Representatives of international finance warn world leaders of coming economic crisis

© Sputnik/ Igor Samoilov

    

Heads of international financial companies have warned of the possible bursting of asset bubbles and called on state governments to better control the granting of loans to avoid a new financial crisis, DWN reported.

The paper released under the moderation of the World Economic Forum (WEF) points out that fundamental problems of the financial markets have not been resolved, despite the fact that central banks pumped millions into money markets.

Matthew Blake, Head of the Banking and Capital Markets Industry at the WEF, is one of the authors of the paper.

"In the past nine months, we have dealt intensively with the questions of financial and economic stability. We don't want to make any proposals with our declaration, but raise awareness among all stakeholders about possible dangers and the question of how to mitigate them," he said in an interview with DWN.

Blake could not name any geographical areas posing significant dangers. But the paper identified potential trouble spots, including the real estate market and shadow banks. Despite numerous announcements, shadow banks still remain unregulated and carry out high-risk which may threaten financial stability, the paper said

Blake stated that the key point — in the US as well as in Europe — is to better control the allocation of capital so that the economy does not face new imbalances. Interaction between banks and political circles is necessary to limit damage in the event of a new crisis, he claimed, adding that he expects policymakers to deal with the issue.

Comment: There has already been plenty of "interaction" between banks and political circles, and that's one of the problems in an oligarchy. For a great overview of this economic quagmire, check out 2015 the BRICS checkmate Western finance:

Long story short, banks are investing way more money than they own. Thanks to those investments that reach into the $trillions, they totally control most markets and, of course, they make huge profits when the market goes in the direction they want. But they also take tremendous risks if the market goes in the other direction.

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1,300 dead seabirds found on beach in Lenga, Chile

© Paolo Avila / AFP / Getty Images
A dead bird lies on the beach of Concepcion, 310 miles south of Santiago, Chile, May 18, 2015, one of 1300 birds of different species that were found dead on the shore.

    

At least 1,300 dead birds found on a beach in Chile is a mystery that officials may have finally narrowed down. MSN reports that Chilean authorities are investigating what killed so many seabirds belonging to the family.

It's possible that these birds may have drowned after getting trapped in fishing nets — or died from a disease related to bird flu. The country's Agriculture and Livestock Service (SAG) says that the bird flu isn't endemic to Chile.

The 1,300 dead birds on the beach were discovered Sunday afternoon by visitors to a small "black-sand beach in the southern town of Lenga, a cove with several hundred inhabitants who live mainly on fishing and tourism," the report states.

SAG planned to analyze the birds in an effort to determine their cause of death.

This isn't the first time several seabirds were found dead on the beach. Hundreds of birds were found dead in the around the same area back in 2010. At the time, experts learned they were killed after getting trapped in fishing nets.

Raw Story reported in May of 2012 that around 2,000 birds were found dead on the beaches of central Chile. Fishermen were blamed for snagging them in their nets and allowing them to drown. The dead birds covered some four miles of beach around Santo Domingo. The main species of those found dead were gray petrels, but there were also pelicans, gannets, and Guanay cormorants.

The fishermen were accused of "doing nothing" when the birds got trapped in their nets. The fisherman essentially allowed the birds "to drown before throwing the bodies back into the sea," said San Antonio Natural History and Archeology Museum Director, Jose Luis Brito.

Around the same time the dead birds were found on the beach, thousands of dolphins and other seabird carcasses were discovered on beaches in Peru. This included pelicans. Oil exploration work was blamed by environmental groups. Peru's deputy environment minister, Gabriel Quijandria, disagreed with the animals' cause of death. He argued that warming waters resulted in their deaths due to food supplies being disturbed by the radical change.

The 1,300 dead birds found on a beach is an alarming number of animals to die from fishing nets. Any time a large volume of animals mysteriously show up dead, it appears some sort of imbalance in nature is going on until scientists learn what the actual cause is and how it can be remedied.

