I wonder how much hard currency the Taliban need to settle debts they've incurred to get to their current position. Maybe rather a large amount.
They can sell all the mineral assets to the Chinese who have the need and the cash.
The world is awash with mineral deposits, and it's a hell of a lot easier to get them out of Mongolia, Africa, etc. Places with - you know - physical infrastructure, ports, roads, etc. (Not to mention a lack of fanatics and an ongoing civil war.)
The idea that people will be lining up to pay for licenses in Afghanistan is farcical. They weren't lining up when the Taliban were last in power. And they weren't lining up when the Americans were in control. Why would they line up now?
The first thing you need to know about rare earth elements is that they are incredibly common.
There are hundreds of new REE mines planned, from Colorado to Queensland to large parts of Africa. There is no way that Afghanistan, with no roads, no reliable electricity, no port, and no educated workforce is going to be economic. It'd cost 5x the price to mine in rural Afghanistan and get it to Shenzen than to mine in Queensland and chuck it on a ship.
Yet stories persist in the business media about such moves.
I’ll see how it plays out and leave you to your needlessly aggressive tone. I only mentioned it.
I apologize if I am aggressive, but the point I'm making is that it is hardly unusual for places to have massive mineral deposits. It's true of Canada, the US, Australia, Russia, Mongolia, China and most of Africa.
What is expensive is not finding deposits, it's getting them out the ground (building a mine), and then getting them to market. And Afghanistan is going to be extremely expensive on both those fronts.
That is true but China doesn’t play on the short or even medium term vision of the West, it plays long-term. Having what will probably be a reliable supplier (because the Taliban are not going to mess with China, and neither will Pakistan if China tells it to stop supporting the Taliban) is not a bad covering strategy.
Nah, I think the Chinese support for the Taliban is simpler. It buys off the Islamist world from what is going on with the Uighurs, and is a defeat for the USA, and a thorn in the side of India. Better a client state than an enemy, much like Myanmar.
You think the 'Islamic World' en-bloc is sympathetic to the Taliban? Or is even unified in some way?
That doesn't sound like the betting money is expecting things to go well for the Dems during the next three years.
Or that they expect another Dem to emerge.
They better or else at the moment there is a real chance of Trump 2 - The Return in 2024
The Republicans picking Trump, and they will if he runs, is the way the Dems win.
My strong sense of a few months ago was that WH24 will involve neither Biden nor Trump. I think I might go back to that and stick.
I think so too. Biden will be a one term president, but I don't think will resign early. That is just not the way Presidents act. Just as British monarchs do not abdicate, no matter how doddery.
Nixon is still the only POTUS to have ever resigned, isn't he?
Presidential resignations are far more the stuff of fiction, like House of Cards etc, than they can actually occur.
This is correct. While nothing is ever certain, it is perhaps useful to note that there have been Presidents with health issues who all served until deaths/defeat/term limites. FDR of course, but also Reagan if you believe the stories about his second term and dementia.
As a total aside, I think the liberal US press has come out of Afghanistan rather well. They've not been cheerleaders for the administration, but have been willing to call it out for its failures.
Err, no. A C- at best.
The ABC interview of Biden was about as light touch as you could get. Having said that, you need to careful with the mentally impaired.
Unfair. Given the intensely polarised nature of American politics Rob Smithson has a point. I’ve seen unexpectedly brutal criticism of Biden’s Debacle from CNN, NYT, MSNBC, USA Today, WSJ, WashPo, and given their usual bias it actually has more impact than any right wing media assaults
They are unsparing. Even the supposedly soft soap George Stephanopoulos ABC interview cruelly exposed Biden as inadequate and confounded. The producers must have known this. Yet they ran it.
Credit where it is due - for once. The liberal US media has accepted this is a clusterfuck by a Democrat prez
ABC didn’t really have any alternative but to run it. What do you say “we had an interview with the President but, mmm, we decided it made him look bad so we skipped it”.
I agree other papers has been unsparing (although the WSJ is not a liberal paper) but my point was that it is temporary.
That was not your point: I said that the liberal press had been willing to call out the adminstration for its failures over Afghanistan.
You said, no, that they only deserved a C-.
You didn't mention temporary, you only mentioned a soft touch Biden interview.
That’s correct, I didn’t mention the temporary bit. Happy to say I’ve got that comment and retract the C- rating.
I see comment below on how Biden apologists have contorted themselves on the excuses.
Facts: 1. The Biden adminstration pushed the pace of the withdrawal and actually deprived itself of eyes and ears to assist an ongoing assessment
2. The Biden adminstration did get told things could downhill very quickly if there was no retained support for the Afghan military.
3. The optics & PR drove Biden's decision to push on with the Trump deal and the calculation was it was going to be Trump's problem if it went wrong because it was his agreement.
Just another calculation gone wrong on this but the calculations were always going to be wrong because the objectives and motivations were wrong.
Given the topic of rare earth elements, China's love of mining is something that connects them and the Taliban already
I'd rate his chance of standing in 2024 at no better than one-in-six, and he's hardly a shoo in to win. (Indeed, he's more likely to be the sacrificial lamb candidate if the election looks like a certain loss.)
+1. Most screaming lay in the history of political betting.
Nah, that was Mike Bloomberg in 2020 or Andrea Leadsome in 2019.
Yep, both great. But I'd say No Deal Brexit was the absolute best because it was never happening AND a short price. Odds on at one point. I don't expect anything as good on the lay front for a long long time.
Brian Rose for Mayor of London, serious sums were available to be laid at 5/1 and 6/1 or so. Will never be beaten.
Honourable Mention: Andrew Yang for the Dem 2020 Primaries. Much better lay than Bloomberg imho, since Bloomberg had a kinda feasible path to victory far more than Yang ever did.
Oh God, Brian Rose - that was a great bet to lay, as was Yang
DeSantis must be a lay at 15 given what is happening in FL.
Not at the moment. If Trump doesn’t run, DeSantis is the clear favourite.
I agree with you. If Trump doesn't run, DeSantis is the favouite. And I'd reckon he would be much more formidable opponent for whoever the Democrat is than Trump. Let's not forget, he won a swing state in a midterm year.
Most now seem to be in the 46%/47% approval rating though rather than the over 50% it was before
There has been a very wide range for Biden’s ratings with Rasmussen and YouGov at the lower end and Morning Consult and Politico at the higher end.
Probably what is better to look at is the trend line within each pollster. That is clearly declining.
46/47% of course is danger territory for Biden/Harris.
47% is closer to the 48% Kerry, Gore and Clinton got and well below the 51% Biden got in 2020 when he beat Trump or the over 50% Obama got in 2008 and 2012
Personally, I think Biden is toast. I know many on here will say “you would say that” but I don’t know how he recovers from this, particularly the images, the ABC interview (how can you say one of Biden’s key strengths is compassion after that?) and the poor performance of his Sec of Defence.
I think Harris knows that as well, plus a fair few other Democrat leaders. To many, particularly on the left, Biden has served his purpose and a President Harris would better suit their purposes when there is still time to push through an agenda. If you want a curveball, don’t be too surprised if you start to hear murmurings that the 25th should be invoked for Biden.
Except Harris polls no better than Biden or generally worse.
If Biden wants a replacement candidate for the top job in 2024 he would be better replacing Harris with someone like Buttigieg and making the latter Secretary of State for instance to be a serious contender for Harris.
Buttigieg could then be Macron to his Hollande as they try to stop the return of Trump/Sarkozy
I don’t think it will be Biden’s to choose. He was always a vehicle for those who wanted to get rid of Trump. He never had a strong base of his own. If he starts to push back now, they will just say he is getting senile.
He is a Puppet President.
Doesn't say a lot for Trump that he can be beaten by a Puppet without a strong base of his own.
Well, if you have a media that backs up and the biggest Tech companies that will block damaging stories of your son and what he has been up to, it is remarkable what you can do.
If this is all true then why would they not do it all over again for Biden in 2024?
They probably will. However, it might be a harder trick to pull off in 2024. The scrutiny will be greater and, in all likelihood, Congress will be GOP controlled which adds another factor.
I'd rate his chance of standing in 2024 at no better than one-in-six, and he's hardly a shoo in to win. (Indeed, he's more likely to be the sacrificial lamb candidate if the election looks like a certain loss.)
+1. Most screaming lay in the history of political betting.
Nah, that was Mike Bloomberg in 2020 or Andrea Leadsome in 2019.
Yep, both great. But I'd say No Deal Brexit was the absolute best because it was never happening AND a short price. Odds on at one point. I don't expect anything as good on the lay front for a long long time.
Brian Rose for Mayor of London, serious sums were available to be laid at 5/1 and 6/1 or so. Will never be beaten.
Honourable Mention: Andrew Yang for the Dem 2020 Primaries. Much better lay than Bloomberg imho, since Bloomberg had a kinda feasible path to victory far more than Yang ever did.
Oh God, Brian Rose - that was a great bet to lay, as was Yang
DeSantis must be a lay at 15 given what is happening in FL.
Not at the moment. If Trump doesn’t run, DeSantis is the clear favourite.
I agree with you. If Trump doesn't run, DeSantis is the favouite. And I'd reckon he would be much more formidable opponent for whoever the Democrat is than Trump. Let's not forget, he won a swing state in a midterm year.
Even Trump won Florida in 2020
He did.
And one would expect the Governing party to do worse at the midterms, and the fact that DeSantis won in 2018 is to his credit.
Most now seem to be in the 46%/47% approval rating though rather than the over 50% it was before
There has been a very wide range for Biden’s ratings with Rasmussen and YouGov at the lower end and Morning Consult and Politico at the higher end.
Probably what is better to look at is the trend line within each pollster. That is clearly declining.
46/47% of course is danger territory for Biden/Harris.
47% is closer to the 48% Kerry, Gore and Clinton got and well below the 51% Biden got in 2020 when he beat Trump or the over 50% Obama got in 2008 and 2012
Personally, I think Biden is toast. I know many on here will say “you would say that” but I don’t know how he recovers from this, particularly the images, the ABC interview (how can you say one of Biden’s key strengths is compassion after that?) and the poor performance of his Sec of Defence.
I think Harris knows that as well, plus a fair few other Democrat leaders. To many, particularly on the left, Biden has served his purpose and a President Harris would better suit their purposes when there is still time to push through an agenda. If you want a curveball, don’t be too surprised if you start to hear murmurings that the 25th should be invoked for Biden.
Except Harris polls no better than Biden or generally worse.
If Biden wants a replacement candidate for the top job in 2024 he would be better replacing Harris with someone like Buttigieg and making the latter Secretary of State for instance to be a serious contender for Harris.
Buttigieg could then be Macron to his Hollande as they try to stop the return of Trump/Sarkozy
I don’t think it will be Biden’s to choose. He was always a vehicle for those who wanted to get rid of Trump. He never had a strong base of his own. If he starts to push back now, they will just say he is getting senile.
He is a Puppet President.
Doesn't say a lot for Trump that he can be beaten by a Puppet without a strong base of his own.
Well, if you have a media that backs up and the biggest Tech companies that will block damaging stories of your son and what he has been up to, it is remarkable what you can do.
Yep, just like in 2016 when the media and the tech companies all backed Clinton over Trump and gave Clinton an easy ride, yet Trump still won?
You seem to be perilously close to creeping towards QAnon-type conspiracy theories.
I wonder how much hard currency the Taliban need to settle debts they've incurred to get to their current position. Maybe rather a large amount.
They can sell all the mineral assets to the Chinese who have the need and the cash.
The world is awash with mineral deposits, and it's a hell of a lot easier to get them out of Mongolia, Africa, etc. Places with - you know - physical infrastructure, ports, roads, etc. (Not to mention a lack of fanatics and an ongoing civil war.)
The idea that people will be lining up to pay for licenses in Afghanistan is farcical. They weren't lining up when the Taliban were last in power. And they weren't lining up when the Americans were in control. Why would they line up now?
The first thing you need to know about rare earth elements is that they are incredibly common.
There are hundreds of new REE mines planned, from Colorado to Queensland to large parts of Africa. There is no way that Afghanistan, with no roads, no reliable electricity, no port, and no educated workforce is going to be economic. It'd cost 5x the price to mine in rural Afghanistan and get it to Shenzen than to mine in Queensland and chuck it on a ship.
Yet stories persist in the business media about such moves.
I’ll see how it plays out and leave you to your needlessly aggressive tone. I only mentioned it.
I apologize if I am aggressive, but the point I'm making is that it is hardly unusual for places to have massive mineral deposits. It's true of Canada, the US, Australia, Russia, Mongolia, China and most of Africa.
What is expensive is not finding deposits, it's getting them out the ground (building a mine), and then getting them to market. And Afghanistan is going to be extremely expensive on both those fronts.
That is true but China doesn’t play on the short or even medium term vision of the West, it plays long-term. Having what will probably be a reliable supplier (because the Taliban are not going to mess with China, and neither will Pakistan if China tells it to stop supporting the Taliban) is not a bad covering strategy.
We'll see. Maybe the Chinese will invest in mines in Afghanistan for geopolitical reasons. But it's hard to see what the Chinese would get out of it. After all, they can buy up Africa for much lower prices.
Right now, China can basically do what it likes. It is so ascendant. It has that ‘superbitas’. It has the real signs of imperial swagger. Britain in the early 19th century
It is all about self confidence. Theoretically China is still the economic and military inferior of America, but it does not feel that way, not any more. Soon it won’t even be theoretically disputable. China will rule
FFS they just leaked an engineered coronavirus from a lab onto the world which has killed 10 million and decimated the global economy and they’ve persuaded half of us this didn’t happen, it was actually a mad pangolin in a cyberzoo, and those of us that know it happened wearily accept that China is so powerful there will be no payback
Most now seem to be in the 46%/47% approval rating though rather than the over 50% it was before
There has been a very wide range for Biden’s ratings with Rasmussen and YouGov at the lower end and Morning Consult and Politico at the higher end.
Probably what is better to look at is the trend line within each pollster. That is clearly declining.
46/47% of course is danger territory for Biden/Harris.
47% is closer to the 48% Kerry, Gore and Clinton got and well below the 51% Biden got in 2020 when he beat Trump or the over 50% Obama got in 2008 and 2012
Personally, I think Biden is toast. I know many on here will say “you would say that” but I don’t know how he recovers from this, particularly the images, the ABC interview (how can you say one of Biden’s key strengths is compassion after that?) and the poor performance of his Sec of Defence.
I think Harris knows that as well, plus a fair few other Democrat leaders. To many, particularly on the left, Biden has served his purpose and a President Harris would better suit their purposes when there is still time to push through an agenda. If you want a curveball, don’t be too surprised if you start to hear murmurings that the 25th should be invoked for Biden.
I don't think the 25h would be a curve ball, I think it would be putting a tired old man out of his misery.
But I think Biden will choose retire on the grounds of ill health in 2022 rather than have the 25th invoked. Of course, Harris is hardly on the left of the Democratic Party, so I wouldn't expect to see AOC get her wish list were she to take over.
What are the rules on VPs becoming POTUS? Can she be elected for 2 terms or is there a point where her “promotion term” is long enough that it counts as 1?
Yes, it's the half way point of the Presidency.
But I'd want pretty long odds on Harris being President for a decade.
Midday 20/01/2023 is the halfway point isn't it?
Yes.
I guess the interesting question is what happens if Biden dies of a heart attack that morning. Is she measured from her own inauguration, or from Biden's death?
25th Amendment means that Harris automatically and therefore instantly becomes President if Biden dies, doesn't it? The inauguration ceremony swearing in the new President after a death is technically just ceremonial.
I believe Ford became POTUS at the moment Nixon resigned and was actually sworn in later that day.
“The mothers were desperate, they were getting beaten by the Taliban. They shouted, ‘save my baby’ and threw the babies at us, some of the babies fell on the barbed wire. It was awful what happened. By the end of the night there wasn’t one man among us who was not crying,” said the Parachute Regiment officer quietly.
That's the shot, here's the chaser
Biden’s Long Trail of Betrayals Why is the president so consistently wrong on major foreign-policy matters?
I wonder how much hard currency the Taliban need to settle debts they've incurred to get to their current position. Maybe rather a large amount.
They can sell all the mineral assets to the Chinese who have the need and the cash.
The world is awash with mineral deposits, and it's a hell of a lot easier to get them out of Mongolia, Africa, etc. Places with - you know - physical infrastructure, ports, roads, etc. (Not to mention a lack of fanatics and an ongoing civil war.)
The idea that people will be lining up to pay for licenses in Afghanistan is farcical. They weren't lining up when the Taliban were last in power. And they weren't lining up when the Americans were in control. Why would they line up now?
The first thing you need to know about rare earth elements is that they are incredibly common.
There are hundreds of new REE mines planned, from Colorado to Queensland to large parts of Africa. There is no way that Afghanistan, with no roads, no reliable electricity, no port, and no educated workforce is going to be economic. It'd cost 5x the price to mine in rural Afghanistan and get it to Shenzen than to mine in Queensland and chuck it on a ship.
Yet stories persist in the business media about such moves.
I’ll see how it plays out and leave you to your needlessly aggressive tone. I only mentioned it.
I apologize if I am aggressive, but the point I'm making is that it is hardly unusual for places to have massive mineral deposits. It's true of Canada, the US, Australia, Russia, Mongolia, China and most of Africa.
What is expensive is not finding deposits, it's getting them out the ground (building a mine), and then getting them to market. And Afghanistan is going to be extremely expensive on both those fronts.
That is true but China doesn’t play on the short or even medium term vision of the West, it plays long-term. Having what will probably be a reliable supplier (because the Taliban are not going to mess with China, and neither will Pakistan if China tells it to stop supporting the Taliban) is not a bad covering strategy.
We'll see. Maybe the Chinese will invest in mines in Afghanistan for geopolitical reasons. But it's hard to see what the Chinese would get out of it. After all, they can buy up Africa for much lower prices.
Right now, China can basically do what it likes. It is so ascendant. It has that ‘superbitas’. It has the real signs of imperial swagger. Britain in the early 19th century
It is all about self confidence. Theoretically China is still the economic and military inferior of America, but it does not feel that way, not any more. Soon it won’t even be theoretically disputable. China will rule
FFS they just leaked an engineered coronavirus from a lab onto the world which has killed 10 million and decimated the global economy and they’ve persuaded half of us this didn’t happen, it was actually a mad pangolin in a cyberzoo, and those of us that know it happened wearily accept that China is so powerful there will be no payback
Most now seem to be in the 46%/47% approval rating though rather than the over 50% it was before
There has been a very wide range for Biden’s ratings with Rasmussen and YouGov at the lower end and Morning Consult and Politico at the higher end.
