Showing posts with label Switzerland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Switzerland. Show all posts

Friday, March 28, 2025

Latest Trump minerals deal with Ukraine carves up the invaded country between Trump and Putin even worse than before


 

Trump's minerals deal with Ukraine is an expropriation document, demanding half of its oil and gas, almost all of its metals, and now also much of its infrastructure in reparations.

Black radicals want reparations from whites. The radical Trump wants to gobble up most of Ukraine.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, here:

Donald Trump is holding a gun to the head of Volodymyr Zelensky, demanding huge reparations payments and laying claim to half of Ukraine’s oil, gas, and hydrocarbon resources as well as almost all its metals and much of its infrastructure.

The latest version of his “minerals deal”, obtained by The Telegraph, is unprecedented in the history of modern diplomacy and state relations. ...

It dovetails with parallel talks between the US and Russia for a comprehensive energy partnership, including plans to restore West Siberian gas flows to Europe in large volumes, with US companies and Trump-aligned financiers gaining a major stake in the business.

The revived gas trade would flow through Ukraine’s network, and later via the Baltic as the sabotaged Nord Stream pipelines are brought back on stream. ...

Prof Riley said: “It is not compatible with EU membership, and perhaps that is part of the purpose. I have to wonder whether the real intention might not be to force Zelensky to reject it.” ...

Germany’s Bild Zeitung said talks have been underway for weeks in Switzerland to reopen the Nord Stream 2 pipelines, conducted secretly by ex-Stasi agent Matthias Warnig and Mr Trump’s envoy Richard Grenell, a man known for his Kremlin sympathies.

The terms would give US contractors operational control and a fat revenue stream, creating money out of “thin air”. A cynic might call it a legal “donation” to Mr Trump’s circle by the Kremlin.

“There is talk about Nord Stream. It would be interesting if the Americans put pressure on Europe, to make them stop refusing our Russian gas,” said Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister. ...

All evidence so far is that Trump & Putin Inc is a perfectly harmonious joint venture.

 

Monday, February 10, 2025

Meanwhile, there is real money: $2,905.98 the ounce, the seventh record gold price this year

gold content: about $542 at today's high


Gold prices jumped more than 1% on Monday to hit a record high, as safe-haven demand surged on fears of a global trade war after U.S. President Donald Trump announced new tariff plans.

Spot gold was up 1.3% to $2,897.99 per ounce after hitting a record high of $2,905.98 earlier in the session — its seventh record this year.

U.S. gold futures rose 1.2% to $2,923.1.

“The precious metal is set to retain its upward bias, as long as President Trump’s policy threats continue to stoke fear and uncertainty through global financial markets,” said Exinity Group chief market analyst Han Tan.

More

PM Update:

Spot gold surged 1.5% to $2,903.53 per ounce after hitting a record high of $2,911.30 earlier in the session.

Tuesday, January 16, 2024

The world is drunk on debt: Global debt at all levels reached $307 trillion in 3Q2023

IIF CEO Tim Adams sounded the alarm on rising levels of debt while speaking to CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. ... "We need sobriety . . .."

The global banking industry’s premier trade group said late last year that worldwide debt climbed to a record of $307.4 trillion in the third quarter of 2023, with a substantial increase in both high-income countries and emerging markets.

The IIF said it expected global debt to reach $310 trillion by the end of 2023, warning that elections in more than 50 countries and regions this year could usher in a shift toward populism that brings with it still-higher debt levels.

More.

Sunday, April 26, 2020

Coronavirus data update for Sun Apr 26, 2020

Johns Hopkins reports right now 5,184,635 tests completed in the US with 940,797 confirmed cases of infection.

That's an infection rate of 18.1%, after stay-at-home has been observed more or less nationwide since mid-March. Average flu infection in the US, without stay-at-home, is 8%. So imagine how bad this could have been, and still might be.

