We’re All Soviets Now | Niall Ferguson | The Free Press

We’re All Soviets Now

A government with a permanent deficit and a bloated military. A bogus ideology pushed by elites. Poor health among ordinary people. Senescent leaders. Sound familiar?

#Wokeism, #Illiberalism and the #China model: How the West has lost its way @nfergus

Niall Ferguson on the cultural despair in American institutions [as they] "increasingly succumb to the plague of 'wokeism' — an illiberal ideology that originated on elite campuses but is now prevalent everywhere from Californian public schools to the Central Intelligence Agency."

He continues, "I am not so gloomy, because I believe that woke ideas are profoundly unpopular with the electorate as a whole and that the Democrats' adoption of slogans such as 'anti-racism' and 'diversity, equity and inclusion' will ultimately backfire when it becomes clear to more people what they mean in practice."

"There is a kind of low-level totalitarianism detectable in many institutions today — from elite universities to newspapers, publishers and technology companies — which reveals that practices such as informing, denunciation and defamation can all flourish even in the absence of a one-party dictatorship."

The China model: why is the West imitating Beijing?

Niall Ferguson

The @ICIJorg & @NYTimes investigate #Angola’s #Kleptocracy

How U.S. Firms Helped Africa's Richest Woman Exploit Her Country's Wealth

Ms. dos Santos, estimated to be worth over $2 billion, claims she is a self-made woman who never benefited from state funds. But a different picture has emerged under media scrutiny in recent years: She took a cut of Angola’s wealth, often through decrees signed by her father. She acquired stakes in the country’s diamond exports, its dominant mobile phone company, two of its banks and its biggest cement maker, and partnered with the state oil giant to buy into Portugal’s largest petroleum company.

...A trove of more than 700,000 documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and shared with The New York Times, shows how a global network of consultants, lawyers, bankers and accountants helped her amass that fortune and park it abroad. Some of the world’s leading professional service firms — including the Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Company and PwC — facilitated her efforts to profit from her country’s wealth while lending their legitimacy.

The empire she and her husband built stretches from Hong Kong to the United States, comprising over 400 companies and subsidiaries. It encompasses properties around the world, including a $55 million mansion in Monte Carlo, a $35 million yacht and a luxury residence in Dubai on a seahorse-shaped artificial island.

Read the whole story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/19/world/africa/isabel-dos-santos-angola.html?

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MasterFeeds

Niall Ferguson @NFergus on the state of Western Civilization in Conversation with @JohnAndersonAO

Don't miss this excellent interview with Niall Ferguson by Former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia John Anderson on the state of Western Civilisation, its history and current trajectory, the evils of Totalitarianism, the takeover of Western universities & colleges by the Left, Social Media and much more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re0Mu8Tq4fE&feature=share

A wave of #Asianization is set to follow the 20th century’s #Americanization & 19th century’s #Europeanization of the world

Of Asia's nearly 5bn people, 3.5bn are not Chinese. China's huge debts, rapidly ageing population and the crowding out of foreign competition from its domestic market is pulling global attention toward other Asian sub-regions, such as South Asia and south-east Asia. 

The whole Asia region — which Khanna defines as stretching from the Arabian Peninsula and Turkey in the west to Japan and New Zealand in the east, and from Russia in the north to Australia in the south — is already a behemoth. It accounts for about 50 per cent of global gross domestic product and two-thirds of its economic growth. But the most arresting statistic in the 433-page tome is this: of an estimated "$30tn in global middle-class consumption growth between 2015 and 2030, only $1tn is expected to come from today's western economies". 

As this vast undertow of spending power emerges, it will tilt the world. In spite of some "pockets of haughty ignorance centred around London and Washington", the west appears certain to play a vastly diminished role in global affairs. A wave of Asianisation is set to follow the 20th century's Americanisation and 19th century's Europeanisation of the world, argues Khanna.

Seethe whole book review and essay on the FT Here: https://www.ft.com/content/452df746-f880-11e8-af46-2022a0b02a6c

Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?

Jeffrey Goldberg’s excellent piece in The Atlantic on Jews and their future in Europe.  It’s not 1933, but it’s definitely not pretty.

