Round 1 Goes to We the People

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-06-13/round-1-goes-we-people

Fast track authority for TPP – which would have assured the passage of a horrible treaty – was voted down FRIDAY.

But Obama, Ryan and the powers-that-be are forcing Round 2 on Tuesday.

Conservatives and liberals BOTH hate the TPP. It's literally We The People versus the oligarchy.

Keep the pressure on … TPP will pass unless we raise hell.

Deborah Gleeson, a lecturer at the school of psychology and public health at La Trobe University, said the inclusion of an annexe on health “serves no useful public interest purpose”…

“It sets a terrible precedent for using regional trade deals to tamper with other countries’ health systems…

Jane Kelsey of the faculty of law of the University of Auckland described the annexe as one of the most controversial parts of the TPP in her analysis. She said the US pharmaceutical industry was using the trade agreement to target New Zealand’s Pharmaceutical Management Agency (Pharmac), equivalent to the PBS…

“This leaked text shows the TPP will severely erode Pharmac’s ability to continue to deliver affordable medicines and medical devices as it has for the past two decades.

“That will mean fewer medicines are subsidised, or people will pay more as co-payments or more of the health budget will go to pay for medicines instead of other activities or the health budget will have to expand beyond the cap.

“Whatever the outcome, the big global pharmaceutical companies will win”…

AMA president Brian Owler said while doctors were very concerned at the possible effects on Australia’s healthcare systems, they were constantly dismissed by the trade minister Andrew Robb.

“When we have raised concerns about the effects on health, the only response is ‘we are not going to undermine the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme’,” said Owler.

“We are worried about the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism and there are issues in terms of patents that would affect pharmaceutical prices.

“The problem is our concerns have been dismissed by the trade minister but we do not know what is in the text.”

Why Does Obama Want This Trade Deal So Badly? By William Finnegan

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/why-does-obama-want-the-trans-pacific-partnership-so-badly?mbid=nl_061115_Daily&CNDID=26139401&mbid=nl_061115_Daily&CNDID=26139401&spMailingID=7818393&spUserID=MzkxMjA1MjAwODQS1&spJobID=701457124&spReportId=NzAxNDU3MTI0S0


The political battle over the enormous, twelve-nation trade agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership keeps getting stranger. President Obama has made the completion of the deal the number-one legislative priority of his second term. Indeed, Republican opponents of the T.P.P., in an effort to rally the red-state troops, have begun calling it Obamatrade. And yet most of the plan’s opponents are not Republicans; they’re Democrats. Obama’s chief allies in his vote-by-vote fight in the House of Representatives to win “fast-track authority” to negotiate this and other trade deals are Speaker John Boehner and Representative Paul Ryan—not his usual foxhole companions. SECOND VOTE ATTEMPT TUESDAY The House Republican leaders tell their dubious members that they are supporting Obama only in order to “constrain” him. Meanwhile, Obama is lobbying members of the Black Congressional Caucus, whose support he can normally count on, tirelessly and, for the most part, fruitlessly. “The president’s done everything except let me fly Air Force One,” Representative Cedric Richmond, Democrat of Louisiana, told the Christian Science Monitor this week. Nonetheless, Richmond said, “I’m leaning no.”

The long, bad aftertaste of NAFTA—the North American Free Trade Agreement, enacted in 1994—explains much of the Democratic opposition to the T.P.P. Ronald Reagan originally proposed NAFTA, but Bill Clinton championed it, got it through Congress mainly on Republican votes, and signed it. In many Democratic districts, NAFTA is still widely blamed for the loss of hundreds of thousands of American manufacturing jobs, and for long-term downward pressure on wages. When President Obama argues that the T.P.P. is not NAFTA, he is correct. It convenes Pacific Rim nations and economies of many stripes, from wealthy, democratic Japan to authoritarian, impoverished Vietnam, and it includes six countries with which the United States already has free-trade agreements. If enacted, it will encompass forty per cent of global economic activity. It is less a traditional trade deal than a comprehensive economic treaty and, at least for the United States, a strategic hedge against the vast and growing weight of Chinese regional influence. What exactly the T.P.P. will do, however, is difficult to know, because its terms are being negotiated in secret. Only “cleared advisors,” most of them representing various private industries, are permitted to work on the text. Leaked drafts of chapters have occasionally surfaced—enough to alarm, among others, environmentalists, labor groups, and advocates for affordable medicine.

