I survived the primary election Tuesday (barely).

We were the 9th precinct out of 48 to make it to city hall. Cleanup took an hour. In all, not bad. But boy, I'm gonna be wiped for a week!

Defining Away Economic Failure — Paul Craig Roberts

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/08/04/defining-away-economic-failure-paul-craig-roberts/

His analysis and description match my observations, and his conclusion:

"We live in a lie, and the lie is ever expanding."

The only surprising thing about this is that he didn't land on "Russia makes nothing" Presidential BS with both feet.

Back in the early days of the franchise, when they lost everything they touched.

Reporter: "What do you feel about your teams execution?"

McKay: "I'm all for it."

http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/medicare-s-49th-anniversary-for-seniors-should-become-universal-coverage-for-all-by-its-50th

On Wednesday, July 30, many official events celebrated Medicare's 49th anniversary of providing health coverage for seniors. Before President Lyndon Johnson signed the law enacting Medicare coverage, seniors in the United States received erratic often bankrupting care. By all accounts, all but the most ardent elderly Tea Party stalwarts laud Medicare for its freedom of choice in providers and relative simplicity in claims processing. Although the Affordable Care Act is hopefully a political holding position until single-payer health care for all is enacted in the US - thus catching the nation up with most of the rest of the developed world - there are still right-wingers whose goal is to dismantle the current Medicare system...


July 30 is Medicare's 49th birthday. What better way to celebrate than by strengthening Medicare through a better alternative that will not harm beneficiaries? Congress should pass the Medicare Drug Savings Act introduced by Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Rep. Henry Waxman of California. This legislation will require drug companies to provide the government discounts for low-income Medicare beneficiaries, saving the government and taxpayers $141 billion over 10 years and all but eliminating the need to cut benefits or shift costs to beneficiaries.

Yes, Medicare is not perfect. Big Pharma is still making billions of dollars in windfall profits because the Bush Administration, in implementing Medicare Part D, prohibited the federal government from negotiating Medicare medication prices with pharmaceutical firms. It is hard to get politicians concerned about cutting the federal deficit to shut off the multi-billion government gift to the drug industry...


Above all, the economic health of a nation depends upon a nation being healthy. The only way to ensure that goal is through Medicare coverage for everyone in the United States.

http://truth-out.org/news/item/25244-greece-a-nation-for-sale-and-the-death-of-democracy

The savage methods of alleged "economic efficiency" and privatization increase neither efficiency nor competition, but do lead to price increases for consumers, higher costs for government, corruption, embezzlement and the destruction of democracy. When the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) came to Greece's rescue in May 2010 with a 110 billion euro bailout loan in order to avoid the default of a eurozone member state (a second bailout loan worth 130 billion euros was activated in March 2012), the intentions of the rescue plan were multifold.

First, the EU-IMF duo (with the IMF in the role of junior partner) wanted to protect the interests of the foreign banks and the financial institutions that had loaned Greece billions of euros. Greece's gross foreign debt amounted to over 410 billion euros by the end of 2009, so a default would have led to substantial losses for foreign banks and bondholders, but also to the collapse of the Greek banking system itself as the European Central Bank (ECB) would be obliged in such an event to refuse to fund Greek banks.

Second, by bailing out Greece, the EU wanted to avoid the risk of negative contagion effects spreading across the euro area. A Greek default would have led to a financial meltdown across the euro area and perhaps to the end of the euro altogether.

Third, with Germany as Europe's hegemonic power, there was a clear intention to punish Greece for its allegedly "profligate" ways (although it was large inflows of capital from the core countries that financed consumption and rising government spending), and by extension, send out a message to the other "peripheral" nations of the eurozone of the fate awaiting them if they did not put their fiscal house in order.

Fourth, the EU wanted to take the opportunity presented by the debt crisis to turn Greece into a "guinea pig" for the policy prescriptions of a neoliberal Europe. Berlin and Brussels had long ago embraced the main pillars of the Washington Consensus - fiscal austerity, privatization, deregulation and destatization - and the debt crisis offered a golden opportunity to cut down the Greek public sector to the bare bones and radicalize the domestic labor market with policies that slash wages and benefits and enhance flexibilization and insecurity.