Probably what is better to look at is the trend line within each pollster. That is clearly declining.
46/47% of course is danger territory for Biden/Harris.
47% is closer to the 48% Kerry, Gore and Clinton got and well below the 51% Biden got in 2020 when he beat Trump or the over 50% Obama got in 2008 and 2012
Personally, I think Biden is toast. I know many on here will say “you would say that” but I don’t know how he recovers from this, particularly the images, the ABC interview (how can you say one of Biden’s key strengths is compassion after that?) and the poor performance of his Sec of Defence.
I think Harris knows that as well, plus a fair few other Democrat leaders. To many, particularly on the left, Biden has served his purpose and a President Harris would better suit their purposes when there is still time to push through an agenda. If you want a curveball, don’t be too surprised if you start to hear murmurings that the 25th should be invoked for Biden.
I don't think the 25h would be a curve ball, I think it would be putting a tired old man out of his misery.
But I think Biden will choose retire on the grounds of ill health in 2022 rather than have the 25th invoked. Of course, Harris is hardly on the left of the Democratic Party, so I wouldn't expect to see AOC get her wish list were she to take over.
What are the rules on VPs becoming POTUS? Can she be elected for 2 terms or is there a point where her “promotion term” is long enough that it counts as 1?
Yes, it's the half way point of the Presidency.
But I'd want pretty long odds on Harris being President for a decade.
Midday 20/01/2023 is the halfway point isn't it?
Yes.
I guess the interesting question is what happens if Biden dies of a heart attack that morning. Is she measured from her own inauguration, or from Biden's death?
25th Amendment means that Harris automatically and therefore instantly becomes President if Biden dies, doesn't it? The inauguration ceremony swearing in the new President after a death is technically just ceremonial.
I believe Ford became POTUS at the moment Nixon resigned and was actually sworn in later that day.
That's what Wiki seems to say on the 25th Amendment page, too.
Most now seem to be in the 46%/47% approval rating though rather than the over 50% it was before
There has been a very wide range for Biden’s ratings with Rasmussen and YouGov at the lower end and Morning Consult and Politico at the higher end.
Probably what is better to look at is the trend line within each pollster. That is clearly declining.
46/47% of course is danger territory for Biden/Harris.
47% is closer to the 48% Kerry, Gore and Clinton got and well below the 51% Biden got in 2020 when he beat Trump or the over 50% Obama got in 2008 and 2012
Personally, I think Biden is toast. I know many on here will say “you would say that” but I don’t know how he recovers from this, particularly the images, the ABC interview (how can you say one of Biden’s key strengths is compassion after that?) and the poor performance of his Sec of Defence.
I think Harris knows that as well, plus a fair few other Democrat leaders. To many, particularly on the left, Biden has served his purpose and a President Harris would better suit their purposes when there is still time to push through an agenda. If you want a curveball, don’t be too surprised if you start to hear murmurings that the 25th should be invoked for Biden.
Except Harris polls no better than Biden or generally worse.
If Biden wants a replacement candidate for the top job in 2024 he would be better replacing Harris with someone like Buttigieg and making the latter Secretary of State for instance to be a serious contender for Harris.
Buttigieg could then be Macron to his Hollande as they try to stop the return of Trump/Sarkozy
I don’t think it will be Biden’s to choose. He was always a vehicle for those who wanted to get rid of Trump. He never had a strong base of his own. If he starts to push back now, they will just say he is getting senile.
He is a Puppet President.
Doesn't say a lot for Trump that he can be beaten by a Puppet without a strong base of his own.
Well, if you have a media that backs up and the biggest Tech companies that will block damaging stories of your son and what he has been up to, it is remarkable what you can do.
Yep, just like in 2016 when the media and the tech companies all backed Clinton over Trump and gave Clinton an easy ride, yet Trump still won?
You seem to be perilously close to creeping towards QAnon-type conspiracy theories.
Ah here we go. If you say the Media was immensely pro-Biden, that makes you close to QAnon. Another way to shut down discussion.
How about this. You seem like someone who is always happy to stand close to Corbyn and support him. Should I assume you are an anti-Semite?
“The mothers were desperate, they were getting beaten by the Taliban. They shouted, ‘save my baby’ and threw the babies at us, some of the babies fell on the barbed wire. It was awful what happened. By the end of the night there wasn’t one man among us who was not crying,” said the Parachute Regiment officer quietly.
That's the shot, here's the chaser
Biden’s Long Trail of Betrayals Why is the president so consistently wrong on major foreign-policy matters?
I wonder how much hard currency the Taliban need to settle debts they've incurred to get to their current position. Maybe rather a large amount.
They can sell all the mineral assets to the Chinese who have the need and the cash.
The world is awash with mineral deposits, and it's a hell of a lot easier to get them out of Mongolia, Africa, etc. Places with - you know - physical infrastructure, ports, roads, etc. (Not to mention a lack of fanatics and an ongoing civil war.)
The idea that people will be lining up to pay for licenses in Afghanistan is farcical. They weren't lining up when the Taliban were last in power. And they weren't lining up when the Americans were in control. Why would they line up now?
The first thing you need to know about rare earth elements is that they are incredibly common.
There are hundreds of new REE mines planned, from Colorado to Queensland to large parts of Africa. There is no way that Afghanistan, with no roads, no reliable electricity, no port, and no educated workforce is going to be economic. It'd cost 5x the price to mine in rural Afghanistan and get it to Shenzen than to mine in Queensland and chuck it on a ship.
Yet stories persist in the business media about such moves.
I’ll see how it plays out and leave you to your needlessly aggressive tone. I only mentioned it.
I apologize if I am aggressive, but the point I'm making is that it is hardly unusual for places to have massive mineral deposits. It's true of Canada, the US, Australia, Russia, Mongolia, China and most of Africa.
What is expensive is not finding deposits, it's getting them out the ground (building a mine), and then getting them to market. And Afghanistan is going to be extremely expensive on both those fronts.
That is true but China doesn’t play on the short or even medium term vision of the West, it plays long-term. Having what will probably be a reliable supplier (because the Taliban are not going to mess with China, and neither will Pakistan if China tells it to stop supporting the Taliban) is not a bad covering strategy.
We'll see. Maybe the Chinese will invest in mines in Afghanistan for geopolitical reasons. But it's hard to see what the Chinese would get out of it. After all, they can buy up Africa for much lower prices.
Right now, China can basically do what it likes. It is so ascendant. It has that ‘superbitas’. It has the real signs of imperial swagger. Britain in the early 19th century
It is all about self confidence. Theoretically China is still the economic and military inferior of America, but it does not feel that way, not any more. Soon it won’t even be theoretically disputable. China will rule
FFS they just leaked an engineered coronavirus from a lab onto the world which has killed 10 million and decimated the global economy and they’ve persuaded half of us this didn’t happen, it was actually a mad pangolin in a cyberzoo, and those of us that know it happened wearily accept that China is so powerful there will be no payback
I wonder how much hard currency the Taliban need to settle debts they've incurred to get to their current position. Maybe rather a large amount.
They can sell all the mineral assets to the Chinese who have the need and the cash.
The world is awash with mineral deposits, and it's a hell of a lot easier to get them out of Mongolia, Africa, etc. Places with - you know - physical infrastructure, ports, roads, etc. (Not to mention a lack of fanatics and an ongoing civil war.)
The idea that people will be lining up to pay for licenses in Afghanistan is farcical. They weren't lining up when the Taliban were last in power. And they weren't lining up when the Americans were in control. Why would they line up now?
The first thing you need to know about rare earth elements is that they are incredibly common.
There are hundreds of new REE mines planned, from Colorado to Queensland to large parts of Africa. There is no way that Afghanistan, with no roads, no reliable electricity, no port, and no educated workforce is going to be economic. It'd cost 5x the price to mine in rural Afghanistan and get it to Shenzen than to mine in Queensland and chuck it on a ship.
Yet stories persist in the business media about such moves.
I’ll see how it plays out and leave you to your needlessly aggressive tone. I only mentioned it.
At the risk of being aggressive, that’s not the most convincing of stories: Rare-earth metals in Afghanistan were estimated to be worth anywhere between USD one trillion to USD three trillion in 2020, a CNBC report this week quoted Ahmad Shah Katawazai, a former diplomat at the Afghan Embassy in Washington…
…(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed)
I wonder how much hard currency the Taliban need to settle debts they've incurred to get to their current position. Maybe rather a large amount.
They can sell all the mineral assets to the Chinese who have the need and the cash.
The world is awash with mineral deposits, and it's a hell of a lot easier to get them out of Mongolia, Africa, etc. Places with - you know - physical infrastructure, ports, roads, etc. (Not to mention a lack of fanatics and an ongoing civil war.)
The idea that people will be lining up to pay for licenses in Afghanistan is farcical. They weren't lining up when the Taliban were last in power. And they weren't lining up when the Americans were in control. Why would they line up now?
The first thing you need to know about rare earth elements is that they are incredibly common.
There are hundreds of new REE mines planned, from Colorado to Queensland to large parts of Africa. There is no way that Afghanistan, with no roads, no reliable electricity, no port, and no educated workforce is going to be economic. It'd cost 5x the price to mine in rural Afghanistan and get it to Shenzen than to mine in Queensland and chuck it on a ship.
Yet stories persist in the business media about such moves.
I’ll see how it plays out and leave you to your needlessly aggressive tone. I only mentioned it.
I apologize if I am aggressive, but the point I'm making is that it is hardly unusual for places to have massive mineral deposits. It's true of Canada, the US, Australia, Russia, Mongolia, China and most of Africa.
What is expensive is not finding deposits, it's getting them out the ground (building a mine), and then getting them to market. And Afghanistan is going to be extremely expensive on both those fronts.
That is true but China doesn’t play on the short or even medium term vision of the West, it plays long-term. Having what will probably be a reliable supplier (because the Taliban are not going to mess with China, and neither will Pakistan if China tells it to stop supporting the Taliban) is not a bad covering strategy.
Nah, I think the Chinese support for the Taliban is simpler. It buys off the Islamist world from what is going on with the Uighurs, and is a defeat for the USA, and a thorn in the side of India. Better a client state than an enemy, much like Myanmar.
You think the 'Islamic World' en-bloc is sympathetic to the Taliban? Or is even unified in some way?
Hmmm.
Well, they don't seem to be that interested in the Uigars, and I cannot see that China supporting Taliban Afghanistan makes them more interested.
Indeed, it starts to look a bit like Mao's support of anti Imperialist forces in other countries.
“The mothers were desperate, they were getting beaten by the Taliban. They shouted, ‘save my baby’ and threw the babies at us, some of the babies fell on the barbed wire. It was awful what happened. By the end of the night there wasn’t one man among us who was not crying,” said the Parachute Regiment officer quietly.
That's the shot, here's the chaser
Biden’s Long Trail of Betrayals Why is the president so consistently wrong on major foreign-policy matters?
Which is why he was still the right choice. Despite being doddery and shite.
At what point, do you weigh up the facts and actions, against the perceptions? As someone said in the US “great, we’ve swapped bad tweets for bad policies”
The Government is falling apart, this is what happens when we put Jeremy Corbyn up for PM, let this be a lesson for us all!
Evidence of a government falling apart?
So you haven't caught up with Raab's refusal to make a phonecall whilst on his holibobs then?
How is that the government falling apart?
As far as I understand that phone call happened with someone else making it.
What a non story. 😴
It is not a non story because it gives the impression that Raab is either too important to curtail his holiday to make the call, or he just can't be arsed.
Most now seem to be in the 46%/47% approval rating though rather than the over 50% it was before
There has been a very wide range for Biden’s ratings with Rasmussen and YouGov at the lower end and Morning Consult and Politico at the higher end.
Probably what is better to look at is the trend line within each pollster. That is clearly declining.
46/47% of course is danger territory for Biden/Harris.
47% is closer to the 48% Kerry, Gore and Clinton got and well below the 51% Biden got in 2020 when he beat Trump or the over 50% Obama got in 2008 and 2012
Personally, I think Biden is toast. I know many on here will say “you would say that” but I don’t know how he recovers from this, particularly the images, the ABC interview (how can you say one of Biden’s key strengths is compassion after that?) and the poor performance of his Sec of Defence.
I think Harris knows that as well, plus a fair few other Democrat leaders. To many, particularly on the left, Biden has served his purpose and a President Harris would better suit their purposes when there is still time to push through an agenda. If you want a curveball, don’t be too surprised if you start to hear murmurings that the 25th should be invoked for Biden.
Except Harris polls no better than Biden or generally worse.
If Biden wants a replacement candidate for the top job in 2024 he would be better replacing Harris with someone like Buttigieg and making the latter Secretary of State for instance to be a serious contender for Harris.
Buttigieg could then be Macron to his Hollande as they try to stop the return of Trump/Sarkozy
I don’t think it will be Biden’s to choose. He was always a vehicle for those who wanted to get rid of Trump. He never had a strong base of his own. If he starts to push back now, they will just say he is getting senile.
He is a Puppet President.
Doesn't say a lot for Trump that he can be beaten by a Puppet without a strong base of his own.
Well, if you have a media that backs up and the biggest Tech companies that will block damaging stories of your son and what he has been up to, it is remarkable what you can do.
Yep, just like in 2016 when the media and the tech companies all backed Clinton over Trump and gave Clinton an easy ride, yet Trump still won?
You seem to be perilously close to creeping towards QAnon-type conspiracy theories.
Ah here we go. If you say the Media was immensely pro-Biden, that makes you close to QAnon. Another way to shut down discussion.
How about this. You seem like someone who is always happy to stand close to Corbyn and support him. Should I assume you are an anti-Semite?
Sorry, you've got the wrong person. I've never had any time for Corbyn. Mind you, given a forced choice between Trump and Corbyn.............
Sorry did Phil just say Gordon Brown caused the Global Financial Crisis, on the sauce early again were we
He caused the crisis in the UK, at least. The regulatory system was set up by Brown and it allowed banks to operate at 50-100x leverage with the likes of Northern Rock actually well above that.
Precisely.
London specifically and the UK in general is a Financial world power and the Chancellor of the Exchequer is responsible for regulating that.
There wasn't (to my knowledge) a single British bank run in the entire 20th century. The regulations with the Bank of England that we had worked. Then in came Gordon Brown who was warned not to remove BoE oversight, did so, then we had not one but two bank failures within a decade of the changes happening.
The idea you can dismiss the financial crisis because it was "global" might work for many nations, it doesn't work for the UK. The UK is a leading power that literally helps write the global financial rules. Brown changed the rules, his changes led to the crisis.
If your primary industry that you're a world leader in fails, within a few years of rewriting the rules for that industry, then don't cry that it is "global" afterwards.
Lots of bank failures though. Bank run is a very specific definition
I wonder how much hard currency the Taliban need to settle debts they've incurred to get to their current position. Maybe rather a large amount.
They can sell all the mineral assets to the Chinese who have the need and the cash.
The world is awash with mineral deposits, and it's a hell of a lot easier to get them out of Mongolia, Africa, etc. Places with - you know - physical infrastructure, ports, roads, etc. (Not to mention a lack of fanatics and an ongoing civil war.)
The idea that people will be lining up to pay for licenses in Afghanistan is farcical. They weren't lining up when the Taliban were last in power. And they weren't lining up when the Americans were in control. Why would they line up now?
The first thing you need to know about rare earth elements is that they are incredibly common.
There are hundreds of new REE mines planned, from Colorado to Queensland to large parts of Africa. There is no way that Afghanistan, with no roads, no reliable electricity, no port, and no educated workforce is going to be economic. It'd cost 5x the price to mine in rural Afghanistan and get it to Shenzen than to mine in Queensland and chuck it on a ship.
Yet stories persist in the business media about such moves.
I’ll see how it plays out and leave you to your needlessly aggressive tone. I only mentioned it.
I apologize if I am aggressive, but the point I'm making is that it is hardly unusual for places to have massive mineral deposits. It's true of Canada, the US, Australia, Russia, Mongolia, China and most of Africa.
What is expensive is not finding deposits, it's getting them out the ground (building a mine), and then getting them to market. And Afghanistan is going to be extremely expensive on both those fronts.
That is true but China doesn’t play on the short or even medium term vision of the West, it plays long-term. Having what will probably be a reliable supplier (because the Taliban are not going to mess with China, and neither will Pakistan if China tells it to stop supporting the Taliban) is not a bad covering strategy.
We'll see. Maybe the Chinese will invest in mines in Afghanistan for geopolitical reasons. But it's hard to see what the Chinese would get out of it. After all, they can buy up Africa for much lower prices.
Right now, China can basically do what it likes. It is so ascendant. It has that ‘superbitas’. It has the real signs of imperial swagger. Britain in the early 19th century
It is all about self confidence. Theoretically China is still the economic and military inferior of America, but it does not feel that way, not any more. Soon it won’t even be theoretically disputable. China will rule
FFS they just leaked an engineered coronavirus from a lab onto the world which has killed 10 million and decimated the global economy and they’ve persuaded half of us this didn’t happen, it was actually a mad pangolin in a cyberzoo, and those of us that know it happened wearily accept that China is so powerful there will be no payback
“The mothers were desperate, they were getting beaten by the Taliban. They shouted, ‘save my baby’ and threw the babies at us, some of the babies fell on the barbed wire. It was awful what happened. By the end of the night there wasn’t one man among us who was not crying,” said the Parachute Regiment officer quietly.
That's the shot, here's the chaser
Biden’s Long Trail of Betrayals Why is the president so consistently wrong on major foreign-policy matters?
I wonder how much hard currency the Taliban need to settle debts they've incurred to get to their current position. Maybe rather a large amount.
They can sell all the mineral assets to the Chinese who have the need and the cash.
The world is awash with mineral deposits, and it's a hell of a lot easier to get them out of Mongolia, Africa, etc. Places with - you know - physical infrastructure, ports, roads, etc. (Not to mention a lack of fanatics and an ongoing civil war.)
The idea that people will be lining up to pay for licenses in Afghanistan is farcical. They weren't lining up when the Taliban were last in power. And they weren't lining up when the Americans were in control. Why would they line up now?
The first thing you need to know about rare earth elements is that they are incredibly common.
There are hundreds of new REE mines planned, from Colorado to Queensland to large parts of Africa. There is no way that Afghanistan, with no roads, no reliable electricity, no port, and no educated workforce is going to be economic. It'd cost 5x the price to mine in rural Afghanistan and get it to Shenzen than to mine in Queensland and chuck it on a ship.
Yet stories persist in the business media about such moves.
I’ll see how it plays out and leave you to your needlessly aggressive tone. I only mentioned it.
