Global Stocks Rout Pushes Wall Street’s Fear Gauge to Four-Year High Bloomberg
Asia’s ferocious sell-off has its roots in US AI boom FT
Private capital groups deploy $160bn as they prepare for deal revival FT
Private Equity: In Essence, Plunder? CFA Institute
Climate
The Hidden Ways Extreme Heat Disrupts Infrastructure Scientific American
‘Astonishing’ Antarctica heat wave sends temperatures 50 degrees above normal CNN
Extreme heat, bone-dry vegetation and human misconduct prompting intense wildfire season ABC
* * * Singapore’s $170 Million Climate Defense For Luxury Stores Shows Protections Aren’t Equal Bloomberg
Major energy companies conceal 47% of biodiversity damage, according to research Phys.org
Water
Cambodia PM launches project linking Mekong River to sea via canal Channel News Asia
Southeast Asian countries turn to the Netherlands for ways to tackle flood risks Channel News Asia
Big city water buy-ups in the Lower Arkansas Valley are raising alarms as age-old battles erupt again Colorado Sun
Syndemics
Cognitive and psychiatric symptom trajectories 2–3 years after hospital admission for COVID-19: a longitudinal, prospective cohort study in the UK The Lancet. From the Abstract: “Occupation change is common and associated mainly with objective and subjective cognitive deficits.”
COVID as political defeat Closed Form
China?
As stock sell-off sweeps Asia, China’s yuan surges as US rate cuts loom South China Morning Post
Shifting the U.S.-Japan Alliance from Coordination to Integration RAND
Myanmar
Myanmar Resistance Group Claims It Has ‘Fully Captured’ Key Military HQ The Diplomat
Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina resigns, flees country, military takes over South China Morning Post
India
What is a ‘privileged Dalit’? Creamy Layer definition cannot just be economic Indian Expresss
Even after a year in jail, Imran Khan still dominates Pakistan’s politics BBC
Syraqistan
Russia Supplies Iran with Long-Range EW System “Murmansk-BN” to Counter U.S. and Israel Defense Security Asia. Big if true. More on the Murmanks system.
Top U.S. general in the Middle East as U.S. and Israel prepare for possible Iran attack Axios
Israeli army shares Hezbollah war scenarios with northern mayors: Report Anadolu Agency
Israelis to face major food shortages if Hezbollah strikes Haifa Al Mayadeen
Saudi Arabia, France among countries telling nationals to leave Lebanon as war fears surge Straits Times
* * * Did Ukraine special forces strike Russia forces at a Syrian airbase? The New Arab
* * * Why has America risked it all in Gaza? Al Jazeera
How Hamas fights The Telegraph
* * * ‘Order from Amazon’: How tech giants are storing mass data for Israel’s war 972 Magazine
Journal still can’t confirm January story about UN agency for Palestinians Semafor
European Disunion
French workers seize the torch Counterfire
Dear Old Blighty
UK going through its worst wave of riots in 13 years Anadolu Agency. Commentary:
Rioters are blocking Merseyside Fire and Rescue from getting to the library they set ablaze. Fireworks being lauched at them too.#Riots pic.twitter.com/mJ7RWWkgNa
— Alex Tiffin (@RespectIsVital) August 3, 2024
Riots erupt in UK after stabbing spree falsely blamed on asylum seeker FOX
UK PM Starmer slams ‘far-right thuggery’ after more anti-immigrant violence France24
Migration, Stagnation, or Procreation: Quantifying the Demographic Trilemma (PDF) Paul Morland and Philip Pilkington. ARC Research. From 2023, still germane.