Some of the fear and loathing inspired by the T.P.P. is hard to take seriously. Conservative opponents of immigration reform, for instance, have descried in the T.P.P. a Trojan horse, inside which, they fear, the dreaded immigration reform will be smuggled into law. (Paul Ryan has tried to debunk this notion, calling it an “urban legend.”) There are House Republicans who seemingly refuse to support any measure that Obama wants, simply because he wants it. Last week, contemplating the approaching fast-track vote, Representative Ryan Zinke, of Montana, said, “We are talking about giving Barack Obama—a President who negotiates with rogue nations like Iran and Cuba—exorbitant authority to do what he thinks is best.” Zinke, a former Navy SEAL commander, went on, “I don’t have faith that President Obama will negotiate in the best interest of Montana or America.” More substantive objections to the T.P.P. have emerged from senators and representatives, who are now allowed, under strictly controlled conditions—in a guarded basement room under the Capitol, with no note-taking—to read drafts of the eight-hundred-page agreement. Senator Elizabeth Warren has criticized its provisions for “investor-state dispute settlement.” I.S.D.S. allows corporations to sue governments over laws that may adversely affect “expected future profits.” Environmental regulations, public-health measures, and even minimum-wage laws can be challenged under I.S.D.S., which is already a feature of many trade agreements. A Swedish power company is currently suing Germany, seeking $4.6 billion in damages, because of steps Germany is taking to phase out nuclear power, and Philip Morris is suing to prevent Uruguay and Australia from implementing policies to reduce smoking. Under the T.P.P., the international tribunals that would hear such cases would not, according to Warren, be staffed by judges but by a rotating cast of corporate lawyers. Challenges to American laws should at least be lodged, she argues, in American courts.

WikiLeaks has published T.P.P. draft chapters on investment, the environment, and two versions, from 2013 and 2014, of the intellectual-property-rights chapter. The environment chapter was a major disappointment to activists who had been led to believe that it would contain real enforcement mechanisms. In the Sierra Club’s analysis, the T.P.P. will generate a rapid increase in exports of American liquefied natural gas, which will in turn lead to more fracking, more methane emissions, a shift of the domestic energy market from gas toward coal, and the exacerbation of climate change. The proposed intellectual-property agreements appear to have been dictated by the entertainment, tech, and pharmaceutical industries. Doctors Without Borders declared that, if the drug-patent provisions do not change in the final draft, the T.P.P. is on track to become “the most harmful trade pact ever for access to medicines” in developing countries. With each glimpse of the draft chapters, the coalition opposing the agreement grows. Even a “sweetener” in the form of assistance for workers who lose their jobs because of trade agreements turns out to be partly financed by a seven-hundred-million-dollar raid on Medicare. Now Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, is trying to raise a hundred thousand dollars through crowdsourcing, planning to offer the money as a reward to anyone who leaks the entire T.P.P. text—twenty-nine chapters’ worth.

With the fast-track authority that President Obama seeks, he would be able to negotiate trade agreements and present them to Congress for an up-or-down vote, with no amendments or filibusters permitted. Such agreements would then require only fifty-one votes, not sixty, to pass. Paul Ryan recently said, on CNN, that “every President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has had” some form of fast-track authority. That is not quite right—Richard Nixon never got it, although he initiated the modern version of it. Still, not having it plainly galls Obama. And his only realistic hope of enacting the T.P.P. now turns on getting fast-track authority from the House. The Senate passed fast-track last month, sixty-two to thirty-seven, with only fourteen Democrats voting yes. Boehner and Ryan expect to be able to produce two hundred Republican votes. That means eighteen Democratic votes are needed. Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader, is reported to be working closely with Boehner and Ryan to come up with the number they need—although she still hasn’t said which way she’ll vote herself. That’s how strange the legislative politics of the T.P.P. have become.