I apologize if I am aggressive, but the point I'm making is that it is hardly unusual for places to have massive mineral deposits. It's true of Canada, the US, Australia, Russia, Mongolia, China and most of Africa.
What is expensive is not finding deposits, it's getting them out the ground (building a mine), and then getting them to market. And Afghanistan is going to be extremely expensive on both those fronts.
That is true but China doesn’t play on the short or even medium term vision of the West, it plays long-term. Having what will probably be a reliable supplier (because the Taliban are not going to mess with China, and neither will Pakistan if China tells it to stop supporting the Taliban) is not a bad covering strategy.
We'll see. Maybe the Chinese will invest in mines in Afghanistan for geopolitical reasons. But it's hard to see what the Chinese would get out of it. After all, they can buy up Africa for much lower prices.
Right now, China can basically do what it likes. It is so ascendant. It has that ‘superbitas’. It has the real signs of imperial swagger. Britain in the early 19th century
It is all about self confidence. Theoretically China is still the economic and military inferior of America, but it does not feel that way, not any more. Soon it won’t even be theoretically disputable. China will rule
FFS they just leaked an engineered coronavirus from a lab onto the world which has killed 10 million and decimated the global economy and they’ve persuaded half of us this didn’t happen, it was actually a mad pangolin in a cyberzoo, and those of us that know it happened wearily accept that China is so powerful there will be no payback
Any research that doesn't agree with @Leon's preconceptions is to be discarded.
The reality is that we don't know, and we may never know. We can only attribute probabilities at this stage.
Do some research on the backstory of Angie Rasmussen. Then reconsider your silly remark
(1) You claim to think in probabilities, but you speak in certainties. (2) You only ever post stories which back up your existing point of view.
Now, I have said that I think that the lab leak hypothesis is the most likely one, but it is not the only one. It took a long time to find the animal hosts for SARS and MERS, and we've never found them for HIV or Ebola. It may be that a year from now a colony of bats is discovered with exactly the same virus. (Although, of course, this does not mean it definitely didn't escape from the lab.)
I disagree strongly on the engineered bioweapon story, for the various reasons I've described before (infectiousness to animals, weakness of Chinese vaccines, etc.), and there are also very good reasons to doubt the gain of function hypothesis (notably the fact that the virus in its initial form was less infectious than the Yuhan strain).
I wonder how much hard currency the Taliban need to settle debts they've incurred to get to their current position. Maybe rather a large amount.
They can sell all the mineral assets to the Chinese who have the need and the cash.
The world is awash with mineral deposits, and it's a hell of a lot easier to get them out of Mongolia, Africa, etc. Places with - you know - physical infrastructure, ports, roads, etc. (Not to mention a lack of fanatics and an ongoing civil war.)
The idea that people will be lining up to pay for licenses in Afghanistan is farcical. They weren't lining up when the Taliban were last in power. And they weren't lining up when the Americans were in control. Why would they line up now?
The first thing you need to know about rare earth elements is that they are incredibly common.
There are hundreds of new REE mines planned, from Colorado to Queensland to large parts of Africa. There is no way that Afghanistan, with no roads, no reliable electricity, no port, and no educated workforce is going to be economic. It'd cost 5x the price to mine in rural Afghanistan and get it to Shenzen than to mine in Queensland and chuck it on a ship.
Yet stories persist in the business media about such moves.
I’ll see how it plays out and leave you to your needlessly aggressive tone. I only mentioned it.
I apologize if I am aggressive, but the point I'm making is that it is hardly unusual for places to have massive mineral deposits. It's true of Canada, the US, Australia, Russia, Mongolia, China and most of Africa.
What is expensive is not finding deposits, it's getting them out the ground (building a mine), and then getting them to market. And Afghanistan is going to be extremely expensive on both those fronts.
That is true but China doesn’t play on the short or even medium term vision of the West, it plays long-term. Having what will probably be a reliable supplier (because the Taliban are not going to mess with China, and neither will Pakistan if China tells it to stop supporting the Taliban) is not a bad covering strategy.
We'll see. Maybe the Chinese will invest in mines in Afghanistan for geopolitical reasons. But it's hard to see what the Chinese would get out of it. After all, they can buy up Africa for much lower prices.
Most now seem to be in the 46%/47% approval rating though rather than the over 50% it was before
There has been a very wide range for Biden’s ratings with Rasmussen and YouGov at the lower end and Morning Consult and Politico at the higher end.
Probably what is better to look at is the trend line within each pollster. That is clearly declining.
46/47% of course is danger territory for Biden/Harris.
47% is closer to the 48% Kerry, Gore and Clinton got and well below the 51% Biden got in 2020 when he beat Trump or the over 50% Obama got in 2008 and 2012
Personally, I think Biden is toast. I know many on here will say “you would say that” but I don’t know how he recovers from this, particularly the images, the ABC interview (how can you say one of Biden’s key strengths is compassion after that?) and the poor performance of his Sec of Defence.
I think Harris knows that as well, plus a fair few other Democrat leaders. To many, particularly on the left, Biden has served his purpose and a President Harris would better suit their purposes when there is still time to push through an agenda. If you want a curveball, don’t be too surprised if you start to hear murmurings that the 25th should be invoked for Biden.
Except Harris polls no better than Biden or generally worse.
If Biden wants a replacement candidate for the top job in 2024 he would be better replacing Harris with someone like Buttigieg and making the latter Secretary of State for instance to be a serious contender for Harris.
Buttigieg could then be Macron to his Hollande as they try to stop the return of Trump/Sarkozy
I don’t think it will be Biden’s to choose. He was always a vehicle for those who wanted to get rid of Trump. He never had a strong base of his own. If he starts to push back now, they will just say he is getting senile.
He is a Puppet President.
Doesn't say a lot for Trump that he can be beaten by a Puppet without a strong base of his own.
Well, if you have a media that backs up and the biggest Tech companies that will block damaging stories of your son and what he has been up to, it is remarkable what you can do.
Yep, just like in 2016 when the media and the tech companies all backed Clinton over Trump and gave Clinton an easy ride, yet Trump still won?
You seem to be perilously close to creeping towards QAnon-type conspiracy theories.
Ah here we go. If you say the Media was immensely pro-Biden, that makes you close to QAnon. Another way to shut down discussion.
How about this. You seem like someone who is always happy to stand close to Corbyn and support him. Should I assume you are an anti-Semite?
Sorry, you've got the wrong person. I've never had any time for Corbyn. Mind you, given a forced choice between Trump and Corbyn.............
Well, you’ve sounded dangerously close to backing his views so I can only assume you are…
He hasn't tried to over throw a democratic election.
Big point in his favour.
The Democrats are somehow the saviours of Democracy? What a joke. Have you read HR1? What about the blatant attempts to intimidate the Supreme Court by launching a panel to see whether it needs to be expanded just so the Democrats have a permanent majority? Or strong arming independent Congressional staff to justify Reconciliation for Biden’s spending plans?
Hey, but that’s all ok because “it’s not Trump”
No one is saying the Democrats are the saviour of democracy.
But they aren't Trump.
Obama, Bush and every other President in recent times handed over power peacefully.
I have no doubt that if (or perhaps more like when...) Harris loses, then she will hand over peacefully.
Respecting democracy when you lose is the single most important thing for any political system.
I'd rather have a government that banned alcohol and made insurance companies illegal and taxed me at 99% but which could be evicted by voters, than one that taxed me ay 10%, but which refused to depart if the voters said "be gone".
Your last paragraph sounds like an endorsement of Jeremy Corbyn. Particularly the 99% tax rate
The Government is falling apart, this is what happens when we put Jeremy Corbyn up for PM, let this be a lesson for us all!
Evidence of a government falling apart?
So you haven't caught up with Raab's refusal to make a phonecall whilst on his holibobs then?
How is that the government falling apart?
As far as I understand that phone call happened with someone else making it.
What a non story. 😴
It is not a non story because it gives the impression that Raab is either too important to curtail his holiday to make the call, or he just can't be arsed.
Tomorrow's Daily Mail front page claims that Raab delegated the call to a junior minister but then for some reason the call was never made at all, for the record.
“The mothers were desperate, they were getting beaten by the Taliban. They shouted, ‘save my baby’ and threw the babies at us, some of the babies fell on the barbed wire. It was awful what happened. By the end of the night there wasn’t one man among us who was not crying,” said the Parachute Regiment officer quietly.
That's the shot, here's the chaser
Biden’s Long Trail of Betrayals Why is the president so consistently wrong on major foreign-policy matters?
Which is why he was still the right choice. Despite being doddery and shite.
At what point, do you weigh up the facts and actions, against the perceptions? As someone said in the US “great, we’ve swapped bad tweets for bad policies”
For the reasons I elucidated earlier.
Trump - as he proved after his defeat - is a danger to democracy. And that is 100x more important than his specific policies.
One thing that this crisis has shown, again, is just how much better our political system can be than America's.
Despite this being Biden's clusterfuck, despite the fact Parliament is in recess, Boris was in Parliament on Wednesday giving a statement and facing questions from opposition and backbenchers etc alike.
Biden not only faces no such opposition grilling as the PM sees every week while not in recess, he has to the best of my knowledge not accepted any questions from the general media either. He keeps turning up to press conferences, saying what he has to say, and walking off.
There is nobody in the USA that can grill a failing or flailing President in the same way that the PM must face up to in Parliament.
@rcs1000 likes to speak about the importance of processes. This is a failing of the US process - and Biden refusing to take any questions from the media or anyone else while such a major story is happening is a process problem.
One thing that this crisis has shown, again, is just how much better our political system can be than America's.
Despite this being Biden's clusterfuck, despite the fact Parliament is in recess, Boris was in Parliament on Wednesday giving a statement and facing questions from opposition and backbenchers etc alike.
Biden not only faces no such opposition grilling as the PM sees every week while not in recess, he has to the best of my knowledge not accepted any questions from the general media either. He keeps turning up to press conferences, saying what he has to say, and walking off.
There is nobody in the USA that can grill a failing or flailing President in the same way that the PM must face up to in Parliament.
@rcs1000 likes to speak about the importance of processes. This is a failing of the US process - and Biden refusing to take any questions from the media or anyone else while such a major story is happening is a process problem.
I wonder how much hard currency the Taliban need to settle debts they've incurred to get to their current position. Maybe rather a large amount.
They can sell all the mineral assets to the Chinese who have the need and the cash.
The world is awash with mineral deposits, and it's a hell of a lot easier to get them out of Mongolia, Africa, etc. Places with - you know - physical infrastructure, ports, roads, etc. (Not to mention a lack of fanatics and an ongoing civil war.)
The idea that people will be lining up to pay for licenses in Afghanistan is farcical. They weren't lining up when the Taliban were last in power. And they weren't lining up when the Americans were in control. Why would they line up now?
The first thing you need to know about rare earth elements is that they are incredibly common.
There are hundreds of new REE mines planned, from Colorado to Queensland to large parts of Africa. There is no way that Afghanistan, with no roads, no reliable electricity, no port, and no educated workforce is going to be economic. It'd cost 5x the price to mine in rural Afghanistan and get it to Shenzen than to mine in Queensland and chuck it on a ship.
Yet stories persist in the business media about such moves.
I’ll see how it plays out and leave you to your needlessly aggressive tone. I only mentioned it.
I apologize if I am aggressive, but the point I'm making is that it is hardly unusual for places to have massive mineral deposits. It's true of Canada, the US, Australia, Russia, Mongolia, China and most of Africa.
What is expensive is not finding deposits, it's getting them out the ground (building a mine), and then getting them to market. And Afghanistan is going to be extremely expensive on both those fronts.
That is true but China doesn’t play on the short or even medium term vision of the West, it plays long-term. Having what will probably be a reliable supplier (because the Taliban are not going to mess with China, and neither will Pakistan if China tells it to stop supporting the Taliban) is not a bad covering strategy.
We'll see. Maybe the Chinese will invest in mines in Afghanistan for geopolitical reasons. But it's hard to see what the Chinese would get out of it. After all, they can buy up Africa for much lower prices.
Chinese companies mine in Afghanistan already
But the mining sector is tiny - there's some copper, a little gold and a lot of undeveloped resources.
I wonder how much hard currency the Taliban need to settle debts they've incurred to get to their current position. Maybe rather a large amount.
They can sell all the mineral assets to the Chinese who have the need and the cash.
The world is awash with mineral deposits, and it's a hell of a lot easier to get them out of Mongolia, Africa, etc. Places with - you know - physical infrastructure, ports, roads, etc. (Not to mention a lack of fanatics and an ongoing civil war.)
The idea that people will be lining up to pay for licenses in Afghanistan is farcical. They weren't lining up when the Taliban were last in power. And they weren't lining up when the Americans were in control. Why would they line up now?
The first thing you need to know about rare earth elements is that they are incredibly common.
There are hundreds of new REE mines planned, from Colorado to Queensland to large parts of Africa. There is no way that Afghanistan, with no roads, no reliable electricity, no port, and no educated workforce is going to be economic. It'd cost 5x the price to mine in rural Afghanistan and get it to Shenzen than to mine in Queensland and chuck it on a ship.
Yet stories persist in the business media about such moves.
I’ll see how it plays out and leave you to your needlessly aggressive tone. I only mentioned it.
I apologize if I am aggressive, but the point I'm making is that it is hardly unusual for places to have massive mineral deposits. It's true of Canada, the US, Australia, Russia, Mongolia, China and most of Africa.
What is expensive is not finding deposits, it's getting them out the ground (building a mine), and then getting them to market. And Afghanistan is going to be extremely expensive on both those fronts.
That is true but China doesn’t play on the short or even medium term vision of the West, it plays long-term. Having what will probably be a reliable supplier (because the Taliban are not going to mess with China, and neither will Pakistan if China tells it to stop supporting the Taliban) is not a bad covering strategy.
We'll see. Maybe the Chinese will invest in mines in Afghanistan for geopolitical reasons. But it's hard to see what the Chinese would get out of it. After all, they can buy up Africa for much lower prices.
Right now, China can basically do what it likes. It is so ascendant. It has that ‘superbitas’. It has the real signs of imperial swagger. Britain in the early 19th century
It is all about self confidence. Theoretically China is still the economic and military inferior of America, but it does not feel that way, not any more. Soon it won’t even be theoretically disputable. China will rule
FFS they just leaked an engineered coronavirus from a lab onto the world which has killed 10 million and decimated the global economy and they’ve persuaded half of us this didn’t happen, it was actually a mad pangolin in a cyberzoo, and those of us that know it happened wearily accept that China is so powerful there will be no payback
Any research that doesn't agree with @Leon's preconceptions is to be discarded.
The reality is that we don't know, and we may never know. We can only attribute probabilities at this stage.
Do some research on the backstory of Angie Rasmussen. Then reconsider your silly remark
(1) You claim to think in probabilities, but you speak in certainties. (2) You only ever post stories which back up your existing point of view.
Now, I have said that I think that the lab leak hypothesis is the most likely one, but it is not the only one. It took a long time to find the animal hosts for SARS and MERS, and we've never found them for HIV or Ebola. It may be that a year from now a colony of bats is discovered with exactly the same virus. (Although, of course, this does not mean it definitely didn't escape from the lab.)
I disagree strongly on the engineered bioweapon story, for the various reasons I've described before (infectiousness to animals, weakness of Chinese vaccines, etc.), and there are also very good reasons to doubt the gain of function hypothesis (notably the fact that the virus in its initial form was less infectious than the Yuhan strain).
You’re a misinformed fool on this story. It doesn’t mean you’re entirely wrong (I agree it is extremely unlikely China deliberately leaked a GOF’d bioweapon, it makes no sense). But you simply don’t know what you’re talking about on the lab leak theories. Quoting Rasmussen. Jeez
I wonder how much hard currency the Taliban need to settle debts they've incurred to get to their current position. Maybe rather a large amount.
They can sell all the mineral assets to the Chinese who have the need and the cash.
The world is awash with mineral deposits, and it's a hell of a lot easier to get them out of Mongolia, Africa, etc. Places with - you know - physical infrastructure, ports, roads, etc. (Not to mention a lack of fanatics and an ongoing civil war.)
The idea that people will be lining up to pay for licenses in Afghanistan is farcical. They weren't lining up when the Taliban were last in power. And they weren't lining up when the Americans were in control. Why would they line up now?
The first thing you need to know about rare earth elements is that they are incredibly common.
There are hundreds of new REE mines planned, from Colorado to Queensland to large parts of Africa. There is no way that Afghanistan, with no roads, no reliable electricity, no port, and no educated workforce is going to be economic. It'd cost 5x the price to mine in rural Afghanistan and get it to Shenzen than to mine in Queensland and chuck it on a ship.
Yet stories persist in the business media about such moves.
I’ll see how it plays out and leave you to your needlessly aggressive tone. I only mentioned it.
I apologize if I am aggressive, but the point I'm making is that it is hardly unusual for places to have massive mineral deposits. It's true of Canada, the US, Australia, Russia, Mongolia, China and most of Africa.
What is expensive is not finding deposits, it's getting them out the ground (building a mine), and then getting them to market. And Afghanistan is going to be extremely expensive on both those fronts.
That is true but China doesn’t play on the short or even medium term vision of the West, it plays long-term. Having what will probably be a reliable supplier (because the Taliban are not going to mess with China, and neither will Pakistan if China tells it to stop supporting the Taliban) is not a bad covering strategy.
We'll see. Maybe the Chinese will invest in mines in Afghanistan for geopolitical reasons. But it's hard to see what the Chinese would get out of it. After all, they can buy up Africa for much lower prices.
Right now, China can basically do what it likes. It is so ascendant. It has that ‘superbitas’. It has the real signs of imperial swagger. Britain in the early 19th century
It is all about self confidence. Theoretically China is still the economic and military inferior of America, but it does not feel that way, not any more. Soon it won’t even be theoretically disputable. China will rule
FFS they just leaked an engineered coronavirus from a lab onto the world which has killed 10 million and decimated the global economy and they’ve persuaded half of us this didn’t happen, it was actually a mad pangolin in a cyberzoo, and those of us that know it happened wearily accept that China is so powerful there will be no payback
Any research that doesn't agree with @Leon's preconceptions is to be discarded.
The reality is that we don't know, and we may never know. We can only attribute probabilities at this stage.
Do some research on the backstory of Angie Rasmussen. Then reconsider your silly remark
(1) You claim to think in probabilities, but you speak in certainties. (2) You only ever post stories which back up your existing point of view.
Now, I have said that I think that the lab leak hypothesis is the most likely one, but it is not the only one. It took a long time to find the animal hosts for SARS and MERS, and we've never found them for HIV or Ebola. It may be that a year from now a colony of bats is discovered with exactly the same virus. (Although, of course, this does not mean it definitely didn't escape from the lab.)