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Texas officially prohibits cities from banning fracking

© Reuters/Terry Wade

    

A new Texas law signed by Republican Governor Greg Abbott prohibits cities and towns from imposing local ordinances to prevent fracking and other potentially environmentally harmful oil and natural gas activities.

In debating the law, Texas lawmakers emphasized the state's successful development of oil and gas for more than 100 years. The bill received a two-thirds majority vote in the Texas House and Senate. The law preempts municipal authorities from regulating oil and gas operations "within its boundaries or extraterritorial jurisdiction." Local authorities can only pass ordinances and other measures to "regulate only surface activity" in ways that are "commercially reasonable" to oil and gas operations.

"HB 40 does a profound job of helping to protect private property rights here in the State of Texas, ensuring those who own their own property will not have the heavy hand of local regulation deprive them of their rights. This law ensures that Texas avoids a patchwork quilt of regulations that differ from region to region, differ from county to county or city to city," said Governor Abbott in a statement.

"[It] strikes a meaningful and correct balance between local control and preserving the state's authority to ensure that regulations are even-handed and do not hamper job creation."

Texas lawmakers had introduced 11 bills to put limits on local control after 60 municipalities decided to restrict drilling or fracking in some way. The city of Denton outlawed fracking last fall, but was sued by the Texas General Land Office and Texas Oil and Gas Association after passing the ban. Denton is situated over the Barnett Shale, considered one of the largest reserves of natural gas in the US.

"It had gotten to the point where various municipalities have been writing extremely detailed and onerous ordinances, making it difficult for companies to operate," Ed Ireland, head of the Barnett Shale Energy Education Council, told the Associated Press.

The passage of the law has angered officials in Denton, according to the . Officials said they only supported the ban after failed attempts to resolve quality-of-life problems, "including a well explosion and noisy drilling near homes and schools."

"It's a bad situation when city leaders' hands are tied," Denton Councilman Kevin Roden told the . "There seems to be an attitude that big state government knows better than the citizens of a city. I just think - conservative or liberal - that is something you don't do in Texas."

The law does include exemptions for Forth Worth and Dallas, both of which passed setback ordinances that push surface drilling away from residential and commercial areas. Dallas, specifically, doesn't permit drilling closer than within 1,500 feet of homes, schools or churches. In Fort Worth, the distance is 600 feet.

The move comes as the state is being slammed by a slump in oil prices which has led to job losses. Nationwide energy production has fallen 3.5 percent and Texas alone lost about 25,000 jobs in March, according to federal data.

Legal fights are anticipated as local governments review the implications of the new state law.

"The bill guts 100 years of traditional municipal authority to regulate oil and gas operations," A. Scott Anderson, a senior policy director for the Environmental Defense Fund, told the .

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Mystery explosion rocks Centurion, South Africa

    

Residents from Centurion are baffled by a mysterious explosion that rocked parts of the area during the early hours of Sunday.

Numerous attempts by Rekord to establish exactly what had caused the loud blast, which woke residents from their sleep, proved futile.

Residents from Rooihuiskraal, Wierdapark, Amberfield, The Reeds and other connecting areas all heard the same sound and felt the rumbling.

Some readers speculated that it was yet another ATM bombing, while others believed the tremors had been caused by a light earthquake, but authorities contacted by Rekord could shed no light on the cause or the origin of what sounded to residents like a loud blast.

Vanessa Jacobs, armed response manager for Orange Fox Security, said as soon as information came through about the mysterious explosion, reaction vehicles had immediately been dispatched to various ATM sites in the affected area.

"The reaction officers visited all the areas where residents said they had heard the noise. All of the ATMs were however secure. One of our reaction officers said it might have been what is commonly referred to as a 'cricket' (CO2 cartridge) bomb. Although still unconfirmed, the reaction officer saw a red light go up in the area followed by a loud sound," she said.

Cricket bombs are improvised explosive devices, also known as cartridge bombs or CO2 bombs. They are made by taking empty CO2 canisters (like what might be used to power a BB gun), and filling it with gunpowder or flash powder and attaching a fuse.

