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criscimagnael

Anwar Raslan Syria War Crimes Trial Verdict: Live Updates - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ria-war-crimes-germany-verdict

shared by criscimagnael on 13 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • The former officer, Anwar Raslan, was accused of overseeing a detention center where prosecutors said at least 4,000 people were tortured and nearly 60 were killed.
  • He fled Syria in 2012 after the government committed a massacre in his hometown, killing more than 100 people. He joined Syria’s exiled opposition and traveled with them to peace talks in Geneva in 2014.
  • Through nearly 11 years of civil war, the Syrian government bombed residential neighborhoods, used poison gas and tortured countless detainees in state lockups
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  • Mr. Raslan’s guilty verdict, they say, bolsters the ability of European courts to pursue similar cases while sending a message to war criminals around the world that they could one day face consequences.
  • This sends a clear message to the world that certain crimes will not go unpunished.
  • After more than a decade of war, Mr. al-Assad remains in power, and there appears little chance that he or his senior advisers or military commanders will stand trial soon.
  • Other potential avenues for justice have also been blocked. Syria is not party to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and Russia and China have used their vetoes on the United Nations Security Council to prevent Syria from being referred to the court.
  • Germany is among a few European countries that have sought to try former Syrian officials for war crimes based on universal jurisdiction,
  • German prosecutors argued that his position gave him oversight of torture that included beating, kicking, electric shocks and sexual assault. Witnesses in the trial said they were fed inedible food, denied medical care and kept in overcrowded cells.
  • He entered Germany on a visa in 2014 and lived there legally until the German authorities arrested him in 2019.
  • But his past caught up with him in Germany, where he was tried for crimes against humanity.
  • When the Syrian conflict broke out in 2011 with protests seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad, Mr. Raslan was the head of interrogation at a security office in the capital, Damascus.
  • Beatings were common, the food was inedible, the cells were so crowded that some prisoners had to stand so others could lie down. German prosecutors said at least 4,000 people were tortured and nearly 60 killed under his authority there.
  • The verdict marks a watershed moment for an international network of lawyers, human rights activists and Syrian war survivors who have struggled for years to bring officials who sanctioned or participated in the violence to justice.
  • He was arrested in 2019, and his trial began the next year. On Thursday, Mr. Raslan was found guilty of crimes against humanity and was sentenced to life in prison.
  • When Mahran Aoiun heard that a former Syrian intelligence officer had been sentenced on Thursday to life in prison for overseeing torture at a detention center, it brought back the joy he felt years ago when he was released from a brutal Syrian jail.
  • The verdict handed down by a court in Koblenz, Germany, against the former officer, Ansar Raslan, stirred complicated feelings among Syrians who were abused in Syrian prisons — some at the hands of Mr. Raslan himself.
  • Others hoped that Mr. Raslan’s conviction would draw attention to the many more crimes committed during the Syrian war that have not been prosecuted, and to the officials who committed them who are still free.
  • “Those who are torturing prisoners will think twice after the trial,” he said. “This is an achievement.”
  • New York Times photographers have covered Syria’s civil war and the humanitarian crisis it has unleashed since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began nearly 11 years ago.
  • A Syrian doctor accused of torturing a detainee in a secret military prison will soon go on trial in Germany on charges of crimes against humanity and causing grievous bodily harm. The doctor, Alaa Mousa, was living in Germany as a refugee when he was arrested in 2020.
  • German prosecutors built their case with the help of hundreds of Syrian witnesses in Germany and beyond. They indicted Mr. Raslan using “universal jurisdiction,” a legal principle stipulating that in the case of crimes against humanity and genocide, normal territorial restraints on prosecutions do not apply.