Nearly every constituency in the Democratic Party opposes it; and the more they learn about it, the more they oppose it. And yet their leader, Obama, wants it badly. But why? Maybe it’s a better agreement—better for the American middle class, for American workers—than it seems in the leaked drafts, where it appears bent to the will of multinational corporations. John Kerry, the Secretary of State, and Ashton Carter, the Secretary of Defense, co-authored a column on Monday in USA Today arguing, in evangelical tones, that the T.P.P. will usher in a glorious new era of American-led prosperity, a “global race to the top” for all parties. Meanwhile, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. sees only a race to the bottom. Organized labor, by all accounts, plans to punish any elected Democrat who supports the T.P.P., or even supports fast-track for Obama, in the next campaign. It’s difficult, again, to evaluate the agreement when we can’t see it. And it will be difficult for Congress to do its job if its members can’t study each part of the many-tentacled T.P.P. on its merits, but must simply vote yes or no on the whole shebang. What’s the rush? Is it simply Obama’s wish to make his mark on history and to complete his pivot toward Asia before his time is up? Politicians are often accused of supporting pro-corporate policies to please wealthy backers, looking toward the next campaign. That can’t be Obama’s motive now.

TWO CHOICES: CORRUPTION OR COERCION (OR MAYBE ONE OF EACH): HIS RETIREMENT BENEFITS AND/OR LIFE ARE AT STAKE. IT SURE AS HELL ISN'T FOR HIS "LEGACY"! AND HIS EGO IS INSATIABLE.

Business Leaders React With Dismay to Defeat of Trade Bill

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/13/business/business-leaders-react-with-dismay-to-defeat-of-trade-bill.html

As big a setback as Friday’s vote on Capitol Hill was for President Obama’s efforts to advance his trade agenda, it was an even bigger rebuff for the leaders of American business.

While there are deep divisions over trade policy among Democrats, and to some extent among Republicans as well, corporate America has been nearly unified in its support of a deal that would lower various barriers to trade and investment between the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim nations.

Though many sought to put the best face on the vote, business groups and chief executives were quick to voice their displeasure with the House’s rejection of aid to workers harmed by imports, which could doom prospects for eventual approval of a wider trade pact...

THIS IS DISINGENUOUS, AT BEST, NAIVE AT WORST....US BUSINESS IS GOING TO COLLAPSE UNDER THE TOILET PAPER....

The final indignity for Obama came in the minutes before the vote, when Pelosi—his erstwhile ally for six-and-and-half years—deserted him as well.

PROVING THAT WOMEN ARE MUCH BETTER AT NUMBERS AND REALITY THAN MEN GIVE US CREDIT FOR--NANCY READ THE WRITING ON THE WALL.

How Pelosi broke with Obama

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/how-pelosi-broke-with-obama-118961.html

It had come to this: Nancy Pelosi needed John Boehner to help save her party and her president from an ugly public meltdown.

By Friday morning, it was clear that a crucial piece of Barack Obama’s trade initiative was barreling toward defeat. Democrats were disjointed, dispirited, even angry in some cases. At the same time, they knew that they – not Republicans – would shoulder much of the blame for killing the president’s top legislative priority and for the ensuing spectacle of a party at war.

So just before noon, with debate already underway on the House floor, Pelosi picked up the phone and called Boehner to inform him that a must-pass component of the White House trade package was going to fail. It was the second such warning from Pelosi to Boehner in two days.

“Are you still going ahead?” Pelosi asked him, according to sources familiar with the call. “Are you going to pull the bill?”

No, he wasn’t, Boehner replied. This was his best chance to push fast-track trade authority across his unpredictable House floor, he told Pelosi.

Hours later, the House resoundingly defeated Trade Adjustment Assistance, a federal aid program to help workers who lose their jobs to free trade. The vote effectively scuttled Obama’s bid for fast-track trade authority – though Republicans may try to revive it in the coming days or weeks – because it was conditioned on approval of the jobs bill.

Pelosi was a minor player for much of Obama’s push to secure authority to clinch the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation pact that would be the largest free-trade deal in history. But as the vote neared, and major Democratic opposition bubbled to the surface, she was in a wrenching position: naturally inclined to deliver for a president she’s worked hand-in-glove with for years, but all-too-aware of the strong progressive winds within her caucus against a deal Democrats believe would jilt American workers.

Up until moments before Friday’s vote, Pelosi hadn’t told a soul how she was going to vote on TAA or Trade Promotion Authority, the fast-track trade law Obama was seeking....

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/how-pelosi-broke-with-obama-118961.html#ixzz3d2UuOTyB

The Democrats’ TPP rebellion just drew blood: Everything you need to know about today’s shocking vote

Today’s rebuke for the Obama Administration and his friends on the Republican side of the aisle on their trade agenda restores democratic accountability to the process of governing. What Obama was proposing was a trick, one used repeatedly to advance distasteful policies, by getting each side to vote only on the parts they like. And House progressives responded by saying they wouldn’t play that game anymore. If they can withstand the pressure, not only will trade be derailed, but the era of the split-vote gambit, where opponents help the victors, will be over.