* * * Government deficits create private wealth Funding the Future
New Not-So-Cold War
Uprisings in UK, Ukraine Finally Unveils F-16s – Full Report Simplicius, Simplicius the Thinker
Ukraine has to destroy Russian air defence to use F-16s – ISW Ukrainska Pravda
* * * Ukraine’s Double-Edged Sword? The Dangers of Using Criminal Groups for National Defense Journal of Illicit Economics and Development
Factory or front line? Ukrainian businesses fight to retain workers FT
* * * Has summer finally arrived? Gilbert Doctorow
August allergies BNE Intellinews
* * * Russian flows to Europe via TurkStream hit second-highest monthly level S&P
2024
Kamala Harris’s Big-Business Choice Zephyr Teachout, The New York Review of Books
Donald Trump: America has more ‘liquid gold’ under its feet than Saudi Arabia FOX
Digital Watch
Many safety evaluations for AI models have significant limitations TechCrunch
Brave New World? Human Welfare and Paternalistic AI (PDF) Cass Sunstein, SSRN
Why I Hate Instagram Now Conor Friedarsdorf, The Atlantic
50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution The Register
The Supremes
After Chevron: Political Economy and the Future of the Administrative State LPE Project
Supply Chain
Can Morocco’s phosphate wealth put it at the centre of the global battery supply chain? BNE Intellinews
Class Warfare
Reform Caucus Wins Amazon Labor Union Officer Elections Labor Notes
Country diary: The night air is thick with bats Guardian
Antidote du jour (Paul Shaffner):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
THE KAMALATION
(melody borrowed from The Impossible Dream from the musical Man of La Mancha by Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion, 1965, as performed by Elvis Presley, 1971)
She’s backed by a neocon team
And the—A.F.L.C.I.O.
She’s read Judith Butler and Foucault
She’s here cuz Joe got the heave-ho
Now she gets to jolly along
She learns a whole new repertoire
Soundbites of some liberal theories
We’re told that she’s our superstar
The Party has blessed
And backed her this far
Though if she proves vote-less
She won’t be our Czar
There’s a team to ghostwrite
So she gets some hurrahs
She’s practicing soundbites that sell
And conceal her flaws
Now she goes into battle for you
Against Trump and the rest
Plays her part in this giant sitcom
And our votes do the rest
How has she earned any of this?
She put lots of black men behind bars
Her past must be hidden in storage
Her hands deep in the cookie jar
She’s a DEI hire—a chair-sitting guest
We all know that this choice is not ours
A Zionist is her husband by marriage
If not her—then who will be in charge?
Mum is fired up by UK daytime TV calling for using the army.
This quote by Adama to President Roslin in rebooted BSG instantly came to mind.
Did she get to enjoy the Home Secretary getting interviewed* on Good Morning Britain today?
*The interviewer is her husband
Ha! I knew from election day that ITV would get into trouble over Ed interviewing his wife. Not even a supreme sceptic like me thought it would erupt within 6 weeks of the election.
(I found things doubly amusing because we juveniles in the first form at secondary school used to make jokes when seeing his surname on the sign up sheet in the music school when he was upper sixth and a House Captain.) Small world.
Thankfully I just missed overlapping with the current leader of the Lib Dems.
The paper linked to above, ‘Migration, Stagnation, or Procreation: Quantifying the Demographic Trilemma’ by Morland and Pilkington, is fascinating stuff. (Partly because I’m currently based in London, in Notting Hill/Kensington.)
Forex, just a couple of items from it (there are a lot more):-
“…We assume any immigration ratio substantially higher than the highest achieved by the United States is, at best, highly experimental and, at worst, potentially destabilising … The maximum immigratioon ratio that the United States has achieved and subsequently absorbed was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the ratio was just above 14%. As we saw earlier, the immigration ratio in the United Kingdom was 14.4% in 2021— so around the same as the United States saw in its great migration wave.”
“…Our “business as usual” UK/ “mass migration” model is clearly unsustainable. To achieve a reasonable old-age dependency ratio and therefore keep the economy at levels of sustainable growth, the rates of migration required are nonsensical. The model projects an immigration ratio of over 37% by 2083. This implies that more than one-third of the population would be foreign born. This is an immigration ratio that is almost triple that which the United States experimented with in the early 20th century.”
Bracingly direct analysis as so often from Pilkington. It’s amazing how hard it is to find any analysts who will express the migration question so directly. The left is so often guilty of trying to dodge the question.
Mass legal migration into an island with extensive, preservation land-use laws and a strong desire (for many reasons) to not turn its cities into Manhattan, let alone Hong Kong (density-wise).
And newcomers or natives have no desire to move to the Isle of Skye or the Scottish highlands.
