China developer Evergrande: debt crisis, bond default ...
OPINION - Mitchell Bard
The left’s flight from Israel’s reality
What would happen if Israel ended the “occupation” tomorrow? Does anyone believe the progressives will be satisfied? Israel got no credit for withdrawing from Gaza and is now attacked for defending itself from terrorists there.
(October 6, 2021 / JNS) I can understand people who want to see the Palestinians’ lives improve, Israel withdraw from the West Bank and the establishment of a Palestinian state. What is both incomprehensible and contemptible, however, is a refusal to recognize or acknowledge the threats Israel faces from the Palestinians, the history behind the conflict and the implications of their proscriptions.
The problem is certainly not new, but it has gotten worse. In 1958, former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion described the Zionist movement in America as confined to the older generation, charging that “it is a movement that does not know what to say to the younger generation.” CONTINUE
I have posted some of this in previous memos. This expanded summary was sent by a dear and old friend and fellow memo reader.
It is a far more fleshed out list but I have not verified. Do your own investigation if you wish.
One thing is certain, government is where power and money float around in the air and thus acts as a magnet for the corrupt
We all know the Potomac is full of vermin and liar type creatures..
HERE'S THE WHOLE LIST OF THE ANIMALS, AND CREATURES & BLOOD SUCKERS WHO LIVE IN THE SWAMP!!!! YOU'VE SEEN SOME OF THE NAMES BEFORE. BUT MANY ON THE LIST YOU HAVEN'T SEEN OR KNOWN ABOUT BEFORE -- AND IT WILL SURPRISE YOU, OR MAYBE IT WON'T
IT'S A GREAT LIST TO KEEP AS A "REFERENCE GUIDE" WHEN YOU NEED TO KNOW WHICH OF THE CREATURES ARE AT IT IN THE FUTURE AND WHY!!
"FACT CHECKED!!" & THE DECK IS STACKED!!!
“Things you must know to be informed: ‘
*YES, THE GOVERNOR OF MICHIGAN USED TO WORK FOR GEORGE SOROS.*
*YES, CALIF GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM IS NANCY PELOSI'S NEPHEW
* YES, ADAM SHIFF'S SISTER IS MARRIED TO ONE OF GEORGE SOROS’ SONS.
* YES, JOHN KERRY'S DAUGHTER IS MARRIED TO A MULLAH'S SON IN IRAN.
* YES, HILLARY'S DAUGHTER CHELSEA IS MARRIED TO GEORGE SOROS' NEPHEW.
* YES, ABC NEWS EXECUTIVE PRODUCER IAN CAMERON IS MARRIED TO SUSAN RICE, OBAMA'S FORMER NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER.
* YES, CBS PRESIDENT DAVID RHODES IS THE BROTHER OF BEN RHODES, OBAMA'S DEPUTY NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER FOR STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS.
* YES, ABC NEWS CORRESPONDENT CLAIRE SHIPMAN IS MARRIED TO JAY CARNEY, FORMER OBAMA WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY.
* YES, ABC NEWS AND UNIVISION REPORTER MATTHEW JAFFE IS MARRIED TO KATIE HOGAN, OBAMA'S FORMER DEPUTY PRESS SECRETARY
* YES, ABC PRESIDENT BEN SHERWOOD IS THE BROTHER OF ELIZABETH SHERWOOD, OBAMA'S FORMER SPECIAL ADVISER.
* YES, CNN VP VIRGINIA MOSELEY IS MARRIED TO TOM NIDES, FORMER HILLARY CLINTON'S DEPUTY SECRETARY.
THIS IS WHAT YOU CALL A "STACKED DECK". IF YOU HAD A HUNCH THE NEWS MEDIA WAS SOMEWHAT RIGGED AND YOU COULDN'T PUT YOUR FINGER ON IT, THIS MIGHT HELP YOU SOLVE THE PUZZLE.
Now you know why no one is investigated. They all have their hands in the cookie jar! You might remember James Comey who investigated the Clinton email scandal and the Clinton Foundation, and made the final decision to not recommend prosecution by the DOJ.
It turns out that the Clinton Foundation was audited by the law firm DLA Piper. One of the executives there was in charge of the Clinton Foundation audit.
Who was it? Peter Comey, James Comey’s brother. Peter Comey held an executive position with the Washington law firm that did the audit of the Clinton foundation in 2015. Peter Comey was officially DLA Piper “Senior Director of Real Estate Operations for the Americas,” in 2015 when the Clinton Foundation scandals first broke and Hillary was preparing her Presidential campaign. Not only was DLA Piper, the firm where Comey’s brother worked involved in the audit of the Clinton Foundation, but according to the foundation’s donor records, DLA Piper has given between $50 - 100k to the Foundation. It gets even cozier. DLA Piper executive Douglas Emhoff is taking an extended leave of absence from the firm. Who is Douglas Emhoff? He is the husband of KAMALA HARRIS! Just a coincidence? Amazing if it is. You can't make this stuff up! Another example of the DC swamp.”