Progressive Democrats took their stand on trade adjustment assistance (TAA), a separate bill to “fast track” trade authority for the President, which the Senate linked together, so that they had to pass concurrently. TAA offers modest job training, income support and health insurance assistance to workers who lose their jobs from trade deals. It’s not very effective, but it sounds good; Democrats who oppose trade deals can say that they at least got some help for workers.

TAA and fast track have passed together ever since the Trade Act of 1974. This is a Washington game where Democrats get to vote for TAA so Republicans don’t have to. Republicans don’t favor TAA because they see it as welfare.

That set up liberal Democrats as the deciding factor on whether Obama would get his fast-track trade authority. The President went to Capitol Hill to tell Democrats to “play it straight” on the vote. But voting for TAA as a sweetener for a policy most Democrats don’t support is the opposite of playing it straight. It’s a stupid game, and progressives finally decided not to play… {more}

…Here’s what happened: The House considered three bills Friday. One was a generally noncontroversial customs enforcement bill. Another was the actual fast-track trade-authority legislation. (You can read the case against that bill here.) And the third was a bill providing trade-adjustment assistance to workers who get screwed over by trade deals. Republicans have long detested trade-adjustment assistance as a wasteful big-government program, and Democrats were not happy with the way it was being paid for.

The way House Speaker John Boehner structured the process along with the Senate, all three bills had to pass or else the entire package would not advance. (If you’re a gambler, think of it like a three-item parlay bet.)

Progressive Democrats who oppose fast track feared it would pass with mainly Republican votes alongside a small number of Democrats, but they sensed an opportunity on the must-pass trade-assistance bill—since relatively few Republicans would back the legislation, it would be much easier to kill by withholding Democratic votes. And if trade assistance goes down, so too would fast track.

And that’s exactly what happened. Minority leader Nancy Pelosi took the floor early Friday afternoon and said that explicitly defeating trade assistance “is the only way we will be able to slow down fast track.” When the votes rolled in shortly thereafter, the trade-assistance bill failed with 302 votes against it and only 126 in favor.

It’s worth stressing here how much progressive organizing had to do with this defeat. President Obama personally appeared in Congress at the last minute Friday morning to appeal to Democrats one more time, on the heels of crashing the congressional baseball game the night before. But Pelosi and Democrats remained unswayed, and in her speech, Pelosi instead credited the work of activists holding members to a “hot stove” back home.

But fast track isn’t quite dead yet. Boehner moved on to the fast-track and customs bills anyway, both of which “passed,” though fast track only got two votes more than it needed. The package still won’t advance without trade-adjustment assistance—but Boehner scheduled a revote for Tuesday. {more}

The key roll call came on a measure to grant financial aid to displaced workers, with 144 Democrats linking arms with 158 Republicans in a rout that left the overall package of trade bills stalled.

Most of what I say is about the way Arbitration works, who the arbitrators are and what power arbitration gives to corporations. Therefore almost everything I say applies just as accurately to the TPP as well. If you want to skip what I say about the TTIP itself and skip to where I talk about Arbitration then skip down to about 12.25.

I can also say that while I have harsh — but true – things to say about US food and animal standards, I would like to point out that in return Europe wants America to lower its standards on trading derivatives (DQ: a subject I covered in A Dark Alliance: European Union Joins Forces With Wall Street). So I don’t want anyone to think America is the baddie here and Europe all peaches and cream. If the TTIP goes through Europe will export its insane and stupid ideas about derivatives to America. The losers here will be the ordinary people on both sides of the pond, the only winners will be the corporations.

Greece was warned by a group of European Union officials in Brussels it had less than 24 hours to come up with a serious counter-proposal, according to a person familiar with the discussion.

Greek delegate told by EU officials that a list must includes reform on pension and VAT.

Greece told by the officials that they are taking seriously all scenarios.

EU official didn’t specifically say what would happen to Greece if there was no plan presented tomorrow.

The German government is holding "concrete consultations" on what to do in the case of a bankruptcy of the Greek state, German newspaper Bild said, citing several people familiar with the matter.

This includes discussions about introducing capital controls in Greece if the crisis-stricken country goes bankrupt, Bild said in an advance copy of an article due to be published on Friday.

