Showing posts with label Qatar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Qatar. Show all posts
Monday, July 13, 2026
Friday, July 3, 2026
Wednesday, June 10, 2026
When the going gets tough, the weak have to sell their gold, or hinder its purchase
As gold’s tumble continues, traders bet the pain may last for two more years
... “Turkey’s central bank is selling gold and buying dollars trying to support the lira, and the gulf nations – Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia – they need the money for the war so they’ve been selling gold, too,” Nigam Arora, founder of the Arora Report, said in a call. “At the same time, India’s raised duties on gold, and anyone who’s just watching charts, they had stops under $4,400 and had to start selling when it broke that level.“ ...
Meanwhile in India . . .
Reserve Bank of India’s forex defense tool surpasses $110 billion as rupee slides
The RBI's net-short dollar book has ballooned to record levels as India's central bank fights to stabilize a currency under siege from oil prices, geopolitical tensions, and capital outflows.
India’s central bank is burning through an unprecedented amount of financial ammunition to keep the rupee from cratering. The Reserve Bank of India’s forward dollar-selling contracts have crossed the $110 billion mark, reaching an estimated $110-115 billion in early June 2026, a record for the institution’s net-short dollar book.
Think of it like this: instead of selling dollars from its vault today and watching reserves drain in real time, the RBI is writing IOUs to sell dollars at a future date. It’s a way to defend the currency now while kicking the reserve hit down the road. The problem is that the IOUs are piling up fast, and the road isn’t getting any longer. ...
India imports roughly 85% of its crude oil needs, making it acutely sensitive to energy cost swings. When oil gets more expensive, India needs more dollars to pay for it, which weakens the rupee.
The forward sales strategy itself carries a subtle risk. Those contracts eventually mature, meaning the RBI will need to deliver dollars at the agreed-upon future dates. If the rupee hasn’t stabilized by then, the central bank could face a situation where it’s simultaneously defending the currency in real time and settling old commitments. ...
Wednesday, April 8, 2026
Saturday, March 28, 2026
Tanker traffic out of the Persian Gulf has been cut by 98% in one month because of the Iran War, effectively reducing the world's primary energy inputs through the Strait of Hormuz by 20%
The UAE is bypassing the Strait of Hormuz with 1.9 million barrels per day now coming out of Fujairah via its overland pipeline, and Saudi Arabia's overland pipeline west to Yanbu is moving about 4.5 million barrels per day out through the Red Sea, but that's not the 20 million barrels per day lost due to the war, and no LNG is moving at all.
Pakistan and Bangladesh get two thirds of their LNG from the Gulf, Taiwan gets one third of its LNG. Taiwan says its has eleven days' supply remaining. Many others are also severely affected by the cut-off of LNG from Qatar. About 20 LNG tankers are trapped in the Gulf, half the global fleet available for charter.
Meanwhile Iran has increased export of its oil from 1 million barrels per day in February to 2 million in March, 90% of which goes to China, and Iran is now charging tolls to vessels to exit the Gulf along its coast, which occurs only under Iranian escort.
Wednesday, March 18, 2026
Trump cooperated with Israel in attacking world's largest gas field in Iran, giving Iran an opening to retaliate against Persian Gulf neighbors' oil and gas assets
They've lit the world on fire. They're madmen.
WATCH: Iranian gas, oil infrastructure at Iran’s South Pars and Asaluyeh hit in Israeli air strike
Facilities linked to Iran’s gas and oil industry in South Pars and Asaluyeh were targeted in an Israeli airstrike on Wednesday, a source confirmed to The Jerusalem Post.
The South Pars gas field is the world’s largest natural gas reserve and is jointly operated by Iran and Qatar.
An Israeli official told the Post that the attack was coordinated with the United States, adding that the target was Iran’s largest gas facility in Bushehr. ... Those Israeli strikes were coordinated with the United States, Axios reported a senior Israeli official as saying. ...