The police in Centurion also could shed no light on the blast, and to date, no reports of damage to property or any injuries had been received that could be connected to the early morning hour occurrence.

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Western isolation of Russia has failed, opens new opportunities for Putin

© Sputnik/ Vladimir Pesnya

    

All attempts by Western countries to put political and economic pressure on Russia have failed. If anything, they have helped Vladimir Putin to become an even more popular leader, said.

Over the last year, Russia has gone through some tough times — the political isolation from the West over the country's alleged intervention in the Ukrainian crisis, the fall of the ruble and economic sanctions.

However, at the end of the day, Russian President Vladimir Putin came out as a victor from all the adversities and should even thank the West for giving him an opportunity to strengthen his country, open up new economic venues and unite his citizens under a new national idea, French magazine reported.

After the Western-backed illegal coup that ousted officially elected Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 and the start of the Ukrainian civil war, Russia was able to re-unite with Crimea. The people of the Crimean peninsula did not accept the illegal coup in Kiev and voted to get out of Ukraine and join back the Russian Federation. Thus, Russia ended up expanding its territory, said.

Although Western sanctions against Russia hurt the country's economy, they forced Russia to reconsider its economic policies, look for new business partners and strive towards economic independence by developing domestic industries. The road may be long and hard, but the end result will be sure worth it.

Western isolation gave Moscow a chance to develop new relationships with its Eastern neighbors. Russia has pursued a great deal of economic, financial and military cooperation with China and India over the past year. The West, on the other hand, missed out on great economic opportunities by turning Russia from a potential partner to an adversary, Boulevard Voltaire argued.

By rejecting their invitations to the Moscow Victory Day Parade on May 9, Western leaders not only insulted Putin personally, but the entire Russian population. . Western attempts to play down the role of the Soviet army in World War II certainly did not find support among ordinary Russians.

Thanks to Western attempts to pressure Russia, Putin has become the undisputed leader of the country that cherishes its history and values, concluded.

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SOTT FOCUS: Problem solved: NATO and EU want to bomb 'refugee terrorists' they created

2015

    

The latest chapter in NATO's 'anti-terror' operations seems to be opening up, again in Libya.

In case you didn't know, 'ISIS jihadists' are coming to Europe and the UK! Disguised as Muslim refugees they are "hell-bent on committing atrocities," thus the necessity of 'bombing them over there so we don't have to bomb them here'. The story goes that ISIS is 'blending in' with refugees on their boat crossings to Europe, thus ALL refugees coming to Europe could potentially be 'terrorists'. So, bomb them!

The US (NATO) which is responsible for causing the humanitarian crisis and, as it happens, ISIS itself, is once again offering a 'solution' to a problem it created. If you don't want hordes of refugees, then don't bomb their homes; that's the simple truth that is lost on NATO warmongers. But they the price of killing innocent people - as Madeleine Albright would say - is always "worth it". Especially when you can just call the refugees you create "terrorists", and threaten to kill them too.

NATO is not only capitalizing on the ISIS 'threat', it's using the 'concern' about the refugee crisis it created to continue to 'manage' the Middle east in a way that ensures Western control of the oil spigot and keeps Russia and China out of southwest Asia. Another Western intervention will, of course, cause even more displaced persons and spawn more terrorists in a never-ending loop, but don't expect the goons running NATO to care or have the perspicacity to foresee that inevitable consequence. It's a twisted world of psychopaths in power that wouldn't appear in your worst nightmares.

In a recent report from the Guardian, we learn that:

The European Union has drawn up plans for military attacks in Libya to try to curb the influx of migrants across the Mediterranean by targeting the trafficking networks. It is to launch a bid on Monday to secure a UN mandate for armed action in Libya's territorial waters.

