We have the Napoleon wannabe in Paris, Emmanuel Macron, threatening to send in NATO troops, to thank for Putin's explicit threat to use nuclear weapons

 Vladimir Putin warns of wider conflict over Ukraine

 Russian president makes most explicit threat to use nuclear weapons since full-scale invasion:

Referring to French President Emmanuel Macron’s refusal to rule out sending western troops to Ukraine this week, Putin said Russia remembered “the fate of those who once sent their contingents to our country. “Now the consequences for possible interveners will be much more tragic,” he added. “We also have weapons that can strike targets on their territory.”

CNBC similarly here:

The comments appeared to be a direct response to French President Emmanuel Macron’s suggestion earlier this week that European heads of state and Western officials, who had met in Paris on Monday, had talked about the possibility of sending ground troops into Ukraine.

The French leader on Monday said there was no consensus on the idea, but that it had not been “ruled out.”

The comments have since sent NATO countries scrambling to deny they’d send troops into Ukraine, with Russia warning that such a deployment would prompt an “inevitable” Russia-NATO conflict.

 

The Financial Times lol: Liberal democracy good, conservative democracy bad

 Is The Financial Times' coverage worth a pound sterling?

 

Bank of America paper losses on bond portfolio exceed $100 billion at end of 1Q, amounting to 20% of all such unrealized losses for all US banks

 Bank of America Nurses $100B Paper Loss After Big Bet in Bond Market

The English flatter themselves with this delusion

Americans, Long Besotted by Royalty, Mourn Britain's Queen

 

 

And just like that we have a Russian invasion of Ukraine from every direction

 Vladimir Putin obviously cares less about the money he can make off oil exports than he does about reincorporating Ukraine into Russia.

The Financial Times says Trudeau has gone too far invoking the Emergencies Act against the peaceful protest of the Canada Freedom Convoy, calls restrictions on truckers' cross border travel "government over-reach"

 Here:

Canadian leader Justin Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act this week in response to the occupation was a step too far, however. The measures are designed to respond to insurrection, espionage and genuine threats to the Canadian constitution rather than peaceful protest, no matter how irritating and inconvenient. The right to such protest is fundamental to a free society. Such protests often involve inconveniencing people, whether that means the pickets of striking workers, Britain’s anti-climate change group Extinction Rebellion, or the Freedom Convoy.

 

https://www.ft.com/content/1f83d3dc-a95b-4947-92ba-4f08899228a3?segmentId=b385c2ad-87ed-d8ff-aaec-0f8435cd42d9 

 

 

 

 

 

The editorial oddly refers to the draconian financial repression undertaken by Trudeau under the Act without actually condemning it, saying only in a general way that the government's response has been illiberal and mishandled.

 

Trudeau's henchman, Chrystia Freeland, has had a long association with The Financial Times from the 1990s.

 

LOL, CNBC a week ago said vaccinations in India, home of the Delta variant, helped to bring about the decline in cases

Public health experts told the Financial Times in late May that regional lockdowns, reduced social interaction and an increasing number of antibodies against Covid among the general population were helping to bring down the infection rate in India. Vaccinations too have helped to continue the downward trend in cases.

More.

Cases per million plummeted 91% between May 7 and July 23, at which point just 7% of India's massive population of 1.3 billion had been fully vaccinated.

The vaccines had nothing to do with the crash in cases, but they may have helped cause this debacle in India.

Vaccination temporarily weakens the immune system, making it more vulnerable to infection, which is why it is inadvisable to vaccinate en masse when infections are raging around you. Mind you, in India on February 18th they were not. It would have been as safe a time as any to start vaccinating.

Yet is it mere coincidence that the massive explosion in cases in India after the approximate bottom around February 18th dovetails perfectly with the commencement of mass vaccinations in India around February 13th?

Well?

I think Nottle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As for the antibody hypothesis, the faith placed in it after all this time is quite simply precious.

Antibody tests can miss previous COVID-19 infection

Antibody tests do not reliably confirm that someone has had COVID-19, which means global estimates of infection rates are likely inaccurate, according to researchers. "We studied the blood of over 120 people with confirmed COVID-19 and measured levels of antibodies ... using 14 different tests" up to three months after diagnosis, said Michael Peluso of the University of California, San Francisco. "All of these people definitely had COVID-19, but not all of them had positive COVID-19 blood tests." The accuracy of the tests at confirming prior COVID-19 varied by how sick the person had been, how much time had passed since the illness and which test had been used. "People who were less sick and in whom more time had passed were less likely to test positive using certain tests," Peluso said. "Since most people have mild (or even asymptomatic) infection with SARS-CoV-2, this study has important implications for our interpretation of several of the large studies that have been done ... to try to estimate the number of people who have had COVID-19." In a report published on Friday in the journal Science Advances, his team advises, "Individual patients or providers using these assays to assess the presence or absence of prior infection and/or immune status should take these considerations into account, given the poor negative predictive value of some tests."