Wednesday, March 4, 2026
The U.S. and Israel pulled the Iran war trigger when they did because intelligence revealed the opportunity to decapitate the regime in one fell swoop
Let's hope that this time they are successful in eliminating Iran's nuclear capabilities once and for all.
Last Monday [Feb 23], Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called President Trump
with a stunning tip: Iran's supreme leader and his top advisers were
all set to meet at one location in Tehran on Saturday morning [Feb 28].
They could all be killed in a single devastating airstrike, Netanyahu told Trump and his team, according to three sources briefed on the discussion. ... The Feb. 23 call — held from the White House Situation Room and unreported until now — was a pivotal moment that set the Iran war in motion. ...
On Friday at 3:38 p.m. EST, [Trump] gave the final order. Eleven hours later, bombs fell on Tehran, Khamenei was killed and the war had begun. ...
... According to a Financial Times report, almost all of the Iranian capital’s traffic cameras were secretly tapped. ...
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
Yeah, what a hero Trump is, they should give him the Nobel Peace Prize
From the suck-ups at Real Clear Politics this morning:
Monday, May 12, 2025
Tuesday, May 6, 2025
A week before the 60-day War Powers Act deadline, the Houthis conveniently cry uncle and pledge to halt attacks on US naval forces and Red Sea shipping
Israel wipes out the Houthi airport, fuel supplies, and concrete factory and then they finally cry uncle?
Something doesn't add up here.
Trump announces US will stop bombing Houthis
... Trump, ahead of a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, said the halt would start immediately. The Houthis approached the administration on Monday night indicating “they want to stop the fighting,” he said. ...
Israel escalated strikes against the Houthis on Monday night with 20 fighter jets bombing the rebel-held port city of Hodeidah. Israeli forces were responding to a ballistic missile strike against the Jerusalem airport by the group. The Trump administration also labeled the Houthis a terror group in March, changing a Biden-era policy. ... Houthi strikes against the waterway have declined significantly in recent months, and the group hasn’t targeted a commercial vessel since late December. ...
Israel's military says it has fully disabled Yemen's main airport with strikes...
... “We indirectly informed the Americans that the continued escalation will affect the criminal Trump’s visit to the region, and we have not informed them of anything else,” said Mahdi al-Mashat, head of the Houthi’s supreme political council, in a statement carried by the rebel-controlled SABA news agency early Wednesday. Trump is due to visit Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates next week. ...
Wednesday, March 5, 2025
Defying every norm, Trump is negotiating directly with terrorists again (no, not the ones in Moscow)
US holding secret talks with Hamas on release of Gaza hostages, 'Post' confirms
... US special envoy for hostage affairs Adam Boehler ... met with senior Hamas officials in Doha, Qatar, several times. These meetings, first reported by Barak Ravid on Axios, mark the first known direct dialogue between Hamas and the US administration since the US designated Hamas as a terrorist organization in 1997.
Such talks run counter to long-standing US policy against direct contact with groups that Washington lists as foreign terrorist organizations. ...
The White House said Boehler has the authority to negotiate directly with Hamas.
“When it comes to the negotiations that you’re referring to, first of all, the special envoy who’s engaged in those negotiations does have the authority,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters. ...
Such talks run counter to long-standing US policy against direct contact with groups that Washington lists as foreign terrorist organizations.Such talks run counter to long-standing US policy against direct contact with groups that Washington lists as foreign terrorist organizations.
Friday, May 10, 2024
Just as the treacherous Biden cut off arms to Israel he issued military export waivers to Israel's enemies Qatar, which hosts Hamas, and Lebanon, which harbors Hezbollah
The perfidy of Joe Biden knows no bounds.
Less than a day before the Biden administration announced its intent to cut off U.S. arms sales to Israel, it issued a sanctions waiver to bypass congressional prohibitions on arms sales to a host of Arab nations that boycott the Jewish state, including Hamas ally Qatar and Iran-controlled Lebanon, the Washington Free Beacon has learned.
More.