The first three goals of the Greek bailout plan (bailout programs were later extended to Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Cyprus as well) have been achieved, while the fourth one is an ongoing and permanent process since Greece has now been turned into a neo-colony, where the primary and virtually exclusive obligation of the puppet government is repaying the bail-out loans in full.(1) This involves enforcing draconian austerity measures and carrying out a blanket privatization program, spanning from rail and road transport to airports and seaports, from water utilities to electricity distribution, from gaming to mining, and from land to pristine seashores. The coastal and forestry bills drafted recently by the Finance and Tourism Ministries have been described by WWW (World Wild Fund) Greece as being "ecologically criminal."

...The pro-troika governments that have ruled Greece since the start of the international bailouts are servicing the interests of the European masters and the domestic financial and corporate elite with complete indifference to the suffering of the weak and the poor, the accelerating decomposition of the country's social fabric and the ensuing social and economic injustices. In past ages, history mercilessly punished such callous leaders. But this is the age of predatory capitalism, of the expansion of commodification into all aspects of political, economic and social life and of the onslaught on the social contract. For contemporary political leaders in Greece and the EU, democracy is just a catch phrase. Their actual role is to cater to the needs of an elite system, a plutocracy thriving on the impoverishment of a multitude, to the whims of financial vultures that accumulate massive amounts of wealth by subjecting entire nations to a regime of debt peonage...Greece, the land that gave birth to democracy and whose ancient culture laid the foundation for Western civilization, is now a nation for sale. Having fought heroically in World War II against both Mussolini's and Hitler's armies (inspiring Winston Churchill to say that "until now, we knew that Greeks were fighting like heroes; from now on we shall say that the heroes fight like Greeks&quot , contemporary Greece has lost its sovereignty under peacetime conditions, courtesy of a German-led EU and its own obsequious, servile, cowardly and oleaginous political leaders.

Any hope for recovery from the austerity-caused depression and the reclaiming of national sovereignty and dignity lies squarely with the left's rise to power. Whether this materializes or not will depend on the strategic skills of Syriza to keep the momentum going and on the critical skills of the Greek masses to comprehend what is really at stake. Democracy has already been laid to rest and the nation's entire patrimony is now on sale.


MUCH MORE AT LINK, INCLUDING HOW GERMANY SCREWED ITS OWN PEOPLE. FIRST, BEFORE GOING ON T SCREW THE EUROZONE

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_26281956/record-breaking-data-breach-highlights-widespread-security-flaws

In what appears to be the biggest data breach ever, a Russian gang reportedly has stolen 1.2 billion user names and passwords and more than 500 million email addresses from 420,000 websites.

The scale of the attack and the fact that it comes after multiple reports of previous cyber assaults raises significant questions about the security practices of thousands of companies around the globe and puts at risk the financial and personal information of a significant fraction of the planet's population...The breach was discovered by Hold Security of Milwaukee, which could not immediately be reached for comment by this newspaper. But according to the New York Times, the security firm didn't name any of the victimized websites because of nondisclosure agreements with those sites or because the host companies remain vulnerable.

"They targeted any website they could get, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to very small websites," Alex Holden of Hold Security told the Times. "And most of these sites are still vulnerable."


Hold drew criticism late Tuesday when it reportedly posted a notice on its site offering to let companies know if their site was affected by the breach for "as low as $120" a month. The company quickly took down the notice....

NO DOUBT ON RAHM EMMANUEL'S THEORY OF NEVER LETTING A CRISIS GO TO WASTE...

I WAS SURPRISED WHEN I LOOKED THAT UP...I ALWAYS THOUGHT IT WAS DICK CHENEY'S...OF COURSE, HE NEVER LET ON WHAT HE WAS DOING...

SUCH CARDS, THOSE SENATORS. WHAT? THE PRESIDENT WORK?

https://mninews.marketnews.com/content/key-us-senate-dems-urge-obama-fix-tax-inversions-own

For fiscal policy experts, corporate tax inversions are a complex problem with many nuances to consider. For some congressional Democrats, tax inversions are manna from Heaven. Months OF seeking political traction from their so-called "Fair Shot" agenda with an increase in the minimum wage and extending unemployment insurance gained them little. But the recent surge of tax inversions has given them an opportunity to advance a populist agenda on the issue, although at the risk of alienating some key Republicans who would like to work with them to solve the problem.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin and two key Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee, Elizabeth Warren and Jack Reed, sent a letter Tuesday to President Barack Obama urging him to tackle the problem through an executive order - a move that would surely infuriate congressional Republicans who already accuse him of overstepping his constitutional authority.