And it only gets worse. This "Family Tree" will make your head spin . THE SWAMP IS DEEP!!
Dominion (voting machine provider) serves 40% of the US market. It is in 30 states - - The state of exas rejected the machines.
Admiral Peter Neffenger is on Biden's transition team.
Neffenger was the President of the board of Smartmatic
Smartmatic (another voting machine supplier) entered into an agreement with Dominion in 2009
Smartmatic counted votes in Venezuela
Smartmatic is connected to Philippine voter fraud
Smartmatic is run by Lord Mark Malloch Brown who works for George Soros (-he and Brown are life-long friends)
Brown chairs the Boards of a number of non-profit boards including the Open Society Foundation,
Brown chairs the Centre for Global Development.
Open society of course is owned by George Soros
Smartmatic partnered with DLA Piper Global
Douglas C. Emhoff works at DLA Piper Global
Douglass C. Emhoff is Kamala Harris's husband
Guess who owns Dominion? - -Blum Capital Partners, L.P.
Guess who is on the board for the company? -- Richard C.Blum.
Richard C. Blum is Dianne Feinstein's husband
Nancy Pelosi's husband is also a major investo
An aide to Nancy Pelosi, Nadeam Elshami, was hired by Dominion Voting System
And it goes on & ON!!
Dominion Voting Systems is listed on the Clinton Foundation website
Dominion Voting is listed as a $25,000 -$50,000 donor to the Clinton Foundation in 2014 by The Washington Post
eorgia Governor Kemp used Dominion Voting after Texas and Florida rejected them
Dominion has a lobbyist named Jared Thomas
Jared Thomas was Governor Brian Kemp’s chief of staff and press secretary from 2012 to 2015
You must remember the Feinstein-Kavanaugh-Soros connections to understand this next information
Debra Katz (Christine Ford's lawyer) worked for George-Soros at the Open Society Foundation.
Debra Katz (Christine Ford's lawyer) also worked at Project on Government Oversight (POGO).
POGO is funded by Soros’s Open Society Foundation.
POGO is the co-signer of the letter Diane Feinstein presented against Kavanaugh's nomination.
Kamala Harris did not prosecute OneWest Bank for their fraud when she had the authority - Soros owned OneWest Bank.
Now you know why a woman who placed 7th in her State when running for President is now VP.
Last but not least:
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Fair weighs in:
On September 29th, the National School Boards Association sent a letter to President Biden, asking him to bring in federal law enforcement to deal with “threats,” “harassment,” and “violence” by parents toward school board members regarding COVID policies and “critical race theory.” On October 4th, Attorney General Garland issued a memo directing the FBI to meet with leaders in every district in the nation, and stating he will announce a plan to deal with these parents in the coming days.
FAIR wants to ensure parents do not feel intimidated when peacefully exercising their civil and First Amendment rights. In response, FAIR has issued a letter to the DOJ and will continue to keep a watchful eye on these events as they unfold.
Download and discuss the NSBA and DOJ letters, as well as FAIR’s response, on the FAIR Community forum here.
Merrick Garland’s Federal Offense
Threats against school boards are an issue for local law enforcement.
By The Editorial Board
Is there a culture-war issue that Merrick Garland won’t jump into? We can’t think of one, and now the Attorney General is nosing the Justice Department into debates at local school boards
His intervention came this week after the National School Boards Association (NSBA) wrote to President Biden asking the feds to consider if threats and acts directed at school boards “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
We hadn’t heard that an angry parent is the equivalent of ISIS. But Mr. Garland this week directed the FBI and U.S. Attorneys to meet with local law enforcement to find ways to address the “disturbing spike” in “threats against school administrators, board members, teachers and staff.”
The NSBA letter cited various disruptions and incidents. In Illinois a man was arrested after striking a school official escorting him from a meeting. In Michigan a man gave a Nazi salute and shouted “Heil Hitler” in protest of masking requirements. In Virginia a man was arrested and another ticketed for trespassing after a raucous meeting whose subjects included the treatment of transgender students.
Some meetings were suspended amid the arguments. Disrupting a public meeting is inexcusable and, as Mr. Garland rightly notes, some of these acts may be criminal.
The problem is that none of this constitutes a federal offense. The AG is also getting close to chilling political speech that is protected by the First Amendment. Invoking Hitler may be dumb and over the top, but it’s protected speech.
Today school boards are ground zero for some of America’s most divisive cultural debates: critical race theory, mask and vaccination policy for teachers and students, the use of racial quotas to deny Asian-American students entry to elite public schools, and the Covid-19 response that kept many public schools closed for a year. Citizens have an enormous stake in how these decisions are made.