Reports of infection rates as high as 31.5% in Chelsea, MA, are problematic. These are antibody tests, and so far have high false positive rates, meaning all the positives could be false, test populations which are much too small, and test populations which are not representative. People on the streets right now and people in grocery stores right now are not representative of the whole population. What's more, the antibodies detected by these tests could well be for non-COVID-19 coronaviruses, which means you've learned nothing about exposure to SARS-CoV-2.

There have been 54,001 deaths according to Johns Hopkins data right now, for a mortality rate of 5.74%.

Flu mortality averages 0.1%.

Therefore we are dealing with something at least 2.3 times more infectious than flu, and 57 times more deadly.

Global data indicates as of 0730 hours a mortality rate of 6.98%. Test data is too uneven globally to draw firm general conclusions. Mortality data from places like Iran at 6.31%, China at 5.53% and Russia at 0.92% just looks like lies in comparison to open, free societies, as follows.

The European big five, Spain, Italy, France, Germany and the UK have an average mortality rate of 11%, 1.9 times worse than for the US. Germany remains a standout with mortality of only 3.75%, however, which is 35% lower than in the US. Belgium has the most liberal counts of deaths, and so a very high mortality rate of 15.38%.

Norway is at 2.68%, Sweden 12.06% (oops, they followed herd immunity, and are now paying the price), Finland 4.15%, and Denmark 4.84%.

Switzerland 5.56% and Austria 3.56% really stand out relative to Hungary at 10.88%.

Canada reports in at 5.6% with Mexico at 9.43%.

Japan and South Korea come in at 2.72% and 2.26% respectively.

It's obvious to me right now that if America wants to return to some sense of normalcy after this debacle has been allowed to reach the stage that it has, the only plausible way forward is to ramp up testing for the disease massively, and provide masks to the general population which protect it while in public. Instead our president and lawmakers have been busy with other things, like bailing out businesses. They are not serious people, anymore than the people they represent, a minority of which is clamoring for herd immunity, and therefore massive casualties.

The pro-life anti-abortion party is infected with a pro-death coronavirus party. The real division in the Republican Party between the actual conservatives and the libertarian ideologues has been laid bare by SARS-CoV-2. The former want to save you, as do many liberals. The latter believe only in survival of the fittest.  

The idea that immunity will be built up for this disease in the US population so that this will be over once and for all strikes me as completely speculative at this point.

America has to prepare to live with this disease indefinitely.  

Saturday, March 14, 2020

Death rate from COVID-19 remains a catastrophe in Italy, China and Iran less so if you can believe them, USA France and Spain form another group, South Korea Switzerland and Germany all are under 1%

The USA is, unfortunately, not looking more like South Korea.

If the USA gets 30 million COVID-19 cases, a mortality rate of 2.15% translates into 645,000 deaths, 21.5 times the number who die from flu in an average year with 30 million influenza cases (mortality rate of 0.1%).

Tuesday, July 4, 2017

Tens of thousands of refugees stuck in Italy

From the story here:

With France and Switzerland closing their borders to migrants since last year, the tens of thousands in Italy have nowhere to go. The EU came up with a plan to relocate around 160,000 asylum seekers stuck in Italy and Greece but so far only 12,000 have been resettled. Italy says it can no longer be expected to deal single-handedly with the vast number of asylum seekers, most of them economic migrants, streaming across the Mediterranean. ... 

The Italian government has warned that after years of taking in hundreds of thousands of migrants, the country is now at breaking point.

Sunday, August 17, 2014

German Bunds make history, yields fall below 1%, poor GDP blamed on MILD winter!

Germany now joins Japan and Switzerland in the below 1% yield club. The rush into the safety of government bonds driving down yields is a sign everywhere of lousy productivity.

Meanwhile yields below 2% exist in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Sweden, The Netherlands, Ireland, France, Finland, Denmark, The Czech Republic, Belgium, and Austria. Finland is the lowest of these presently at 1.14%.