Wednesday, July 13, 2022
US manufacturing jobs went straight south after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, a development cheered by US Chamber of Commerce chairman Steve Van Andel of Michigan's AMWAY in the Chicom China Daily, US Independence Day 2001
US Chamber Backs China's WTO Entry
:
Steve Van Andel, the newly elected chairman of the US Chamber of Commerce, said on Monday that he was looking forward to China joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) sometime before the end of this year. He said this will pave the way for permanent normal trade relations between China and the United States.
"For US business, one of the best things that can happen to help confidence in the Chinese market is China becoming part of the WTO," Andel said in an interview with China Daily.
His remarks come at a time that China is hoping to enter the world trade body. The country hopes to join before a WTO ministerial meeting in Qatar between November 9 and 13.
China has concluded separate agreements with the United States and the European Union, the world's two top trading powers, in the last few weeks, promoting its WTO membership.
Although the US Congress last year voted for Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) between China and the United States, it still reviews its trade policy towards China every year until the country actually becomes part of the WTO.
"The chamber is already actively supporting normal trade relations with China again." Andel said.
The chamber, the world's largest commerce association representing 3 million US companies and 3,000 state and local chambers, has been committed to lobbying the US Congress to normalize trade relations with China.
He said he would go back to Congress soon after his visit to China to lobby for normal trade relations with China again.
A normal trade relation between China -- potentially the world's largest market with 1.3 billion consumers -- and the United States is very important to businesses in both countries, he said.
Last year, the trade volume between the two nations amounted to US$74.5 billion.
He said China's WTO entry would certainly benefit "not only better relations, but also more trade between the two markets.''
Andel said he would carry the same message during his talks with the Chinese leaders and government officials, including President Jiang Zemin over the next couple of days.
Andel will lead a US business delegation to China in September to attend a meeting organized by China's Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation.
"I will also next year travel around the United States again, probably to 50 to 60 different local chambers talking about the importance of trade with China to US and Chinese businesses,'' he said.
Andel, chairman of US-based Amway, the global consumer goods giant, said China's WTO accession and normal trade relations between China and United States were expected to boost his company's business in China.
Amway, which has invested more than US$100 million in China, aims to increase its business in the country to 10 percent of its global turnover in a few years from the current level of 5 percent.
(Chinadaily.com.cn 07/04/2001)
Friday, March 25, 2022
Environmentalists sneered at Trump's promotion of natural gas, and Europe didn't want his Freedom Gas in 2019, now they're cutting deals for US LNG which Trump made the US the world's third top exporter of by 2019
EU strikes gas deal with the U.S. as it seeks to cut its reliance on Russia :
The White House said the EU said would work toward the goal of ensuring, until at least 2030, demand for approximately 50 billion cubic meters per year of extra U.S. LNG. This is “consistent with our shared net-zero goals,” it added.
U.S. liquefied natural gas export capacity will be world’s largest by end of 2022:
U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) export capacity has grown rapidly since the Lower 48 states first began exporting LNG in February 2016. In 2019, the United States became the world’s third-largest LNG exporter, behind Australia and Qatar. Once the new LNG liquefaction units, called trains, at Sabine Pass and Calcasieu Pass in Louisiana are placed in service by the end of 2022, the United States will have the world’s largest LNG export capacity.
The environmentalist wacko Democrat Governor of Washington State Jay Inslee sneered at the idea of freedom gas:
Europe rebuffed Trump's LNG in 2019, preferring the cheaper Russian gas:
Thursday, October 7, 2021
The big news in the huge Qatar study of 907k is NOT that Pfizer effectiveness against infection fell to only 20% in months five to seven after the second dose
In a huge Qatar study of 907k, Pfizer effectiveness against infection fell to only 20% in months five to seven after the second dose, which is admittedly pretty shocking (but don't get distracted by the shiny object -- boosters!):
The results indicated that vaccine effectiveness against any SARS-CoV-2 infection was 36.8% (95% CI, 33.2-40.2) in the third week after the first dose, peaking at 77.5% (95% CI, 76.4-78.6) in the first month following the second dose. Effectiveness gradually waned thereafter, then dropped after the fourth month to reach about 20% in the fifth through seventh months, according to the researchers.