What can go wrong?
” ‘Astonishing’ Antarctica heat wave sends temperatures 50 degrees above normal”
I don’t think that that is supposed to happen. There is a lot of worry about what would happen if all the ice there melted and they are talking in this article about over a 150 foot rise in sea levels. Another thought occurred to me so I went looking to how much ice is in that continent-
‘The Antarctic ice sheet covers an area of almost 14 million square kilometres (5.4 million square miles) and contains 26.5 million cubic kilometres (6,400,000 cubic miles) of ice. A cubic kilometer of ice weighs approximately 0.92 metric gigatonnes, meaning that the ice sheet weighs about 24,380,000 gigatonnes.’
OK, that is a lot of ice. But it also compresses that continent down because of all that weight. So as that weight goes away, that continent should start to rebound much higher. What will be the effect then? Massive earthquakes? Tsunamis being triggered in the southern hemisphere? Do we even know?
Worry more about the methane stored at the poles and under Siberia’s permafrost.
The atmosphere could become humanly unbreathable. If all that methane escapes, we’ll also get temperatures that aren’t in the historical record because, for one thing, the human race wouldn’t have survived them. Nor would most life on Earth.
We know this because it didn’t. There’ve been five great extinction events in Earth’s prehistory, each coinciding with massive methane releases. The Permian Mass Extinction and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, in particular, almost ended life on this planet.”
Isostatic rebound is a looooooong process. Parts of Canada and Northern Europe are still feeling such effects ten thousand years after the Younger Dryas effectively ended the most recent glacial period.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound
Quite true that. What I should have added is that this would not be a linear process but a chaotic one with runaway effects included. That is when the fun would occur.
The thing about isostatic rebound is that it can take some time to occur, but when the pressure is released, it’s surprising just how quickly the land can pop up. A trained eye can spot raised beaches all over the western fringes of Europe, some are comparatively recent.
It seems that 300k gallons of jet fuel from Texas is in the Mediterranean creating a fuss:
https://timesofmalta.com/article/graffitti-calls-government-block-military-fuel-shipment-israel.1096223
It would be a damn shame if it didn’t reach Iz. Apparently the French have allowed it to dock.
Perhaps it’s time for the inimitable Tom Lehrer?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1-23_We_Will_All_Go_Together_When_We_Go.mp3
Cheers!
Climate entry, hurricane landfall edition. As this newest storm Debby makes landfall in Florida, the low country region of South Carolina which features Charleston is preparing for record rainfall amounts. Gonna need a bigger ark it sounds like.
https://www.live5news.com/weather/
https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/2024-08-05-hurricane-debby-landfall-florida-southeast-flood-forecast
Re:Can Morocco’s phosphate wealth put it at the centre of the global battery supply chain? BNE Intellinews
Limited phosphate reserves has been for long cited as a long term problem for (intensive) agriculture. Now, facing competition from the industry of batteries such problem might come real sooner than expected.
yeah…rock phosphate is a finite substance.
“conventional” ag in the usa, t least, pours it willy-nilly…to produce weaponised “commodities” like corn and soya(that they then hafta get creative to figger out what to do with the excess(HFCS, ethanol)….but much of that phosphate(and the rest of the chemical soup) runs off into the Gulf of Mexico, creating the Dead Zone of hypoxia…larger right now that at any time since folks started monitoring it.
cousin fishes for a living out of Port Aransas…
he says the fish are gone…nothing like even ten years ago:combination of warmer water, a whole lot more people, ordinary polution from the Texas coastal refinery/chemical pipeforest, and likely that hypoxia….as well as things like red tide, spread of vibrio, etc
i make sure that the bones my butcherin and cookin generates end up in the garden beds…or at least in the pasture.
and the composting toilet also contributes to at least somewhat closing that particular nutrient cycle.
ashes and charcoal, too…
but Big Ag is on borrowed time, in more ways than one…and phosphates are one of the largest near future problems they face.
Sodium Ion batteries are already being made and the manufacturing is already ramping up in China.
Its first market sector would be stationary batteries ( BESS) and cars next with enough improvements.