CNBC reports here:

"Following disappointing growth data for the euro zone, 10-year yields finally broke through the 1 percent handle on Thursday—a first—dipping to an intraday low of 0.998 percent.  Yields then fell below 1 percent again on Friday, on reports that Ukrainian troops had attacked armed Russian military, which had crossed into the country near the border of Izvaryne. U.S. yields also declined, hitting a low of 2.333 percent, while the euro and European stocks turned negative."

German GDP fell in the second quarter from the first, at -0.6% annualized, which was, believe it or not, blamed on a mild winter there after poor GDP Stateside was blamed on an unusually harsh one.

The Wall Street Journal reported with a straight face here:

"Germany's economy, long Europe's growth engine, shrank for the first time in more than a year, a development economists largely attributed to a mild winter that boosted activity in the first quarter at the expense of the second. The bigger concerns, they say, are France and Italy, where respectable rates of growth aren't even in sight."

Oh well, at least they wrote "shrank".


Friday, May 30, 2014

Cold wintry places which had positive GDP, unlike the US under Obama (-1.0%)

Poland     +1.10%
Denmark     .89%
Germany     .80%
England       .80%
CANADA   .70%
Switzerland .50%
Norway       .30%

Sunday, July 14, 2013

The Swiss Overwhelmingly Want To Be Home Owners But Aren't

And the famous Robert Shiller really doesn't care, here:


Consider Switzerland, which by several accounts has had one of the lowest rates of homeownership in the developed world. In 2010, only 36.8 percent of Swiss homes housed an owner-occupant; in the United States that same year, the rate was 66.5 percent. Yet Switzerland is doing just fine, with a gross domestic product that is 4 percent higher, per capita, than that of the United States, according to 2011 figures produced at the University of Pennsylvania. It’s not that the Swiss inherently prefer renting. A 1996 survey asked a sample of Swiss whether, if they could freely choose, they would rather be homeowners or renters. Eighty-three percent said homeowners.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To hell with what people want, right? Just keep property values so high only the likes of David Niven, William F. Buckley, Jr. and Tina Turner can afford to own there.



Friday, January 13, 2012

Dead Since 1936, Oswald Spengler Remarkably Described Our Own Time

'It must be stated again and again that this society . . . is sick, sick in its instincts and therefore in its mind. It offers no defence. It takes pleasure in its own vilification and disintegration. From the middle of the eighteenth century it has broken up more and more into Liberal and Conservative circles - the latter representing merely the opposition set up in desperate self-defence against the former. On the one side there is a small number of people who, possessed of the true political instinct, see what is going on and whither it is leading and exert themselves to prevent, moderate, or divert accordingly; people of the kind who formed Scipio's circle in Rome (and whose outlook inspired Polybius' historical work), and, again, Burke, Pitt, Wellington, and Disraeli in England, Metternich, Hegel, and Bismarck in Germany, and Tocqueville in France. They sought to defend the conserving forces of the old Culture - State, monarchy, army, consciousness of standing, property, peasantry - even in cases where they had reason to object, and are therefore cried down as "reactionary." This word, which the Liberals invented, is thrown back at them now by their Marxian pupils, in that they try to prevent the logical outcome of their actions: such is our reputed progress. On the other side stands almost everything that has the urban intelligence or, if not, at least looks up to it as the badge of superiority in the conditions of today and in terms of the power of the future - the future that is already the past.

'At this point journalism becomes the dominant expression of the time. It is the critical esprit of the eighteenth century diluted and lightened for intellectual mediocrity - and let us not forget that age means to part, to dissect, to disintegrate. Drama, poetry, philosophy, even science and history are turned into leading articles and feuilletons written with an unashamed bias against everything that is conservative and has formerly inspired respect. "Party" becomes the Liberal substitute for rank and State; revolution, in the form of periodic mass elections fought by all available means of money, brains, and even - after the Gracchan method - physical violence, is exalted into a constitutional process; government, as the meaning and duty of State existence, is either opposed and derided or degraded to the level of a party business. But the blindness and cowardice of Liberalism goes further still. Tolerance is extended to the destructive forces of the city dregs, not demanded by them. In Western Europe Russian Nihilists and Spanish anarchists are gushed over in "good" society with revolting sentimentality and passed on from one fashionable hostess to another. In Paris and London, above all in Switzerland, both they and their undermining activities are carefully protected. The Liberal press rings with maledictions of the prisons in which the martyrs of liberty languish, and not a word is dropped in favour of the countless defenders of the State, down to the simple soldier and policeman, who are blown into the air, crippled by bullet-wounds, or slaughtered in the exercise of their duty.

