Tell it like I see it…my weekly news collection
7 min readApr 3, 2020
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Weekly news collection of April, 4, 2020
Crypto and Money
- A Coindesk podcast with Niall Ferguson on how the Covid-19 crisis shows the general failure of all centralised systems and the need for a distributed architecture to reduce the points of failure in a global world. A distributed architecture for money.
- Some ground for optimism in the crypto sector in a Coindesk podcast
Economics
- US manufacturing still hold in March (but the crisis was only at the beginning in the US) while the services´ sector collapse.
- US Jobless claims surge to 10 million in the last 2 weeks.
- EU Services collapse
Investing
- Everyone agrees, this is just the beginning of a long and nasty bear market
- Visualize the impacts on businesses here:
- Visualize how broken are the markets in 56 charts here:
- US businesses have drawn credit facilities for US$ 208 billion in the last few weeks fearing a credit crunch, of which US$ 100 billion only in last week. Auto and retail the most impacted sectors.
Geopolitics
- NATO shows its irrelevance by carrying out useless military drills against an imaginary “evil” instead of deploying military medical staff to fight the real evil and help out the needing member countries. Only wasted money which enriches the arms lobby…
EU Coronabonds issue
- The debate about the EU joint issue of coronabonds gets heated. Southern EU countries against the hard-core monetarists of northern Europe. However correct is Ramin´s historical reconstruction of the economic crises of the last 10 years in Europe and Germany´s role in them (article below), one cannot place the blame entirely on Germany. After all the “victims” are to be blamed more than the “culprit”. Put simply, it is not Germany´s fault if the Italians or the Greeks are represented by corrupted politicians who do not have at heart the interest of their own people. The problem is not Germany. The problem are the traitors to their own people like Tsipras, Conte, Renzi, Letta, Monti and so on with the governments of the last 15 years who did not raise their voice in Europe to bring a change in attitudes, policies and rules. The Brits did not accept it and left. But they are a proud people, they have a proud leader and they have balls. The others don´t. They weep and blame someone else, rather than standing up and fight. Germany pushes them around like puppets and will rightly continue to do so until you let them do that. Italy has all the means to change its destiny, to say enough to the €uro and the EU, but its people are not proud enough and do not have the courage to fight and endure the pains of hard choices before the gains will come. They are weak, they are vassals.
EU
- Having nothing else more important to do in such a critical moment Von der Leyen and other EU bureaucrats want to SANCTION Hungary. The reason being that “evil” PM Orban democratically asked the Parliament to vote for granting him extraordinary powers to handle the #covid crisis and the Parliament democratically said YES. This is “dictatorship” for the EU. Rather, in Italy the EU puppet PM Conte (now turning slightly rebellious towards his German masters and asking to issue EU coronabonds) grabs the very same powers with an emergency decree — without asking anyone — and that is “democracy” for the EU. No wonder that with such incompetent and arrogant bureaucrats the EU is falling apart. These people live in another world…made of unaccountability, irresponsibility, privileges, fat salaries, etc. The EU´s founding fathers, Adenauer, De Gasperi, Churchill and Monnet would be turning in their graves if they could only see what the EU has become.
Covid-19
- Putin, a giant Statesman of a past epoch in a world of mediocre politicians, sends medical aid even to the US. This despite the US sanctions, the continuous beating, smearing and insulting. The Dems also try to boycott the effort and smear the generous gesture. NO COMMENT
- In addition some Italian “press-stitutes” (i.e press-prostitutes) are hard at work in disinformation and smear the Russian aids as “useless”, while the Italian Ambassador officially thanks Russia for 600 ventilators.
- If you want to see how this crisis might end look no further than Event201, a very timely pandemic simulation exercise which took place at the end of November 2019. Very interesting, but not for the faint of heart. Watch the videos of the meetings. In particular Video Segment 4 to see how your privacy rights and freedom of speech will be curtailed.
- Also for the not faint-hearted my recent article on the economic impact of a pandemic based on World Bank studies
Stay Healthy
- You hear everything and its contrary about the utility or inutility of wearing a face mask. However always use your brain and be critical. There is a medium way between being 100% virus-proof or totally useless. This article shows the right common sense approach, the very same common sense that most people seem to miss.
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