“These findings suggest that a large proportion of the vaccinated population could lose its protection against infection in the coming months, perhaps increasing the potential for new epidemic waves,” Chemaitelly and colleagues wrote.
More.
But these claims fly in the face of the Provincetown incident of July 4th, where there was mass infection among fully vaccinated individuals, a plurality of whom had received Pfizer. Loss of protection against infection appears to be coterminous with vaccination "protection", not something which occurs after month seven, for example. The median interval from completion of vaccination to symptom onset in that incident was 3 months, which means half of the infected symptomatic cohort had been recently vaccinated (6-86 days!):
Among fully vaccinated symptomatic persons, the median interval from
completion of ≥14 days after the final vaccine dose to symptom onset was
86 days (range = 6–178 days).
Despite achieving 50% of population fully vaccinated by July 2 (59.3% one dose), new cases per
million in Qatar nearly doubled by August 22, from 43.14 to 81.36.
Fully vaccinated people can and do spread the virus right away, not six months later after their shots
"wear out".
What idiot blames waning vaccine effectiveness on the bad behavior of vaccinated people?
The Qatar study people, apparently:
The vaccine's weakening protection may be due to people's behavior, the study authors noted.
"Vaccinated persons presumably have a higher rate of social contact than unvaccinated persons and may also have lower adherence to safety measures," they wrote. "This behavior could reduce real-world effectiveness of the vaccine as compared with its biologic effectiveness, possibly explaining the waning of protection."
The studies were published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Like my tetanus shot wanes in effectiveness because I went on a bender last weekend.
If the damn thing works, it works. Pfizer's vaccine clearly isn't a vaccine.
A golden opportunity to blame SPREAD on bad behavior wildly missed.
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-10-07/studies-show-power-of-pfizer-vaccine-starts-to-wane-after-two-months
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
General McKenzie in Qatar told Taliban to stay out of Kabul or he would bomb them: They didn't and he didn't
Kind of hard to have any credibility when your commander in chief has none.
Biden signaled surrender already in early May, much earlier than hitherto reported; that's why the country collapsed like a house of cards.
Defeat in Afghanistan was a CHOICE made by the Democrat president, no different than the Vietnam defeat was a choice, made by the Democrat Congress of the time, of which Biden was also a part, which cut off funding to the government of South Vietnam.
The contractors which were necessary to the mission of the Afghan Army were already pulling out by the time of the May 8 Biden meeting where discussion of evacuating Afghan SIVs was supposedly excluded for fear of destabilizing the Ghani government, much earlier than has been reported until now:
At the time of the May meeting, Taliban forces were engaged in a countrywide offensive and were already capturing key territory in the west and outside Kabul, the nation's capital. U.S.-funded private contractors, meanwhile, were flying out of the country as part of the American troop withdrawal. The Afghan military needed the contractors to keep its air force flying. ... On Aug. 8, McKenzie delivered his findings to Milley, who in turn shared them with Austin. McKenzie warned that Kabul would be encircled in 30-60 days and that the city and the whole country could fall within weeks or a couple of months at most.
Tuesday, December 17, 2019
Saturday, September 1, 2018
Tucker Carlson says there's nothing free about this market, falls short of calling it an expression of global fascism
But who knows, maybe his forthcoming book connects the dots between the multinational corporations and their revolving door governments, and the central banking system which mediates the operation.
Here:
TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS:
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is worth about $150 billion. That’s enough to make him the richest man in the world, by far, and possibly the richest person in human history. It’s certainly enough to pay his employees well. But he doesn’t. A huge number of Amazon workers are so poorly paid, they qualify for federal welfare benefits. According to data from the nonprofit group New Food Economy, nearly one in three Amazon employees in Arizona, for example, was on food stamps last year. Jeff Bezos isn’t paying his workers enough to eat, so you made up the difference with your tax dollars. Next time you see Bezos, make sure he says thank you.