If these debates are more contentious than they ought to be, one problem may be that those running public schools don’t think they’re accountable to parents. Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate for Virginia Governor, recently made this explicit when he said in a debate, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Many school boards view parents as a nuisance, and that can lead to frustration when people finally get a chance to be heard.
Local and state authorities are well equipped to make arrests and prosecute threats or acts of violence. Parents don’t want or need the FBI and federal prosecutors intervening to stifle their legitimate concerns for the education of their children.
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As I noted in a previous memo, if God still gives a damn about America, and he has less reason to do so, he would cause China's economy to collapse and take Xi down at the same time,
China’s Unstable Political Economy
Evergrande’s collapse is a sign of deeper weakness, just when Xi is impatient to challenge the U.S.
By John Lee
The world has been watching as the Chinese real-estate giant Evergrande flails, and some have been asking whether Beijing will soon have a moment akin to 2008’s collapse of Lehman Brothers in America. Xi Jinping may manage to prevent the burst of the real estate bubble, but China’s economy isn’t heading for more-sustainable growth. Evergrande’s woes are a reminder that China’s political economy under Mr. Xi has become even more unstable, even as Beijing grows more impatient to displace America as the dominant power. Time is not on China’s side.
The global financial crisis that began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 led to a severe liquidity crunch as financial institutions lost faith in the capacity of one another and commercial firms to repay their loans. China’s financial system doesn’t work this way. Loss of faith in the commercial worthiness of other entities isn’t fatal. Instead, banks and other financial institutions unfailingly lend if instructed to do so by political masters.
This happened in 2008, when Chinese state-owned banks injected about $15 trillion of new capital into the economy for fixed-investment projects over the next six years, as export markets in North America and Europe stagnated. This was about 1.5 times the size of the entire American commercial banking system at the time. Politically driven lending has been a feature of the Chinese political economy ever since.
There are other tools in the Chinese Communist Party kit bag. Loans and bond payment obligations are forcibly rolled over or deferred to ensure nonperforming loans and defaults don’t weigh down a lender’s books. State-owned and even private firms are compelled to purchase bonds issued by moribund corporate entities. In short, the determinants of liquidity in the Chinese system are political, not commercial—and the Chinese Communist Party has the tactical wherewithal to avoid a Lehman Brothers moment.
But aren’t Evergrande’s woes evidence that Beijing is serious about deflating a dangerous real estate bubble, reducing moral hazard in lending, and breaking the economy’s addiction to debt, to prevent a terrifying reckoning sometime in the future?
Mr. Xi is promising to achieve all that—but the reality is that local governments normally derive about one-third of revenues from land sales and real-estate transactions. In the 18 months of the pandemic, more than half of the revenue for local governments have come from property, as corporate-income and value-added tax receipts declined.
Beijing can’t turn a blind eye to this: Local governments are responsible for providing around three-quarters of all social and public goods such as hospitals and schools. Overstep the mark on Evergrande or firms like it, and their distress will increase fears that guaranteed capital appreciation for real-estate assets is no longer a safe assumption.
That would lead to a rapid cooling of the real-estate market and cause systemic failures. Purchases of existing and off-the-plan properties are used extensively as collateral for further borrowings, and any rapid deflation in asset values could pose a profound risk to the entire economy.
Any permanent slowing of credit and restrictive lending policies will mean that even more state-owned enterprises and property developers will struggle to meet their debt obligations, putting more firms in the Evergrande predicament. At the same time, credit-issuing institutions in the formal and shadow banking industries would suffer more defaults by borrowers, which will reduce their capacity to issue new loans. That would damage China’s only reliable way of generating the growth demanded by politics.
This means that the political economy will remain largely unchanged even if Evergrande is allowed to fail. Evergrande’s model of “three highs and one low”—high debt, high leverage, high turnover and low cost—will remain the Chinese modus operandi.
Mr. Xi’s pledge to reduce inequality by cutting down billionaires such as Evergrande’s Xu Jiayin is a smoke screen. The primary cause of inequality in China is entrenched privileges for state-owned enterprises and the well-connected at the expense of the truly private economy. Until discrimination against the latter is reduced, wealth won’t be better distributed, and household income won’t increase enough to drive and sustain the domestic consumption-led growth promised by Chinese leaders.
Mr. Xi is determined to tighten his hold on economic power, to the country’s detriment. He is also impatient to challenge American pre-eminence. China’s material power is formidable and shouldn’t be underestimated—but Beijing doesn’t start from the position of strength that it is eager to project.
Mr. Lee is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the United States Studies Center in Sydney. He served as senior national security adviser to the Australian foreign minister, 2016-18.