I disagree strongly on the engineered bioweapon story, for the various reasons I've described before (infectiousness to animals, weakness of Chinese vaccines, etc.), and there are also very good reasons to doubt the gain of function hypothesis (notably the fact that the virus in its initial form was less infectious than the Yuhan strain).
You’re a misinformed fool on this story. It doesn’t mean you’re entirely wrong (I agree it is extremely unlikely China deliberately leaked a GOF’d bioweapon, it makes no sense). But you simply don’t know what you’re talking about on the lab leak theories. Quoting Rasmussen. Jeez
Most now seem to be in the 46%/47% approval rating though rather than the over 50% it was before
There has been a very wide range for Biden’s ratings with Rasmussen and YouGov at the lower end and Morning Consult and Politico at the higher end.
Probably what is better to look at is the trend line within each pollster. That is clearly declining.
46/47% of course is danger territory for Biden/Harris.
47% is closer to the 48% Kerry, Gore and Clinton got and well below the 51% Biden got in 2020 when he beat Trump or the over 50% Obama got in 2008 and 2012
Personally, I think Biden is toast. I know many on here will say “you would say that” but I don’t know how he recovers from this, particularly the images, the ABC interview (how can you say one of Biden’s key strengths is compassion after that?) and the poor performance of his Sec of Defence.
I think Harris knows that as well, plus a fair few other Democrat leaders. To many, particularly on the left, Biden has served his purpose and a President Harris would better suit their purposes when there is still time to push through an agenda. If you want a curveball, don’t be too surprised if you start to hear murmurings that the 25th should be invoked for Biden.
Except Harris polls no better than Biden or generally worse.
If Biden wants a replacement candidate for the top job in 2024 he would be better replacing Harris with someone like Buttigieg and making the latter Secretary of State for instance to be a serious contender for Harris.
Buttigieg could then be Macron to his Hollande as they try to stop the return of Trump/Sarkozy
I don’t think it will be Biden’s to choose. He was always a vehicle for those who wanted to get rid of Trump. He never had a strong base of his own. If he starts to push back now, they will just say he is getting senile.
He is a Puppet President.
Doesn't say a lot for Trump that he can be beaten by a Puppet without a strong base of his own.
Well, if you have a media that backs up and the biggest Tech companies that will block damaging stories of your son and what he has been up to, it is remarkable what you can do.
Yep, just like in 2016 when the media and the tech companies all backed Clinton over Trump and gave Clinton an easy ride, yet Trump still won?
You seem to be perilously close to creeping towards QAnon-type conspiracy theories.
Ah here we go. If you say the Media was immensely pro-Biden, that makes you close to QAnon. Another way to shut down discussion.
How about this. You seem like someone who is always happy to stand close to Corbyn and support him. Should I assume you are an anti-Semite?
Sorry, you've got the wrong person. I've never had any time for Corbyn. Mind you, given a forced choice between Trump and Corbyn.............
Well, you’ve sounded dangerously close to backing his views so I can only assume you are…
I don't really want to get embroiled, but you'd struggle to find any evidence that I back Corbyn, on here or elsewhere. Whereas you do provide some evidence that you think there are conspiracies against Trump/Republicans, and you think, apparently, that Democrats may try to rig elections or ignore the results.
“The mothers were desperate, they were getting beaten by the Taliban. They shouted, ‘save my baby’ and threw the babies at us, some of the babies fell on the barbed wire. It was awful what happened. By the end of the night there wasn’t one man among us who was not crying,” said the Parachute Regiment officer quietly.
That's the shot, here's the chaser
Biden’s Long Trail of Betrayals Why is the president so consistently wrong on major foreign-policy matters?
Which is why he was still the right choice. Despite being doddery and shite.
At what point, do you weigh up the facts and actions, against the perceptions? As someone said in the US “great, we’ve swapped bad tweets for bad policies”
When Biden becomes a threat to democracy. That's a fact and action that Trump has done - and the disgraceful voter suppression in Texas etc that has followed too is a real threat to democracy.
I wonder how much hard currency the Taliban need to settle debts they've incurred to get to their current position. Maybe rather a large amount.
They can sell all the mineral assets to the Chinese who have the need and the cash.
The world is awash with mineral deposits, and it's a hell of a lot easier to get them out of Mongolia, Africa, etc. Places with - you know - physical infrastructure, ports, roads, etc. (Not to mention a lack of fanatics and an ongoing civil war.)
The idea that people will be lining up to pay for licenses in Afghanistan is farcical. They weren't lining up when the Taliban were last in power. And they weren't lining up when the Americans were in control. Why would they line up now?
The first thing you need to know about rare earth elements is that they are incredibly common.
There are hundreds of new REE mines planned, from Colorado to Queensland to large parts of Africa. There is no way that Afghanistan, with no roads, no reliable electricity, no port, and no educated workforce is going to be economic. It'd cost 5x the price to mine in rural Afghanistan and get it to Shenzen than to mine in Queensland and chuck it on a ship.
Yet stories persist in the business media about such moves.
I’ll see how it plays out and leave you to your needlessly aggressive tone. I only mentioned it.
I apologize if I am aggressive, but the point I'm making is that it is hardly unusual for places to have massive mineral deposits. It's true of Canada, the US, Australia, Russia, Mongolia, China and most of Africa.
What is expensive is not finding deposits, it's getting them out the ground (building a mine), and then getting them to market. And Afghanistan is going to be extremely expensive on both those fronts.
That is true but China doesn’t play on the short or even medium term vision of the West, it plays long-term. Having what will probably be a reliable supplier (because the Taliban are not going to mess with China, and neither will Pakistan if China tells it to stop supporting the Taliban) is not a bad covering strategy.
We'll see. Maybe the Chinese will invest in mines in Afghanistan for geopolitical reasons. But it's hard to see what the Chinese would get out of it. After all, they can buy up Africa for much lower prices.
Right now, China can basically do what it likes. It is so ascendant. It has that ‘superbitas’. It has the real signs of imperial swagger. Britain in the early 19th century
It is all about self confidence. Theoretically China is still the economic and military inferior of America, but it does not feel that way, not any more. Soon it won’t even be theoretically disputable. China will rule
FFS they just leaked an engineered coronavirus from a lab onto the world which has killed 10 million and decimated the global economy and they’ve persuaded half of us this didn’t happen, it was actually a mad pangolin in a cyberzoo, and those of us that know it happened wearily accept that China is so powerful there will be no payback
Any research that doesn't agree with @Leon's preconceptions is to be discarded.
The reality is that we don't know, and we may never know. We can only attribute probabilities at this stage.
Do some research on the backstory of Angie Rasmussen. Then reconsider your silly remark
(1) You claim to think in probabilities, but you speak in certainties. (2) You only ever post stories which back up your existing point of view.
Now, I have said that I think that the lab leak hypothesis is the most likely one, but it is not the only one. It took a long time to find the animal hosts for SARS and MERS, and we've never found them for HIV or Ebola. It may be that a year from now a colony of bats is discovered with exactly the same virus. (Although, of course, this does not mean it definitely didn't escape from the lab.)
I disagree strongly on the engineered bioweapon story, for the various reasons I've described before (infectiousness to animals, weakness of Chinese vaccines, etc.), and there are also very good reasons to doubt the gain of function hypothesis (notably the fact that the virus in its initial form was less infectious than the Yuhan strain).
You’re a misinformed fool on this story. It doesn’t mean you’re entirely wrong (I agree it is extremely unlikely China deliberately leaked a GOF’d bioweapon, it makes no sense). But you simply don’t know what you’re talking about on the lab leak theories. Quoting Rasmussen. Jeez
Do more reading
I didn't quote Rasmussen.
Hmm. I humiliated you on the BSL2 lab by the wet market. I’ll let this one go, because it’s 1.30am in Athens and tomorrow I have to eat MY LAST LUNCH AT THE ACROPOLIS RESTAURANT
SOB
You’re much more sensible on American politics. And I’m intrigued by Monero. Peace, and goodnight PB
“The mothers were desperate, they were getting beaten by the Taliban. They shouted, ‘save my baby’ and threw the babies at us, some of the babies fell on the barbed wire. It was awful what happened. By the end of the night there wasn’t one man among us who was not crying,” said the Parachute Regiment officer quietly.
That's the shot, here's the chaser
Biden’s Long Trail of Betrayals Why is the president so consistently wrong on major foreign-policy matters?
Which is why he was still the right choice. Despite being doddery and shite.
At what point, do you weigh up the facts and actions, against the perceptions? As someone said in the US “great, we’ve swapped bad tweets for bad policies”
For the reasons I elucidated earlier.
Trump - as he proved after his defeat - is a danger to democracy. And that is 100x more important than his specific policies.
He’s an idiot. He should have accepted he lost. As I said at the time, his attempts to persuade legislatures to nullify results was wrong. That made his actions and words irresponsible, dangerous and out of order.
But.
If Trump really wanted to reverse democracy and impose a dictatorship, there were far more effective actions he could have taken.
And it also misses a rather big elephant in the room when it comes to undermining democracy, namely the two years (actually four) that one of the two main political parties in the US actively pushed an agenda that the elected US President was invalid because Trump - in their eyes - had been elevated to the Presidency through Russian disinformation and underhand tricks. A view that Hillary Clinton has continued to back.
I think it remarkable that those who get so heated about Trump do not recognise just how dangerous and anti-democratic the Democrats actions were in the years following his election.
He hasn't tried to over throw a democratic election.
Big point in his favour.
The Democrats are somehow the saviours of Democracy? What a joke. Have you read HR1? What about the blatant attempts to intimidate the Supreme Court by launching a panel to see whether it needs to be expanded just so the Democrats have a permanent majority? Or strong arming independent Congressional staff to justify Reconciliation for Biden’s spending plans?
Hey, but that’s all ok because “it’s not Trump”
No one is saying the Democrats are the saviour of democracy.
But they aren't Trump.
Obama, Bush and every other President in recent times handed over power peacefully.
I have no doubt that if (or perhaps more like when...) Harris loses, then she will hand over peacefully.
Respecting democracy when you lose is the single most important thing for any political system.
I'd rather have a government that banned alcohol and made insurance companies illegal and taxed me at 99% but which could be evicted by voters, than one that taxed me ay 10%, but which refused to depart if the voters said "be gone".
Your last paragraph sounds like an endorsement of Jeremy Corbyn. Particularly the 99% tax rate
The Government is falling apart, this is what happens when we put Jeremy Corbyn up for PM, let this be a lesson for us all!
Evidence of a government falling apart?
So you haven't caught up with Raab's refusal to make a phonecall whilst on his holibobs then?
How is that the government falling apart?
As far as I understand that phone call happened with someone else making it.
What a non story. 😴
It is not a non story because it gives the impression that Raab is either too important to curtail his holiday to make the call, or he just can't be arsed.
Tomorrow's Daily Mail front page claims that Raab delegated the call to a junior minister but then for some reason the call was never made at all, for the record.
That could be a dismissable, or certainly a final warning disciplinary offence in my organisation. Should it be the superior or the subordinate that carries the can?
Hard to form a government on those figures. Not quite enough for an SPD/Green/Left alliance. nor for another grand CDU/SPD coalition. Nowhere near enough for a CDU/FDP alliance. Nobody wants to touch the AfD, who are anyway on the slide.
SPD/Green/FDP works, but the pro-business FDP are possibly the most anti-Green party - still, that may be the only viable option. I wouldn't rule out a CDU recovery, though - they are pretty resilient.
He hasn't tried to over throw a democratic election.
Big point in his favour.
The Democrats are somehow the saviours of Democracy? What a joke. Have you read HR1? What about the blatant attempts to intimidate the Supreme Court by launching a panel to see whether it needs to be expanded just so the Democrats have a permanent majority? Or strong arming independent Congressional staff to justify Reconciliation for Biden’s spending plans?
Hey, but that’s all ok because “it’s not Trump”
No one is saying the Democrats are the saviour of democracy.
But they aren't Trump.
Obama, Bush and every other President in recent times handed over power peacefully.
I have no doubt that if (or perhaps more like when...) Harris loses, then she will hand over peacefully.
Respecting democracy when you lose is the single most important thing for any political system.
I'd rather have a government that banned alcohol and made insurance companies illegal and taxed me at 99% but which could be evicted by voters, than one that taxed me ay 10%, but which refused to depart if the voters said "be gone".
Your last paragraph sounds like an endorsement of Jeremy Corbyn. Particularly the 99% tax rate
The Government is falling apart, this is what happens when we put Jeremy Corbyn up for PM, let this be a lesson for us all!
Evidence of a government falling apart?
So you haven't caught up with Raab's refusal to make a phonecall whilst on his holibobs then?
How is that the government falling apart?
As far as I understand that phone call happened with someone else making it.
What a non story. 😴
It is not a non story because it gives the impression that Raab is either too important to curtail his holiday to make the call, or he just can't be arsed.
Tomorrow's Daily Mail front page claims that Raab delegated the call to a junior minister but then for some reason the call was never made at all, for the record.
That could be a dismissable, or certainly a final warning disciplinary offence in my organisation. Should it be the superior or the subordinate that carries the can?
If in a normal office environment, I'd say both should be disciplined. The junior for not doing what he was instructed to do. The superior for not ensuring that his instructions were followed.
I wonder how much hard currency the Taliban need to settle debts they've incurred to get to their current position. Maybe rather a large amount.
They can sell all the mineral assets to the Chinese who have the need and the cash.
The world is awash with mineral deposits, and it's a hell of a lot easier to get them out of Mongolia, Africa, etc. Places with - you know - physical infrastructure, ports, roads, etc. (Not to mention a lack of fanatics and an ongoing civil war.)
The idea that people will be lining up to pay for licenses in Afghanistan is farcical. They weren't lining up when the Taliban were last in power. And they weren't lining up when the Americans were in control. Why would they line up now?
The first thing you need to know about rare earth elements is that they are incredibly common.
There are hundreds of new REE mines planned, from Colorado to Queensland to large parts of Africa. There is no way that Afghanistan, with no roads, no reliable electricity, no port, and no educated workforce is going to be economic. It'd cost 5x the price to mine in rural Afghanistan and get it to Shenzen than to mine in Queensland and chuck it on a ship.
Yet stories persist in the business media about such moves.
I’ll see how it plays out and leave you to your needlessly aggressive tone. I only mentioned it.
I apologize if I am aggressive, but the point I'm making is that it is hardly unusual for places to have massive mineral deposits. It's true of Canada, the US, Australia, Russia, Mongolia, China and most of Africa.
What is expensive is not finding deposits, it's getting them out the ground (building a mine), and then getting them to market. And Afghanistan is going to be extremely expensive on both those fronts.
That is true but China doesn’t play on the short or even medium term vision of the West, it plays long-term. Having what will probably be a reliable supplier (because the Taliban are not going to mess with China, and neither will Pakistan if China tells it to stop supporting the Taliban) is not a bad covering strategy.
We'll see. Maybe the Chinese will invest in mines in Afghanistan for geopolitical reasons. But it's hard to see what the Chinese would get out of it. After all, they can buy up Africa for much lower prices.
Chinese companies mine in Afghanistan already
But the mining sector is tiny - there's some copper, a little gold and a lot of undeveloped resources.
Maybe so but they been there quite a while now including in areas where the Taliban had a strong measure of influence or control. Bit of an earner for the Taliban in the past a bit like what we had (and sometimes still have) in building sites in Belfast: 'providing security'.
Sorry did Phil just say Gordon Brown caused the Global Financial Crisis, on the sauce early again were we
He caused the crisis in the UK, at least. The regulatory system was set up by Brown and it allowed banks to operate at 50-100x leverage with the likes of Northern Rock actually well above that.
Precisely.
London specifically and the UK in general is a Financial world power and the Chancellor of the Exchequer is responsible for regulating that.
There wasn't (to my knowledge) a single British bank run in the entire 20th century. The regulations with the Bank of England that we had worked. Then in came Gordon Brown who was warned not to remove BoE oversight, did so, then we had not one but two bank failures within a decade of the changes happening.
The idea you can dismiss the financial crisis because it was "global" might work for many nations, it doesn't work for the UK. The UK is a leading power that literally helps write the global financial rules. Brown changed the rules, his changes led to the crisis.
If your primary industry that you're a world leader in fails, within a few years of rewriting the rules for that industry, then don't cry that it is "global" afterwards.
Unmitigated bollocks. What is the charge? Are you saying Gordon Brown was such a brilliant Chancellor he steered Britain unscathed through the global financial crisis but unfortunately fell into a quite different UK-only financial crisis at exactly the same time?
There was the fringe banking crisis in the early 1970s but that was successfully dealt with by the Bank of England (and about £100 million which was a lot of money in those days) but in those days the sterling market was entirely in domestic hands because of exchange controls. To pretend there were no problems even then, or that there is any sensible comparison with today is at best naive. Or do you want to go back to shutting out foreign banks and letting the BoE run things by telling Lloyds, NatWest, the Midland and Barclays what to do? Oh, and it was the depositors of the fringe banks that were rescued not the institutions themselves, so not too dissimilar from the Northern Rock outcome under the hated Gordon Brown.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown even if he did personally order bat soup in the Cafe de Wuhan.
I haven't read the comments below the line yet so may just be repeating what others have said. If so, my apologies.
But I think there has been a fair bit of misdirection by those Biden supporters and apologists who make something of the fact it was Trump who agreed the withdrawal terms. It is not the withdrawal or the terms of the agreement with the Taliban that are the source of the immediate outrage (even if it was a pretty rubbish deal), it is the way that the withdrawal has been so badly mishandled by both Biden and Johnson.
They have known for more than a year that this was coming. They have had time to plan for it and do some really basic things like identifying and evacuating all those who would be in immediate danger because of their work for the Western allies. They could have offered asylum to those women who they had persuaded to join the Afghan police and military. They certainly could have made sure that all those who worked directly with the western forces had the opportunity to leave the country and seek sanctuary in the West if they wanted to. They have done none of this. They have waited until the last minute and then panicked and there are tens of thousand of people who trusted the West and who worked with us to make our job easier and to make their country a better place to live who we have just thrown to the wolves.
If you want an idea of the scale of just how badly Biden has fucked this up, just consider the Wall Street Journal yesterday said there are some 15,000 US citizens now trapped in Afghanistan with no means of escape. That is before you even start to consider the thousands of Afghans who we should be looking to get out to safety.
The leadership of both the UK and the US have been criminally negligent over this.