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/worlds-largest-sodium-battery-unit-150000707.html
Lithium iron phosphate batteries seem like the winner in the battery wars for this decade anyway. This is generally good news as it avoids the need for nickel or cobalt in the batteries.
I’m a little sceptical that this will have a big impact on phosphate demand – the amount used (and misused) in agriculture is enormous, I haven’t seen many confirmed figures, but I don’t think there is enough in LIP battery to really make a dent in overall demand, even if that type of battery becomes the leader.
Al Jazeera asks a good question, “Why has America risked it all in Gaza?” and answers that an insecure superpower is trying to show who’s boss in an increasingly multi-polar world. It’s hard for me to accept psychoanalytic arguments like that. The USA isn’t simply a family with a belligerent patriarch. It’s more complex and interesting than that.
I assume, partly based on stuff we’ve head on NC, that the Pentagon’s experts have a good enough idea how badly the war scenarios will go, so they know that going all in with Israel is unlikely to restore the USA’s mojo and instill fear and subservience in its enemies. And if they know then so does the White House.
I suspect bureaucratic and political inertia in the context of a leadership vacuum are more likely. Twice this summer we’ve seen how dramatically the political/media machine can move when they are told to. And we’ve seen how flummoxed Biden looks most of the time.
The pentagon is doling out a lot of money!
As I said in the entry about Palestine above.
As long as there is profit, the PMC running the US will never admit “we cannot kill enough of them”.
While “our” side has enough nukes’ that the US does not control, to destroy the oil fields and then some.
Politics is local, but it wouldn’t be prudent to underestimate the perception of a genocide and a severely weakened Israel and 2.5 years of a DC only interested in foreign policy. The factory rebound isn’t wiping out the Obama years.
The Imperial decline is real, but very few Likudniks in DC want to pitch another defeat to voters. It’s so bad Shapiro was the favorite to be Harris’ running mate even though he undercuts the reason for her bump in the polls.
Then this isn’t a 2008 situation where the only question was the size of the majorities, freeing politicians to act in a way they won’t now.
Thinking that the results matter to most in Washington is futile. The results that they see are money flowing into defense companies and post government jobs in the sector. The war itself, that is another person’s problem.
In the fields the bodies burning…
In a sense the Gaza War is easy to assess. The Zionist lobby is the policy maker for Israel/Palestine issues. Israel wants the ethnic cleansing of the WB and Gaza thus that will be the US policy. The idea of a “two-state solution” is just debris from the sunken ship that sank with the death of the Oslo process and, to be blunt, that disaster was on the Clinton administration decision to undermine the process early on. At that point the die was cast and any chance of a negotiated settlement evaporated. Since then Israel has grown more nationalistic with a strong fascist slant and no negotiation was possible and no negotiatioin is possible whether for a final solution or a cease-fire.
Of course, things are worse with the Biden administration because of the power vacuum you mention. As a long-time observer of the Washington scene it looks to me that there are probably several policies operating at once each with their constituencies and priorities. With a weak POTUS this points to disaster. However, the threat of major war in the region which Israel wants may be of sufficient worry that realists in the FP community may hold sway (they are there in the underground) particularly with the spectacular and consisten failure of the neocons.
“Shifting the U.S.-Japan Alliance from Coordination to Integration”
I’m sure that they mean subordination rather than integration. We see that in South Korea where if there is trouble, a US general will have command of the South Korean armed forces. To be a vassal state means giving up your sovereignty and you also see that with the sentence ‘Aligning new American and Japanese command and control arrangements will require the allies to agree on, among other things, the regional scope of U.S. operational commanders in Japan.’ So I expect that it will be a US commander that will eventually have command of the Japanese armed forces when they go after China.
So, do we have 2008 redux? Japan seems to be utterly familyblogged, from the looks of it.
Bondzilla is wading through the waters offshore and heading for Tokyo …
To be met with Catzilla in Tokyo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6R1mU0vj5o (16 secs)
Things aren’t going so well in the European and UK stock markets either.
Hmmph, US as well. Dow futes pooping the bed. VIX hits 62 (I’m still younger, phew!)