  • The principle is not new. Israel used it during the 1960s trial of the former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, as did Spain in 1998 when demanding that Britain arrest Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator. Previous universal jurisdiction cases in Germany have dealt with crimes committed in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and, more recently, with the genocide of Yazidis in Iraq by former members of the Islamic State.
  • Germany has the legal basis to prosecute such crimes under the German Code of Crimes Against International Law, which came into effect in 2002, and it has been using it.
  • “For Germany, it’s also historically the continuation of what we learned from the Nazi period and what we learned about the importance of the Nuremberg trials and the Auschwitz trials for the way we dealt with our past and ultimately for who we are today,”
  • The Nuremberg trials went after the leading members of the Nazi regime, but also a range of individuals who played a role in Nazi repression, including doctors, business leaders, bureaucrats and propagandists, said Wolfgang Kaleck, a founder of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, which is representing victims in Mr. Raslan’s trial.
  • Raslan is the first ranking Syrian official to be convicted of war crimes, but he may not be the last.
  • But several other cases have already been tried or are pending.
  • Owing partly to its own history in World War II, Germany has become something of a go-to venue for prosecuting crimes against humanity, even if committed outside its own borders. It is also home to hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, putting it at the center of efforts to hold the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria accountable for war crimes.
  • Human rights lawyers concede that so far, the trials have targeted low- and middle-ranking Syrian officials or soldiers.
  • “If you don’t start now, then in 10 years, you cannot get Assad or his chief of intelligence because you have no evidence,” Mr. Kaleck said. “These cases are a way of building a stock of documents, witness statements, of understanding interconnections and gathering knowledge on which you can build future cases.”
  • Since the Syrian uprising in 2011, Syrian victims, human rights activists and others have filed more than 20 legal complaints against Syrian regime officials for war crimes and other violations of international law, according to Mr. Kaleck’s center.
  • This body of evidence, which has been growing for over a decade, could be used in different cases.“More has to come, that is clear,” Mr. Kaleck said. “But this is an important step.”
  • But the decade-long conflict has left the country shattered, killing hundreds of thousands of people, forcing half of the population from their homes and reducing major cities to rubble. Most of those who remain have been left to live in poverty.
  • The rebellion that began in 2011 as an uprising against Syria’s autocratic president, Bashar al-Assad, escalated into a civil war, but the splinted rebel movement failed to topple the government.
  • But the war was gruesome. The government employed poison gas, barrel bombs and suffocating sieges on rebellious communities, and waged a ruthless assault on civilian opponents, throwing hundreds of thousands into filthy prisons where many were tortured and killed.
  • Some Arab countries have begun restoring ties with the government in an effort to move past the war, although strict sanctions by the United States and other Western countries have blocked most investment.
  • The United States initially provided covert military support to the rebels, but as the war splintered into multiple overlapping conflicts, America shifted its focus to fight the jihadists of the Islamic State, who at their peak controlled nearly a third of eastern Syria.
  • For Syrian civilians, there is less daily violence now than during the war’s earlier years, but the economy has been destroyed.
  • More than half of Syria’s prewar population fled their homes during the fighting, and most have not returned, including the 5.6 million refugees who largely live in destitution in neighboring Arab countries.
  • “Justice has not been fully accomplished,” he said. “This is a small slice of what we are talking about.”
Javier E

