singer, were displayed on a shelf.
Now 71, Chalopin has a mop of red hair and wears rimless round glasses. As we sat down, he pulled a book about financial fraud, Misplaced Trust, off the shelf. “People do funny things for money,” he said, cryptically.
He made himself a cup of tea and told me he’d come to the Bahamas in 1987 after selling his first animation studio, DIC Entertainment.
The sale had made him rich—he bought a castle outside Paris and a pink colonial in the Bahamas, which later served as the villain’s home in the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale. He banked at Deltec, then befriended its aging founder.
The bank, which once conducted investment banking throughout Latin America, had dwindled to just a few billion dollars of assets.
Chalopin invested, eventually becoming the biggest shareholder. Bahamian banks are often depicted in movies as a haven for money launderers, but Chalopin said Deltec’s edge was customer service, not secrecy.
He decided to seek out clients in new lines of business, such as biotech, gene editing, and artificial intelligence, that were too small to get personal attention from bigger banks.
Another area was cryptocurrencies. “Crypto was like, ‘Don’t touch, it’s very dangerous,’ ” he said. “Well, if you dig a little bit deeper, you realize it’s not, actually.”
He said he was introduced to Devasini in 2017 by a customer who’d gotten rich from Bitcoin. Devasini cooked Chalopin a risotto lunch and impressed him with his forthrightness.
When they discovered that Devasini had grown up in the same Italian village as Chalopin’s mother, they began calling each other cugino (cousin).
Devasini bought a house near Chalopin’s in the Bahamas, and together they purchased and divided the waterfront lot between the two properties.
Chalopin told me Tether had been unfairly maligned. “There’s no agenda or plot,” he said. “They are not Enron or Madoff. When there’s a problem, they fix it honorably.”
Chalopin said he investigated Tether for months before taking the company on as a client in November 2018. He signed a letter vouching for its assets.
He was surprised that critics still insisted Tether’s currency was not backed by cash. “Frankly, the biggest thing was at the time ‘the money doesn’t exist,’ ” he said. “We knew the money exists! It was sitting here.”
But when I asked Chalopin if he knew for sure that Tether’s assets were fully secure now, he laughed.
It was a difficult question, he said. He only held cash and extremely low-risk bonds for Tether.
But recently the company had started using other banks to handle its money. Only a quarter of it—$15 billion or so—is still with Deltec. “I cannot speak about what I cannot know,” he said. “I can only control what’s with us.”
After I returned to the U.S., I obtained a document showing a detailed account of Tether Holdings’ reserves. It said they include billions of dollars of short-term loans to large Chinese companies—something money-market funds avoid.
And that was before one of the country’s largest property developers, China Evergrande Group, started to collapse. I also learned that Tether had made loans worth billions of dollars to other crypto companies, with Bitcoin as collateral.
One of them is Celsius Network Ltd., a giant quasi-bank for cryptocurrency investors, its founder Alex Mashinsky told me. He said he pays an interest rate of 5% to 6% on loans of about 1 billion Tethers.
Tether has denied holding any Evergrande debt, but Hoegner, Tether’s lawyer, declined to say whether Tether had other Chinese commercial paper.
He said the vast majority of its commercial paper has high grades from credit ratings firms, and that its secured loans are low-risk, because borrowers have to put up Bitcoin that’s worth more than what they borrow.
“All Tether tokens are fully backed, as we have consistently demonstrated,” the company said in a statement posted on its website after the story was published.
Tether’s Chinese investments and crypto-backed loans are potentially significant. If Devasini is taking enough risk to earn even a 1% return on Tether’s entire reserves, that would give him and his partners a $690 million annual profit.
But if those loans fail, even a small percentage of them, one Tether would become worth less than $1. Any investors holding Tethers would then have an incentive to redeem them; if others did it first, the money could dry up. The bank run would be on.
The officials who gathered in July at the Treasury Department are discussing regulating Tether like a bank, which would force Devasini to finally show where the money is, or even undermining it by issuing an official U.S. stablecoin.
The strange thing is that, at least for now, most participants in the crypto market, including some very large and sophisticated operators, don’t seem to care about any of the risks.
Just last month, traders bought $3 billion in new Tethers, presumably sending billions of perfectly good U.S. dollars to the Inspector Gadget co-creator’s Bahamian bank in exchange for digital tokens conjured by the Mighty Ducks guy and run by executives who are targets of a U.S. criminal investigation.
The situation has parallels to the wildcat banking days. The customers patronizing those not-banks weren’t rubes; sketchy notes were the only money they could find.