I understand where you are coming from
What I struggle with is believing the administrations (not the politicians) are really that incompetent. Shouldn’t the MoD have had an evacuation plan in place in advance? Shouldn’t they have been winding down efforts already? That should be regardless of political leadership
But so much of the issue involves people who were not working for the MoD. Contractors working for other Government agencies, charity workers and those working for private companies. It is unreasonable to expect the MoD to have a plan in place to evacuate tens of thousand of people when they have been given no guidance on who they should or should not evacuate. I have friends working inside the military right now as well as some who recently left and they tell me that, as far as the British were concerned, there was almost complete silence from any governmental body or politician about evacuating anyone. It has been a complete and utter failure of leadership from start to finish. All the more so with the US.
I wonder how much hard currency the Taliban need to settle debts they've incurred to get to their current position. Maybe rather a large amount.
They can sell all the mineral assets to the Chinese who have the need and the cash.
The world is awash with mineral deposits, and it's a hell of a lot easier to get them out of Mongolia, Africa, etc. Places with - you know - physical infrastructure, ports, roads, etc. (Not to mention a lack of fanatics and an ongoing civil war.)
The idea that people will be lining up to pay for licenses in Afghanistan is farcical. They weren't lining up when the Taliban were last in power. And they weren't lining up when the Americans were in control. Why would they line up now?
The first thing you need to know about rare earth elements is that they are incredibly common.
There are hundreds of new REE mines planned, from Colorado to Queensland to large parts of Africa. There is no way that Afghanistan, with no roads, no reliable electricity, no port, and no educated workforce is going to be economic. It'd cost 5x the price to mine in rural Afghanistan and get it to Shenzen than to mine in Queensland and chuck it on a ship.
Yet stories persist in the business media about such moves.
I’ll see how it plays out and leave you to your needlessly aggressive tone. I only mentioned it.
I apologize if I am aggressive, but the point I'm making is that it is hardly unusual for places to have massive mineral deposits. It's true of Canada, the US, Australia, Russia, Mongolia, China and most of Africa.
What is expensive is not finding deposits, it's getting them out the ground (building a mine), and then getting them to market. And Afghanistan is going to be extremely expensive on both those fronts.
That is true but China doesn’t play on the short or even medium term vision of the West, it plays long-term. Having what will probably be a reliable supplier (because the Taliban are not going to mess with China, and neither will Pakistan if China tells it to stop supporting the Taliban) is not a bad covering strategy.
We'll see. Maybe the Chinese will invest in mines in Afghanistan for geopolitical reasons. But it's hard to see what the Chinese would get out of it. After all, they can buy up Africa for much lower prices.
Right now, China can basically do what it likes. It is so ascendant. It has that ‘superbitas’. It has the real signs of imperial swagger. Britain in the early 19th century
It is all about self confidence. Theoretically China is still the economic and military inferior of America, but it does not feel that way, not any more. Soon it won’t even be theoretically disputable. China will rule
FFS they just leaked an engineered coronavirus from a lab onto the world which has killed 10 million and decimated the global economy and they’ve persuaded half of us this didn’t happen, it was actually a mad pangolin in a cyberzoo, and those of us that know it happened wearily accept that China is so powerful there will be no payback
Any research that doesn't agree with @Leon's preconceptions is to be discarded.
The reality is that we don't know, and we may never know. We can only attribute probabilities at this stage.
It's incorrect out of the gate to some degree. The lab was definitely working on bat coronaviruses at some point. That's indisputable and backed by archived papers from their scientists. It's highly likely that it's an unintentional lab leak with one or more of the scientists being infected by a lab animal and the unknowingly spreading it to the wider community either via another animal or to another person. The WIV is absolutely involved in this somewhere along the line. To deny that just seems obtuse at this point in time.
Keep an eye for a possible victory visit to Kabul shortly of one Mullah Baradar and his associates. More Taliban are coming into the city.
Despite the fact there is now a high level of air traffic by the US in and out of Kabul (the RAF has been shuttling on a very regular cycle for days), stories persist that the planes are not going out with anywhere near capacity onboard.
Sorry did Phil just say Gordon Brown caused the Global Financial Crisis, on the sauce early again were we
He caused the crisis in the UK, at least. The regulatory system was set up by Brown and it allowed banks to operate at 50-100x leverage with the likes of Northern Rock actually well above that.
Precisely.
London specifically and the UK in general is a Financial world power and the Chancellor of the Exchequer is responsible for regulating that.
There wasn't (to my knowledge) a single British bank run in the entire 20th century. The regulations with the Bank of England that we had worked. Then in came Gordon Brown who was warned not to remove BoE oversight, did so, then we had not one but two bank failures within a decade of the changes happening.
The idea you can dismiss the financial crisis because it was "global" might work for many nations, it doesn't work for the UK. The UK is a leading power that literally helps write the global financial rules. Brown changed the rules, his changes led to the crisis.
If your primary industry that you're a world leader in fails, within a few years of rewriting the rules for that industry, then don't cry that it is "global" afterwards.
Unmitigated bollocks. What is the charge? Are you saying Gordon Brown was such a brilliant Chancellor he steered Britain unscathed through the global financial crisis but unfortunately fell into a quite different UK-only financial crisis at exactly the same time?
There was the fringe banking crisis in the early 1970s but that was successfully dealt with by the Bank of England (and about £100 million which was a lot of money in those days) but in those days the sterling market was entirely in domestic hands because of exchange controls. To pretend there were no problems even then, or that there is any sensible comparison with today is at best naive. Or do you want to go back to shutting out foreign banks and letting the BoE run things by telling Lloyds, NatWest, the Midland and Barclays what to do? Oh, and it was the depositors of the fringe banks that were rescued not the institutions themselves, so not too dissimilar from the Northern Rock outcome under the hated Gordon Brown.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown even if he did personally order bat soup in the Cafe de Wuhan.
Unscathed? No that would be unmitigated bollocks.
What I'm saying is that Gordon Brown was such an abjectly catastrophic Chancellor that he overborrowed in boom times, removed Bank of England supervision from the Banks, had the first British Bank Run in over a century and saw two bank failures and ended up leaving a toxic legacy of a ruinous catastrophic amount of structural deficit for us to recover from.
I wonder how much hard currency the Taliban need to settle debts they've incurred to get to their current position. Maybe rather a large amount.
They can sell all the mineral assets to the Chinese who have the need and the cash.
The world is awash with mineral deposits, and it's a hell of a lot easier to get them out of Mongolia, Africa, etc. Places with - you know - physical infrastructure, ports, roads, etc. (Not to mention a lack of fanatics and an ongoing civil war.)
The idea that people will be lining up to pay for licenses in Afghanistan is farcical. They weren't lining up when the Taliban were last in power. And they weren't lining up when the Americans were in control. Why would they line up now?
The first thing you need to know about rare earth elements is that they are incredibly common.
There are hundreds of new REE mines planned, from Colorado to Queensland to large parts of Africa. There is no way that Afghanistan, with no roads, no reliable electricity, no port, and no educated workforce is going to be economic. It'd cost 5x the price to mine in rural Afghanistan and get it to Shenzen than to mine in Queensland and chuck it on a ship.
Yet stories persist in the business media about such moves.
I’ll see how it plays out and leave you to your needlessly aggressive tone. I only mentioned it.
I apologize if I am aggressive, but the point I'm making is that it is hardly unusual for places to have massive mineral deposits. It's true of Canada, the US, Australia, Russia, Mongolia, China and most of Africa.
What is expensive is not finding deposits, it's getting them out the ground (building a mine), and then getting them to market. And Afghanistan is going to be extremely expensive on both those fronts.
That is true but China doesn’t play on the short or even medium term vision of the West, it plays long-term. Having what will probably be a reliable supplier (because the Taliban are not going to mess with China, and neither will Pakistan if China tells it to stop supporting the Taliban) is not a bad covering strategy.
We'll see. Maybe the Chinese will invest in mines in Afghanistan for geopolitical reasons. But it's hard to see what the Chinese would get out of it. After all, they can buy up Africa for much lower prices.
Chinese companies mine in Afghanistan already
But the mining sector is tiny - there's some copper, a little gold and a lot of undeveloped resources.
The Taliban were mining all manner of precious metals and other minerals in the areas they controlled throughout the early 2000s and doing very well out of it. A geologist friend of mine was seconded to the Norwegian military after completing his national service to do geochemical analysis and surveying of Afghan rivers to trace where precious metals and some gems seized by the Coalition forces were coming from.
I haven't read the comments below the line yet so may just be repeating what others have said. If so, my apologies.
But I think there has been a fair bit of misdirection by those Biden supporters and apologists who make something of the fact it was Trump who agreed the withdrawal terms. It is not the withdrawal or the terms of the agreement with the Taliban that are the source of the immediate outrage (even if it was a pretty rubbish deal), it is the way that the withdrawal has been so badly mishandled by both Biden and Johnson.
They have known for more than a year that this was coming. They have had time to plan for it and do some really basic things like identifying and evacuating all those who would be in immediate danger because of their work for the Western allies. They could have offered asylum to those women who they had persuaded to join the Afghan police and military. They certainly could have made sure that all those who worked directly with the western forces had the opportunity to leave the country and seek sanctuary in the West if they wanted to. They have done none of this. They have waited until the last minute and then panicked and there are tens of thousand of people who trusted the West and who worked with us to make our job easier and to make their country a better place to live who we have just thrown to the wolves.
If you want an idea of the scale of just how badly Biden has fucked this up, just consider the Wall Street Journal yesterday said there are some 15,000 US citizens now trapped in Afghanistan with no means of escape. That is before you even start to consider the thousands of Afghans who we should be looking to get out to safety.
The leadership of both the UK and the US have been criminally negligent over this.
The planning, such as it was, assumed that there’d be the civil war we had scripted for them, with the Afghan security forces able to keep the Taliban out, at least for a year or so. The intelligence, or judgement, failure was in not evaluating the situation objectively and not preparing for other eventualities.
And yet the fact that Western Governments were negotiating with the Taliban to secure them loans and cutting the Afghan Government out of the deals surely shows we already knew what the outcome was going to be - and very rapidly as well.
Sorry did Phil just say Gordon Brown caused the Global Financial Crisis, on the sauce early again were we
He caused the crisis in the UK, at least. The regulatory system was set up by Brown and it allowed banks to operate at 50-100x leverage with the likes of Northern Rock actually well above that.
Precisely.
London specifically and the UK in general is a Financial world power and the Chancellor of the Exchequer is responsible for regulating that.
There wasn't (to my knowledge) a single British bank run in the entire 20th century. The regulations with the Bank of England that we had worked. Then in came Gordon Brown who was warned not to remove BoE oversight, did so, then we had not one but two bank failures within a decade of the changes happening.
The idea you can dismiss the financial crisis because it was "global" might work for many nations, it doesn't work for the UK. The UK is a leading power that literally helps write the global financial rules. Brown changed the rules, his changes led to the crisis.
If your primary industry that you're a world leader in fails, within a few years of rewriting the rules for that industry, then don't cry that it is "global" afterwards.
Unmitigated bollocks. What is the charge? Are you saying Gordon Brown was such a brilliant Chancellor he steered Britain unscathed through the global financial crisis but unfortunately fell into a quite different UK-only financial crisis at exactly the same time?
There was the fringe banking crisis in the early 1970s but that was successfully dealt with by the Bank of England (and about £100 million which was a lot of money in those days) but in those days the sterling market was entirely in domestic hands because of exchange controls. To pretend there were no problems even then, or that there is any sensible comparison with today is at best naive. Or do you want to go back to shutting out foreign banks and letting the BoE run things by telling Lloyds, NatWest, the Midland and Barclays what to do? Oh, and it was the depositors of the fringe banks that were rescued not the institutions themselves, so not too dissimilar from the Northern Rock outcome under the hated Gordon Brown.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown even if he did personally order bat soup in the Cafe de Wuhan.
Unscathed? No that would be unmitigated bollocks.
What I'm saying is that Gordon Brown was such an abjectly catastrophic Chancellor that he overborrowed in boom times, removed Bank of England supervision from the Banks, had the first British Bank Run in over a century and saw two bank failures and ended up leaving a toxic legacy of a ruinous catastrophic amount of structural deficit for us to recover from.
Even if you are right that Brown "overborrowed in boom times", that is irrelevant to the GFC or our recovery from it. Likewise removing BoE banking supervision. Strange you do not want to blame Mrs Thatcher for Northern Rock but again that still did not cause the GFC. Nor did George Osborne cause such scandals as the UBS or London whale, even though they occurred under his new, improved banking regulations.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown.
I wonder how much hard currency the Taliban need to settle debts they've incurred to get to their current position. Maybe rather a large amount.
They can sell all the mineral assets to the Chinese who have the need and the cash.
The world is awash with mineral deposits, and it's a hell of a lot easier to get them out of Mongolia, Africa, etc. Places with - you know - physical infrastructure, ports, roads, etc. (Not to mention a lack of fanatics and an ongoing civil war.)
The idea that people will be lining up to pay for licenses in Afghanistan is farcical. They weren't lining up when the Taliban were last in power. And they weren't lining up when the Americans were in control. Why would they line up now?
The first thing you need to know about rare earth elements is that they are incredibly common.
There are hundreds of new REE mines planned, from Colorado to Queensland to large parts of Africa. There is no way that Afghanistan, with no roads, no reliable electricity, no port, and no educated workforce is going to be economic. It'd cost 5x the price to mine in rural Afghanistan and get it to Shenzen than to mine in Queensland and chuck it on a ship.
Yet stories persist in the business media about such moves.
I’ll see how it plays out and leave you to your needlessly aggressive tone. I only mentioned it.
I apologize if I am aggressive, but the point I'm making is that it is hardly unusual for places to have massive mineral deposits. It's true of Canada, the US, Australia, Russia, Mongolia, China and most of Africa.
What is expensive is not finding deposits, it's getting them out the ground (building a mine), and then getting them to market. And Afghanistan is going to be extremely expensive on both those fronts.
That is true but China doesn’t play on the short or even medium term vision of the West, it plays long-term. Having what will probably be a reliable supplier (because the Taliban are not going to mess with China, and neither will Pakistan if China tells it to stop supporting the Taliban) is not a bad covering strategy.
We'll see. Maybe the Chinese will invest in mines in Afghanistan for geopolitical reasons. But it's hard to see what the Chinese would get out of it. After all, they can buy up Africa for much lower prices.
Right now, China can basically do what it likes. It is so ascendant. It has that ‘superbitas’. It has the real signs of imperial swagger. Britain in the early 19th century
It is all about self confidence. Theoretically China is still the economic and military inferior of America, but it does not feel that way, not any more. Soon it won’t even be theoretically disputable. China will rule
FFS they just leaked an engineered coronavirus from a lab onto the world which has killed 10 million and decimated the global economy and they’ve persuaded half of us this didn’t happen, it was actually a mad pangolin in a cyberzoo, and those of us that know it happened wearily accept that China is so powerful there will be no payback
Any research that doesn't agree with @Leon's preconceptions is to be discarded.
The reality is that we don't know, and we may never know. We can only attribute probabilities at this stage.
It's incorrect out of the gate to some degree. The lab was definitely working on bat coronaviruses at some point. That's indisputable and backed by archived papers from their scientists. It's highly likely that it's an unintentional lab leak with one or more of the scientists being infected by a lab animal and the unknowingly spreading it to the wider community either via another animal or to another person. The WIV is absolutely involved in this somewhere along the line. To deny that just seems obtuse at this point in time.
That's my most likely scenario: I'd reckon probably a 70-75% chance. I'd say a purely zootic origin is less likely because of where the nexus of the infection was, so I'd reckon that's maybe a 10-15% chance.
Then there is the question of whether it is "gain of function" powered. On the one hand, the lab definitely engaged in gain of function research. On the other, it is hard to work out how a less virulent, less infectious disease than its closest relative (the Yunan mine bat disease) would have come out of gain of function. Still, they will have viruses that we don't know about, and which might have been way less virulent in their natural form, but which became more virulent through gain of function research. I'll put that at 10-15% as well.
Then there's genetically engineered bioweapon that escaped. I think this is close to zero because (a) infecting other mammals makes it a terrible weapon - you need specificity for any bioweapon; and (b) if the Chinese can't even develop a decent vaccine, that hardly suggests great experience in virology. I'd put that at less than 1%.
I still can't quite believe the head of the UK armed forces described the Taliban as "country boys" who live by a "code of honour", who want an "inclusive country".
But it's okay because Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has endorsed the comments, according to this article.
Hard to form a government on those figures. Not quite enough for an SPD/Green/Left alliance. nor for another grand CDU/SPD coalition. Nowhere near enough for a CDU/FDP alliance. Nobody wants to touch the AfD, who are anyway on the slide.
SPD/Green/FDP works, but the pro-business FDP are possibly the most anti-Green party - still, that may be the only viable option. I wouldn't rule out a CDU recovery, though - they are pretty resilient.
It looks like the Greens have blown their chances of 2nd or 1st place. They peaked a couple of months too early. Someone mentioned an alleged scandal involving one of their leaders IIRC.
Sorry did Phil just say Gordon Brown caused the Global Financial Crisis, on the sauce early again were we
He caused the crisis in the UK, at least. The regulatory system was set up by Brown and it allowed banks to operate at 50-100x leverage with the likes of Northern Rock actually well above that.
Precisely.
London specifically and the UK in general is a Financial world power and the Chancellor of the Exchequer is responsible for regulating that.
There wasn't (to my knowledge) a single British bank run in the entire 20th century. The regulations with the Bank of England that we had worked. Then in came Gordon Brown who was warned not to remove BoE oversight, did so, then we had not one but two bank failures within a decade of the changes happening.
The idea you can dismiss the financial crisis because it was "global" might work for many nations, it doesn't work for the UK. The UK is a leading power that literally helps write the global financial rules. Brown changed the rules, his changes led to the crisis.
If your primary industry that you're a world leader in fails, within a few years of rewriting the rules for that industry, then don't cry that it is "global" afterwards.
Unmitigated bollocks. What is the charge? Are you saying Gordon Brown was such a brilliant Chancellor he steered Britain unscathed through the global financial crisis but unfortunately fell into a quite different UK-only financial crisis at exactly the same time?
There was the fringe banking crisis in the early 1970s but that was successfully dealt with by the Bank of England (and about £100 million which was a lot of money in those days) but in those days the sterling market was entirely in domestic hands because of exchange controls. To pretend there were no problems even then, or that there is any sensible comparison with today is at best naive. Or do you want to go back to shutting out foreign banks and letting the BoE run things by telling Lloyds, NatWest, the Midland and Barclays what to do? Oh, and it was the depositors of the fringe banks that were rescued not the institutions themselves, so not too dissimilar from the Northern Rock outcome under the hated Gordon Brown.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown even if he did personally order bat soup in the Cafe de Wuhan.
Unscathed? No that would be unmitigated bollocks.