I leave the country for 2 weeks and NOW the markets decide to dirtnap? I’m offended; couldn’t they have at least waited until I got back to turn my 401k into a 201k?
Catzilla for Tokyo, Bun-zilla for Europe?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgj3nZWtOfA
Corporate Japan is essentially nationalized already given the BoJ’s ownership of so much of the JPN debt market, might as well make it official
the “f a s ci s m” word gets tnrown around so flippantly today, but JPN is a literal, text-book-definition bundle of sticks…..fusion of govt, business, the people into the LDP and post-1946 system
I wondered how the JCB was going to “taper” until I read somewhere that they’ll force their banks to buy up the difference. Then, when the banks tank, the JCB will ride to the rescue to buy up their debt. So, yeah, sounds like a giant rigged bingo parlor.
Oil and pretty much every import item has suddenly become cheaper for them. Heck, regular Japanese might just be able to travel overseas again if the Yen were to continue to strengthen.
Regular Japanese people have not really participated in the two or three years old stock market rally, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1445395/japan-share-of-individual-stockholders-in-the-population/.
The ones who have been familyblogged today are rich people including plenty of hedgefunders in the … US, UK, etc.
This state of affairs will not continue though, the Yen will drop again because ultimately the country’s economy is weak.
Japan seems to defy all known economics laws, so it’s hard to tell. But I certainly think that a strengthening yen and higher interest rates might benefit Japanese people (as most are savers, not debtors, high interest rates can boost the economy). Plus they’ll finally have some relief from all those annoying gaijin clogging up the subways.
The bigger problem for Japan I think is that many of its key companies seem likely to be the big losers in the battle for export dominance between Japan, ROK and China.
(I don’t think “Griftee” is a scrabble word but it seems to fit – the victim of the grifter is the griftee.)
Little Griftee
(Sing to the tune of “Litttle Bitty” by Alan Jackson)
Melody
A vacant office tower owned by crooked, crummy banks
Foreclosed for pennies ’cause its prospects really stank
Got carved up into tranches by a Wall Street Wunderkind
It’ll end up in a teachers pension fund
Chorus:
It’s alright to be a little griftee
Scam your hometown, or a big old city
The cops don’t care if you swindle in style
Ponzi goes on for a little bitty while!
A little healthcare system turned into another scam
Better stay healthy or you’re living on spam
A little Fed Chair makes a little bitty speech
He’ll spin promises that induce you to leech
[Chorus; interlude]
You know you got no job and a stimulus check
A six-pack of beer it’ll buy while markets wreck
A little bitty D.A. in a fancy pants suit
Some white-collar crimes that she wouldn’t prosecute!
[Music tempo slows to half-time]
A big orange clown
And a pretty laughing girl
Want your vote so that they can rule the world
They don’t care about our hopes and our dreams
They’re all part of the same old rotten scheme …
It’s alright to be a little griftee
An airport salad costs ya fourteen fifty
The cops don’t care if you swindle in style
Ponzi goes on for a little bitty while!
It’s alright to be a little griftee
It was a nice town ’til they stripped us to our skivvies
Cops don’t care if you swindle in style
Ponzi goes on for a little bitty while
Nice , well done. Funny line about an airport meal…
Recommend reading the article above linked to the CFA institute interview. Sounds like the book’s author has an interesting perspective and firm grasp of private equity practices.
True in Atlanta – home of the $14.50 salad. The $13 ham sandwich is also on the menu.
I will check out that link, thanks.
Just so people are not cofused, the first image in the linked article is from a completly unrelated system, that works in a different frequency range.
Also, Murmansk-BN can not jam GPS, nor anything else that is out of its frequency range (3-30 MHz). The power of the system is also related to its frequency range (just like the size of antenna is), and lower frequency systems are more powerful by default (and have bigger antennas).
Also, the effective range depends on many factors, and “some defense analysts” can just throw numbers without knowing conditions under which they apply.
Also, this is not really “big if true”, but more of “normal”/”expected” level. Similar systems have existed since Soviet times, though less sofisticated of course (manual rasing of antenna masts, not computerized, etc), and have been exported.