But that ended when, in the early days of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln started printing federal paper money and instituted a prohibitively high tax on other currency.
The wildcat notes, which once fueled frontier cities’ economies, fell into disuse.
Some gave them to children to play with. In rural areas, they were used for wallpaper. —With Daniele Lepido, Alex Harris, Joanna Ossinger, Amanda Wang, and Allen Wan
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Brock Pierce, co-founder of Tether.PHOTOGRAPHER: ERICK MARCISCANO/GETTY IMAGES @BW
World Of Finance
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Reeve Collins, Tether’s first CEO.SOURCE: TETHER @BW
World Of Finance
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Giancarlo Devasini, Tether’s chief financial officer.PHOTOGRAPHER: ALBERTO GIULIANI @BW
World Of Finance
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Jean Chalopin, chairman of Deltec Bank & Trust.PHOTOGRAPHER: REBECCA SAPP/GETTY IMAGES @BW
World Of Finance
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These Folks all look like they could have been in Boogie Nights
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09-MAY-2021 :: The Lotos-eaters
World Of Finance
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08-FEB-2021 :: The Markets Are Wilding
World Of Finance
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Commodity Markets at a Glance WSJ
Commodities
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*BALTIC DRY INDEX HIT THE HIGHEST LEVEL SINCE AUGUST 2008 @AlessioUrban
Commodities
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Gold has followed inflation very closely since the GFC. After the pandemic lows, it front-ran the rise in CPI and got ahead of itself. We are now on the other side of this. @TaviCosta
Commodities
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Gold looks fundamentally cheap and technically oversold while inflation continues to gain traction.
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Gold INO 1758.50
Commodities
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U.S. crude nearing $80 @DavidInglesTV [I think its going to a $100.00]
Minerals, Oil & Energy
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.@FAO food price index, which tracks international prices of the most globally traded food commodities, averaged 130.0 points last month, the highest reading since September 2011, according to the agency's data.
Commodities
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The figure compared with a revised 128.5 for August. The August figure was previously given as 127.4.
On a year-on-year basis, prices were up 32.8% in September.
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Agricultural commodity prices have risen steeply in the past year, fuelled by harvest setbacks and Chinese demand.Food prices @AlessioUrban
Commodities
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In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.
Commodities
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23-NOV 2015 The new temperature normal is surely going to play havoc with food supplies and soft commodity prices.
Commodities
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"Bread, freedom and social justice" were the three main goals of the 2011 uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak
Commodities
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Mozambique bread riots may be warning sign on African food security Africa Monitor @csmonitor By Aly-Khan Satchu, September 6, 2010
Commodities
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Global food markets are but the perturbation of a butterflys's wing away from a serious tipping point.
Given the fragility of the food markets, Maputo might well be a shot across the bows of many regimes, who have yet to secure access to sufficient food at sufficiently low prices for their people.
Failure to execute on this front, surely imperils many.
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23-NOV 2015 I cannot help feeling we are like frogs in boiling water. We have created massive interference in the "cosmic tuning" phenomenon
Commodities
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Our high-frequency trackers of portfolio flows to EM equities and local bonds, which map well to official BoP data, show outflows of more than $2bn from EM ex China last week. @SergiLanauIIF
Emerging Markets
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Flows year to date are negative too. Small current account deficits mitigate the impact of weak flows.
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#COVID19 update in Africa @AfricaCDC
Africa
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Since the latest peak early July, the number of weekly cases has been decreasing continuously for three months; @WHO
Africa
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African Region .@WHO Weekly epidemiological update on COVID-19 - 5 October 2021
Africa
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The African Region reported over 49 000 new cases and just under 1900 new deaths, decreases of 43% and 25% respectively as compared to the previous week.
The declining trend in cases reported in the region and observed since early July continued this week.
While this trend is true for most countries in the region, in the past week, seven countries reported increases of over 20% in new cases as compared to the previous week.
The highest numbers of new cases were reported from
South Africa (9637 new cases; 16.2 new cases per 100 000 population; a 38% decrease)
Ethiopia (7127 new cases; 6.2 new cases per 100 000; a 19% decrease)
Lesotho* (6943 new cases; 324.1 new cases per 100 000).
The highest numbers of new deaths were reported from
South Africa (752 new deaths; 1.3 new deaths per 100 000 population; a 15% decrease)
Ethiopia (306 new deaths; <1 new death per 100 000; a 20% increase)
Lesotho* (231 new deaths; 10.8 new deaths per 100 000)
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Africa is currently reporting a million new infections about every 49 days @ReutersGraphics
Africa
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Angola Algeria & Lesotho at peak
Countries reporting the most new infections each day *
ALGERIA 4,000
SOUTH AFRICA 1,247
ETHIOPIA 1,002
LESOTHO 995
LIBYA 835
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19-JUL-2021 Many Folks seem to feel we are in the final Act of the COVID-19 Play. I would be limit short that particular narrative.