What I'm saying is that Gordon Brown was such an abjectly catastrophic Chancellor that he overborrowed in boom times, removed Bank of England supervision from the Banks, had the first British Bank Run in over a century and saw two bank failures and ended up leaving a toxic legacy of a ruinous catastrophic amount of structural deficit for us to recover from.
Even if you are right that Brown "overborrowed in boom times", that is irrelevant to the GFC or our recovery from it. Likewise removing BoE banking supervision. Strange you do not want to blame Mrs Thatcher for Northern Rock but again that still did not cause the GFC. Nor did George Osborne cause such scandals as the UBS or London whale, even though they occurred under his new, improved banking regulations.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown.
Why would I blame Thatcher for Northern Rock, when it was Brown that tore up the regulations and put in place a system that failed in the way he was warned it would fail, within a decade of him putting it into place?
That America had a financial crisis is not an excuse for the UK's own financial system failing. The UK is not a rule taker in Finance, its supposed to be something we do well and we set the rules on ourselves.
Especially when the failure of Northern Rock took place almost a year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers the whole "it started in America" excuse really wears thin.
I still can't quite believe the head of the UK armed forces described the Taliban as "country boys" who live by a "code of honour", who want an "inclusive country".
But it's okay because Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has endorsed the comments, according to this article.
Sorry did Phil just say Gordon Brown caused the Global Financial Crisis, on the sauce early again were we
He caused the crisis in the UK, at least. The regulatory system was set up by Brown and it allowed banks to operate at 50-100x leverage with the likes of Northern Rock actually well above that.
Precisely.
London specifically and the UK in general is a Financial world power and the Chancellor of the Exchequer is responsible for regulating that.
There wasn't (to my knowledge) a single British bank run in the entire 20th century. The regulations with the Bank of England that we had worked. Then in came Gordon Brown who was warned not to remove BoE oversight, did so, then we had not one but two bank failures within a decade of the changes happening.
The idea you can dismiss the financial crisis because it was "global" might work for many nations, it doesn't work for the UK. The UK is a leading power that literally helps write the global financial rules. Brown changed the rules, his changes led to the crisis.
If your primary industry that you're a world leader in fails, within a few years of rewriting the rules for that industry, then don't cry that it is "global" afterwards.
Unmitigated bollocks. What is the charge? Are you saying Gordon Brown was such a brilliant Chancellor he steered Britain unscathed through the global financial crisis but unfortunately fell into a quite different UK-only financial crisis at exactly the same time?
There was the fringe banking crisis in the early 1970s but that was successfully dealt with by the Bank of England (and about £100 million which was a lot of money in those days) but in those days the sterling market was entirely in domestic hands because of exchange controls. To pretend there were no problems even then, or that there is any sensible comparison with today is at best naive. Or do you want to go back to shutting out foreign banks and letting the BoE run things by telling Lloyds, NatWest, the Midland and Barclays what to do? Oh, and it was the depositors of the fringe banks that were rescued not the institutions themselves, so not too dissimilar from the Northern Rock outcome under the hated Gordon Brown.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown even if he did personally order bat soup in the Cafe de Wuhan.
Unscathed? No that would be unmitigated bollocks.
What I'm saying is that Gordon Brown was such an abjectly catastrophic Chancellor that he overborrowed in boom times, removed Bank of England supervision from the Banks, had the first British Bank Run in over a century and saw two bank failures and ended up leaving a toxic legacy of a ruinous catastrophic amount of structural deficit for us to recover from.
Even if you are right that Brown "overborrowed in boom times", that is irrelevant to the GFC or our recovery from it. Likewise removing BoE banking supervision. Strange you do not want to blame Mrs Thatcher for Northern Rock but again that still did not cause the GFC. Nor did George Osborne cause such scandals as the UBS or London whale, even though they occurred under his new, improved banking regulations.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown.
Why would I blame Thatcher for Northern Rock, when it was Brown that tore up the regulations and put in place a system that failed in the way he was warned it would fail, within a decade of him putting it into place?
That America had a financial crisis is not an excuse for the UK's own financial system failing. The UK is not a rule taker in Finance, its supposed to be something we do well and we set the rules on ourselves.
Especially when the failure of Northern Rock took place almost a year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers the whole "it started in America" excuse really wears thin.
A common 1980s criticism of the big bang was that encouraging building societies to leave their core expertise and play at banking was bound to end in tears.
Sorry did Phil just say Gordon Brown caused the Global Financial Crisis, on the sauce early again were we
He caused the crisis in the UK, at least. The regulatory system was set up by Brown and it allowed banks to operate at 50-100x leverage with the likes of Northern Rock actually well above that.
Precisely.
London specifically and the UK in general is a Financial world power and the Chancellor of the Exchequer is responsible for regulating that.
There wasn't (to my knowledge) a single British bank run in the entire 20th century. The regulations with the Bank of England that we had worked. Then in came Gordon Brown who was warned not to remove BoE oversight, did so, then we had not one but two bank failures within a decade of the changes happening.
The idea you can dismiss the financial crisis because it was "global" might work for many nations, it doesn't work for the UK. The UK is a leading power that literally helps write the global financial rules. Brown changed the rules, his changes led to the crisis.
If your primary industry that you're a world leader in fails, within a few years of rewriting the rules for that industry, then don't cry that it is "global" afterwards.
Unmitigated bollocks. What is the charge? Are you saying Gordon Brown was such a brilliant Chancellor he steered Britain unscathed through the global financial crisis but unfortunately fell into a quite different UK-only financial crisis at exactly the same time?
There was the fringe banking crisis in the early 1970s but that was successfully dealt with by the Bank of England (and about £100 million which was a lot of money in those days) but in those days the sterling market was entirely in domestic hands because of exchange controls. To pretend there were no problems even then, or that there is any sensible comparison with today is at best naive. Or do you want to go back to shutting out foreign banks and letting the BoE run things by telling Lloyds, NatWest, the Midland and Barclays what to do? Oh, and it was the depositors of the fringe banks that were rescued not the institutions themselves, so not too dissimilar from the Northern Rock outcome under the hated Gordon Brown.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown even if he did personally order bat soup in the Cafe de Wuhan.
Unscathed? No that would be unmitigated bollocks.
What I'm saying is that Gordon Brown was such an abjectly catastrophic Chancellor that he overborrowed in boom times, removed Bank of England supervision from the Banks, had the first British Bank Run in over a century and saw two bank failures and ended up leaving a toxic legacy of a ruinous catastrophic amount of structural deficit for us to recover from.
Even if you are right that Brown "overborrowed in boom times", that is irrelevant to the GFC or our recovery from it. Likewise removing BoE banking supervision. Strange you do not want to blame Mrs Thatcher for Northern Rock but again that still did not cause the GFC. Nor did George Osborne cause such scandals as the UBS or London whale, even though they occurred under his new, improved banking regulations.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown.
Why would I blame Thatcher for Northern Rock, when it was Brown that tore up the regulations and put in place a system that failed in the way he was warned it would fail, within a decade of him putting it into place?
That America had a financial crisis is not an excuse for the UK's own financial system failing. The UK is not a rule taker in Finance, its supposed to be something we do well and we set the rules on ourselves.
Especially when the failure of Northern Rock took place almost a year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers the whole "it started in America" excuse really wears thin.
A common 1980s criticism of the big bang was that encouraging building societies to leave their core expertise and play at banking was bound to end in tears.
And yet it didn't.
Having Gordon Brown screw up the regulations on the other hand did. And it led to a bank run here in the UK before it did in America that you pretend this started in.
Sorry did Phil just say Gordon Brown caused the Global Financial Crisis, on the sauce early again were we
He caused the crisis in the UK, at least. The regulatory system was set up by Brown and it allowed banks to operate at 50-100x leverage with the likes of Northern Rock actually well above that.
Precisely.
London specifically and the UK in general is a Financial world power and the Chancellor of the Exchequer is responsible for regulating that.
There wasn't (to my knowledge) a single British bank run in the entire 20th century. The regulations with the Bank of England that we had worked. Then in came Gordon Brown who was warned not to remove BoE oversight, did so, then we had not one but two bank failures within a decade of the changes happening.
The idea you can dismiss the financial crisis because it was "global" might work for many nations, it doesn't work for the UK. The UK is a leading power that literally helps write the global financial rules. Brown changed the rules, his changes led to the crisis.
If your primary industry that you're a world leader in fails, within a few years of rewriting the rules for that industry, then don't cry that it is "global" afterwards.
Unmitigated bollocks. What is the charge? Are you saying Gordon Brown was such a brilliant Chancellor he steered Britain unscathed through the global financial crisis but unfortunately fell into a quite different UK-only financial crisis at exactly the same time?
There was the fringe banking crisis in the early 1970s but that was successfully dealt with by the Bank of England (and about £100 million which was a lot of money in those days) but in those days the sterling market was entirely in domestic hands because of exchange controls. To pretend there were no problems even then, or that there is any sensible comparison with today is at best naive. Or do you want to go back to shutting out foreign banks and letting the BoE run things by telling Lloyds, NatWest, the Midland and Barclays what to do? Oh, and it was the depositors of the fringe banks that were rescued not the institutions themselves, so not too dissimilar from the Northern Rock outcome under the hated Gordon Brown.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown even if he did personally order bat soup in the Cafe de Wuhan.
Unscathed? No that would be unmitigated bollocks.
What I'm saying is that Gordon Brown was such an abjectly catastrophic Chancellor that he overborrowed in boom times, removed Bank of England supervision from the Banks, had the first British Bank Run in over a century and saw two bank failures and ended up leaving a toxic legacy of a ruinous catastrophic amount of structural deficit for us to recover from.
Even if you are right that Brown "overborrowed in boom times", that is irrelevant to the GFC or our recovery from it. Likewise removing BoE banking supervision. Strange you do not want to blame Mrs Thatcher for Northern Rock but again that still did not cause the GFC. Nor did George Osborne cause such scandals as the UBS or London whale, even though they occurred under his new, improved banking regulations.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown.
Why would I blame Thatcher for Northern Rock, when it was Brown that tore up the regulations and put in place a system that failed in the way he was warned it would fail, within a decade of him putting it into place?
That America had a financial crisis is not an excuse for the UK's own financial system failing. The UK is not a rule taker in Finance, its supposed to be something we do well and we set the rules on ourselves.
Especially when the failure of Northern Rock took place almost a year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers the whole "it started in America" excuse really wears thin.
A common 1980s criticism of the big bang was that encouraging building societies to leave their core expertise and play at banking was bound to end in tears.
And yet it didn't.
Having Gordon Brown screw up the regulations on the other hand did. And it led to a bank run here in the UK before it did in America that you pretend this started in.
You appear to have no idea what went on. Northern Rock was a former building society that became a bank. As a building society, it had taken deposits into savings accounts and lent them out as mortgages. As a bank, it borrowed on the international money markets (and lent as mortgages). Remember those 1980s doomster and gloomsters? When the sub-prime market in where was it? Somewhere abroad. Anyway, when the sub-prime market started to go tits-up in 2007, NR found it hard to borrow. The Bank of England stepped in and all was well. Just like in the good old days.
Until the BBC reported that NR had needed support. That is what caused the queues to withdraw. This was more like the toilet roll and pasta shortage at the beginning of the pandemic, caused by panic buying because people were afraid that (other) panic buyers would empty the shelves, and not by a supply shortage. Whatever happened to Robert Peston (for it was he!)? The next year, NR was nationalised.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown.
Sorry did Phil just say Gordon Brown caused the Global Financial Crisis, on the sauce early again were we
He caused the crisis in the UK, at least. The regulatory system was set up by Brown and it allowed banks to operate at 50-100x leverage with the likes of Northern Rock actually well above that.
Precisely.
London specifically and the UK in general is a Financial world power and the Chancellor of the Exchequer is responsible for regulating that.
There wasn't (to my knowledge) a single British bank run in the entire 20th century. The regulations with the Bank of England that we had worked. Then in came Gordon Brown who was warned not to remove BoE oversight, did so, then we had not one but two bank failures within a decade of the changes happening.
The idea you can dismiss the financial crisis because it was "global" might work for many nations, it doesn't work for the UK. The UK is a leading power that literally helps write the global financial rules. Brown changed the rules, his changes led to the crisis.
If your primary industry that you're a world leader in fails, within a few years of rewriting the rules for that industry, then don't cry that it is "global" afterwards.
Unmitigated bollocks. What is the charge? Are you saying Gordon Brown was such a brilliant Chancellor he steered Britain unscathed through the global financial crisis but unfortunately fell into a quite different UK-only financial crisis at exactly the same time?
There was the fringe banking crisis in the early 1970s but that was successfully dealt with by the Bank of England (and about £100 million which was a lot of money in those days) but in those days the sterling market was entirely in domestic hands because of exchange controls. To pretend there were no problems even then, or that there is any sensible comparison with today is at best naive. Or do you want to go back to shutting out foreign banks and letting the BoE run things by telling Lloyds, NatWest, the Midland and Barclays what to do? Oh, and it was the depositors of the fringe banks that were rescued not the institutions themselves, so not too dissimilar from the Northern Rock outcome under the hated Gordon Brown.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown even if he did personally order bat soup in the Cafe de Wuhan.
Unscathed? No that would be unmitigated bollocks.
What I'm saying is that Gordon Brown was such an abjectly catastrophic Chancellor that he overborrowed in boom times, removed Bank of England supervision from the Banks, had the first British Bank Run in over a century and saw two bank failures and ended up leaving a toxic legacy of a ruinous catastrophic amount of structural deficit for us to recover from.
Even if you are right that Brown "overborrowed in boom times", that is irrelevant to the GFC or our recovery from it. Likewise removing BoE banking supervision. Strange you do not want to blame Mrs Thatcher for Northern Rock but again that still did not cause the GFC. Nor did George Osborne cause such scandals as the UBS or London whale, even though they occurred under his new, improved banking regulations.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown.
Why would I blame Thatcher for Northern Rock, when it was Brown that tore up the regulations and put in place a system that failed in the way he was warned it would fail, within a decade of him putting it into place?
That America had a financial crisis is not an excuse for the UK's own financial system failing. The UK is not a rule taker in Finance, its supposed to be something we do well and we set the rules on ourselves.
Especially when the failure of Northern Rock took place almost a year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers the whole "it started in America" excuse really wears thin.
A common 1980s criticism of the big bang was that encouraging building societies to leave their core expertise and play at banking was bound to end in tears.
And yet it didn't.
Having Gordon Brown screw up the regulations on the other hand did. And it led to a bank run here in the UK before it did in America that you pretend this started in.
You appear to have no idea what went on. Northern Rock was a former building society that became a bank. As a building society, it had taken deposits into savings accounts and lent them out as mortgages. As a bank, it borrowed on the international money markets (and lent as mortgages). Remember those 1980s doomster and gloomsters? When the sub-prime market in where was it? Somewhere abroad. Anyway, when the sub-prime market started to go tits-up in 2007, NR found it hard to borrow. The Bank of England stepped in and all was well. Just like in the good old days.
Until the BBC reported that NR had needed support. That is what caused the queues to withdraw. This was more like the toilet roll and pasta shortage at the beginning of the pandemic, caused by panic buying because people were afraid that (other) panic buyers would empty the shelves, and not by a supply shortage. Whatever happened to Robert Peston (for it was he!)? The next year, NR was nationalised.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown.
The British Financial Crisis, a subset of the Global Financial Crisis, was caused by Gordon Brown.
Your indefatigable defence of Gordon Brown on here for year after year leads me to think that you must be one of his inner circle. Either that or you have the most unlikely man crush.....
"Climate change can be tackled with small reductions in flying and driving and we can continue eating meat and dairy, according to a report by Tony Blair’s think tank. It rebuts claims that meeting the UK’s legally binding target of net zero by 2050 will require a “total transformation” of people’s daily lives and says the number of behaviour changes needed over the next 15 years is “relatively limited”. It adds that the emissions savings needed to hit the target would not require a reduction in living standards."
Hard to form a government on those figures. Not quite enough for an SPD/Green/Left alliance. nor for another grand CDU/SPD coalition. Nowhere near enough for a CDU/FDP alliance. Nobody wants to touch the AfD, who are anyway on the slide.
SPD/Green/FDP works, but the pro-business FDP are possibly the most anti-Green party - still, that may be the only viable option. I wouldn't rule out a CDU recovery, though - they are pretty resilient.
It looks like the Greens have blown their chances of 2nd or 1st place. They peaked a couple of months too early. Someone mentioned an alleged scandal involving one of their leaders IIRC.
Not sure if it’s the one you’re thinking of but one of their candidates was exposed for having links to far-left extremists and then responded by threatening the journalist.
Sorry did Phil just say Gordon Brown caused the Global Financial Crisis, on the sauce early again were we
He caused the crisis in the UK, at least. The regulatory system was set up by Brown and it allowed banks to operate at 50-100x leverage with the likes of Northern Rock actually well above that.
Precisely.
London specifically and the UK in general is a Financial world power and the Chancellor of the Exchequer is responsible for regulating that.
There wasn't (to my knowledge) a single British bank run in the entire 20th century. The regulations with the Bank of England that we had worked. Then in came Gordon Brown who was warned not to remove BoE oversight, did so, then we had not one but two bank failures within a decade of the changes happening.
The idea you can dismiss the financial crisis because it was "global" might work for many nations, it doesn't work for the UK. The UK is a leading power that literally helps write the global financial rules. Brown changed the rules, his changes led to the crisis.
If your primary industry that you're a world leader in fails, within a few years of rewriting the rules for that industry, then don't cry that it is "global" afterwards.
Unmitigated bollocks. What is the charge? Are you saying Gordon Brown was such a brilliant Chancellor he steered Britain unscathed through the global financial crisis but unfortunately fell into a quite different UK-only financial crisis at exactly the same time?
There was the fringe banking crisis in the early 1970s but that was successfully dealt with by the Bank of England (and about £100 million which was a lot of money in those days) but in those days the sterling market was entirely in domestic hands because of exchange controls. To pretend there were no problems even then, or that there is any sensible comparison with today is at best naive. Or do you want to go back to shutting out foreign banks and letting the BoE run things by telling Lloyds, NatWest, the Midland and Barclays what to do? Oh, and it was the depositors of the fringe banks that were rescued not the institutions themselves, so not too dissimilar from the Northern Rock outcome under the hated Gordon Brown.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown even if he did personally order bat soup in the Cafe de Wuhan.
Unscathed? No that would be unmitigated bollocks.
What I'm saying is that Gordon Brown was such an abjectly catastrophic Chancellor that he overborrowed in boom times, removed Bank of England supervision from the Banks, had the first British Bank Run in over a century and saw two bank failures and ended up leaving a toxic legacy of a ruinous catastrophic amount of structural deficit for us to recover from.