Same with the Waltons. The Walton family founded Walmart. Collectively they’re worth about $175 billion. That’s more than the entire gross domestic product of Qatar, the oil-rich Gulf state. The Waltons could certainly afford to be generous with their workers. Instead, they count on you to take up the slack. In 2013, taxpayers sent more than $6 billion to Walmart’s workers, for food stamps, Medicaid, and housing assistance.
And if you think that’s shocking, meet Travis Kalanick. He’s the youthful founder of Uber. His personal fortune is close to $5 billion. His drivers, by contrast, often make less than minimum wage. One recent study showed that many Uber drivers lose money working for the company. That’s not a sustainable business model. The only reason it continues is because of your generosity. Because you’re paying the welfare benefits for Uber’s impoverished drivers, child billionaires like Travis get to keep buying bigger houses and more airplanes. He’s someone else who definitely owes you a thank you note.
If you can think of a less fair system than that, send us an email. We’d love to hear it. It’s indefensible. Yet almost nobody ever complains about it. How come? Conservatives, like us, support the free market, and for good reason. Free markets work. But there’s nothing free about this market. A lot of these companies operate as monopolies. They hate markets. They use government regulation to crush competition. There’s nothing conservative about that, just as there’s nothing conservative about most big corporations. Just the opposite. They’re the backbone of the left. Pick a leftwing cause that you think is hurting the country. Check the donor list, and you’ll find the name of some corporation. Often many corporations. Corporate America enables the progressive lunacy you see every night on this show. They’re funding the revolution now in progress.
That’s why liberals say nothing as oligarchs amass billions by soaking the middle class. Because they’ve been paid off. For example, you probably assumed the people who founded Walmart were conservative. Most of their customers certainly are. Yet the bulk of the Walton family backed Hillary Clinton in the last election. They gave the Democratic Party more than $700,000 during the 2016 cycle. Almost every billionaire in Silicon Valley did the same. In return, they got immunity from criticism, and you got to keep paying their employees. Not a bad deal for them.
There is one person in Washington who’s offended by this arrangement, and we’re sorry to say he’s wrong on pretty much everything else. But this is a weird moment, so you take allies where you can find them. Bernie Sanders, of all people, is trying to get your money back from Jeff Bezos. This is especially amazing since Bezos is on Bernie’s side on most things. They’re both leftwing activists. But on this question, Bernie’s right. He’s planning legislation that would force big corporations to return the taxpayer-funded welfare benefits you’ve paid to their workers. It’s not a perfect solution, and it probably won’t pass. No matter what they claim in public, liberals in Congress would never support something like that. Their loyalty isn’t to you. It’s to Uber and Jeff Bezos. But at the very least it might awaken a sleepy population to the new reality of activist corporate America. And that’s a good thing.
America has changed enormously in the last 20 years. A lot of people you thought were your allies are in fact working against your interests. They have contempt for you and your family, your customs and your faith. Included in this group, I’m sorry to say, are a lot of big corporations. They have no use for you or the country you grew up in. Stand in their way, and they’ll crush you. It’s all shocking enough that I recently wrote a book about it. It’s called “Ship of Fools,” and it explains what happened and who did it. The book is out in a month, the first week of October, but you can preorder a copy now, and I hope you will.
Wednesday, April 26, 2017
Middle Class: The 30-30-30 countries according to wealth distribution are primarily Germanic
The following are the countries with relatively equal sized lower, middle and upper classes in 2013, meaning roughly 30% have wealth under $10,000, roughly 30% have wealth $10,000 to $100,000, and roughly 30% have wealth in excess of $100,000 up to $1M:
USA: 31-33-31
Austria: 28-32-37
Germany: 29-33-35
New Zealand: 26-34-38
Qatar: 25-38-35
Taiwan: 23-45-31
USA: 31-33-31
Austria: 28-32-37
Germany: 29-33-35
New Zealand: 26-34-38
Qatar: 25-38-35
Taiwan: 23-45-31
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