The average doctor in the U.S. makes $350,000 a year. Why? - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...doctor-pay-shortage

doctor pay international comparison economics

shared by Javier E on 07 Aug 23 - No Cached
  • The average U.S. physician earns $350,000 a year. Top doctors pull in 10 times that.
  • The figures are nigh-on unimpeachable. They come from a working paper, newly updated, that analyzes more than 10 million tax records from 965,000 physicians over 13 years. The talented economist-authors also went to extreme lengths to protect filers’ privacy, as is standard for this type of research.
  • By accounting for all streams of income, they revealed that doctors make more than anyone thought — and more than any other occupation we’ve measured. In the prime earning years of 40 to 55, the average physician made $405,000 in 2017 — almost all of it (94 percent) from wages
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  • Doctors in the top 10 percent averaged $1.3 million
  • And those in the top 1 percent averaged an astounding $4 million, though most of that (85 percent) came from business income or capital gains.
  • In certain specialties, doctors see substantially more in their peak earning years: Neurosurgeons (about $920,000), orthopedic surgeons ($789,000) and radiation oncologists ($709,000) all did especially well for themselves. Specialty incomes cover 2005 to 2017 and are expressed in 2017 dollars.
  • family-practice physicians made around $230,000 a year. General practice ($225,000) and preventive-medicine ($224,000) doctors earned even less — though that’s still enough to put them at the top of the heap among all U.S. earners.
  • “There is this sense of, well, if you show that physician incomes put them at the top of the income distribution, then you’re somehow implying that they’re instead going into medicine because they want to make money. And that narrative is uncomfortable to people.”
  • why did those figures ruffle so many physician feathers?
  • “You can want to help people and you can simultaneously want to earn money and have a nicer lifestyle and demand compensation for long hours and long training. That’s totally normal behavior in the labor market.”
  • Yale University economist Jason Abaluck notes that when he asks the doctors and future doctors in his health economics classes why they earn so much, answers revolve around the brutal training required to enter the profession. “Until they finish their residency, they’re working an enormous number of hours and their lifestyle is not the lifestyle of a rich person,” Abaluck told us.
  • why do physicians make that much?
  • On average, doctors — much like anyone else — behave in ways that just happen to drive up their income. For example, the economists found that graduates from the top medical schools, who can presumably write their own ticket to any field they want, tend to choose those that pay the most.
  • “Our analysis shows that certainly physicians respond to earnings when choosing specialties,” Polyakova told us. “And there’s nothing wrong with that, in my opinion.
  • “In general, U.S. physicians are making about 50 percent more than German physicians and about more than twice as much as U.K. physicians,
  • Grover said the widest gaps were “really driven by surgeons and a handful of procedural specialties,” doctors who perform procedures with clear outcomes, rather than preventing disease or treating chronic condition
  • “we’re not about prevention, you know?” he said, noting that his own PhD is in public health. “I wish it was different, but it ain’t!”
  • The United States has fewer doctors per person than 27 out of 31 member countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
  • In 1970, based on a slightly different measure that’s been tracked for longer, America had more licensed physicians per person than all but two of the 10 countries for which we have data. What caused the collapse?
  • the United States has far fewer residency slots than qualified med school graduates, which means thousands of qualified future physicians are annually shut out of the residency pipeline, denied their chosen career and stuck with no way to pay back those quarter-million-dollar loans.
  • “I’d like to see an in-depth analysis of the effect of the government capping the number of residency spots and how it’s created an artificial ‘physician shortage’ even though we have thousands of talented and graduated doctors that can’t practice due to not enough residency spots,”
  • Such an analysis would begin with a deeply influential 1980 report,
  • That report, by a federal advisory committee tasked with ensuring the nation had neither too few nor too many doctors, concluded that America was barreling toward a massive physician surplus. It came out just before President Ronald Reagan took office, and the new administration seemed only too eager to cut back on federal spending on doctor-training systems.
  • ssociation of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), a coalition of MD-granting medical schools and affiliated teaching hospitals, slammed the brakes on a long expansion. From 1980 to around 2004, the number of medical grads flatlined, even as the American population rose 29 percent.
  • Federal support for residencies was also ratcheted down, making it expensive or impossible for hospitals to provide enough slots for all the medical school graduates hitting the market each year. That effort peaked with the 1997 Balanced Budget Act which, among other things, froze funding for residencies — partially under the flawed assumption that HMOs would forever reduce the need for medical care in America, Orr writes. That freeze has yet to fully unwind.
  • or decades, many policymakers believed more doctors caused higher medical spending. Orr says that’s partly true, but “the early studies failed to differentiate between increased availability of valuable medical services and unnecessary treatment and services.”
  • “In reality, the greater utilization in places with more doctors represented greater availability, both in terms of expanded access to primary care and an ever-growing array of new and more advanced medical services,” he writes. “The impact of physician supply on levels of excessive treatment appears to be either small or nonexistent.”
  • “People have a narrative that physician earnings is one of the main drivers of high health-care costs in the U.S.,” Polyakova told us. “It is kind of hard to support this narrative if ultimately physicians earn less than 10 percent of national health-care expenditures.”
  • Polyakova and her collaborators find doctor pay consumes only 8.6 percent of overall health spending. It grew a bit faster than inflation over the time period studied, but much slower than overall health-care costs.
  • Regardless, the dramatic limits on medical school enrollment and residencies enjoyed strong support from the AAMC and the AMA. We were surprised to hear both organizations now sound the alarm about a doctor shortage. MD-granting medical schools started expanding again in 2005.
  • it’s because states have responded to the shortage by empowering nurse practitioners and physician assistants to perform tasks that once were the sole province of physicians. Over the past 20 years, the number of registered nurses grew almost twice as quickly as the number of doctors, and the number of physician assistants grew almost three times as rapidly, our analysis showed.
  • While there still aren’t enough residency positions, we’re getting more thanks in part to recent federal spending bills that will fund 1,200 more slots over the next few years.
Javier E

Men's groups reject masculinity promoted by Trump, Josh Hawley - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...y-journeymen-josh-hawley-trump