Africa
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‘We haven’t been spared, we’re just not counting’: Sudan’s hidden Covid death toll @Telegraph
Africa
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On average, the general government gross debt is projected at 71 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) for 2021, an increase of 30 percentage points of GDP since 2013 @Worldbank #AfricasPulse report:
Africa
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Ex-#UN boss @SirMarkLowcock #Ethiopia under #NobelPeacePrize laureate #AbiyAhmed a blueprint in on how to destroy a country, concluding: «Scenario planners in leading countries and institutions now think Ethiopia may disintegrate.» @KjetilTronvoll
Africa
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How to Destroy a Country: Does Ethiopia Have a Future? @SirMarkLowcock
Africa
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Here’s an easy five-point plan for the leadership of a country which has emerged from civil war and dire poverty over recent decades and now wants to destroy itself.
First, pick a fight with a corner of your territory run by a previously powerful minority ethnic group. Cut off their resources. Provoke them into a response. Send in the army. Invite a neighbouring army in to rape and kill civilians and destroy their crops, businesses, schools, and clinics.
Persuade the victims they are about to be subject to a genocide and promote hate speech about them among the rest of the population.
Second, divert resources from other parts of your country with a history of ethnic tensions. That will stir up things there too.
Third, tank the economy. Print money, order weapons you can’t afford from abroad, aggravate inflation and, especially if you are landlocked and dependent on imports, incite attacks on your supply lines.
Fourth, alienate your most important international supporters, particularly those you rely on for finance.
Public attacks on their leaders work quite well for this, as does whipping up antipathy towards them among your own population. Buying weapons from their enemies is good too.
Fifth, antagonise a few of your immediate neighbours. Inflaming arguments over disputed land is one option; giving them reason to think you plan a grab on shared water resources is another.
I don’t think Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and other leaders in Ethiopia actually want to destroy their country.
But an intelligent observer from outer space with an insight into the human condition might, having watched what has happened in the last 12 months, easily conclude that they do.
Let’s run through the list to see how the five-point plan has been executed.
It was foolish to send Ethiopian Federal troops to Tigray last November in an attempt to resolve what was essentially a political argument.
It was beyond reckless to invite the Eritrean army in to help.
And it was criminal to abet and incite the campaign of mass rape, killings, and destruction of property that followed.
It was also counterproductive: the population of Tigray concluded they faced a genocide and reacted to defend and protect themselves accordingly.
Ethnic tensions have been high across much of Ethiopia in recent years.
It is said that years ago, Nelson Mandela tried to persuade then Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi that he should be trying to create a country in which people from the many tribes and groups that make up the country see themselves as Ethiopians first, and members of their ethnic group a distant second.
The examples of Tanzania under Nyerere and (more controversially) Rwanda under Kagame were cited. For whatever reason, it did not happen.
This has proved Ethiopia’s Achilles heel. Meles was, with difficulty, able to keep the lid on. But things crumbled after his death in 2012.
In early 2018 I met people from towns along the border between the Oromia and Somali regions in south-eastern Ethiopia who had just been displaced by fighting over resources and political power.
In January 2019, in the south of the country, I met some of the nearly one million people forced to flee violence over access to land around Gedeo and West Guji.
There are many other conflict areas, especially in the western half of the country.
Federal forces deployed to maintain order have since been diverted to Tigray. Watching what is happening, groups elsewhere have armed their own militias ready to defend their interests. Hardliners have gained influence all over.
Notwithstanding the huge economic progress Ethiopia has made over the last 30 years, which I recalled in The Washington Post nearly a year ago, the macroeconomic position has always been a juggling act between maximising growth and avoiding over-heating.
Inflation, foreign exchange, and fiscal risks, already growing because of the pandemic, are now acute.
Meanwhile, the reaction of the international community to events in Tigray has evolved from concern and alarm to threats and sanctions as the crisis has grown and Abiy has continued to throw fuel on the flames.
Western countries are (whether they should be or not) proud of the contribution they have made to progress in Ethiopia in recent decades, especially what their development aid has helped achieve.
Using the national propaganda machine to whip up popular feeling against them, as the authorities in Addis Ababa have done in recent months, is a provocation.
If the calculation is that others, like China, will compensate for lost resources from western countries and international institutions, it is quickly going to be proved wrong.