Even if you are right that Brown "overborrowed in boom times", that is irrelevant to the GFC or our recovery from it. Likewise removing BoE banking supervision. Strange you do not want to blame Mrs Thatcher for Northern Rock but again that still did not cause the GFC. Nor did George Osborne cause such scandals as the UBS or London whale, even though they occurred under his new, improved banking regulations.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown.
Why would I blame Thatcher for Northern Rock, when it was Brown that tore up the regulations and put in place a system that failed in the way he was warned it would fail, within a decade of him putting it into place?
That America had a financial crisis is not an excuse for the UK's own financial system failing. The UK is not a rule taker in Finance, its supposed to be something we do well and we set the rules on ourselves.
Especially when the failure of Northern Rock took place almost a year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers the whole "it started in America" excuse really wears thin.
A common 1980s criticism of the big bang was that encouraging building societies to leave their core expertise and play at banking was bound to end in tears.
And yet it didn't.
Having Gordon Brown screw up the regulations on the other hand did. And it led to a bank run here in the UK before it did in America that you pretend this started in.
You appear to have no idea what went on. Northern Rock was a former building society that became a bank. As a building society, it had taken deposits into savings accounts and lent them out as mortgages. As a bank, it borrowed on the international money markets (and lent as mortgages). Remember those 1980s doomster and gloomsters? When the sub-prime market in where was it? Somewhere abroad. Anyway, when the sub-prime market started to go tits-up in 2007, NR found it hard to borrow. The Bank of England stepped in and all was well. Just like in the good old days.
Until the BBC reported that NR had needed support. That is what caused the queues to withdraw. This was more like the toilet roll and pasta shortage at the beginning of the pandemic, caused by panic buying because people were afraid that (other) panic buyers would empty the shelves, and not by a supply shortage. Whatever happened to Robert Peston (for it was he!)? The next year, NR was nationalised.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown.
The British Financial Crisis, a subset of the Global Financial Crisis, was caused by Gordon Brown.
Your indefatigable defence of Gordon Brown on here for year after year leads me to think that you must be one of his inner circle. Either that or you have the most unlikely man crush.....
If you look back through the PB archives it was my suggestion Gordon Brown should be first against the wall for PFI. That is what he should be condemned for, not this nonsense around the GFC.
Most now seem to be in the 46%/47% approval rating though rather than the over 50% it was before
There has been a very wide range for Biden’s ratings with Rasmussen and YouGov at the lower end and Morning Consult and Politico at the higher end.
Probably what is better to look at is the trend line within each pollster. That is clearly declining.
46/47% of course is danger territory for Biden/Harris.
47% is closer to the 48% Kerry, Gore and Clinton got and well below the 51% Biden got in 2020 when he beat Trump or the over 50% Obama got in 2008 and 2012
Personally, I think Biden is toast. I know many on here will say “you would say that” but I don’t know how he recovers from this, particularly the images, the ABC interview (how can you say one of Biden’s key strengths is compassion after that?) and the poor performance of his Sec of Defence.
I think Harris knows that as well, plus a fair few other Democrat leaders. To many, particularly on the left, Biden has served his purpose and a President Harris would better suit their purposes when there is still time to push through an agenda. If you want a curveball, don’t be too surprised if you start to hear murmurings that the 25th should be invoked for Biden.
I don't think the 25h would be a curve ball, I think it would be putting a tired old man out of his misery.
But I think Biden will choose retire on the grounds of ill health in 2022 rather than have the 25th invoked. Of course, Harris is hardly on the left of the Democratic Party, so I wouldn't expect to see AOC get her wish list were she to take over.
What are the rules on VPs becoming POTUS? Can she be elected for 2 terms or is there a point where her “promotion term” is long enough that it counts as 1?
Yes, it's the half way point of the Presidency.
But I'd want pretty long odds on Harris being President for a decade.
Midday 20/01/2023 is the halfway point isn't it?
Yes.
I guess the interesting question is what happens if Biden dies of a heart attack that morning. Is she measured from her own inauguration, or from Biden's death?
25th Amendment means that Harris automatically and therefore instantly becomes President if Biden dies, doesn't it? The inauguration ceremony swearing in the new President after a death is technically just ceremonial.
I believe Ford became POTUS at the moment Nixon resigned and was actually sworn in later that day.
VPOTUS becomes POTUS the moment the latter dies, resigns or is removed by impeachment, but cannot exercise any of the powers of the Presidency until sworn in.
Sorry did Phil just say Gordon Brown caused the Global Financial Crisis, on the sauce early again were we
He caused the crisis in the UK, at least. The regulatory system was set up by Brown and it allowed banks to operate at 50-100x leverage with the likes of Northern Rock actually well above that.
Precisely.
London specifically and the UK in general is a Financial world power and the Chancellor of the Exchequer is responsible for regulating that.
There wasn't (to my knowledge) a single British bank run in the entire 20th century. The regulations with the Bank of England that we had worked. Then in came Gordon Brown who was warned not to remove BoE oversight, did so, then we had not one but two bank failures within a decade of the changes happening.
The idea you can dismiss the financial crisis because it was "global" might work for many nations, it doesn't work for the UK. The UK is a leading power that literally helps write the global financial rules. Brown changed the rules, his changes led to the crisis.
If your primary industry that you're a world leader in fails, within a few years of rewriting the rules for that industry, then don't cry that it is "global" afterwards.
Unmitigated bollocks. What is the charge? Are you saying Gordon Brown was such a brilliant Chancellor he steered Britain unscathed through the global financial crisis but unfortunately fell into a quite different UK-only financial crisis at exactly the same time?
There was the fringe banking crisis in the early 1970s but that was successfully dealt with by the Bank of England (and about £100 million which was a lot of money in those days) but in those days the sterling market was entirely in domestic hands because of exchange controls. To pretend there were no problems even then, or that there is any sensible comparison with today is at best naive. Or do you want to go back to shutting out foreign banks and letting the BoE run things by telling Lloyds, NatWest, the Midland and Barclays what to do? Oh, and it was the depositors of the fringe banks that were rescued not the institutions themselves, so not too dissimilar from the Northern Rock outcome under the hated Gordon Brown.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown even if he did personally order bat soup in the Cafe de Wuhan.
Unscathed? No that would be unmitigated bollocks.
What I'm saying is that Gordon Brown was such an abjectly catastrophic Chancellor that he overborrowed in boom times, removed Bank of England supervision from the Banks, had the first British Bank Run in over a century and saw two bank failures and ended up leaving a toxic legacy of a ruinous catastrophic amount of structural deficit for us to recover from.
Even if you are right that Brown "overborrowed in boom times", that is irrelevant to the GFC or our recovery from it. Likewise removing BoE banking supervision. Strange you do not want to blame Mrs Thatcher for Northern Rock but again that still did not cause the GFC. Nor did George Osborne cause such scandals as the UBS or London whale, even though they occurred under his new, improved banking regulations.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown.
Why would I blame Thatcher for Northern Rock, when it was Brown that tore up the regulations and put in place a system that failed in the way he was warned it would fail, within a decade of him putting it into place?
That America had a financial crisis is not an excuse for the UK's own financial system failing. The UK is not a rule taker in Finance, its supposed to be something we do well and we set the rules on ourselves.
Especially when the failure of Northern Rock took place almost a year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers the whole "it started in America" excuse really wears thin.
A common 1980s criticism of the big bang was that encouraging building societies to leave their core expertise and play at banking was bound to end in tears.
And yet it didn't.
Having Gordon Brown screw up the regulations on the other hand did. And it led to a bank run here in the UK before it did in America that you pretend this started in.
You appear to have no idea what went on. Northern Rock was a former building society that became a bank. As a building society, it had taken deposits into savings accounts and lent them out as mortgages. As a bank, it borrowed on the international money markets (and lent as mortgages). Remember those 1980s doomster and gloomsters? When the sub-prime market in where was it? Somewhere abroad. Anyway, when the sub-prime market started to go tits-up in 2007, NR found it hard to borrow. The Bank of England stepped in and all was well. Just like in the good old days.
Until the BBC reported that NR had needed support. That is what caused the queues to withdraw. This was more like the toilet roll and pasta shortage at the beginning of the pandemic, caused by panic buying because people were afraid that (other) panic buyers would empty the shelves, and not by a supply shortage. Whatever happened to Robert Peston (for it was he!)? The next year, NR was nationalised.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown.
The British Financial Crisis, a subset of the Global Financial Crisis, was caused by Gordon Brown.
Your indefatigable defence of Gordon Brown on here for year after year leads me to think that you must be one of his inner circle. Either that or you have the most unlikely man crush.....
If you look back through the PB archives it was my suggestion Gordon Brown should be first against the wall for PFI. That is what he should be condemned for, not this nonsense around the GFC.
Given the financial legacy left by Major and having a subsequent 13 years of economic growth, we really shouldn't have had had any debt left by 2008.
“The mothers were desperate, they were getting beaten by the Taliban. They shouted, ‘save my baby’ and threw the babies at us, some of the babies fell on the barbed wire. It was awful what happened. By the end of the night there wasn’t one man among us who was not crying,” said the Parachute Regiment officer quietly.
That's the shot, here's the chaser
Biden’s Long Trail of Betrayals Why is the president so consistently wrong on major foreign-policy matters?
Which is why he was still the right choice. Despite being doddery and shite.
At what point, do you weigh up the facts and actions, against the perceptions? As someone said in the US “great, we’ve swapped bad tweets for bad policies”
For the reasons I elucidated earlier.
Trump - as he proved after his defeat - is a danger to democracy. And that is 100x more important than his specific policies.
He’s an idiot. He should have accepted he lost. As I said at the time, his attempts to persuade legislatures to nullify results was wrong. That made his actions and words irresponsible, dangerous and out of order.
But.
If Trump really wanted to reverse democracy and impose a dictatorship, there were far more effective actions he could have taken.
And it also misses a rather big elephant in the room when it comes to undermining democracy, namely the two years (actually four) that one of the two main political parties in the US actively pushed an agenda that the elected US President was invalid because Trump - in their eyes - had been elevated to the Presidency through Russian disinformation and underhand tricks. A view that Hillary Clinton has continued to back.
I think it remarkable that those who get so heated about Trump do not recognise just how dangerous and anti-democratic the Democrats actions were in the years following his election.
When did Hillary Clinton or any other prominent Democrat propose for Trump's election to be annulled because of Russian interference? This is ridiculous gaslighting and projection.
Zac Goldsmith being hung out here by looks of things.
Big Friend of Carrie? iirc.
Who could have leaked this story? Someone who likes Barnard Castle me thinks.
Dominic Cummings would be out of the loop on this so could not be the leaker.
Also it is hardly "Zac Goldsmith being hung out to dry". The Mail says:-
The officials said Mr Raab needed to urgently request assistance in rescuing interpreters who worked for the British military. They said it was important the call was made by him personally.
But the Cabinet minister failed to make the call and it was delegated to Lord Goldsmith, the junior minister. However, the Afghan foreign ministry refused to set up a call with someone who was not their minister's direct counterpart and it was delayed.
Ex-Royal Marine Paul 'Pen' Farthing sees wife leave Kabul on almost empty plane - Paul 'Pen' Farthing tells Sky News how aircraft are taking off from Kabul airport every hour "regardless of whether they're full or not", adding: "People can't get in, they cannot get into the airport."
A former Royal Marine commando attempting to help people flee Afghanistan's capital Kabul has warned: "We are going to leave so many people behind".
But Mr Farthing was left fuming at a "scandal" that saw Kaisa fly out of Afghanistan on what appeared to be an almost empty plane, despite thousands still waiting to leave the country.
"We are going to leave people behind, that is an absolute given," he said of the "heartbreaking" situation in Kabul. "This is an absolute screw-up of an evacuation. We are going to be watching some absolutely horrific scenes."
"We'll have left people behind and I can see soldiers will be seriously injured on the last day as the last planes take off," Mr Farthing added.
“The mothers were desperate, they were getting beaten by the Taliban. They shouted, ‘save my baby’ and threw the babies at us, some of the babies fell on the barbed wire. It was awful what happened. By the end of the night there wasn’t one man among us who was not crying,” said the Parachute Regiment officer quietly.
That's the shot, here's the chaser
Biden’s Long Trail of Betrayals Why is the president so consistently wrong on major foreign-policy matters?
Which is why he was still the right choice. Despite being doddery and shite.
At what point, do you weigh up the facts and actions, against the perceptions? As someone said in the US “great, we’ve swapped bad tweets for bad policies”
For the reasons I elucidated earlier.
Trump - as he proved after his defeat - is a danger to democracy. And that is 100x more important than his specific policies.
He’s an idiot. He should have accepted he lost. As I said at the time, his attempts to persuade legislatures to nullify results was wrong. That made his actions and words irresponsible, dangerous and out of order.
But.
If Trump really wanted to reverse democracy and impose a dictatorship, there were far more effective actions he could have taken.
And it also misses a rather big elephant in the room when it comes to undermining democracy, namely the two years (actually four) that one of the two main political parties in the US actively pushed an agenda that the elected US President was invalid because Trump - in their eyes - had been elevated to the Presidency through Russian disinformation and underhand tricks. A view that Hillary Clinton has continued to back.
I think it remarkable that those who get so heated about Trump do not recognise just how dangerous and anti-democratic the Democrats actions were in the years following his election.
When did Hillary Clinton or any other prominent Democrat propose for Trump's election to be annulled because of Russian interference? This is ridiculous gaslighting and projection.
Clinton campaign backs call for intelligence briefing before Electoral College vote
Sorry did Phil just say Gordon Brown caused the Global Financial Crisis, on the sauce early again were we
He caused the crisis in the UK, at least. The regulatory system was set up by Brown and it allowed banks to operate at 50-100x leverage with the likes of Northern Rock actually well above that.
Precisely.
London specifically and the UK in general is a Financial world power and the Chancellor of the Exchequer is responsible for regulating that.
There wasn't (to my knowledge) a single British bank run in the entire 20th century. The regulations with the Bank of England that we had worked. Then in came Gordon Brown who was warned not to remove BoE oversight, did so, then we had not one but two bank failures within a decade of the changes happening.
The idea you can dismiss the financial crisis because it was "global" might work for many nations, it doesn't work for the UK. The UK is a leading power that literally helps write the global financial rules. Brown changed the rules, his changes led to the crisis.
If your primary industry that you're a world leader in fails, within a few years of rewriting the rules for that industry, then don't cry that it is "global" afterwards.
Unmitigated bollocks. What is the charge? Are you saying Gordon Brown was such a brilliant Chancellor he steered Britain unscathed through the global financial crisis but unfortunately fell into a quite different UK-only financial crisis at exactly the same time?
There was the fringe banking crisis in the early 1970s but that was successfully dealt with by the Bank of England (and about £100 million which was a lot of money in those days) but in those days the sterling market was entirely in domestic hands because of exchange controls. To pretend there were no problems even then, or that there is any sensible comparison with today is at best naive. Or do you want to go back to shutting out foreign banks and letting the BoE run things by telling Lloyds, NatWest, the Midland and Barclays what to do? Oh, and it was the depositors of the fringe banks that were rescued not the institutions themselves, so not too dissimilar from the Northern Rock outcome under the hated Gordon Brown.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown even if he did personally order bat soup in the Cafe de Wuhan.
Unscathed? No that would be unmitigated bollocks.
What I'm saying is that Gordon Brown was such an abjectly catastrophic Chancellor that he overborrowed in boom times, removed Bank of England supervision from the Banks, had the first British Bank Run in over a century and saw two bank failures and ended up leaving a toxic legacy of a ruinous catastrophic amount of structural deficit for us to recover from.
Even if you are right that Brown "overborrowed in boom times", that is irrelevant to the GFC or our recovery from it. Likewise removing BoE banking supervision. Strange you do not want to blame Mrs Thatcher for Northern Rock but again that still did not cause the GFC. Nor did George Osborne cause such scandals as the UBS or London whale, even though they occurred under his new, improved banking regulations.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown.
Why would I blame Thatcher for Northern Rock, when it was Brown that tore up the regulations and put in place a system that failed in the way he was warned it would fail, within a decade of him putting it into place?
That America had a financial crisis is not an excuse for the UK's own financial system failing. The UK is not a rule taker in Finance, its supposed to be something we do well and we set the rules on ourselves.
Especially when the failure of Northern Rock took place almost a year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers the whole "it started in America" excuse really wears thin.
A common 1980s criticism of the big bang was that encouraging building societies to leave their core expertise and play at banking was bound to end in tears.
And yet it didn't.
Having Gordon Brown screw up the regulations on the other hand did. And it led to a bank run here in the UK before it did in America that you pretend this started in.
You appear to have no idea what went on. Northern Rock was a former building society that became a bank. As a building society, it had taken deposits into savings accounts and lent them out as mortgages. As a bank, it borrowed on the international money markets (and lent as mortgages). Remember those 1980s doomster and gloomsters? When the sub-prime market in where was it? Somewhere abroad. Anyway, when the sub-prime market started to go tits-up in 2007, NR found it hard to borrow. The Bank of England stepped in and all was well. Just like in the good old days.
Until the BBC reported that NR had needed support. That is what caused the queues to withdraw. This was more like the toilet roll and pasta shortage at the beginning of the pandemic, caused by panic buying because people were afraid that (other) panic buyers would empty the shelves, and not by a supply shortage. Whatever happened to Robert Peston (for it was he!)? The next year, NR was nationalised.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown.
The British Financial Crisis, a subset of the Global Financial Crisis, was caused by Gordon Brown.
Your indefatigable defence of Gordon Brown on here for year after year leads me to think that you must be one of his inner circle. Either that or you have the most unlikely man crush.....
If you look back through the PB archives it was my suggestion Gordon Brown should be first against the wall for PFI. That is what he should be condemned for, not this nonsense around the GFC.
Rubbish. PFI can be a perfectly good way of funding schemes - the problem is, in order to fiddle the books, Brown and Blair used it on the wrong sort of projects. They used a saw to hammer in a screw. But the misuse of PFI was a symptom of the wider mismanagement of the country's finances that led to the eventual crash hurting us so badly. PFI itself is fine.
The GFC may have 'started' in the US. The reason it mucked us up so badly was Brown's actions and mistreatment of the economy - for political reasons - over the previous decade. Brown's statement about abolishing boom and bust is typical of the stupid, unrealistic view of the economy he had. Or worse, pretended to have.
I'm also doubtful you are right to so blithely say that it started in the US, but was not caused by Brown. Unless you think his actions pre-2008 actually helped the situation?