men loneliness anxiety masculinity connection sharing therapy culture us crisis

shared by Javier E on 14 Aug 23 - No Cached
  • connection that U.S. men increasingly say is missing from their lives, leaving them lonely, disconnected and, often, angry. Earlier this year, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy declared the country to be in an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” National suicide rates have risen in recent decades, and men in 2021 died by suicide at a rate nearly four times higher than women, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
  • American men’s isolation stems in large part from a pervasive cultural belief, experts say: that men should be self-reliant and hide their emotions, especially from other men.
  • Today, a battle over the face of American masculinity is underway. Popular music, action movies and leaders like former president Donald Trump and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), author of the recent book “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” push for a more aggressive model.
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  • “If a boy expresses too much emotion or too much need for connection, is too giddy, is too joyful, what we say to that boy is, ‘What are you, a sissy? What are you, a girl? What are you, gay?’” Greene said. “It’s your job to dominate those around you, or you will lose status, and that will increase the number of individuals above you who can dish out dominance to you. And what we find is that in that system, in that structure, men are constantly in competition with each other and constantly driven by this sense of anxiety.”
  • many boys are raised with what she called “the cowboy mentality — ‘I can do it myself, I don’t need others,’” often perpetuated by “the father wanting the son to man up and not be so soft. … The whole model of getting help is part of so-called femininity.”
  • As a result, she said, “Women end up being the therapist for their husband, and more are getting sick of it.”
  • some men are looking for alternatives, and some are finding them in fellowship organizations with names like EvryMan, the ManKind Project and the Journeymen, the group doing breathwork that night in D.C.
  • “We have all these groups that are just spontaneously coming into being, as men say, ‘I want a circle of men that I can call my brothers, I want a circle of men that I can express what’s going on for me emotionally, and I want a circle of men who will hold me accountable in positive ways,’”
  • The theme of the Journeymen’s gathering in April, their first in-person meeting in D.C. since the pandemic, was “heartbreak and grief.” As the sky turned cobalt, Williamson implored the men to sense their emotions and “let them flow freely,” to raise their voices and “release them into the darkness.”
  • “People here have gone through a lot in our lives, some in the last few months. As we move through the world as men, sometimes it can be hard to have a sense of that,” he said. “All that which has been unnamed and unfelt, it’s actually been felt, it just hasn’t been dealt with. We put up a stiff arm and won’t let the other guy into our lane of traffic, we don’t want to make eye contact because if we did, we’d have to let him into our lane and show up really differently in the world.”
  • As a man, he said, “you can sense that there are deeper things that are happening in men’s lives, but when you bring it up the subject is changed. If guys’ lives are a house, they only let you see the living room with the plastic on the furniture. And you’re like, ‘Hey, I’m hearing some baying in the basement.’ But we don’t talk about that.”
  • Going around the circle, they began to talk about what lurked in the basement. One had lost his sister a few months earlier. Many talked of fraught or violent relationships with their fathers — or of not having a father around.
  • The toll of American loneliness is steep. The condition can increase the risk of premature death to a degree comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day and correlates with an increased risk of heart disease, stroke and dementia. “Humans are wired for social connection,” said Murthy, the surgeon general, “but we’ve become more isolated over time.”
  • “I saw guys suffering with their sense of identity, their sense of self-worth, their sense of belonging, their sense of their rights to their pain,” he said. “I’d see a guy who’d be drinking really heavily. … They’d come over and start talking about their relationship or lack of relationship. Next minute they’d sober up, they didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”
  • Cogan, now 47, had been working through his own personal difficulties: the end of a previous relationship; his at-times fraught relationship with his father; the bullying he had suffered as a child. Now, he said, he was often the only man his male friends were talking to. “My intuition is that I was modeling openness,” he said. “They saw me talk about my relationship, crying, going to therapy. They saw me as a safe harbor.”
  • For many men, he said, “The world isn’t safe. There’s no expectation that a guy in our culture can say, ‘I’m scared, I’ve got fear.’ There’s no expectation that a guy can ask for safety in our culture. A lot of the guys I know, they can’t even do this with their partner.”
  • in recent years, Way said, men have witnessed societal movements such as the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter, which also challenged old paradigms. “Then covid happens, and we hit the bottom of the barrel on connections,” she noted. “We can’t walk out of our homes. We woke up to see we are a mess, and we’re not having the connections we want, and we’re not actually happy.
Javier E

The Enchantments of Mammon by Eugene McCarraher review - an epic blend of history, prop... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rnity-eugene-mccarraher-review