It said a debt haircut for Greece was also being discussed, adding that government officials were in close contact with the European Central Bank on that.

The German government did not, however, have a concrete plan of how it would react if Greece goes bankrupt and much would have to be decided on an ad-hoc basis, Bild cited the sources as saying.

Bill Black: Roger Cohen Laments his Inadequate Schadenfreude Because the Greeks Don’t Suffer Enough

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/06/bill-black-roger-cohen-laments-his-inadequate-schadenfreude-because-the-greeks-dont-suffer-enough.html

Yves here...I saw the New York Times op ed that Black shreds in this post when it first ran and was appalled. It was as close as you can get in the US MSM to the “lazy Greeks” bigotry that is common in the German media. The comments in the New York Times were running roughly 90% against when I took a gander through them. This piece is also part of an outburst of not-very-well disguised hostility towards Greece, apparently for the crime of having had debt levels blow out as a result of the financial crisis, and then having Eurocrats mismanage post-crisis economic policies and engage in extend and pretend, which has led to depression-induced misery in Greece and ire among its creditors. For instance, a more sophisticated version of this sort of piece is “Let the Greeks eat shit and die leave the Eurozone and take their lumps, like a Financial Times op-ed, Greeks chose poverty, let them have their way. Just like the rash of pieces we’ve seen justifying why having the top 1%/01% is just the result of the workings of nature, brace yourself for even more of this sort of thing if Greece does indeed default.

By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Jointly published with New Economic Perspectives

“Schadenfreude” is a German word that describes taking a “malicious, gloating pleasure in the suffering of other people.” It is a form of sadism. Roger Cohen has written an extraordinary column describing how much he hates the Greek people. Change the name “Greek” to almost any other group and it is certain that the New York Times would refuse to print such a mass of ethnic slurs. The Greeks are fair game, however, for even the crudest slurs in the NYT. But what causes Cohen’s June 8, 2015 column attacking the Greek people to reach a new level in hate speech is this paragraph.

The European Union has done its healing work here. There will not be another civil war, come what may. The sun will still shine; a gazillion islands will still delight; Greeks will still curse every form of authority; they will still smoke in every restaurant in defiance of the law; they will still have more money than they appear to have; tables in cheap “tavernas” will still offer views that have no price. A Greek meltdown is not the same as a Slovakian meltdown. Life is not just.

Did you get that last sentence? Cohen despairs that “life is not just” because the Greek people, who he makes clear he despises, are not suffering enough to slake Cohen’s hate – and will not suffer enough for Cohen’s taste even if the troika pushes Greece into its second, post-crisis Great Depression. Cohen takes a malicious, gloating pleasure in the suffering of the Greek people, but he laments that his schadenfreude is incomplete because the Greeks will still have beautiful, sun lit islands. In a “just” world the Greeks would suffer far more, and feed Cohen’s joy.

For the sake of brevity I will simply mention and provide the links to three articles that describe the “healing work” of the EU (the most economically illiterate and vicious member of the troika). “Healing” is a particularly Orwellian word usage by Cohen. The reality is that the troika’s austerity demands are destroying health care in Greece. Cohen would know this if he read the relevant article published by an obscure newspaper entitled the NYT about a week before Cohen’s column. And the Cohen meme, so reminiscent of every ethnic slur, about the happy but shiftless and always complaining Greeks might have been informed by a column in that same obscure paper that explained how Greek suicide rates had surged dramatically as the troika’s austerity demands forced the Greek economy into worse than Great Depression levels of unemployment and greatly increased poverty. Cohen’s concern for smoke in Greece is laudatory. Cohen is a cheerleader and apologist for the troika’s austerity that has led the desperate Greek people to cut down public forests to burn the wood to keep their homes and children warm – causing dangerous pollution and some fatal home fires. The Wall Street Journal article notes:

Such woodcutting was last common in Greece during Germany’s brutal occupation in the 1940s, underscoring how five years of recession and waves of austerity measures have spawned drastic measures.

The EU’s austerity demands are driven most fervently by Germany and its closest allies.

Not that it will do any good, but people who do not take a malicious, gloating pleasure in the pointless suffering of the Greek people through self-destructive austerity can join me in calling on the New York Times to retract Cohen’s exercise in sadism and ethnic slurs. I will not bother asking Cohen to apologize for there is no chance that it would be sincere.