"Although we will continue to work toward a legislative solution to the problem, we urge you to use your authority to reduce or eliminate tax breaks associated with inversions," the three senators write.

Durbin, Warren and Reed argue that 47 companies have inverted in the last ten years and more than a dozen companies have announced plans to invert or are poised to invert "to dodge U.S. taxes."

......................
The call for Obama to use his executive authority to curb inversions began several weeks ago when a former senior Treasury official, Stephen Shay, wrote a letter in Tax Notes to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew urging this course of action. Lawmakers reacted cautiously to this suggestion, saying it would be better to pass a law to tackle the problem.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden and Sen. Orrin Hatch, the ranking Republican on the panel, began private talks on the matter but were unable to come to an agreement before Congress left Washington for its August recess.

I'M SURE THEY COULDN'T...POOR BABIES WERE STYMIED.

http://www.businessinsider.com/obamas-approval-rating-economic-confidence-wsj-poll-2014-8

A new poll from WSJ/NBC finds a high level of dissatisfaction with the president, the U.S. political system, and the economy, and a stunning number of respondents see a grim future for their children.

Just 40% of respondents approve of the job President Obama is doing, a level which matches an all-time low. On the matter of foreign policy — which is in the news a lot lately due to Russia, Ukraine, Iraq, and Gaza — the President's approval is at a mere 36%, also at an all-time low.

And though the stock market remains close to record highs, while unemployment has dropped considerably, there's still widespread pain being felt economically. 64% of respondents still say they're feeling the effects of the economic collapse, and nearly half believe the economy is still in recession.

But perhaps the worst stat shows the extent to which Americans have lost faith in the future of the country.

76% — an all-time high — are skeptical that their children will have a better life.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/obamas-approval-rating-economic-confidence-wsj-poll-2014-8#ixzz39brWYkf4

http://www.businessinsider.com/r-corporate-americas-abc-policy---anything-but-capex-2014-06

LONDON (Reuters) - The U.S. economy continues to recover from the depths of the Great Recession, although its speed, trajectory and cruising altitude remain the subject of fierce debate.
What's indisputable, however, is that one of the economy's engines has persistently failed to ignite, despite record fuel levels in the tank.

Corporate America has never been more flush with cash. But business investment or capital expenditure - "capex" - has remained depressed, puzzling economists and strategists who have long predicted its resurgence and attendant impact on growth.

Instead, companies have chosen to dip into their collective $1.8 trillion pile of cash to re-hire workers, fund merger and acquisitions activity or buy back their own shares. Boosting growth and returns through long-term investment in their business hasn't registered nearly as highly.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/r-corporate-americas-abc-policy---anything-but-capex-2014-06#ixzz39bsUEVOT

http://www.businessinsider.com/r-walgreen-wont-shift-tax-domicile-abroad-as-buys-alliance-boots-2014-06

(Reuters) - U.S. retailer Walgreen Co <WAG.N> will make a full takeover of Europe's biggest pharmacy chain Alliance Boots <ABN.UL>, but won't use the deal to move its tax domicile overseas after fierce criticism of such tax-cutting moves at home.
Walgreen said on Wednesday it would buy the 55 percent it does not already own of Alliance Boots for 3.13 billion pounds ($5.27 billion) in cash and 144.3 million Walgreen shares, after first taking a 45 percent stake in 2012.

It added the combined company would keep its tax domicile in the United States, with headquarters in the Chicago area.

The announcement from Walgreen follows news Tuesday that the Obama administration is reviewing its options in attempts to stop companies from moving their tax base abroad.

In pre-market trade, shares of Walgreens were down nearly 6%.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/r-walgreen-wont-shift-tax-domicile-abroad-as-buys-alliance-boots-2014-06#ixzz39bt6KiEa

http://www.businessinsider.com/r-argentina-says-to-formally-demand-us-banks-make-bond-payouts--2014-05

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Argentina said on Tuesday it will formally demand that intermediary banks charged with delivering the country's debt payments make hundreds of millions of dollars in payouts that were due in June but that have been blocked by a U.S. court.
Argentina defaulted last week after losing a long legal battle with hedge funds that rejected the terms of debt restructurings in 2005 and 2010.