Sometimes all you can do is gape in awe at the depraved and twisted mindset of these psychopathic warmongers and their collaborators/enablers. The 2011 NATO carpet bombing of Libya, resulting in the obliteration of the wealthiest and most stable country in Africa, and the death of up to a half million people since then (no one's bothering to count), was justified under 'R2P' - the 'responsibility to protect'. The US (Empire) took it upon itself to protect the lives of ordinary Libyans from their "evil dictator", who was killing them by the thousands, we were told. That was, of course, complete and utter bullshit, but it didn't matter; Washington, London and Brussels settled on a noble cause to sell their electorates, and they just had to 'make the deets stick'. They "sexed up" the Libyan dossier just like Iraq, and the people swallowed it, again.

Now here we are, barely four years later, and the same Western leaders are telling us they need to 'do' Libya again... only this time they're going to bomb the very people they said they had to protect last time because... well, you never know, they might be terrorists. British Sun newspaper reporter Katie Hopkins, in an op-ed about the tens of thousands fleeing the raging violence her government helped start in North Africa, was publicly and internationally condemned last month when she compared migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean with cockroaches. Here's what she wrote:

Rescue boats? I'd use gunships to stop migrants, May 19th, 2015

"No, I don't care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don't care."

"Because in the next minute you'll show me pictures of aggressive young men at Calais, spreading like norovirus on a cruise ship... These two populations are the same. The migrants harassing Brit truckers at the port are the same as the vagrants making the perilous trip across the Med."

"What we need are gunships sending these boats back to their own country. You want to make a better life for yourself? Then you had better get creative in Northern Africa."

"Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches. They might look a bit 'Bob Geldof's Ethiopia circa 1984', but they are built to survive a nuclear bomb. They are survivors."

Yes, what she wrote is nasty, ignorant of the context that created the situation and typical of a right-winger's solution to any problem: 'just blow them up'.

But take note of how, in the space of just one month, Hopkins' derided solution - to keep the desperate migrants at bay under the barrel of a gun - is now perfectly acceptable to Westerners of all political persuasion because they have eaten up the lie that 'ISIS is coming to get them'. Hopkins, therefore, was merely expressing what all, or most, Westerners wanted to do - 'keep darky down and in his place in Africa' - but didn't feel comfortable being seen to agree with until the right narrative (lie) had been served, at which point their liberalism can gush forth in poetic tones - 'R2P, 'freedom and democracy', 'evil people smugglers', 'terrorists who hate us for our freedoms', etc, etc.

The Russians were against this absurd proposal from the beginning, saying that they will veto any such UN resolution, no doubt because it sees such a plan for what it is: another attempt at 'humanitarian' intervention in Libya by the US-led Atlantic Alliance. Russian-Chinese opposition, and thus no UN Security Council approval, apparently led to the proposition being dropped by the EU, at least in the UN. Not to be deterred from the practice of their favorite sport of abusing Africans, yesterday the EU agreed with itself that it should still take military action against the refugees it created:

According to the EU foreign policy chief, the operation will consist of three main phases - intelligence gathering, inspection and detection of smuggling boats, and destruction of the captured vessels...

Following Russia's resistance to the plan, we've seen an intensification of the 'ISIS-is-coming-to-invade-Europe-disguised-as-Muslim-refugees' charade. This narrative has been blasted through the Western media before, but it appears that NATO talking-head, Jens Stoltenberg, has now received his marching orders and is rushing headlong to "make the deets stick" (U.S. State Department euphemism for 'make this a reality, and to hell with the facts').

For anyone having trouble just taking Stoltenberg's words at face value, Rita Katz of '24/7 Jihadi Watch' SITE Intelligence Group fame has obtained (produced?) - right on time - photos showing that ISIS isn't only plotting to invade Europe, they're already here! - roaming around Italy, sightseeing, and counting down 'till zero hour' when they will blow all of Christendom to kingdom come, starting with the Roman Colosseum.