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| Sowell Nobel? |
| by John H. Cochrane featuring Thomas Sowell via The Grumpy Economist There is less than a week to go before the Economics Nobel Prize. Dear Nobel Committee: How can you not give the prize to Tom Sowell this year? +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Several years ago, John Fund was a house guest and a featured speaker at the SIRC's President Day Dinner fund raiser. He has written an article describing Senator Sinema: Who Is Kyrsten Sinema? It’s Complicated A radical turned moderate, the Arizona Democrat is more interesting than the left’s hostile caricatures. By John Fund ‘Hi, I’m Kyrsten. I’m in the Arizona House and I’m a socialist.” That’s how the woman who’s now her state’s senior U.S. senator introduced herself to me when we met at an immigration conference in 2006. I found her to be more complicated than a slogan. I told her I worked for a federally sponsored job-training program in college and learned that she is a former social worker who is suspicious of impersonal bureaucracies and genuinely curious about other people. Lately she’s become a pariah on the left for her skepticism of the $3.5 trillion Biden budget extravaganza. Detractors harassed her in a public restroom to cheers from some media figures. “Saturday Night Live” portrayed her as an obstructionist who’s too ditsy to know what she wants. There’s talk of a primary challenge in 2024. The anger is explained in part by her history on the left. Yet she’s built a bipartisan coalition in swing-state Arizona. The polling firm Bendixen & Amandi found that 52% of Arizona Democrats and 51% of Republicans view her favorably. She showed signs of her heterodoxy before her 2018 Senate election. In an ad for that campaign, she deplored how people in Washington “are more interested in their talking points and their ideology than getting stuff done.” This May, the Arizona Republic asked her what her long-term strategy in the Senate was. “Most folks in Arizona aren’t thinking to themselves: ‘What is the government doing for me today?’ ” she said. “They’re often thinking about what the government is doing to me today, right?” She continued: “I want Arizonans to, 1), not have to think about their government very much. But, 2), when they do, to think to themselves: ‘Well, that it is at least a little less bad than it used to be, it’s less painful than it used to be and Kyrsten has done some work to help make my life a little bit easier and a little bit better.’ ” That restrained legislative approach drives progressives nuts, but calmer ones who know her say it’s rooted in her belief that both the hard right and the hard left are good at arguing but bad at governance. “Sinema might become a respected, legitimate post-partisan national figure,” says Mike McKenna, former deputy director for legislative affairs in Donald Trump’s White House. “Like Trump, she has the capacity to scramble traditional power structures—but from the other side.” Ms. Sinema says she can’t be pushed around by either party. Maybe that’s because she does know what she wants. She believes in incremental reform, and that usually sticks only if it’s bipartisan. In her 2009 book, “Unite and Conquer: How to Build Coalitions That Win—and Last,” she wrote of “the dread disease” of “identity politics” and how liberals too quickly embrace the “mantle of victimhood.” She has said job creation should be Washington’s No. 1 policy goal, and she believes that best happens without vastly higher taxes, debt and new entitlements. That’s a moderate platform, one I bet a majority of the American people, tired of political squabbling, could get behind. The question both parties should be asking isn’t “What does Kyrsten Sinema want?” but “What if Kyrsten Sinema is right?” Mr. Fund is a National Review columnist and co-author of “Our Broken Elections: How The Left Changed the Way You Vote,” forthcoming in November. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Yin and Yang: Andrew Yang Leaves The Democrats, Call It ‘The Right Thing To Do’ A former Democratic presidential candidate and software entrepreneur has declared independence from the party. After leaving the party, Andrew Yang believes he can make “a larger effect” independent. Yang claims he enrolled as a Democrat at 20 to vote for Bill Clinton’s reelection in 1996. After his political “homelessness” ends, Yang wants to form a third party, which he would call “Forward.” Andrew Yang, a co-founder of Humanity Forward, is launching a book called “Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy” this week. Yang stated that he is not advising anyone to alter their voting status to independent. The book gives the name of the new third party, “The Forward Party.” Yang founded the organization Humanity Forward in 2020 to bridge party divisions and provide economic aid to Americans. He is advocating for ranked-choice voting and the inclusion of more independent voters in primaries. Yang: In open primaries, everyone can vote regardless of party membership. In a few locations, such as New York City, ranked-choice voting is already in use, although its central value appears to be delaying the end of any specific election. It may be a poor idea, given how little faith and trust people still have in the elections. Yang did not receive more than 3% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary and withdrew on the eve of the second election. Yang declared his candidacy for president in 2017, but he could never gain traction in the Democratic primary process. After failing to connect with people in the mayoral election in New York City, Yang leaves the Democratic Party. Yang’s wacky answers to almost everything, including universal basic income, were out of step with the Democratic Party’s growing radicalization and racialization. However, it’s unclear if voters will notice. Yang campaigned on the concept of universal basic income as a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020 and 2021. In 2021, he ran for mayor of New York City in the Democratic primary and finished fourth. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ |
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