“Turks are taking sledgehammers, handguns and fire to iPhones in a symbolic backing of their government as it clashes with the Trump administration over a jailed American pastor.
“Videos showing Turkish citizens stomping on or otherwise destroying iPhones have proliferated online in recent days, following President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s call for Turks to boycott U.S. products…”
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/turkey-anger-donald-trump-us-tariffs-turks-smash-iphones-burn-fake-dollars/
“Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin said Thursday the United States is prepared to put additional sanctions in place against Turkey if the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan does not release American pastor Andrew Brunson, who has been held since 2016.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/16/politics/turkey-us-sanctions-pastor-mnuchin/index.html
“The feud between President Tayyip Erdogan and U.S. President Donald Trump over steel tariffs threatens to turn other emerging markets cold.”
“Turkey is just a drill. A push by major central banks to reverse crisis-era policies is primed to accelerate into 2019 amid plans for higher interest rates and smaller balance sheets. So-called quantitative tightening then risks sucking dollars and euros from nations whose governments and companies binged on cheap debt without improving the fundamentals of their economies.”
https://www.gulf-times.com/story/603038/As-quantitative-tightening-era-nears-Turkey-proves
“Russia will lose investors and face higher borrowing costs if the United States imposes a ban on investors buying new Russian government bonds, the Kremlin-backed Analytical Credit Ratings Agency (ACRA) said in a report on Friday.”
“The Iranian Minister of Industry, Mines and Business has said that fluctuations in the local forex market over the past four months has tripled the number of applications for import licenses, which have now risen to $250 billion… The $250 billion figure is also triple that of Iran’s annual oil income.
“These remarks have come at a time when the Islamic Republic’s Police and repeatedly reporting arrests of scores of individuals for “disrupting [the] forex market” and benefitting from subsidized dollars by importing good and selling them based on the global exchange rate, rather than the fixed Iranian one. General Gholamhossein Gheibparvar, a commander in the Basij militia, reported that his forces have discovered warehouses full of cars, rice, and construction materials across the country and arrested a number of people who intended to sell them on.”
“Lebanese banks are pulling out the stops to bring in dollars as the country strives to preserve a two-decade old currency peg… But the central bank’s high interest rates that keep money flowing into banks are increasing risk within the financial system and strangling an already depressed economy. That all comes at a time of renewed political uncertainty as Lebanon nears three months without a government.”
“The next government in Pakistan, saddled with mounting debts and a severe foreign currency shortage, is facing a dilemma over whom to turn to for critical financial assistance. Both the main options could undermine some of Prime Minister-elect Imran Khan’s social and economic goals.”
https://thediplomat.com/2018/08/pakistans-new-leader-faces-a-bailout-conundrum/
“Indonesia’s government has made a fresh appeal to the country’s exporters to exchange their holdings of foreign currencies to help support the tumbling rupiah, as Turkey’s financial crisis sparks fears of emerging market contagion.”
“”Public hospitals have no medicines and there are no gloves in the maternity wards. The situation is getting more and more serious,” said Eufrigínia dos Reis from the Mozambique Debt Group (Grupo Moçambicano da Dívida), a civil society organization fighting for debt reform. The country’s economic woes were brought on by secret loans that were backed by Mozambique’s financial minister without parliamentary approval – as is required by the constitution… some $500 million can’t be traced.”
https://www.dw.com/en/mozambiques-debt-crisis-who-will-pay-the-bill/a-45105639
“The five-digit inflation has earned Venezuela comparisons to the hyperinflation of Zimbabwe and Weimar Republic (Germany) from the International Monetary Fund. The newly minted currency, which will be known as the “sovereign bolivar,” will be rolled out on Monday.”
“Many of China’s ordinary citizens are just barely making ends meet, because of debt concerns and income disparities, according to an now-deleted article published by a researcher at the China-based think tank Suning Institute of Finance… Fu Yifu, who does macroeconomics research… found that disposable income was far lower than GDP. In 2017, in the countryside, a person’s disposable income was less than a quarter of the nation’s overall per capita GDP. In terms of wages, the numbers were also not optimistic.”
“Crashing out of the EU without a deal would be a “mistake we would regret for generations”, Jeremy Hunt [the UK Foreign Secretary] has said.”
“Snaking through the verdant flat lands of north-eastern Germany, the A20 runs through Chancellor Angela Merkel’s election district. She opened the key artery for the former communist region at a ceremony not far from the Zur Kastanie in December 2005, less than a month after she was first sworn in as the country’s leader. Twelve years later, the four-lane highway caved in after the foundations gave way in the marshy landscape, marking the clearest sign of a growing infrastructure crisis.”
“Thanks to political risks and regulatory changes, Italian lenders may be reluctant to snap up domestic government bonds during market stresses — a potentially huge structural shift in demand in the euro area’s second-most indebted nation.”
“Distillate markets are sending the same signal as a range of other indicators: the rate of global output growth has decelerated in recent months…”
“Short-cycle U.S. shale production is growing and will grow next year too, albeit at a slower pace. Yet, it may not be enough to plug the gap in just a couple of years, when the slump in investments in conventional fields around the world—the result of the oil price crash—will start to show up in the global oil supply.”
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Can-US-Shale-Stop-A-Global-Oil-Supply-Crisis.html
“Companies with speculative-grade credit ratings are spending a growing portion of their profits on interest payments as debt costs rise, causing concern as investors and economists debate the durability of the US expansion… as the Federal Reserve has tightened policy, the market has reached a tipping point, raising concern that further increases in interest rates could spark trouble for the market.”
https://www.ft.com/content/0bf2d9b8-a0ee-11e8-85da-eeb7a9ce36e4
“US companies have been particularly hyperactive buyers of their own stock, thanks to the earnings boost delivered by tax cuts and the robust economy. Goldman Sachs forecasts that the overall volume of US buybacks will reach a record-breaking $1tn in 2018. But companies in the UK, Europe and Japan are also aggressively repurchasing their shares, at a faster pace than new companies are going public or older ones are raising fresh capital through secondary share issues…
““The boom in US buybacks this year is widely known and commonly reported. Less well known, however, is the elevated net purchases by corporates occurring in developed markets outside of the US,” Inigo Fraser-Jenkins, a senior analyst at Bernstein, wrote in a report. At the same time, “the increase in stock buyback activity globally has coincided with subdued equity issuance activity,” he noted. “This explains why net issuance is at historic low levels across most of the developed world.””
https://www.ft.com/content/5a359796-a18e-11e8-85da-eeb7a9ce36e4
“Come on – who are we kidding, $247.2 trillion in debt? There is no economic miracle that will save us from this system. It would require infinite growth over a period of time exceeding the lifespan of this planet.”
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/436089-global-debt-economics-system/