The government deposited payments owed to holders of its restructured bonds with intermediaries Citibank Argentina and Bank of New York Mellon.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Griesa said the deposits were illegal because he had ordered Argentina not to pay restructured bondholders without paying the holdouts at the same time.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/r-argentina-says-to-formally-demand-us-banks-make-bond-payouts--2014-05#ixzz39bthv2XQ

http://www.businessinsider.com/markets-are-down-in-europe-2014-8

LONDON (Reuters) - European stocks fell on Wednesday while nervous investors took refuge in high-rated bonds on reports of a build-up of Russian troops near the border with Ukraine.
The euro came under pressure, trading at nine-month low against the dollar amid threats of retaliatory Russian sanctions against the European Union, and signs the crisis in Ukraine was hitting Europe's biggest economy Germany.

German industrial orders slid in June at their steepest rate since September 2011, with the economy ministry saying geopolitical tensions had probably led to more cautious ordering.

"We are getting closer to a situation where we really have an escalation of the conflict...sanctions being stepped up, and things moving out of control," said Elwin de Groot, senior market economist at Rabobank.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/markets-are-down-in-europe-2014-8#ixzz39buEvH6m

http://www.businessinsider.com/german-factory-orders-drop-2014-8

BERLIN (AP) — German factory orders were down in June compared to the previous month due to a decrease of large orders.
The Federal Statistics Office said Wednesday that industrial orders were 3.2 percent lower than in May, when they also fell by 1.6 percent.

Orders from inside Germany dropped 1.9 percent and those from countries outside the euro zone fell by 4.1 percent.

New orders from other countries in the 18-nation Eurozone fell by 10.4 percent.

The Federal Statistics Office said that geopolitical developments and risks were a likely cause for the decrease in new orders and that they expected only moderate development in the coming months.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/german-factory-orders-drop-2014-8#ixzz39buikTKg

http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-executive-action-on-inversions-warren-2014-8

The Obama administration said Tuesday it was reviewing potential administrative actions to limit stop companies' so-called tax inversion deals, after Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), Jack Reed (D-R.I.), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) sent a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to bypass Congress.

Most simply, tax inversions are mergers in which companies based in this case the U.S. acquire a country based overseas and shift their tax base, allowing them to enjoy a lower tax rate on profits made outside the U.S.

"Treasury is reviewing a broad range of authorities for possible administrative actions that could limit the ability of companies to engage in inversions, as well as approaches that could meaningfully reduce the tax benefits after inversions take place, to at least provide a partial fix," a Treasury Department spokesperson told Business Insider.

In their letter, the senators said the "growing trend in corporate tax avoidance" has created the need for immediate action.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-executive-action-on-inversions-warren-2014-8#ixzz39c21R2l1

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-06/geopolitical-risks-weigh-on-germany-s-factory-orders.html

Italy unexpectedly returned to recession and German factory orders dropped the most since 2011 as political tensions and slowing global growth threaten the euro area’s recovery.

Italy’s economy shrank 0.2 percent in the second quarter after contracting 0.1 percent in the previous three months. German orders slid 3.2 percent in June from May. Both reports were worse than forecast by economists in separate Bloomberg News surveys.

The figures come on the eve of the European Central Bank’s August interest-rate meeting, two months after it announced an unprecedented package of stimulus measures including a negative deposit rate and targeted loans to banks. Those policies will take time to have an impact, leaving the economy at risk from a crisis in eastern Europe that is already undermining business and investor confidence.

“Today’s data are a serious reason for concern and confirm that the euro-area recovery is still sluggish at best,” said Joerg Kraemer, chief economist at Commerzbank AG in Frankfurt. “Evidence is mounting that risks to the ECB’s economic outlook are to the downside.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-06/obama-let-delphi-avoid-taxes-in-tactic-president-assails.html


President Barack Obama says U.S. corporations that adopt foreign addresses to avoid taxes are unpatriotic. His own administration helped one $20 billion American company do just that.