For half a century, memories of the Holocaust limited anti-Semitism on the Continent. That period has ended—the recent fatal attacks in Paris and Copenhagen are merely the latest examples of rising violence against Jews. Renewed vitriol among right-wing fascists and new threats from radicalised Islamists have created a crisis, confronting Jews with an agonizing choice.

Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?

“All comes from the Jew; all returns to the Jew.”

— Édouard Drumont (1844–1917), founder of the Anti-Semitic League of France

I. The Scourge of Our Time

The French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, the son of Holocaust survivors, is an accomplished, even gifted, pessimist. To his disciples, he is a Jewish Zola, accusing France’s bien-pensant intellectual class of complicity in its own suicide. To his foes, he is a reactionary whose nostalgia for a fairy-tale French past is induced by an irrational fear of Muslims. Finkielkraut’s cast of mind is generally dark, but when we met in Paris in early January, two days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, he was positively grim.

“My French identity is reinforced by the very large number of people who openly declare, often now with violence, their hostility to French values and culture,” he said. “I live in a strange place. There is so much guilt and so much worry.” We were seated at a table in his apartment, near the Luxembourg Gardens. I had come to discuss with him the precarious future of French Jewry, but, as the hunt for theCharlie Hebdo killers seemed to be reaching its conclusion, we had become fixated on the television.

Finkielkraut sees himself as an alienated man of the left. He says he loathes both radical Islamism and its most ferocious French critic, Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s extreme right-wing—and once openly anti-Semitic—National Front party. But he has lately come to find radical Islamism to be a more immediate, even existential, threat to France than the National Front. “I don’t trust Le Pen. I think there is real violence in her,” he told me. “But she is so successful because there actually is a problem of Islam in France, and until now she has been the only one to dare say it.”

Suddenly, there was news: a kosher supermarket in Porte de Vincennes, in eastern Paris, had come under attack. “Of course,” Finkielkraut said. “The Jews.” Even before anti-Semitic riots broke out in France last summer, Finkielkraut had become preoccupied with the well-being of France’s Jews.

We knew nothing about this new attack—except that we already knew everything. “People don’t defend the Jews as we expected to be defended,” he said. “It would be easier for the left to defend the Jews if the attackers were white and rightists.”

I asked him a very old Jewish question: Do you have a bag packed?

“We should not leave,” he said, “but maybe for our children or grandchildren there will be no choice.”

Reports suggested that a number of people were dead at the market. I said goodbye, and took the Métro to Porte de Vincennes. Stations near the market were closed, so I walked through neighborhoods crowded with police. Sirens echoed through the streets. Teenagers gathered by the barricades, taking selfies. No one had much information. One young man, however, said of the victims, “It’s just the Feuj.” Feuj, an inversion of Juif—“Jew”—is often used as a slur.

I located an acquaintance, a man who volunteers with the Jewish Community Security Service, a national organization founded after a synagogue bombing in 1980, to protect Jewish institutions from anti-Semitic attack. “Supermarkets now,” he said bleakly. We made our way closer to the forward police line, and heard volleys of gunfire. The police had raided the market; the suspect, Amedy Coulibaly, we soon heard, was dead. So were four Jews he had murdered. They had been shopping for the Sabbath when he entered the market and started shooting.

France’s 475,000 Jews represent less than 1 percent of the country’s population. Yet last year, according to the French Interior Ministry, 51 percent of all racist attacks targeted Jews. The statistics in other countries, including Great Britain, are similarly dismal. In 2014, Jews in Europe were murdered, raped, beaten, stalked, chased, harassed, spat on, and insulted for being Jewish. Sale Juif—“dirty Jew”—rang in the streets, as did “Death to the Jews,” and “Jews to the gas.”

The epithet dirty Jew, Zola wrote in “J’Accuse …!,” was the “scourge of our time.” “J’Accuse …!” was published in 1898.

The Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in the Porte de Vincennes neighborhood of Paris in the aftermath of the January 9 attack that killed four Jews

The resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe is not—or should not be—a surprise.