P.S. I guess we live in a time when every weapon related article has to be written in a wunderwaffe game-changer style.
Yea. Russian fighters jets, too.
Yes but the Kagan family outfit argues that because the west has crossed alleged Russian red lines in the past without a Russian reaction, it is safe to do so again. Shakey analysis at best.
Of course Russia is currently too busy being the power behind mass migration into Europe and the current riots in England. (Please note, the riots are strictly in England, not other parts of the British Isles.)
More CrowdStrike versus Delta legal finger-pointing, this from The Verge -> https://archive.ph/INm5L
– Links in the article showing YT interview and press releases from Delta CEO Ed Bastian who says the outage cost Delta $500M and impacted 40,000 servers (each needing a loving pair of hands to apply the artisanal recovery procedures).
– The flight crew tracking system was listed in an apology from Delta as the mission critical system that was running on Windoz.
– DOT investigating Delta which of course means Delta is turning around and lashing out at MSFT + CrowdStrike
– CrowdStrike previously offered an apology and is now responding via lawyers that Delta is unfairly blaming CS
– CrowdStrike offered Delta “onsite assistance” but received no response
Offering Delta “onsite assistance” is my favorite, that is a truly meaningless and hollow offer (it would take 2 weeks to “onboard” any contractors -> give them laptops, watch 100 training videos, do the dance of giving them “privileged access” to critical system, train them on data center operating procedures before they walk into a data center, show them where the servers are on the data center map, give them access to the ticketing and change control systems, assign them a ticket for each server, and then finally have them fix each of the 40,000 servers with full documentation in each ticket with associated change control updates). Some vendors have an army of badged services folks for complex systems but I can’t imagine CrowdStrike does this, not even for Delta.
Private Equity: In Essence, Plunder?
As always, the “solution” to the problem of the distortions caused by highly regulated capitalism is to regulate more. But to those of us who have at least glanced at how sausage is made in Washington know that regulation reflects what Donors (major financial institutions and their clients).
Successful regulation requires both strong pressure from citizens and a cadre of honest, idealistic (at least to some extent) legislators and bureaucrats and those are in short supply–not because Americans are not honest (most of us are) but because the System built over time is structurally corrupt and getting more so every year. As we gov’t contractors used to say “no good deed goes unpunished.”
I believe the only solution to the various crises we are facing is decentralization and deregulation. How that can be accomplished is certainly tricky but possible but it starts with understanding how the System works. Eventually, the System will collapse and then citizens will be motivated to deal with public policy.
PE Plunder, with underlying concepts that show the rot.
Those lead to Behavioral Alpha.
Among those questions, are ethics included? Or would that be limited to a brief excursion through what is legal? Which questions are not asked, and why?
After the dawn of the last millennium, one general question involved angels dancing on heads of pins. Do those angels now dance ahead of steamrollers, picking up basis points?
A ditty about Little Boy and Fat Man
Two American bombs thought up in the heartland
Little Boy’s gonna be a uranium scar
Fat Man loses his virginity in the backseat of Bockscar
Suckin’ on fire-seared cogs that used to be human beings
Fat Man’s sittin’ on Japan’s lap
He’s got his hands between Nagasaki’s knees
Little Boy say, hey Fat Man lets run off
Behind Hiroshima and see
Dribble off those babbling brooks
Let me do what I please
And Little Boy say a
Oh yeah life goes on
Long after the thrill of livin’ is gone
Oh yeah life goes on
Long after the thrill of livin’ is gone they wok on
Little Boy sits back reflects his thoughts for a moment
Scratches his head and does his best clean sweep
Well you know Fat Man we oughta blow up the city
Fat Man says, baby you ain’t missing no-thing
Little Boy say a
Oh yeah life goes on
Long after the thrill of livin’ is gone
Oh yeah life goes on
Long after the thrill of livin’ is gone
Gonna let it rock
Let it roll
Let the A Bomb come down
And save my soul
Hold on to U 235 as long as you can
Changes comin’ round real soon
Make us half-life women and men
A ditty about Little Boy and Fat Man
Two American bombs that went off according to plan
Jack and Dianne, by John Mellencamp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7gG5KyHbEc