As part of the bailout of the auto industry in 2009, Obama’s Treasury Department authorized spending $1.7 billion of government funds to get a bankrupt Michigan parts-maker back on its feet -- as a British company. While executives continue to run Delphi Automotive Plc (DLPH) from a Detroit suburb, the paper headquarters in England potentially reduces the company’s U.S. tax bill by as much as $110 million a year.

The Obama administration’s role in aiding Delphi’s escape from the U.S. tax system may complicate the president’s new campaign against corporate expatriation. After a wave of companies announced plans to shift addresses this year, Obama last month labeled the firms “corporate deserters.”


The Delphi case also highlights how little attention the administration paid to the tax avoidance technique until recently. Only this year did Obama include a measure in his annual budget proposal to prevent some tax-driven address changes, which are known as “inversions.” Thanks to gaps in a Congressional ban on contracts with inverted companies, his administration continues to award more than $1 billion annually in government business to more than a dozen corporate expats.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-08-05/the-bankruptcy-code-is-bankrupt


Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, has introduced a bill that would allow people with high medical bills to bankrupt their student loans. I sympathize with the basic impulse, but this is absolutely the wrong way to go about it.

The inability to bankrupt student loans is . . . what’s the word I’m looking for? Right -- absurd. If people need bankruptcy relief, they need bankruptcy relief; there’s no reason that debts owed to the government should get special deference in a bankruptcy proceeding. (Technically, student loan debts are not owed to the government, but most of the loans are guaranteed by the government, so ultimately, it’s Uncle Sam who loses when you default.)

It’s not like student loans somehow become especially more problematic if you also have high medical bills. I mean, sure, medical bills often go along with an income problem that makes it hard to pay back your loans. But many other things often go along with income problems that make it hard to pay back your loans. In fact, that’s the definition of insolvency: You don’t have enough income to pay back your loans.

That’s why Congress should offer bankruptcy relief to everyone who is struggling with unpayable student loan debt, not just the handful who also happen to have large medical bills. Shackling people to their debt for decades is bad for them, as well as for society, as people and resources stagnate in place rather than moving on. That’s why we have a bankruptcy code.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-06/norway-becomes-magnet-for-riskiest-forex-bonds-nordic-credit.html

Norway’s booming junk-bond market is attracting a growing number of international companies eager to issue in the AAA-rated country.

DNB ASA, Norway’s biggest bank, estimates that companies based outside the Scandinavian nation have now become a “major driver of volume.” In the six months through June, about half the high-yield debt issued in Norway came from companies with “weak or no links” to the country selling debt in currencies other than kroner, DNB estimates.

Norway, home to Scandinavia’s biggest junk-bond market, is drawing in issuers as record-low central bank rates across most of the developed world feed investor demand for riskier debt. Western Europe’s biggest oil and gas producer has established itself as an attractive market for high-yield issuers thanks to the infrastructure it’s created to help shipping and energy firms sell debt, according to Nordea Bank AB.

Norway has “a lot of exposure to typical high-yield industries, like oil and gas, shipping and offshore -- heavy asset industries which are typical for high-yield credits,” Lars Kirkeby, chief of credit at Nordea in Oslo, said by phone. “It’s quite easy for companies to issue bonds here, especially for foreign companies.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-06/asian-stocks-follow-u-s-rout-as-ukraine-tensions-rise.html

Asian stocks fell, with the regional index extending yesterday’s losses, after U.S. equities dropped to a two-month low amid escalating tensions in Ukraine.

SoftBank Corp., a Japanese mobile-phone operator, dropped 3.5 percent after a person familiar with the matter said Sprint Corp., controlled by SoftBank, ended talks to acquire T-Mobile US Inc. Vard Holdings Ltd. plunged 5.1 percent in Singapore after the shipbuilder said it received a tax claim from Brazil authorities. Aluminum Corp. of China Ltd. surged 9.4 percent in Hong Kong after the government allowed the producer of the light metal to create a rare earth group.

The MSCI Asia Pacific Index dropped 0.4 percent to 146.18 as of 4:06 p.m. in Hong Kong, with all of its 10 industry groups falling. The measure slumped 0.8 percent yesterday, which pared its gain since a Feb. 4 low to 13 percent.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-05/murdoch-s-fox-withdraws-time-warner-takeover-offer.html

Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox Inc. withdrew its unsolicited takeover offer of $75 billion for Time Warner Inc., giving up after the attempt to reshape the media industry sent Fox shares tumbling.