 

 

 

Martin Wolf for The Financial Times likes business historian Adam Tooze's important new book CRASHED: HOW A DECADE OF FINANCIAL CRISES CHANGED THE WORLD

See Martin Wolf, What really went wrong in the 2008 financial crisis?

Tooze has been making the rounds at places like Bloomberg (and especially here) and CNBC promoting the theses of the new book, and was notably interviewed yesterday on Bob Brinker's radio program "Money Talk" (the dismissive summary of the interview provided here is notably blind to Tooze's importance, weakly observing how Tooze maintains that "money has no tangible underpinning", which is about all that grabs the attention of libertarian fundamentalists).

Those more popular presentations give only a tantalizing hint of the narrative power this trained historian brings to the story of the 2008 panic.

To see that in action there is an important lecture available here which Tooze gave at the American Academy in Berlin earlier this year, on March 13th.

"Conservatives" will doubtlessly recoil at Tooze's characterizations of the role played by them during the financial crisis. That those conservatives are really the GOP's libertarians is a distinction the significance of which seems lost on Tooze.

That said, the value of Tooze's perspective goes far beyond the subject of the warring factions of libertarian fundamentalism and neoliberalism, however important those are for understanding our times.

For one thing, Tooze is almost unique in describing in such vivid detail the dominating role now played by the "dollar" in the global economy (American analyst Jeffrey Snider being the notable but obscure exception). It takes an historian. This is, of course, the eurodollar, the proper understanding of which permits Tooze to show how the financial crisis in the United States centered in the mortgage market was globalized via international banking through London and Frankfurt independently of the wishes of the state actors. It also reveals to him that the most important global economic relationship has not been the US with China but the US with London.

Same as it ever was. The king and his colonies still rule the world, with a little help from the Bank of England.

For another, Tooze's work shows the degree to which the global economy has been captured by the bankers in providing these eurodollars, who acted unilaterally behind the scenes, first in the US (Ben Bernanke) and regrettably only later in Europe (Mario "whatever it takes" Draghi), to provide liquidity swaps in the trillions of dollars during the financial crisis while politicians argued about how states should deploy mere billions.

One inescapable conclusion ten years after the financial crisis is that citizens of states are in larger measure no longer masters of their own destinies, and haven't been for a very long time. They are today really ruled by technocrats in charge of central banks who work now more, now less in concert with their host governments to manage economic flows. The danger of this global state capitalism is that it might one day slip back into the outright fascism it so closely resembles.

To the millions of unemployed who were not bailed out in the crisis and who lost their homes and their hope in the United States and in the PIIGS, or to the hundreds of thousands of Muslims now in Chinese reeducation camps, it already has.

The crisis for neoliberalism does not come from capitalist fundamentalism. It comes from its growing list of victims.

How the mighty are fallen: The Financial Times calls National Review "establishment GOP"

Here:

"Publications such as the National Review have long been part of the establishment GOP while drawing on outsider status as the Democrats held control of the White House."

That whir you're hearing is William F. Buckley, Jr., who died in 2008, spinning in his grave.

EuroGroup deal forced on Greece "akin to dragging a collapsed marathon runner back to the race"

From Giles Wilkes' review of Yanis Varoufakis' The Global Minotaur, here.

UK PM Cameron Joins United Stasi Of America, Tells UK Guardian To Destroy Snowden Files

The Financial Times has the story, here:

"[I]f the material was not handed over or destroyed, the government would try to stop the Guardian’s reporting through a legal route."

Conservative Supremes Insist It's An Unconstitutional Penalty, Not A Tax, But Romney Gets Attacked For Saying The Same Thing

So-called conservatives are upset with Mitt Romney's team for calling the ObamaCare mandate an unconstitutional penalty, not a tax, which is what the dissenting Supremes have called it.

Here's a question for y'all: Do you have the courage of your convictions and the brains to express them, or are you going to retreat into political expediency?

We already have the answer to that. They want Mitt Romney's man Fehrnstrom to go into hibernation in the summertime.

Here's another question: Are the dissenting Supremes conservative, or not? If they are not, then tell us why. Ignoring their arguments isn't going to make them go away. Real conservatives respect what they have to say. Anyone who's telling us to accept the tax argument as framed by Roberts for the liberal wing of the Supremes is doing it for political reasons and is a fake conservative. Prominent among these are Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham.

If Romney's camp keeps this up he might actually get accused of being a conservative by real ones. I'm suddenly feeling less alarmed by Mitt Romney.

Well, that's the spin from the Financial Times anyway, here, whose idea of a conservative is a Jack Welch or a Rupert Murdoch. Ha ha ha ha ha.

Pure agitprop.

To Hell With Clive Crook and The Financial Times

For phrases, here, such as:

"if there were any such thing as a moderate Republican;"

and

"a pathologically intransigent Republican party."

Why don't you bugger off to The Guardian or something, Clive? You'd be more happy there, fantasizing about how immune from the dark side of human nature you think you are, and how inferior you imagine the Colonies remain.

We beat you, and we'll beat you again, and again and again and again.