economics history prophecy capitalism myths recommendation

shared by Javier E on 27 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • The Enchantments of Mammon by Eugene McCarraher
  • It is almost impossible to categorise Enchantments of Mammon. This monumental labour of love took two decades to write.
  • this is an extraordinary work of intellectual history as well as a scholarly tour de force, a bracing polemic and a work of Christian prophecy
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  • it is beautifully written and a magnificent read, whether or not one follows the author all the way to his final destination in this journey of the pilgrim soul in the capitalist wilderness.
  • McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work. He rails against “the ensemble of falsehoods that comprise the foundation of economics”, which offer “a specious portrayal of human beings and a fictional account of their history”.
  • Homo economicus, driven by instrumental self-interest and controlled by the power of money, is condemned as a shabby and degrading construct that betrays the truth of human experience.
  • After capitalism has delivered what the author describes as “two centuries of Promethean technics and its irreparable ecological impact” there must be a return to an earlier, gentler, more sacramental vision of the world; one that has a greater sense of natural limits and a restored sense of wonder at creation.
  • McCarraher embarks on a kind of genealogy of neoliberal morals, barrelling his way through the tracts, studies, theories and literature that have constituted the “symbolic universe” of capitalism since the Renaissance.
  • From the English Puritans who made money for the greater glory of God, through the machine idolatry rampant in 1920s Fordism, to the cult of the ruthless entrepreneur
  • capitalism is best understood, he concludes, as a secular faith. It operates through myths and dogma, just as any religion does.
  • Modernity is not, as Max Weber maintained, the culmination of a process of intellectual “disenchantment”, in which societies lost their sense of the sacred and embraced the rational
  • Instead, a different enchantment took hold of our minds; the material culture of production and consumption. “Its moral and liturgical codes are contained in management theory and business journalism,” writes McCarraher. “Its iconography consists of advertising, marketing, public relations and product design.”
  • This brave new era produced a “predatory and misshapen love of the world
  • Spiritually diminished by the commodification of things and people, and the desire to consume, we have lost sight of what the Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins described as the “dearest freshness deep down things”.
  • On Avarice. This work, says McCarraher, signalled a transition: the growth of commerce and banking was beginning to loosen the grip of biblical disdain for “filthy lucre”
  • the Florentine then makes an argument that is precociously modern, suggesting that without it, there would be “no temples, no colonnades, no palaces…”
  • The 17th-century Puritans are presented as a capitalist “avant garde”, driven by notions of a divine calling to turn common land into private property and then turn a profit on it
  • Milton mourns this sellout of the English revolution, using Paradise Lost to portray Mammon as a fallen angel, driven to blasphemous self-aggrandisement on eart
  • by the 20th century such satanic cunning is the new common sense in business circles
  • McCarraher leaves the poetry of Milton to move, via the Industrial Revolution, to the outlandish business utopias dreamed up in early 20th-century America
  • In February 1928, Vanity Fair caught the mood, praising Henry Ford as “a divine master-mind”
  • the epilogue of this mammoth portrait of the religious longings at the heart of secular materialism carries a bleak message: 20th-century fantasies of the world as one global business have been realised. Capital’s empire now extends to all corners of the world. Globalisation has built a “paradise of capital”
  • But Mammon is delivering an unsustainable future dominated by wage stagnation, tech-led unemployment, deepening inequality and environmental peril. As disaster looms, distraction is being sought in “a tranquillising repertoire of digital devices and myriad forms of entertainment” along with “the analgesic pleasures of consumption”.
  • “get back to the garden”. A new Romantic left is needed to reinhabit a sacramental imagination, which values people and things in themselves rather than as factors of production, and places collaboration over competition
  • recalling John Ruskin’s principle of “amazement”, which teaches that the gifts of nature should be admired and nurtured, rather than ravished and depleted
  • where pessimism might take hold, the author’s Christian faith gives him a trump card. For McCarraher, it is simply the case that “the Earth is a sacramental place, mediating the presence and power of God”
  • however obscured the truth is by a destructive lust for power and accumulation. It is simply a question of seeing things as they truly are.
Javier E

