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Telegraph – The head of China’s central bank has given the strongest signal yet that the country will move away from pegging its currency to the dollar, but he said any changes would be gradual. At the annual session of the legislative National People’s Congress in Beijing, Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People’s Bank of China, said that the days of the “special yuan” policy were numbered. He described the dollar peg as a “temporary” response to the global financial crisis, but gave no timescale for any change in policy. The currency has been pegged at about 6.83 yuan per dollar since July 2008. Read Article
BBC – The Brazilian government has announced trade sanctions against a variety of American goods in retaliation for illegal US subsidies to cotton farmers. The World Trade Organization (WTO) approved the sanctions in a rare move. Brazil published a list of 100 US goods that would be subject to import tariffs in 30 days, unless the two governments reached a last-minute accord. It said it regretted the sanctions, but that eight years of litigation had failed to produce a result. Read article
Guardian – An Observer investigation reveals how rich countries faced by a global food shortage now farm an area double the size of the UK to guarantee supplies for their citizens. We turned off the main road to Awassa, talked our way past security guards and drove a mile across empty land before we found what will soon be Ethiopia’s largest greenhouse. Nestling below an escarpment of the Rift Valley, the development is far from finished, but the plastic and steel structure already stretches over 20 hectares – the size of 20 football pitches. Read article
Washington Post – President Obama’s proposed budget would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, congressional budget analysts said Friday. Proposed tax cuts for the middle class account for nearly a third of that shortfall. The 10-year outlook released by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is somewhat gloomier than White House projections, which found that Obama’s budget request would produce deficits that would add about $8.5 trillion to the national debt by 2020. Read Article
Business Insider – Is your nation under massive financial pressure due to deteriorating sovereign debt ratings?
Rising interest costs got you down? Rather than having to actually tackle your mounting debt problems, here’s an innovative solution from some Eurozone finance ministers — create your own, friendlier credit ratings. Read Article
Bloomberg — BP Plc and Exxon Mobil Corp. took the best deal they could get in Iraq last year when they won the largest oil contracts since addam Hussein was toppled in 2003. Oil companies may wait a long time to get a better one. Parliamentary elections may produce a weak or unstable government incapable of tendering new oil contracts, said Samuel Ciszuk, a London-based analyst at IHS Global Insight. He said he does expect the 10 technical-services contracts won by Exxon, BP and 20 other companies to be honored. Read Article
Daily Express – EUROPE’S chief bureaucrat last night provoked fury after threatening to use the “full force” of the Lisbon Treaty to impose economic control over every EU nation.European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso claimed that financial stability was so critical that sweeping new powers were needed for Eurocrats in Brussels to meddle in the economies of all EU members.But his threat sparked an angry backlash from critics of an ever- growing Brussels bureaucracy. Read Article
BBC – Voters in Iceland have overwhelmingly rejected proposals to pay the UK and the Netherlands in the wake of collapse of the Icesave bank.With a third of results counted, 93% of voters said “No” in a referendum. Iceland’s prime minister says her government will remain in office and continue to seek a repayment deal. The British and Dutch governments want reimbursement for the 3.8bn euros (£3.4bn; $5.2bn) they paid out in compensation to customers in 2008. Read Article
“Nothing to fear in God; Nothing to feel in death; Good can be attained; Evil can be endured”
- Epicurus, 3rd century BCE
AOL News – Even as the U.S. pushes for tougher international sanctions aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear program, a government investigation suggests Washington is doing a lousy job policing the sanctions already in place.