'The concept of the proletariat, created of deliberate intention by Socialist theoreticians, has been accepted by the middle classes. Actually it has nothing to do with the thousand branches of strict and skilled labour - from fishing to book-printing, from tree-felling to engine-driving - and is scorned and felt as a disgrace by industrious, trained workers. It was intended solely to secure the amalgamation of these workers with the city mob for the purpose of overthrowing the social order. But Liberalism centred political thought upon it by employing it as though it were an established concept. Under the name Naturalism there arose a pitiable school of literature and painting which exalted filth to aesthetic charm, and vulgar feeling and thinking to a binding world-view. "People" no longer meant the community of the whole nation, but that section of the city masses which set up in opposition to this community. The proletarian appeared as the hero on the stage of the progressive bourgeoisie, and with him the prostitute, the shirker, the agitator, the criminal. From this time onward it has been "modern" and superior to see the world from below, from the perspective of a bar-parlour or a street of ill repute. The cult of the proletarian arose during that period, and in the Liberal circles of Western Europe, not in 1918 in Russia. A fatal notion of things, half false and half stupid, began to pervade educated and semi-educated minds: "the worker" becomes the real person, the real nation, the meaning and aim of history, politics, public care. The fact that all men work, and moreover that others - the inventor, the engineer, and organizer - do more, and more important, work is forgotten. No one any longer dares to bring forward the class or quality of his achievement as a gauge of its value. Only work measured in hours now counts as labour. And the "worker," with all this, is the poor unfortunate one, disinherited, starving, exploited. The words "care" and "distress" are applied to him alone. No one has a thought left for the countryman's less fertile strips of land, his bad harvests, his losses by hail and frost, his anxiety over the sale of his produce; or for the wretched existence of poor craftsmen in strongly industrialized areas, the tragedies of small tradesmen, fishermen on the high seas, inventors, doctors, who have to struggle amid alarms and dangers for each bite of daily bread and go down in their thousands unheeded. "The worker" alone receives sympathy. He alone is supported, cared for, insured. What is more, he is made the saint, the idol, of the age. The world revolves round him. He is the focus of the economic system and the nurseling of politics. Everybody's existence hinges on him; the majority of the nation are there to serve him. The dull lump of a peasant, the lazy official, the swindling tradesman, are legitimate targets for mirth, not to mention judges, officers, and heads of businesses, who are the popular objects of ill-natured jest; but no one would dare to pour the same scorn on "the working man." All the rest are idlers, egoists; he is the one exception. The whole middle class swings the censer before this phantom. No matter what one's own achievements in life may be, one must fall on one's knees before him. His being stands above all criticism. It was the middle classes who successfully "put over" this notion of him, and the very business-like "representatives of the people" continue to sponge upon this legend. They dinned it into the wage-earners until they believed it; until they felt themselves to be really ill-treated and wretched, until they lost all sense of proportion with regard to their output and their importance. Liberalism vis-à-vis the demagogic trend is the form of suicide adopted by our sick society. With this perspective it gives itself up. The merciless, embittered class war that is waged against it finds it prepared to capitulate politically, after having helped spiritually in the forging of the enemy weapons. Only the Conservative element - weak as it was in the nineteenth century - can, and in the future will, hinder the coming of this end. ...


'The manual worker is merely a means to the private ends of professional revolutionaries. He is to fight for the satisfaction of their hatred of the conservative forces and their thirst for power. If only workers were to be recognized as representatives of the workers, the benches of the Left would be very empty in all parliaments. Among the originators of their theoretical programs and leaders of revolutionary campaigns there is not one who actually worked for years in a factory.'