It is fairly simple: Brown wanted to be PM. To do this, he might have to win an election. As chancellor, the best way of winning an election is to bribe the electorate. That meant running the economy for the short term, not the longer term. It's darkly hilarious that the 'short term' ended up shorter than the may have planned ...
All the hardship the crash caused the UK can be put down directly at Brown's feet. He steered the ships onto the rocks.
I still can't quite believe the head of the UK armed forces described the Taliban as "country boys" who live by a "code of honour", who want an "inclusive country".
But it's okay because Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has endorsed the comments, according to this article.
Sorry did Phil just say Gordon Brown caused the Global Financial Crisis, on the sauce early again were we
He caused the crisis in the UK, at least. The regulatory system was set up by Brown and it allowed banks to operate at 50-100x leverage with the likes of Northern Rock actually well above that.
Precisely.
London specifically and the UK in general is a Financial world power and the Chancellor of the Exchequer is responsible for regulating that.
There wasn't (to my knowledge) a single British bank run in the entire 20th century. The regulations with the Bank of England that we had worked. Then in came Gordon Brown who was warned not to remove BoE oversight, did so, then we had not one but two bank failures within a decade of the changes happening.
The idea you can dismiss the financial crisis because it was "global" might work for many nations, it doesn't work for the UK. The UK is a leading power that literally helps write the global financial rules. Brown changed the rules, his changes led to the crisis.
If your primary industry that you're a world leader in fails, within a few years of rewriting the rules for that industry, then don't cry that it is "global" afterwards.
Unmitigated bollocks. What is the charge? Are you saying Gordon Brown was such a brilliant Chancellor he steered Britain unscathed through the global financial crisis but unfortunately fell into a quite different UK-only financial crisis at exactly the same time?
There was the fringe banking crisis in the early 1970s but that was successfully dealt with by the Bank of England (and about £100 million which was a lot of money in those days) but in those days the sterling market was entirely in domestic hands because of exchange controls. To pretend there were no problems even then, or that there is any sensible comparison with today is at best naive. Or do you want to go back to shutting out foreign banks and letting the BoE run things by telling Lloyds, NatWest, the Midland and Barclays what to do? Oh, and it was the depositors of the fringe banks that were rescued not the institutions themselves, so not too dissimilar from the Northern Rock outcome under the hated Gordon Brown.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown even if he did personally order bat soup in the Cafe de Wuhan.
Unscathed? No that would be unmitigated bollocks.
What I'm saying is that Gordon Brown was such an abjectly catastrophic Chancellor that he overborrowed in boom times, removed Bank of England supervision from the Banks, had the first British Bank Run in over a century and saw two bank failures and ended up leaving a toxic legacy of a ruinous catastrophic amount of structural deficit for us to recover from.
Even if you are right that Brown "overborrowed in boom times", that is irrelevant to the GFC or our recovery from it. Likewise removing BoE banking supervision. Strange you do not want to blame Mrs Thatcher for Northern Rock but again that still did not cause the GFC. Nor did George Osborne cause such scandals as the UBS or London whale, even though they occurred under his new, improved banking regulations.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown.
Why would I blame Thatcher for Northern Rock, when it was Brown that tore up the regulations and put in place a system that failed in the way he was warned it would fail, within a decade of him putting it into place?
That America had a financial crisis is not an excuse for the UK's own financial system failing. The UK is not a rule taker in Finance, its supposed to be something we do well and we set the rules on ourselves.
Especially when the failure of Northern Rock took place almost a year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers the whole "it started in America" excuse really wears thin.
A common 1980s criticism of the big bang was that encouraging building societies to leave their core expertise and play at banking was bound to end in tears.
And yet it didn't.
Having Gordon Brown screw up the regulations on the other hand did. And it led to a bank run here in the UK before it did in America that you pretend this started in.
You appear to have no idea what went on. Northern Rock was a former building society that became a bank. As a building society, it had taken deposits into savings accounts and lent them out as mortgages. As a bank, it borrowed on the international money markets (and lent as mortgages). Remember those 1980s doomster and gloomsters? When the sub-prime market in where was it? Somewhere abroad. Anyway, when the sub-prime market started to go tits-up in 2007, NR found it hard to borrow. The Bank of England stepped in and all was well. Just like in the good old days.
Until the BBC reported that NR had needed support. That is what caused the queues to withdraw. This was more like the toilet roll and pasta shortage at the beginning of the pandemic, caused by panic buying because people were afraid that (other) panic buyers would empty the shelves, and not by a supply shortage. Whatever happened to Robert Peston (for it was he!)? The next year, NR was nationalised.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown.
The British Financial Crisis, a subset of the Global Financial Crisis, was caused by Gordon Brown.
Your indefatigable defence of Gordon Brown on here for year after year leads me to think that you must be one of his inner circle. Either that or you have the most unlikely man crush.....
If you look back through the PB archives it was my suggestion Gordon Brown should be first against the wall for PFI. That is what he should be condemned for, not this nonsense around the GFC.
Rubbish. PFI can be a perfectly good way of funding schemes - the problem is, in order to fiddle the books, Brown and Blair used it on the wrong sort of projects. They used a saw to hammer in a screw. But the misuse of PFI was a symptom of the wider mismanagement of the country's finances that led to the eventual crash hurting us so badly. PFI itself is fine.
The GFC may have 'started' in the US. The reason it mucked us up so badly was Brown's actions and mistreatment of the economy - for political reasons - over the previous decade. Brown's statement about abolishing boom and bust is typical of the stupid, unrealistic view of the economy he had. Or worse, pretended to have.
I'm also doubtful you are right to so blithely say that it started in the US, but was not caused by Brown. Unless you think his actions pre-2008 actually helped the situation?
It is fairly simple: Brown wanted to be PM. To do this, he might have to win an election. As chancellor, the best way of winning an election is to bribe the electorate. That meant running the economy for the short term, not the longer term. It's darkly hilarious that the 'short term' ended up shorter than the may have planned ...
All the hardship the crash caused the UK can be put down directly at Brown's feet. He steered the ships onto the rocks.
For me his greatest failings were to create systems without any regulation of systemic risk. This applied to financial institutions where the Bank of England was emasculated and banks and other institutions were encouraged into reckless behaviour in search of illusionary profits but it also applied to the public finances.
Firstly, he committed to balancing the books over the cycle but then manipulated the cycle postponing the day of reckoning so that we managed to go through a boom with a significant deficit. The result when tax revenues from the risky financial behaviour collapsed was catastrophic and it took us over a decade to bring the books back into balance.
Secondly, he manipulated and distorted the public accounts and PFI was a part of that as was the constant reannouncement of the same spending and the practice of rolling up years of spending into a more sexy figure. Before Brown Chancellors could be broadly trusted to tell it as it was. That ended with him.
So we went into the GFC with no one at the wheel looking at systemic risk and with an unsustainable financial position. The role of London in internationalising the corruption of the US housing market really should not be underestimated. It may have started in America but London played a major role in making this an international crisis.
Comments
Hmmm.
Big Friend of Carrie? iirc.
Who could have leaked this story? Someone who likes Barnard Castle me thinks.
I see comment below on how Biden apologists have contorted themselves on the excuses.
Facts:
1. The Biden adminstration pushed the pace of the withdrawal and actually deprived itself of eyes and ears to assist an ongoing assessment
2. The Biden adminstration did get told things could downhill very quickly if there was no retained support for the Afghan military.
3. The optics & PR drove Biden's decision to push on with the Trump deal and the calculation was it was going to be Trump's problem if it went wrong because it was his agreement.
Just another calculation gone wrong on this but the calculations were always going to be wrong because the objectives and motivations were wrong.
Given the topic of rare earth elements, China's love of mining is something that connects them and the Taliban already
And one would expect the Governing party to do worse at the midterms, and the fact that DeSantis won in 2018 is to his credit.
You seem to be perilously close to creeping towards QAnon-type conspiracy theories.
https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1428358306356109317?s=19
The reality is that we don't know, and we may never know. We can only attribute probabilities at this stage.
How about this. You seem like someone who is always happy to stand close to Corbyn and support him. Should I assume you are an anti-Semite?
Which is why he was still the right choice. Despite being doddery and shite.
Rare-earth metals in Afghanistan were estimated to be worth anywhere between USD one trillion to USD three trillion in 2020, a CNBC report this week quoted Ahmad Shah Katawazai, a former diplomat at the Afghan Embassy in Washington…
…(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed)
Indeed, it starts to look a bit like Mao's support of anti Imperialist forces in other countries.
(2) You only ever post stories which back up your existing point of view.
Now, I have said that I think that the lab leak hypothesis is the most likely one, but it is not the only one. It took a long time to find the animal hosts for SARS and MERS, and we've never found them for HIV or Ebola. It may be that a year from now a colony of bats is discovered with exactly the same virus. (Although, of course, this does not mean it definitely didn't escape from the lab.)
I disagree strongly on the engineered bioweapon story, for the various reasons I've described before (infectiousness to animals, weakness of Chinese vaccines, etc.), and there are also very good reasons to doubt the gain of function hypothesis (notably the fact that the virus in its initial form was less infectious than the Yuhan strain).
https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1428027175781928965
https://twitter.com/hendopolis/status/1428476542288547844/photo/1
Trump - as he proved after his defeat - is a danger to democracy. And that is 100x more important than his specific policies.
Despite this being Biden's clusterfuck, despite the fact Parliament is in recess, Boris was in Parliament on Wednesday giving a statement and facing questions from opposition and backbenchers etc alike.
Biden not only faces no such opposition grilling as the PM sees every week while not in recess, he has to the best of my knowledge not accepted any questions from the general media either. He keeps turning up to press conferences, saying what he has to say, and walking off.
There is nobody in the USA that can grill a failing or flailing President in the same way that the PM must face up to in Parliament.
@rcs1000 likes to speak about the importance of processes. This is a failing of the US process - and Biden refusing to take any questions from the media or anyone else while such a major story is happening is a process problem.
Do more reading
I'd support bad policies over bad elections.
SOB
You’re much more sensible on American politics. And I’m intrigued by Monero. Peace, and goodnight PB
But.
If Trump really wanted to reverse democracy and impose a dictatorship, there were far more effective actions he could have taken.
And it also misses a rather big elephant in the room when it comes to undermining democracy, namely the two years (actually four) that one of the two main political parties in the US actively pushed an agenda that the elected US President was invalid because Trump - in their eyes - had been elevated to the Presidency through Russian disinformation and underhand tricks. A view that Hillary Clinton has continued to back.
I think it remarkable that those who get so heated about Trump do not recognise just how dangerous and anti-democratic the Democrats actions were in the years following his election.
https://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/
Hard to form a government on those figures. Not quite enough for an SPD/Green/Left alliance. nor for another grand CDU/SPD coalition. Nowhere near enough for a CDU/FDP alliance. Nobody wants to touch the AfD, who are anyway on the slide.
SPD/Green/FDP works, but the pro-business FDP are possibly the most anti-Green party - still, that may be the only viable option. I wouldn't rule out a CDU recovery, though - they are pretty resilient.
In politics OTOH ......
There was the fringe banking crisis in the early 1970s but that was successfully dealt with by the Bank of England (and about £100 million which was a lot of money in those days) but in those days the sterling market was entirely in domestic hands because of exchange controls. To pretend there were no problems even then, or that there is any sensible comparison with today is at best naive. Or do you want to go back to shutting out foreign banks and letting the BoE run things by telling Lloyds, NatWest, the Midland and Barclays what to do? Oh, and it was the depositors of the fringe banks that were rescued not the institutions themselves, so not too dissimilar from the Northern Rock outcome under the hated Gordon Brown.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown even if he did personally order bat soup in the Cafe de Wuhan.
Despite the fact there is now a high level of air traffic by the US in and out of Kabul (the RAF has been shuttling on a very regular cycle for days), stories persist that the planes are not going out with anywhere near capacity onboard.
What I'm saying is that Gordon Brown was such an abjectly catastrophic Chancellor that he overborrowed in boom times, removed Bank of England supervision from the Banks, had the first British Bank Run in over a century and saw two bank failures and ended up leaving a toxic legacy of a ruinous catastrophic amount of structural deficit for us to recover from.
But I prefer correct public service names for organisations than all this modern marketing guff.
cf The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland v Historic Environment Scotland
No brainer.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown.
Then there is the question of whether it is "gain of function" powered. On the one hand, the lab definitely engaged in gain of function research. On the other, it is hard to work out how a less virulent, less infectious disease than its closest relative (the Yunan mine bat disease) would have come out of gain of function. Still, they will have viruses that we don't know about, and which might have been way less virulent in their natural form, but which became more virulent through gain of function research. I'll put that at 10-15% as well.
Then there's genetically engineered bioweapon that escaped. I think this is close to zero because (a) infecting other mammals makes it a terrible weapon - you need specificity for any bioweapon; and (b) if the Chinese can't even develop a decent vaccine, that hardly suggests great experience in virology. I'd put that at less than 1%.
But it's okay because Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has endorsed the comments, according to this article.
https://news.sky.com/story/afghanistan-defence-secretary-ben-wallace-backs-uk-armed-forces-chief-general-sir-nick-carter-over-taliban-has-changed-remarks-12385054
That America had a financial crisis is not an excuse for the UK's own financial system failing. The UK is not a rule taker in Finance, its supposed to be something we do well and we set the rules on ourselves.
Especially when the failure of Northern Rock took place almost a year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers the whole "it started in America" excuse really wears thin.
Having Gordon Brown screw up the regulations on the other hand did. And it led to a bank run here in the UK before it did in America that you pretend this started in.
Until the BBC reported that NR had needed support. That is what caused the queues to withdraw. This was more like the toilet roll and pasta shortage at the beginning of the pandemic, caused by panic buying because people were afraid that (other) panic buyers would empty the shelves, and not by a supply shortage. Whatever happened to Robert Peston (for it was he!)? The next year, NR was nationalised.
The Global Financial Crisis started in America. It was not caused by Gordon Brown.
Your indefatigable defence of Gordon Brown on here for year after year leads me to think that you must be one of his inner circle. Either that or you have the most unlikely man crush.....
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/only-small-cuts-in-flying-and-driving-needed-to-beat-climate-change-says-blair-institute-rbr87jhw8
"Climate change can be tackled with small reductions in flying and driving and we can continue eating meat and dairy, according to a report by Tony Blair’s think tank. It rebuts claims that meeting the UK’s legally binding target of net zero by 2050 will require a “total transformation” of people’s daily lives and says the number of behaviour changes needed over the next 15 years is “relatively limited”. It adds that the emissions savings needed to hit the target would not require a reduction in living standards."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2021_Canadian_federal_election#Campaign_period
- New cases: 178,700
- Average: 145,402 (+4,853)
- In hospital: 92,912 (+1,778)
- In ICU: 22,887 (+378)
- New deaths: 1,765
https://twitter.com/bnodesk/status/1428527092866691074
https://twitter.com/nswhealth/status/1428529352392597506
The officials said Mr Raab needed to urgently request assistance in rescuing interpreters who worked for the British military. They said it was important the call was made by him personally.
But the Cabinet minister failed to make the call and it was delegated to Lord Goldsmith, the junior minister. However, the Afghan foreign ministry refused to set up a call with someone who was not their minister's direct counterpart and it was delayed.
Initially, it was thought the call had taken place on Saturday or Sunday as Kabul fell. But last night, the Foreign Office admitted it never took place. A spokesman said: 'Given the rapidly changing situation it was not possible to arrange a call before the Afghan government collapsed.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9909923/Raab-ropes-Foreign-Office-admit-NO-one-rang-call-save-Afghan-translators-lives.html
- Paul 'Pen' Farthing tells Sky News how aircraft are taking off from Kabul airport every hour "regardless of whether they're full or not", adding: "People can't get in, they cannot get into the airport."
A former Royal Marine commando attempting to help people flee Afghanistan's capital Kabul has warned: "We are going to leave so many people behind".
But Mr Farthing was left fuming at a "scandal" that saw Kaisa fly out of Afghanistan on what appeared to be an almost empty plane, despite thousands still waiting to leave the country.
"We are going to leave people behind, that is an absolute given," he said of the "heartbreaking" situation in Kabul. "This is an absolute screw-up of an evacuation. We are going to be watching some absolutely horrific scenes."
"We'll have left people behind and I can see soldiers will be seriously injured on the last day as the last planes take off," Mr Farthing added.
https://news.sky.com/story/afghanistan-ex-royal-marine-paul-pen-farthing-sees-wife-leave-kabul-on-almost-empty-plane-12385659
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/clinton-campaign-backs-call-for-intelligence-briefing-before-electoral-college-vote-232512
Harvard professor: The Constitution lets the electoral college choose the winner. They should choose Clinton.
https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/802142698937479168
The Stingray… using lasers to eliminate lice from salmon
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bZxw-Ji7K94
…
3. Germany 147,994
4. Austria 40,096
5. France 31,546
6. Sweden 29,927
7. Greece 21,456
8. Switzerland 14,523
9. Italy 12,096
10. Australia 10,659
11. UK 9,351
…
22. US 1,592
Source: New Statesman (£)
Rhododendron ponticum
Japanese knotweed
Giant hogweed
Himalayan balsam
American skunk cabbage
Giant rhubarb
etc
The GFC may have 'started' in the US. The reason it mucked us up so badly was Brown's actions and mistreatment of the economy - for political reasons - over the previous decade. Brown's statement about abolishing boom and bust is typical of the stupid, unrealistic view of the economy he had. Or worse, pretended to have.
I'm also doubtful you are right to so blithely say that it started in the US, but was not caused by Brown. Unless you think his actions pre-2008 actually helped the situation?
It is fairly simple: Brown wanted to be PM. To do this, he might have to win an election. As chancellor, the best way of winning an election is to bribe the electorate. That meant running the economy for the short term, not the longer term. It's darkly hilarious that the 'short term' ended up shorter than the may have planned ...
All the hardship the crash caused the UK can be put down directly at Brown's feet. He steered the ships onto the rocks.
Firstly, he committed to balancing the books over the cycle but then manipulated the cycle postponing the day of reckoning so that we managed to go through a boom with a significant deficit. The result when tax revenues from the risky financial behaviour collapsed was catastrophic and it took us over a decade to bring the books back into balance.
Secondly, he manipulated and distorted the public accounts and PFI was a part of that as was the constant reannouncement of the same spending and the practice of rolling up years of spending into a more sexy figure. Before Brown Chancellors could be broadly trusted to tell it as it was. That ended with him.
So we went into the GFC with no one at the wheel looking at systemic risk and with an unsustainable financial position. The role of London in internationalising the corruption of the US housing market really should not be underestimated. It may have started in America but London played a major role in making this an international crisis.