NY Fed May Demand Reports From Europe Banks - Bloomberg

NY Fed May Demand Reports From Europe Banks

By Meera Louis - Oct 2, 2011

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York may ask foreign lenders for more detailed daily reports on liquidity as the U.S. steps up monitoring of risks from Europe's sovereign debt crisis, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

Regulators held informal talks with some of the largest European lenders about producing a "fourth-generation daily liquidity" or 4G report, according to the people, who asked for anonymity because communications with central bankers are confidential. The reports may cover potential liabilities such as foreign-exchange swaps and credit-default swaps, said one person. The U.S. has already increased the number of examiners embedded in these banks, the person said.

Concern is growing that European lenders may falter as Greece teeters on the brink of default. U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithnerhas warned that failure to bolster European backstops would threaten "cascading default, bank runs and catastrophic risk" for the global economy.

"The Fed is trying to understand what the pressure points are in terms of liquidity and potential risks that are imposed by foreign banks to domestic institutions in our financial system," said Kevin Petrasic, an attorney at the Washington- based law firm of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLC. "There is a little bit more sense of urgency as a result of what's going on in Europe."
Liquidity Risk

U.S.-based money funds, which buy short-term commercial paper, have been shunning securities issued by some banks based on the continent, and European Central Bank Governing Council member Yves Mersch said Sept. 28 that liquidity shortages pose the main risks to the region's banking system.

Jack Gutt, a spokesman for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, declined to comment. The largest European bank holding companies by assets in the U.S. include units of Deutsche Bank AG (DBK), HSBC Holdings Plc. (HSBA) and Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria S.A., according to Fed data. Duncan King, a spokesman for Frankfurt- based Deutsche Bank, Thaddeus Herrick, a spokesman for Spain- based BBVA and London-based HSBC's Rob Sherman said they couldn't comment.

U.S. banks are starting to provide a 4G report and they are being phased in this month, said Karen Shaw Petrou, managing partner of Washington-based Federal Financial Analytics Inc. Some Europeans are asking U.S. counterparts for information on how to prepare the report even though there has been no formal request from the Fed so far, one of the people said.
Avoiding a Squeeze

"The report requires rapid and in some cases daily data on a banks' assets, liabilities and potential claims to measure the degree to which the bank could be caught in the classic borrow- short, lend-long squeeze," Petrou said. "The 4G is one of the tools to reveal liquidity risk."

The forms aren't public, according to Petrou, and the New York Fed declined to provide a copy.

Euro-zone banks and other institutions were more than $350 billion in debt to the Fed's emergency-lending facilities at one point during the2008-2009 financial crisis, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News. The analysis was based on Fed documents released earlier this year after court orders upheld Freedom of Information Act requests by Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, and News Corp.'s Fox News Network LLC. Fed lending to these entities totaled more than $100 billion on an average day.
Swap Contracts

Regulators lack access to data on foreign institutions operating in the U.S. that would allow them to "make informed judgments about the adequacy of such firms' capital and liquidity buffers," William C. Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said in a Sept. 23 Washington speech.

U.S. prime money-market funds cut their exposure to euro- zone bank deposits and commercial paper, or short-term IOUs, to $214 billion in August from $391 billion at the end of last year, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. data. The funds are rationing their credit to European banks because of concerns that financial institutions will take large losses if a euro- zone nation defaults.

Credit-default swaps allow bondholders to buy protection against losses if an issuer doesn't pay its debts. The contracts can entitle the holder to face value if the borrower defaults. Lawmakers and regulators have blamed misuse of swaps and lack of disclosure for helping to trigger the 2008 financial crisis.

A currency swap is a contract in which one party borrows one currency from another, and simultaneously lends another to the second party. Foreign-exchange swaps are used to raise foreign currencies for financial institutions and their customers, such as exporters and importers as well as investors.

Currencies and their related derivatives are among the most actively traded markets in the world, with average daily turnover reaching $4 trillion as of September 2010, Bank for International Settlements estimates.

To contact the reporter on this story: Meera Louis in Washington at mlouis1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Lawrence Roberts at lroberts13@bloomberg.net; Rick Green at rgreen18@bloomberg.net

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-02/new-york-fed-may-demand-europe-s-banks-produce-more-details-on-liquidity.html