Friday, August 26, 2011

America's Chief and Most Deadly Export Has Been The Credit Bubble

Few have wanted to talk about it, but it is one of the chief consequences of decade-long Federal Reserve policy mistakes as mediated through the world's reserve currency, the dollar:


When the financial system collapsed in 2008, the eurodollar market was its epicenter. Banks in Germany and Holland failed because of overpriced real estate in Florida and California, yet hardly anyone questions the link between these incongruent geographical realities. For the most part, there was no housing bubble in Bavaria or Amsterdam, yet long established banking concerns were stricken, and then failed by one a world away.

For the most part, bank risk managers will prudently match their asset structure to their liability structure to the best of their abilities. In addition to managing overall durations and interest rate spreads, this also means a sensible policy of matching asset and liability denominations. So large funding exposures denominated in dollars leads to pointed acquisitions of dollar-denominated credit assets.

. . . [T]his explains the global spread of a dollar-based credit bubble . . .

Jeffrey Snider goes on to explain, here, how once stalwart Switzerland has become our latest victim.

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Corporate Cash Earned Overseas, Presently About $1 Trillion, Cost the US Treasury About $90 Billion in 2008

So says a detailed and insightful story at Bloomberg here by Jesse Drucker, showing how companies book earnings abroad through the Netherlands, Switzerland and Bermuda, lawfully, to minimize taxation both in the US and in high tax European countries.

The next time some pinhead US politician says he wants to take away your $88 billion mortgage interest deduction, tell him this corporate tax loss expenditure is just as big, and getting bigger. 

When you consider that corporate taxes represent less than a third of the tax revenues which individual payers contribute to the federal government under current arrangements, there's plenty of room to rebalance that income portfolio more fairly.

Maybe we could start by rewarding companies for earning their money here instead of over there. If the Netherlands, Switzerland and Bermuda can do it, why can't we?

Well? 

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Top Ten Countries with Direct Banking Exposure to PIIGS

Since May 2010, banks of eight countries with assets directly exposed to the PIIGS group of countries have made considerable progress in reducing that exposure, based on the figures reported here, now and previously:

IRELAND ........ down 65 percent to $  31.7 billion
Netherlands ........ down 38 percent to $150.5 billion
Belgium ............... down 34 percent to $  78.2 billion
PORTUGAL ........ down 30 percent to $  45.2 billion
France ....... down 29 percent to $646.5 billion
Germany ..... down 24 percent to $532.7 billion
U.K. ............. down 17 percent to $347.2 billion
SPAIN............ down 15 percent to $126.8 billion.

Two additional countries, Austria ($36.8 billion exposed) and Switzerland ($56.4 billion exposed), join these eight in the top ten ranked by seriousness of exposure to PIIGS as a percentage of their bank assets. These are, in descending order:

UK, France, Portugal, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Austria, Spain, Switzerland and Ireland.

PIIGS ranked by the most owed to the banks of these ten countries are as follows:

Italy       $780.3 billion
Spain     $594.5 billion
Ireland   $357.4 billion
Portugal $189.5 billion
Greece   $130.0 billion.

Total owed by PIIGS to the banks of just these 10 countries:  $2.052 trillion.

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Pesky Fuel Rod

The Europeans have banned "The Simpsons" for its insensitive nuclear humor.

I kid you not:

Broadcasters in Germany, Australia and Switzerland have decided to ban or censor episodes of The Simpsons that poke fun at nuclear disasters in light of Japan's atomic emergency.

More here.

Friday, November 26, 2010

Gold Hoarding IN GERMANY

From the UK Telegraph, here:

"You cannot find a bank safe deposit box in Germany because every single one has already been taken and stuffed with gold and silver. It is like an underground Switzerland within our borders."

-- Professor Wilhelm Hankel, Frankfurt University