Murdoch, the billionaire chairman of Fox, said he’s backing down after Time Warner’s board refused to engage in talks and Fox’s stock price declined 11 percent since the offer became public. Fox instead authorized a $6 billion repurchase of its Class A shares.

“Time Warner management and its board refused to engage with us to explore an offer which was highly compelling,” Murdoch, 83, said in a statement yesterday. “Additionally, the reaction in our share price since our proposal was made undervalues our stock and makes the transaction unattractive to Fox shareholders.”

Time Warner, led by Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bewkes, rejected Murdoch’s June offer of $85 a share in cash and stock as too low and said the media company’s growth plan will create more value than any proposal Fox “is in a position to offer.” As its shares tumbled, Fox determined that it couldn’t bump the bid high enough to interest Time Warner’s board and management, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the talks were private.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-05/biggest-u-s-banks-told-to-simplify-their-living-wills-.html

Wall Street banks spent two years asking U.S. regulators what they should put in hypothetical bankruptcy plans to prove they aren’t “too big to fail.” The agencies broke their silence yesterday with a grade: Fail.

The Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. told 11 of the largest U.S. and foreign banks, including JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), that they botched their so-called living wills. The agencies ordered the banks to simplify their legal structures and revise some practices to make sure they can collapse without damaging the wider financial system.

“It’s unfortunate that there have been public findings before there has been any substantive communications with the banks,” said Rodgin Cohen, senior chairman at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, which has several of the affected banks as clients.

The living-wills exercise was a key check on large banks written into the Dodd-Frank Act, a regulatory overhaul prompted by the 2008 financial crisis. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. provided the horror story for what happens when big, complex financial firms land in bankruptcy court. So the regulators yesterday directed the banks to take immediate action to make their holding companies easier to dismantle before their next round of annual filings in 2015.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-05/default-storm-seen-as-record-private-bonds-mature-china-credit.html

The small companies that dominate China’s private market for high-yield bonds face rising default risks as their debt obligations soar to a record and economic growth slows to the lowest in more than two decades.

Privately issued notes totaling 6.2 billion yuan ($1 billion) come due next quarter, the most since authorities first allowed such offerings from small- to medium-sized borrowers in 2012, according to China Merchants Securities Co. The guarantor of debentures sold by Xuzhou Zhongsen Tonghao New Board Co. stepped in to help after the building-materials producer based in the eastern province of Jiangsu missed a coupon payment in March. Three other issuers have also faced “payment crises” this year, China Merchants said.

Premier Li Keqiang has sought to expand financing for small companies, which account for 70 percent of China’s economy, as expansion is set to cool to the slowest since 1990 at 7.4 percent this year, according to a Bloomberg survey. The nation’s bond clearing house last month suspended valuation of privately placed securities sold by an auto-parts exporter after it failed to clarify media reports regarding a possible default. A polyester maker with similar notes had a bankruptcy application accepted in March.

“The current risks exposed in the private-bond market are probably a prelude to a storm,” said Sun Binbin, a Shanghai-based bond analyst at China Merchants. “There’s been improvement in only some sectors of the economy, not in all.”

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_UKRAINE_MARKETS_ROILED?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-08-06-06-48-18

LONDON (AP) -- Fears that the crisis in Ukraine is escalating into a new and dangerous phase roiled financial markets Wednesday.

Following allegations of a buildup of Russian troops on the border of Ukraine and the prospect of tit-for-tat sanctions between the West and Moscow, investors have become increasingly vexed by the situation in Ukraine.

The latest jitters, which contributed to a 1.1 percent fall in Japan's Nikkei 225 stock average earlier and a 1.2 percent decline in the Stoxx 50 index of leading European shares, have come in the wake of comments from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk that he has information indicating that there is a growing threat of a "direct intervention" by Russia in Ukraine.

Tusk's comments come a day after John Ging, director of U.N. humanitarian operations, warned the Security Council at an emergency meeting requested by Russia that the humanitarian situation in eastern Ukraine is steadily worsening as power and water supplies are scarce, homes are destroyed and health workers flee.