Russia Gets Very Serious on De-dollarizing By F. William Engdahl

http://journal-neo.org/2015/06/06/russia-gets-very-serious-on-de-dollarizing/

Russia is about to take another major step towards liberating the Ruble from the Dollar System. Its Finance Ministry just revealed it is considering issuing Russian state debt in Chinese Yuan. That would be an elegant way to decouple from the dependence and blackmail pressures from the US Treasury financial terrorism operations while at the same time strengthening the bonds between China and Russia–Washington’s worst geopolitical nightmare.

Russian Deputy Minister of Finance, Sergei Storchak, announced that his ministry is making a careful study of what would be required to issue Russian bonds denominated in Chinese Yuan. The latest news is part of a long-term strategy between Russia and China that goes at the heart of American hegemony—the role of the dollar as the leading world central bank reserve currency.

The dollar is used in some 60% of central bank reserves today. The second largest is the Euro. Now clearly China is carefully moving, as the world’s largest trading nation, to create its Renminbi or Chinese Yuan as another major reserve currency. That has huge geopolitical implications. So long as the US dollar is leading reserve currency, the world must de facto buy US dollar Treasury bonds for its reserves. That has allowed Washington to have budget deficits since 1971 when the dollar left the gold exchange standard. In effect, China, Japan, Russia, Germany—all trade surplus countries, finance Washington’s deficits that allow her to make wars around the world. It is a paradox that Russia and China at least, are determined to end as soon as possible.

Last year Russia and China signed enormous 30-year energy deals for delivery of Russian oil and gas to China. The payments will be in local currencies not in dollars. Already in 2014 settlement in national currencies between China and Russia in bilateral trade increased nine times over 2013. Lin Zhi, head of the Europe and Central Asia Department of the Chinese Ministry of Economic Development announced last November that, “About 100 Russian commercial banks are now opening corresponding accounts for settlements in yuan. The list of commercial banks where ordinary depositors can open an account in yuan is also growing.” Last November 18 Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank became the first Russian bank to begin financing letters of credit in Chinese yuan.

Long-term strategy

What all this indicates is that Russia and China are carefully planning a long-term strategy of getting out from dependence on the US currency, something that, as the US sanctions last year revealed, make both countries vulnerable to US currency wars of devastating impact... China has just been accepted “in principle” by the Group of 7 finance ministers to have its yuan included in the International Monetary Fund basket of currencies making up IMF Special Drawing Rights. Today only US dollar, Euro and Japanese Yen are included in the basket. Including the yuan would be a huge step towards making the yuan a recognized international reserve currency, and at the same time would weaken the dollar share. China’s foreign reserves consist overwhelmingly of US dollar claims, mainly US Treasury bonds, which is a strategic weakness, because in case of war these can be frozen, as Iran knows too well. It is imperative for China to increase the gold content of the reserves and to diversify the rest into other currencies.

China has also agreed with Russia to unify the new Silk Road high-speed rail project with Russia and Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union. At the same time Beijing has announced it is creating a huge $16 billion fund to develop gold mines along the rail route linking Russia and China and Central Asia. That suggests plans to greatly build up gold as central bank reserve share. China’s central bank has greatly increased its gold holdings in recent years, though whether it is now greater than the alleged Federal Reserve gold holdings of 8000 tons is not yet public. It is expected China must reveal its gold reserves on being formally accepted into the IMF SDR basket perhaps later this year.

Last year, 2014, Song Xin, president of the China Gold Association stated, “We need to establish our gold bank as soon as possible…It can further help us acquire reserves and give us more say and control in the gold market.” A gold sector fund involving countries along the Silk Road has been set up in northwest China’s Xi’an City this May, led by Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE), part of China’s national bank, PBOC. China is the world’s largest gold producer. Among the 65 countries along the routes of the Silk Road Economic Belt, there are numerous Asian countries identified as important reserve bases and consumers of gold. Xinhua reports that 60 countries have invested in the fund, which will facilitate central banks of member states to increase their holdings of gold.

Dr. Diedrick Goedhuys, former economic adviser to the Reserve Bank of South Africa in an interview told me, “I want to emphasize the unique quality of gold, when viewed as a financial asset, of being an asset that is no-one’s liability. A treasury bond, for instance, is an asset in my hands, but a liability, or debt to be repaid, in the books of the treasury. Gold is a pure asset. The Chinese gold mining plan is of vast importance. It’s a long-term plan; it may take ten years before it has a significant effect.”