The World Bank alone has been giving Ethiopia more than a billion dollars a year in grants and very cheap loans in recent years, most of it financed by taxpayers in North America and Europe.
No-one will replace that if it dries up. Even worse, widely circulating rumours that Abiy has bought attack drones from Iran make it look like western money is subsidising the Iranian defence industry.
And closer to home, Abiy’s need for support from the Amhara population complicates the scope for de-escalating the border dispute with Sudan over Al-Fashaga, an area covering 600,000 acres of fertile land and river systems in western Ethiopia.
Most of the Ethiopians living there are Amhara. Likewise, the completion and full operation of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, one of the world’s great current infrastructure projects, which I visited in 2016, is now at risk.
The project, to which many Ethiopians have contributed their own money from the little they have, is a national totem.
It is designed to be the largest hydroelectric power plant in Africa, and the sixth largest in the world, relieving the country’s acute energy shortage.
Regulating the flow of the Nile more consistently through the year, as the dam could do, would help both Sudan and Egypt.
But concern over the rate at which it is filled and fear that water might be diverted for agriculture in Ethiopia have put the Egyptians on red alert.
A previously unknown armed group has become active in the local area. This should all be soluble. But the febrile atmosphere has heightened tensions.
All this threatens the stability of the whole country, but the immediate priority must be averting imminent catastrophe in Tigray.
In June, in my last few days working for the UN, I made clear I believed there was then famine in northern Ethiopia.
I said a re-run of 1984, when a million Ethiopians died in what may have been the world’s worst famine of the last 50 years and the regime responsible for it was subsequently deposed, was not fanciful.
A cessation of hostilities and access for humanitarian agencies could prevent that. But time was running out.
African sentiment has recently swung against Abiy. In a carefully crafted statement in late August on behalf of all the African countries on the UN Security Council, the Kenyans, who had been among those previously biting their tongues, called on him to accept offers of mediation.
They urged the government to scale back ethnic attacks and remove barriers to a political dialogue. They warned of an uncontrollable spread of violence and bloodshed.
They urged that Tigrayan forces, which had surprised many by their success in defending themselves, pull back too.
They called for unfettered humanitarian access and a resumption of basic services to the people of Tigray.
They urged the west to provide humanitarian assistance and, once a mediation effort was properly underway, offer economic support too.
And, importantly, they explicitly rebuffed those in Ethiopia calling for war to be given a chance.
But the penny hasn’t dropped. The screws on Tigray have been turned further in recent weeks.
Fresh recruits to the Ethiopian military, summoned by mass mobilisation campaigns praying on their patriotism, have been deployed in human wave attacks against Tigrayan defensive lines.
This has so far failed: the main result is tragic piles of corpses of young men and boys.
But the Tigrayan population of 6 million face mass starvation now.
Their farms, businesses, and schools were destroyed, and their access to banks, electricity, water, and health services cut off, in the early months of the crisis.
The government claims to be willing to let aid in, but its flunkies harass aid workers crossing lines and intimidate truck drivers in UN convoys, so many are now too terrified to show up for work.
Barely ten per cent of the food needed is getting through. Recent eyewitness reports from aid workers describe people eating nothing but green leaves for days, exponential increases in starvation in both rural and urban areas, and even the children of the staff of the main hospital in Mekelle, the regional capital, showing signs of malnutrition.
Humanitarian workers managing to get seats on the rare flights to the region have, as the Associated Press recently reported, been told they cannot bring dental floss, multi-vitamins, personal medicines or things, like flash drives, that could have a use in documenting what is going on.
All this reveals – or confirms – that Abiy has two objectives in Tigray.
The first is to starve the population either into subjugation or out of existence.
The second is to do that without attracting the global opprobrium that would still, even in today’s fractured geopolitical environment, arise from deliberately causing a massive famine taking millions of lives.
It is also clear that the second objective is less important than the first.
That is the message to be taken from the threatened expulsion last week of UN humanitarian leaders from Ethiopia.
Abiy would rather take the criticism for that than allow them to see what he is trying to do.
The irony, well-informed experts privately say, is that Abiy’s game plan cannot work. If he tries and fails to destroy Tigray, he will be destroyed himself.
If he succeeds, he will never survive the backlash that will follow. His only out is to take up the African Union’s call for dialogue. But does he see that?
Scenario planners in leading countries and institutions now think Ethiopia may disintegrate.
They assess the consequences to be very bad. For everyone. Not just in Ethiopia, but further afield too. Is it still possible to pull back from the brink?
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
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‘The genie out of the bottle’ @AfricanBizMag
Africa
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It’s impossible for the state to manage a guerrilla war up there and at the same time manage to control the rest of the country.