The Government Accountability Office said that the government hasn’t been able to prevent even dual-use and military goods from traveling from the U.S. to Iran, and that the Treasury Department’s statistics on trade with Iran include goods that didn’t even go there. The GAO also found that the department’s paper-based export-licensing system is too slow to give Customs and Border Protection officials the data they need for effective inspections at U.S. ports. Read article
Telegraph – Heydar Aliyev, the son of Ilham Aliyev, the oil-rich country’s president, allegedly spent almost £30 million (US$44 million) on nine waterfront mansions in the southern Gulf emirate earlier this year, reports said. The boy, who was 11 at the time, made the purchase in the Palm Jumeirah development over two weeks, the Washington Post reported on Friday. Heydar’s name and his date of birth appeared on Dubai Land Department records, which were obtained by the paper. The details listed on the property records were the same as those of the son of the former Soviet Republic’s president, whose annual salary is about £150,000 ($228,000). Read article
New York Times – As Greece’s debt troubles batter the euro, Britain has done its utmost to stay above the fray. The pound fell to $1.4954 on Tuesday, its lowest level against the dollar in months. Until now, that is. Suddenly, investors are asking if Britain may soon face its own sovereign debt crisis if the government fails to slash its growing budget deficits quickly enough to escape the contagious fears of financial markets. The pound fell to $1.4954 on Tuesday, its lowest level against the dollar in nearly 10 months. The yield on 10-year government bonds, known as gilts, slid as investors fretted that Parliament would be too fragmented after a crucial election in May to whip Britain’s messy finances back into shape. Read Article
Politico – Senate Democrats are furious that the vast majority of grants from the clean-energy program from last year’s stimulus have been awarded to foreign companies. Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jon Tester of Montana announced Wednesday a new initiative to require the “Buy America” provision of the stimulus to all programs, not just the government ones. A study done by the Investigative Reporting Workshop found that 79 percent of the $2 billion in clean-energy grants allocated since Sept. 1, 2009, has gone to foreign wind companies. Read article
Reuters – Icelanders are set to reject the terms for repaying Anglo-Dutch debts in a referendum on Saturday, forcing new negotiations with creditors and delaying financial aid the country needs to fix its shattered economy. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – The European Union is drawing up plans for its first direct tax with a “green” levy on petrol, coal and natural gas that could cost British consumers up to £3 billion. The European Union is drawing up plans for its first direct tax. Proposals expected to be announced next month would give the EU its first funding which would not come from national governments. Algirdas Semeta, the new European commissioner for taxation, is planning a “minimum rate of tax on carbon” across the whole EU as a “priority”. Read Article
Ed – Using the cult of CO2-hate as a trigger for another tiny step towards a country called Europe, a country that already has a President, a Parliament, a currency, a central bank, a national anthem and the beginnings of an army……and a step closer to towards the end game of a world government for the benefit of the few over the many.
Daily Telegraph – More than nine million savers have seen a “severe” drop in their income since the Bank of England cut interest rates to their lowest level exactly one year ago, it has been disclosed. It is equivalent to one in five Britons, according to the research by campaign group Save Our Savers. During the past year, savers have been hit by “pitiful” interest rates, it said. The reduction in rates means many savers no longer receive a real return on their money once inflation and tax is taken into account. Read Article
Times Online – China has unveiled a 7.5 per cent increase in its military spending for this year, the first time in nearly two decades that the budget has grown by less than double-digit figures. The slowdown in defence expenditure growth surprised international experts who had expected a slight decrease from last year but were forecasting a rise in the region of 14.5 per cent. Read article
Daily Telegraph – The Tories are planning to tackle one of the heaviest burdens on business by scrapping the existing PAYE (”pay-as-you-earn”) scheme in the most radical shake up of the tax system since the Second World War. Read Article
Ed – However though the opposition Conservatives are selling it as a way to reduce the red tape burden on small businesses (classic Problem, Reaction, Solution), in reality if the Tax Office has an electronic trojan in your bank account it will move on from deducting from your salary to taking a cut of your eBay sales and tracking all British financial transactions.
New York Times – In an effort to secure Republican support for an overhaul of financial regulations, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee on Monday proposed giving the Federal Reserve responsibility for protecting consumers from abusive and deceptive financial products. The new plan, described by an official briefed on the negotiations, was the latest iteration of an idea that has divided members of the committee, largely along party lines, and has been the major barrier in the path toward the most significant overhaul of banking rules since the Depression, a priority of the Obama administration. Read Article
Ed – Not only therefore would the wolves have the keys to the chicken coop, but they would also be appointed gamekeeper too.