Europe's energy crisis may get a lot worse - 0 views

messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/...oakv2

energy crisis europe policy politics economics

shared by Javier E on 10 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • It was only at the end of April that Russia cut gas supplies to Poland and Bulgaria, the first two victims of its energy-pressure campaign. But overall gas shipments are at less than one-third the level they were just a year ago. In mid-June, shipments through Nord Stream 1 were cut by 75 percent; in July, they were cut again.
  • “It is wartime,” Tatiana Mitrova, a research fellow at Columbia, told her colleague Jason Bordoff, a former adviser to Barack Obama, on an eye-opening recent episode of the podcast “Columbia Energy Exchange.”
  • I think there’s been a gradual and growing recognition that we are headed into the worst global energy crisis at least since the 1970s and perhaps longer than that.
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  • “This is something that European politicians and consumers didn’t want to admit for quite a long time. It sounds terrible, but that’s the reality. In wartime the economy is mobilized. The decisions are made by the governments, not by the free market. This is the case for Europe this winter,” she said, adding that we may see forced rationing, price controls, the suspension of energy markets and shutdowns of whole industrial sectors. “We are not actually talking about extremely high prices, but we are talking about physical absence of energy resources in certain parts of Europe.”
  • I think you would see Russia continue to restrict gas exports and maybe cut them off completely to Europe — and a very cold winter. I think a combination of those two things would mean sky-high energy prices.
  • Europe has been finding all the supplies that it can, but governments are realizing that’s not going to be sufficient. There are going to have to be efforts taken to curb demand as well and to prepare for the possibility of really severe energy rationing this winter.
  • If things become really severe this winter, I fear that you could see European countries start to look out for themselves rather than one another.
  • I think we could start to see governments saying, “Well, we’re going to restrict exports. We’re going to keep our energy at home.” Everyone starts to just look out for themselves, which I think would be exactly what Putin would hope for.
  • it would be wise to assume that Russia will use every opportunity it can to turn the screws on Europe.
  • It’s increasingly clear that Vladimir Putin is using gas as a weapon and trying to supply just enough gas to Europe to keep Europe in a perpetual state of panic about its ability to weather the coming winter.
  • governments will have to ration energy supplies and decide what’s important.
  • Since Russia invaded Ukraine and maybe until very recently, I’ve had the sense that the European public and the public beyond Europe, as well as policymakers, have been a little bit sleepwalking into a looming crisis.
  • here was some unrealistic optimism about how quickly Europe could do without Russian gas. And we took too long to confront seriously just how bad the numbers would look if the worst came to pass.
  • I think there was continued skepticism that Putin would really cut the gas supply. “It might be declining. It might be a little bit lower,” people thought. “But he’s not really going to shut off the supply.” And I think now everyone’s recognizing that’s a real possibility.
  • Putin has the ability to do a lot of damage to the global economy — and himself, to be sure — if he cuts oil exports as well.
  • There’s no extra oil supply in the world at all, as OPEC Plus reminded everyone by saying: No, we’re not going to be increasing production much, and we can’t even if we wanted to.
  • For all the talk about high gasoline prices and the rhetoric of Putin’s energy price hike, Russia’s oil exports have not fallen very much. If that were to happen — either because the U.S. and Europe forced oil to come off the market to put economic pressure on Putin or because he takes the oil off the market to hurt all of us — oil prices go up enormously.
  • That’s because there’s just no extra supply out there today at all. There’s a very little extra supply that the Saudis and the Emiratis can put on the market. And that’s about it. We’ve used the strategic petroleum reserve, and that’s coming to an end in the next several months.
  • it depends how much he takes off the market. We don’t know exactly. If Russia were to cut its oil exports completely, the prices would just skyrocket — to hundreds of dollars a barrel, I think.
  • We’re heading into a winter where markets might simply not be able to work anymore as the instrument by which you determine supply and demand.
  • if prices just soar to uncontrollable levels, markets are not going to work anymore. You’re going to need governments to step in and decide who gets the scarce energy supplies — how much goes to heating homes, how much goes to industry. There’s going to be a pecking order of different industries, where some industries are deemed more important to the economy than others.
  • a lot of governments in Europe are putting in place those kinds of emergency plans right now.
  • if the worst comes to pass, governments will, by necessity, step in to say: Homes get the natural gas, and parts of industry get dumped. Probably they would set price caps on energy or massively subsidize it. So it’s going to be very painful.
  • Worryingly for the European economy, this may mean that factories that can’t switch fuels will go dormant.
  • Today, before winter comes, gas prices in Europe are around $60 per million British thermal units. That compares to around $7 to $8 here in the United States
  • if the worst comes to pass, the market, as a mechanism, simply won’t work. The market will break. The prices will go too high. There’s just not enough energy for the market to balance at a certain price.
  • don’t forget, the amount of liquid natural gas that Europe is importing today — Asia is competing for those shipments. What happens if the Asia winter is very bad? What happens if China and others are willing to pay very high prices for it?
  • I think we’re in a multiyear potential energy crisis.
  • one thing that hasn’t gotten enough attention and that I worry most about is the impact this is having on emerging markets and the developing economies, because it is an interconnected market. When Europe is competing to buy L.N.G. at very high prices, not to mention Asia, that means if you’re in Pakistan or Bangladesh or lower-income countries, you’re really struggling to afford it. You’re just priced out of the market for natural gas — and coal. Coal is incredibly expensive now,
  • I think that that is a real potential humanitarian crisis, as a ripple effect of what’s happening in Europe right now.
  • right now, the price of gas in Europe is about four times what it was last year. Russia has cut flows to Europe by two-thirds but is earning the same revenue as it did last year. So Putin is not being hurt by the loss of gas exports to Europe. Europe’s being hurt by that.
  • this situation could last for several years.
  • Could the energy crisis bring about a change of heart, in which European countries withdraw some of their support or even begin to pressure Ukraine to negotiate a settlement? Is it possible that could even happen in advance of this winter?
  • you would imagine that, over time, when you don’t see Ukraine on the front page each and every day, eventually people’s attention wanes a bit and at a certain point the economic pain of high energy prices or other economic harms from the conflict reach a point where support may start to fracture a bit.
  • Whether that reaches a point where you start to see the West put pressure on Ukraine to capitulate, I think we’re pretty far away from that now, because everyone recognizes how outrageous and unacceptable Putin’s conduct is.
Javier E

Two Wall Street titans on why the world is at its most precarious since 1938 - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...recarious-since-1938-kp5tth208