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9-JUL-2021 :: The Contagion will surely boomerang and destabilise the Horn of Africa for the forseeable future.
Africa
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If I could I would be limit short the Ethiopian Birr [It trades at 60 to the $ on the black market]
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#NobelPrize laureate #AbiyAhmed claims that his ascent to power in #Ethiopia is #God’s will, based on a prophecy his mother made when he was a child. @KjetilTronvoll
Africa
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Any politician asserting #religious legitimacy arguing they are doing God’s work, presents an ersatz claim.
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PM Abiy His inner war cabinet includes Evangelicals who are counseling him he is "doing Christ's work"; that his faith is being "tested". @RAbdiAnalyst
Africa
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The Tigray War has cost $2.5 billion and international investors are staying away, according to Louw Nel, a senior political analyst at NKC African Economics CGTN
Africa
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November 8, 2020 Ethiopia which was once the Poster child of the African Renaissance
Africa
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South Africa All Share Bloomberg
Africa
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Dollar versus Rand Chart INO 14.99
Africa
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Egypt Pound versus The Dollar Chart INO 15.70
Africa
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Nigeria’s foreign reserve received a boost of USD2.8bn in Sept 2021 to close at USD36.8bn according to data from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). @ChiedzaMadzima
Africa
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Factors behind the boost: rally in oil prices, the ban on forex sales to bureau de change operators, recent eurobond issuance
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Nigeria Targets 4.2% Economic Growth in Expanded Spending Plan @markets
Africa
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Nigeria’s government finalized plans to ramp up spending and borrowing as it grapples with reviving an economy that shrank by the most in a quarter century last year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Expenditure is projected at 16.4 trillion naira ($39.7 billion) next year, or 17.7% more than initially proposed, President Muhammadu Buhari said in a budget presentation to lawmakers on Thursday.
The increased spending will help propel economic growth, forecast at 4.2% in 2021, Buhari said.
The government expects to raise 10.13 trillion naira in revenue, 3.15 trillion naira of which will be generated from crude sales and taxes.
The budget assumed an oil price of $57 a barrel, and that the country will pump an average of 1.88 million barrels a day. Nigeria is Africa’s largest crude producer.
The spending increase will widen the budget deficit to 6.3 trillion naira, or 3.4% of gross domestic product, exceeding a legal threshold of 3% provided by Nigeria fiscal responsibility law.
“We need to exceed this threshold considering our collective desire to continue tackling the existential security challenges facing our country,” he said.
To plug the funding gap, the government will raise an additional 5 trillion naira in loans.
Other incomes of 90.73 billion naira from sales of government assets and a drawdown of 1.16 trillion naira on loans secured for specific development projects will also help close the gap.
Limits imposed by OPEC+, production cuts and operational challenges could hinder efforts to raise more revenue from the oil industry, Ibunkunoluwa Omoyeni, an economist at Vetiva Capital Management Ltd., said by email.
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Ghana Stock Exchange Composite Index Bloomberg
Africa
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#Zambia’s September reading cemented our view of ongoing disinflation hereafter @OEAfrica
Africa
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#Zambia’s September reading cemented our view of ongoing disinflation hereafter, as exchange rate pass through effects and food price dynamics are forecast to outweigh upward pressure arising from international oil price developments.
Conclusions
Probably the best T-BILL Trade in the World in 2021
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23-AUG-2021 :: Finally I want to show you why Frontier markets are all about Politics
Africa
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Now that would have been a great Pairs Trade.
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@HHichilema Zambia
Africa
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Just before gang of YK92 destroyed Kenya and a Ksh500 note was made and even named after one of them. From Ksh 28 to the $ we ended up with Ksh 59 True story I saw the nightmare unfold. @mohammedhersi
World Currencies
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Just before gang of YK92 destroyed Kenya and a Ksh500 note was made and even named after one of them. From Ksh 28 to the $ we ended up with Ksh 59 and that is when the rain started beating Kenya. Loudly crying faceMan facepalming. True story I saw the nightmare unfold.
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Coffee earnings grew by 52% to Sh15.2 billion at year end September 30 on high demand and high prices for Kenyan coffee fueled by shortage in Brazilian coffee due to poor weather @moneyacademyKE
Kenyan Economy
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Kenya Shilling versus The Dollar Live ForexPros
World Currencies
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Nairobi All Share Bloomberg
N.S.E General
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Nairobi ^NSE20 Bloomberg
N.S.E General
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Every .@NSE_PLC Listed Share can be interrogated here
N.S.E General
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