Irish Independent – A revolution will erupt if billions of euro more in taxpayers’ money is handed over to Anglo Irish Bank, Enda Kenny has warned. The Fine Gael leader said people can no longer tolerate massive public funding of the nationalised bank as it stands.Expected record losses at the bank, to be announced later this month, have fuelled speculation it will seek another six billion euro from the Government, on top of the four billion it has already pumped in. Read Article
Bloomberg — George Soros is helping drive up gold prices by doubling his bet in a market even he considers a “bubble” as Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Barclays Capital and HSBC Holdings Plc predict more gains before it bursts. Soros Fund Management LLC, which manages about $25 billion, increased its investment in SPDR Gold Trust, the world’s largest exchange-traded fund for the metal, by 152 percent in the fourth quarter, a Feb. 16 Securities and Exchange Commission filing shows. While prices have fallen 9.2 percent since reaching a record on Dec. 3, 15 of 22 analysts in a Bloomberg survey say gold will reach a new high, with the median forecast predicting a 17 percent advance to as much as $1,300 an ounce this year. Read Article
Ed – With the coming inflationary crisis in the USA & UK (due to significant ‘quantitative easing’ over the last 2 years – in other words printing lots of extra money) the smart money will go to the safest bet there has always been in such times, gold.
Bloomberg – A few miles beyond an irrigated golf course on the outskirts of Damascus, scores of refugees fleeing drought in Syria’s northeastern breadbasket have settled into tents on a rocky field. “Our wells are dry and the rains don’t come,” said Ahmed Abu Hamed Mohieddin, a wheat farmer from the town of Qamishli in the Fertile Crescent, a rich agricultural area stretching from Iraq to Israel. “We cannot depend on God’s will for our crops. We come to the city, where the money is.” He and three sons work as porters in the capital’s vegetable markets. They are among about 300,000 families driven to Damascus, Aleppo and other cities in one of the “largest internal displacements in the Middle East in recent years,” according to a Feb. 17 report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Read Article
Ed – It should also be noted that Syria has an estimated 1.2 million Iraqi refugees living inside its borders currently
De Spiegel - With Greek finances dragging down the euro, calls for coordinated fiscal policy within the common currency zone have become more frequent. Now, Germany and France have presented a paper outlining what such a regime might look like,” reports Spiegel Online, outlining the move towards a centrally planned economy with Brussels exercising complete control over of the financial affairs of member states in a shocking lurch towards economic fascism. Chair of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker, who received the new proposal from German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble and French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, highlighted the need for a “European economic government” to solve the Greece debt crisis Read Article
Ed – Exactly the turn of events that we predicted would happen on 6th February
Reuters – Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou said on Tuesday his country was fighting for survival against bankruptcy and urged civil servants and pensioners to accept sacrifices to save the debt-burdened nation. In a dramatic speech to his Socialist PASOK party on the eve of a cabinet meeting expected to approve new austerity measures, Papandreou said: “I will fight to save the fatherland from whatever the nightmare possibility of bankruptcy might entail.” Under pressure to meet European Union demands to find up to 4.8 billion euros ($6.5 billion) in additional savings before he visits Germany on Friday, he played up the risk of default, saying speculators had made borrowing costs prohibitive. Read Article
Washington Post – A blizzard of bank notes is flying out of Afghanistan — often in full view of customs officers at the Kabul airport — as part of a cash exodus that is confounding U.S. officials and raising concerns about the money’s origin. The cash, estimated to total well over $1 billion a year, flows mostly to the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, where many wealthy Afghans now park their families and funds, according to U.S. and Afghan officials. So long as departing cash is declared at the airport here, its transfer is legal. Read article