Frightening: This picture, supposedly showing how ISIS fighters are in Rome, was shared on Twitter

    

Terror: The pictures taken by landmarks and in train stations were translated and shared by watch group SIte

    

Attack: Another set of images shows vehicles of Italian emergency services, showing the terrorists' boldness

    

Threat: The latest posts are not the first time Rome, the home of Christianity, has been made a target

    

If you take a step back, take off your ponerized goggles and actually look at these photos, without being told that they are in any way related to ISIS, what would you think? These photos, like the rest of the gibberish that SITE and Rita Katz come up with, look like they came from the febrile brain of a complete lunatic. If the shoe fits...

How much of an inveterate coincidence theorist do you have to be before you admit that the consistency with which "terrorists" pop up in a foreign country and threaten the West just as Western governments are proposing bombing that country, is no coincidence at all? The pattern couldn't be more obvious after so many interventions justified in like manner since 9/11. Yemen, the Balkans, and now - allegedly - the EU, the al Qaeda/ISIS hordes always appear on the scene when the West needs 'a noble reason' to further their war-plans and silence domestic criticism.Duh!

It's unlikely Russia can do much to save Libya from another mauling, but we wonder just what assurances Kerry was seeking from Putin in Sochi a few days ago. The silver lining, if there is one, is that with each new global crisis, the stench of stark, raving psychopathology driving the Western hive-mind leeches up closer and closer to the surface.

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US Taxpayer On The Hook As Ukraine Prepares Moratorium On Debt Repayments, Increases Military Spending

It appears, thanks to the generous backing of US taxpayers, Ukraine is about to get its cake and eat it too. On the same day as Ukraine's government unleashes a bill enabling a moratorium on foreign debt repayments - implicitly meaning default "in case of an attack from dishonest lenders" - the defense ministry unveils a plan to increase military spending by 17 billion hryvnia this year statuing that will “make efforts to find possibilities to finance needs” to secure country’s defense. Ukraine bonds are tumbling.

Military Spending is set to surge...

10 agencies, including Defense Ministry, that oversee defense and law enforcement asked Finance Ministry to increase defense spending by 17b hryvnia this yr, ministry in Kiev says on its website.

Finance Ministry will “make efforts to find possibilities to finance needs” to secure country’s defense.

Higher spending is needed because of increased army personnel.

But foreign debtors are set to lose... (as RT reports)

Ukraine’s government has submitted to parliament a bill that allows the introduction of a moratorium on foreign debt payments. The moratorium is to protect the assets of the state and the state sector in case of an “attack” from dishonest lenders.

"To protect the interests of the Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian government today has introduced to the Rada a bill that would give the government the right to suspend payment on Ukraine’s external debts and publicly guaranteed debts. In case of an attack from dishonest lenders on Ukraine this moratorium will protect the assets of the state and the state sector," a statement on the Cabinet website said Tuesday.

The moratorium "will not affect domestic payments and will not affect the stability of the banking system,” the UNIAN news agency said citing s source. In also said the moratorium does not include debt to the IMF, the EBRD and other institutional creditors.

The Cabinet said the moratorium will not affect the bilateral and multilateral obligations of Kiev.

And Ukraine bonds are tumbling...

Specifcally (as Bloomberg reports),

The eastern European nation is seeking permission to hold off on paying coupons, the first of which coming due is a May 21 payment of $33 million on a $1 billion note maturing in November 2016, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Ukraine said cutting its debt burden is a question of justice, according to an e-mailed statement on Tuesday.

“This is a logical next step to show people they are serious,” Dray Simpson, the London-based managing director of emerging markets at Cantor Fitzgerald Europe, said by e-mail on Tuesday. “Up to now there has been a lot of talk and very little action and any confrontations have been won by creditors. If Ukraine are going to reverse that trend they need to be firm.”

Time is running out for the country and its bondholders to reach an agreement as a June 15 International Monetary Fund deadline for the restructuring approaches. Failure to strike a deal puts the next tranche of a $17.5 billion IMF loan at risk for Ukraine as it struggles to keep the economy afloat following a yearlong conflict with pro-Russian separatists in the nation’s east.

*  *  *

Thank you American taxpayer...

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