wall street 2023 inflation

shared by Javier E on 05 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Israel’s war with Hamas and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have made the world a more “scary and unpredictable” place than at any other time since the Second World War, Dimon contended. “Here in the US, we continue to have a strong economy,” he said. “We still have a lot of fiscal and monetary stimulus in the system. But these geopolitical matters are very serious — arguably the most serious since 1938.
  • What’s happening ... right now is the most important thing for the future of the world — freedom, democracy, food, energy, immigration. We diminish that importance when you say, ‘What’s it going to do to the market?’ Markets will be fine. Markets can deal with stuff. Markets go up and down. Markets fluctuate.”
  • That said, the conflict in the Middle East — in which at least 1,400 Israelis have been murdered and 9,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7 — has rattled a financial system already gulping at the prospect of inflation proving sticky and interest rates staying higher for longer. The region accounts for 48 per cent of global energy reserves and produced 33 per cent of the world’s oil last year. Previous crises, such as Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74, resulted in big price shocks — although so far, at about $86 a barrel, oil has roughly returned to its pre-October 7 level, while gas prices have risen only slightly.
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  • So fear creates recessions in the long run — and if we continue to have rising fear, the probability of a European recession grows and the probability of a US recession grows. Geopolitics is playing a bigger role in everyone’s equations.”
  • Geopolitical risk is a major component in shaping all our lives. We are having rising fear throughout the world, and less hope. Rising fear creates a withdrawal from consumption or spending more.
  • “When the Russian invasion occurred in Ukraine, we said that the peace dividend is over,” Larry Fink, chief executive of investment giant BlackRock, told The Sunday Times. “Now, with the instability in the Middle East, we’re going to almost a whole new future.
  • Dimon noted that inflation had “levelled off a little bit” overall, but said: “It’s not clear to me that long-term forces are not inflationary … And that’s why I’m saying rates could possibly go up from here. That’s life in the fast lane.”
  • Higher borrowing costs have started to hit debt-fuelled sectors that boomed in the zero-rates era — such as commercial property, where $80 billion (£65 billion) of assets across the US are in some form of financial distress, according to MSCI, and private equity.
  • [the legendary investor] Warren Buffett says you see who’s swimming naked when the tide goes out. Not everyone is really ready for 6 or 7 per cent rates, but I wouldn’t rule them out.”
  • Fink pointed out that the transmission of rate rises into the US economy was less direct than in the UK
  • “I’m a fundamental believer that we’re going to have higher inflation for longer, and it’s going to require the [Fed] to raise rates higher — probably one or two more tightenings — and that will ultimately be the way we get into recession.”
  • Many senior figures on Wall Street worry about the US government’s ability to finance itself in the medium term. As in the UK, the market for government debt was underpinned by huge waves of quantitative easing (QE) after the financial crisis, as the Federal Reserve, in effect, bought assets including Treasuries to boost the economy. Following a revival of the programme during Covid, it came to an end in March last year.
  • The withdrawal of QE, combined with lacklustre appetite for Treasuries among US banks and international investors such as China, could force the government to pay higher prices at a time of near-record borrowing.
  • “It might be a 20km headwind right now, but next year it’s going to be 25km and it’s going to grow,” a top investor said of the decreasing international demand for US government debt.
  • US stock market floats and fundraisings, the heartbeat of capital markets, slumped to their lowest level since 1998 last year as the spike in interest rates punctured valuations of growth stocks in sectors such as tech and healthcare.
  • The cautious mood on Wall Street comes against a backdrop of surprisingly strong US growth. The economy expanded by an astonishing 4.9 per cent in the third quart
  • the Biden administration is shovelling stimulus into the system via big pieces of legislation promising to accelerate America’s adoption of renewables, rebuild its advanced semiconductor industry and increase its spending on roads, bridges and broadband.
  • We have huge stimulus,” said Fink. “People are not factoring in the Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips Act and the Infrastructure Act, which are about $970 billion of stimulus. Those are the largest stimuluses ever when there’s not a pandemic or a financial crisis ... And it’s at a time when you can have unions win a 25 per cent labour increase … These are very inflationary, whether it’s the fiscal stimulus or these wage increases.”
  • It all comes back to that word. Unexpectedly high growth, massive government stimulus and now two wars that threaten to spill out into broader crises — it all spells inflation. The flurry of hope in markets that Fed and the Bank of England have reached the top of their rate-raising cycles may yet prove premature
Javier E

U.S. Gas Prices Drop Ahead of Thanksgiving Travel - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gas-prices-thanksgiving.html

gas prices

shared by Javier E on 23 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • U.S. gasoline prices are plunging just in time for Thanksgiving, and with the OPEC Plus oil cartel in apparent disarray, they could be heading lower for Christmas.
  • The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline on Wednesday was $3.28, about 6 cents less than a week earlier and 27 cents less than a month ago.
  • Prices have dropped below $3 a gallon in more than a dozen states
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  • The primary reason for lower gasoline prices is the recent weakness of oil prices, which have fallen by more than $15 a barrel, or nearly 20 percent, since early Septembe
  • Demand for fuel has been weak in China and parts of Europe, while production has been strong in Brazil, Canada and the United States.
  • “Reaching a new agreement to cut production will prove to be challenging,”
  • Saudi Arabia had been expected to extend its cuts in production, while cajoling other countries to show restraint as well to bolster prices. But Nigeria and Angola are resisting, and lobbying for higher production quotas
  • He said that although Russia and eight other members of the cartel agreed to cuts in June, “it would be difficult for these countries to accept even lower production quotas.”
  • The uncertainty has served as a signal to traders to bail out of crude.
  • Airfares will be slightly more expensive than last year, the motor club said, but otherwise holiday travel should be cheaper. It said the average price for a domestic hotel stay is down 12 percent from last year, while rental car costs are 20 percent lower.
lilyrashkind