Now with Washington and Wall Street increasingly frustrated at how to weaken the Ruble and China’s Renminbi, those two powers are making giant strides to break free from their dollar chains, a move that could liberate much of mankind if done in a good way.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

“Minister Jaresko has been in possession of a detailed IMF-compliant solution from the Bond Committee for over a month. We are deeply concerned about the stance the minister is taking, which is not in the interests of Ukraine. We are ready and willing to start talks at any time.”

In an interview before a visit to Italy this week, Mr. Putin dismissed fears of any Russian attack on NATO.

“I think that only an insane person and only in a dream can imagine that Russia would suddenly attack NATO,” he told the newspaper Corriere Della Sera. “I think some countries are simply taking advantage of people’s fears with regard to Russia.”

One Bank to rule them all, One Bank to find them;
One Bank to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

---apologies to JRR Tolkein---Demeter

This Is the Housing Chart That Keeps One Economist Up at Night

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-12/scariest-u-s-housing-chart-shows-nasty-scar-years-after-bust

It’s the one chart that keeps Stan Humphries up at night.

A decade after U.S. home sales peaked, 15.4 percent of owners in the first quarter owed more on their mortgages than their properties were worth, according to a report Friday by Zillow Inc. While that’s down from a high of 31.4 percent in 2012, it’s still alarmingly above the 1 or 2 percent that marks a healthy market, said Humphries, the chief economist at the Seattle-based real-estate data provider. Worse yet: The pace of healing is losing steam.



The blotch stains the economy by restraining the housing recovery and by preventing the job market from becoming even more vigorous. It also will probably exacerbate wealth inequality for years to come as homes valued in the bottom third of the market are more likely to be underwater.

“There’s a large swath of the housing market which could become quite static, which creates real long-term problems,” Humphries said.

The share of mortgage borrowers underwater in the first quarter was down 3.4 percentage points from 18.8 percent at the same time last year, according to the Zillow data. That’s a marked slowdown in the pace of improvement from the 6.6 point drop in the 12 months through March 2014. Just over half the owners were 20 percent or more away from breaking even...While the healthiest way for the underwater mortgages to heal is through home-price appreciation, those increases are diminishing. Residential property values nationally rose 4.14 percent in March from the prior year, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller index. The gauge has decelerated each month since the end of 2013, when it climbed 10.8 percent.

...The prospect of having so many properties lingering underwater, probably for another five or six years, is what unsettles Humphries.

“The problem you could be creating is 15 to 20 percent of the housing stock becomes non-tradeable, which means inventory shortages continue, prices remain very spiky because liquidity is thin, and foreclosures remain very high,” he said.

MORE

More Obamacare Sticker Shock: HMO Rates Up 20%, EPO Up 18%, 12% Overall; Death Spiral for Insurers?

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2015/06/more-obamacare-sticker-shock-hmo-rates.html#ZwiYu0cmZxrTCP8E.99

If you did not have insurance before Obamacare, but do now, or if you are heavily subsidized, you may consider Obamacare a blessing.

If you are not in those select groups, then you are highly likely to be paying more for insurance now than before. And it's going to get worse. Some plan types really take a premium hit.

Premiums Jump 12% On Average

Health Pocket reports Obamacare Insurers Propose 12% Higher Premiums for 2016.





Plan Types

Bronze pays 60% of covered costs
Silver pays 70% of covered costs
Gold pays 80% of covered costs
Platinum pays 90% of covered costs


Network Types

Health maintenance organizations (HMOs)
Exclusive Provider Organizations (EPOs)
Point of Service (POS) plans
Preferred Provider Organizations (PPOs)


PPOs and POS plans cover out-of-network care, while HMOs and EPOs do not. EPO and PPO plans do not require referrals from primary care doctors to see specialists, but HMO and POS plans require referrals.

Sticker Shock Coming Up

67% have silver plans. The rates above are for a single 40-year old nonsmoker. Those 67% will see premium hikes ranging from 11% to 20% depending on the network type.

Bronze plans constitute another 22% of all plans. Those in Bronze network plans other than PPOs will see rates go up 15% to 20%.

Bronze PPO plans go up the least, only 4%, but PPO premiums started higher than the others.


Read more at http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2015/06/more-obamacare-sticker-shock-hmo-rates.html#ZwiYu0cmZxrTCP8E.99