Oil Prices Top $120 as China Eases Lockdowns - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...na-eases-lockdowns-11653933068

oil prices china

shared by lilyrashkind on 30 May 22 - No Cached
  • China’s emergence from shutdowns stands to raise demand for oil at a time when supplies of some fuels are running low globally. Shanghai Vice Mayor Wu Qing said over the weekend that the authorities will loosen the conditions under which companies are able to resume work this week.
  • Even with an exemption on pipeline imports, an EU ban would amount to a significant blow to Russia’s ability to cash in on its prize commodity. As of 2020, about three quarters of the 2.8 million barrels in crude Russia exported to Europe each day arrived on boats, according to Bruegel, a think tank.
  • Kristine Petrosyan, an IEA analyst, said Russia would struggle to divert all the oil that had flowed to Europe on boats to buyers in Asia. “I don’t think they can reallocate everything,” she said, adding that the voyage from Russia’s Baltic-sea ports to China takes about 60 days, much longer than the runs to European refineries.
criscimagnael

Iran Seizes Two Greek Tankers in Persian Gulf - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...iran-seizes-greek-tankers.html

shared by criscimagnael on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • The cargo of Iranian oil was then handed over to the United States for being in violation of American sanctions that ban Iran from selling its oil, according to Iranian news media, a claim that could not be independently verified.
  • Iranian oil and energy experts said Iran’s seizure of the ships was a signal to Washington that Iran would toughen its stance if the Biden administration returned to Trump-era policies of maximum pressure and began seizing tankers and crude oil cargo belonging to Iran.
  • Greece’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Iran’s actions on Friday were “tantamount to acts of piracy” and would have a negative impact on Iran-Greece relations, as well as Iran’s relations with the European Union, of which Greece is a member. It advised its citizens not to travel to Iran.
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  • “The main purpose is to send a clear message to the West that future seizures of oil tankers will be met with a response in kind,” said Sina Azodi, an Iran analyst at the Atlantic Council in Washington.
  • Iranian news media said the two vessels had an estimated combined capacity to carry 1.8 million barrels of oil and that their cargo was now in Iran’s possession.
  • Iran has a history of the retaliatory seizing of oil tankers in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz in response to ships carrying its oil being stopped or confiscated. But the incident on Friday marked the first time in months that a foreign-flagged vessel was targeted by Iran.
  • The shadow war between Iran and Israel has also played out in the waters of the Persian Gulf, with the West accusing Iran of a drone attack on an Israeli-affiliated tanker that killed two European crew members in 2021. Iran denied it had a role in the attack
woodlu

The economic consequences of the war in Ukraine | The Economist - 1 views

www.economist.com/...equences-of-the-war-in-ukraine

politics crisis history policy economics

shared by woodlu on 24 Feb 22 - No Cached
  • The immediate global implications will be higher inflation, lower growth and some disruption to financial markets as deeper sanctions take hold.
  • The longer-term fallout will be a further debilitation of the system of globalised supply chains and integrated financial markets that has dominated the world economy since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
  • Russia is one of the world’s largest oil producers and a key supplier of industrial metals such as nickel, aluminium and palladium.
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  • Russia and Ukraine are major wheat exporters, while Russia and Belarus (a Russian proxy) are big in potash, an input into fertilisers.
  • the price of Brent oil breached $100 per barrel on the morning of February 24th and European gas prices rose by 30%.
  • Their delivery might be disrupted if physical infrastructure such as pipelines or Black Sea ports are destroyed. Alternatively, deeper sanctions on Russia’s commodity complex could prevent Western customers from buying from it.
  • Sanctions after the invasion of Crimea did not prevent BP, ExxonMobil or Shell from investing in Russia, while American penalties on Rusal, a Russian metals firm, in 2018 were short-lived.
  • Russia may retaliate by deliberately creating bottlenecks that raise prices. America may lean on Saudi Arabia to increase oil production and prod its domestic shale firms to ramp up output.
  • America is thus likely to put much tougher Huawei-style sanctions on Russian tech firms, limiting their access to cutting-edge semiconductors and software, and also blacklist Russia’s largest two banks, Sberbank and VTB, or seek to cut Russia off from the SWIFT messaging system that is used for cross-border bank transfers.
  • The tech measures will act as a drag on Russia’s growth over time and annoy its consumers.
  • The banking restrictions will bite immediately, causing a funding crunch and impeding financial flows in and out of the country.
  • Russia will turn to China for its financial needs. Already trade between the two countries has been insulated from Western sanctions, with only 33% of payments from China to Russia now taking place in dollars, down from 97% in 2014.
  • What does all this mean for the global economy? Russia faces a serious but not fatal economic shock as its financial system is isolated. For the global economy the prospect is of higher inflation as natural-resource prices rise, intensifying the dilemma that central banks face, and a possible muting of corporate investment as jittery markets dampen confidence.
Javier E

Welcome to the blah blah blah economy - 0 views

image

unpredictable economy global

started by Javier E on 17 Dec 22 no follow-up yet
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