Anyone get their SOTU bingo card ready? My free space is Dem leadership (Jeffries, Pelosi) clapping at some ghoul shit Trump says like securing the border or sending more aid to

Blackrock buying a controlling interest in two of the ports that service the Panama canal from the Hong Kong based conglomerate that currently owns them

https://archive.is/jytZ9

The same purchase will include some euro ports:

The deal also includes an 80 per cent stake of CK Hutchison’s ports subsidiaries, which run 43 ports in 23 countries, including the UK and in Germany.

Exclusive: US and Ukraine prepare to sign minerals deal on Tuesday, sources say

President Donald Trump has told his advisers that he wants to announce the agreement in his address to Congress Tuesday evening, three of the sources said, cautioning that the deal had yet to be signed and the situation could change.

Apparently he wants to sign it sometime in the next ~5 hours?

Japanese jurist Yuji Iwasawa is now the new president of the ICJ, replacing Julia SSebutinde (RIP bozo, ) as of yesterday. Iwasawa seems to also be more critical of piSSrael and supportive of the legal case by South Africa, potentially bringing at least a marginal sense of legitimacy to the ICJ.

Also about 2 weeks ago, the African Union has been granted permission to participate in the genocide case, of which South Africa is a founding member and a leading diplomatic power of.

Bloomberg: China Sets GDP Target at About 5% Despite US Tariffs

The probable future coalition partners of the CDU and SPD just announced their basic understanding to proceed with an absolutely INSANE militarization programme.

The outline is at least 500 billion €s for military hardware and investments in military-relevant infrastructure, with no theoretical limit - over the past couple of days, politicians have thrown around numbers like 800 billion and even higher. That's basically the entire Pentagon budget for Germany to spend over like 5 years or so.

Early statements call for "an army of 100,000 drones, 2,000 Patriot missiles, at least 800 tanks and 1,000 Taurus cruise missiles", with more to come.

This gigantic defense programme will be financed entirely by debt, and they plan to suspend the "debt brake" - but just for defense stuff, pointless social spending like schools and hospitals will not be exempt from the austerity program.

Just insane. All the German MSMs I'm looking at are celebrating. It will be interesting if any leftist organization can mobilize against this monstrosity, this really can't be true.

Really feels like Europe is going completely off the rails this week. Maybe I'm a little out of whack too since I've basically listened to 5 hours of Mercouris et al. every day for some days now and this was to be expected, sort of...but I can't see any good come of this.

Oh well, maybe they'll fix some of the shittier roads at least so that tanks can drive over, or they'll run out of money, or they just find that throwing money at a problem doesn't magically create tanks. There's this adage of "Germany is the country that spends the most on its military and basically gets nothing out of it", and that was still very true over the last couple of years. As far as I know, virtually none of the hardware that the first 100 billions dollars were supposed to buy actually arrived in the depots, it's all still mostly on order lol.

Source: The Krautwave

Sometimes I forget just how brainwashed the NATO countries are until I try discussing the Ukraine war with levels of nuance and it infuriates them.

Saying that trump isn’t working with Putin to take over the world is apparently a very controversial thing with NATO libs. Makes me glad this site exists. Thankfully Guatemalans aren’t nearly as brain broken. We’re more suspicious of China but admiring of Putin (ugh)

Trump's speech is just about to start, PBS, Hasan, and Erin Reed

Hours after No Other Land won the academy awards, Israel occupation forces handed a demolition order for a school in Masafer Yatta. Even Shakespeare couldn't have written such a travesty of justice. Palestinians in Masafer Yatta, and elsewhere, deserve liberation, they deserve to live free from occupation in their own sovereign state.

• Ofer Cassif Israeli Communist MP

Investors dare to imagine a world beyond the dollar

Investors are starting to imagine a financial system without the US at its centre, handing Europe an opportunity that it simply must not miss.

This exercise in thinking the unthinkable comes despite a cacophony of noise in markets. Mansoor Mohi-uddin, chief economist at Bank of Singapore, recently travelled to clients in Dubai and London. To his surprise, not one of them asked him about short-term issues like tech stocks or tweaks to interest rates. Instead, he says, “people were saying, ‘What’s going on?’ The free trade, free markets, globalisation era is over, and nobody knows what’s going to replace it.”

They refer, of course, to the new US administration. Within a month of retaking his seat at the White House, Donald Trump & co had all but trashed the transatlantic alliance, and ridden roughshod over the key checks, balances and institutions on which true US exceptionalism is built.

“It’s such a momentous change going on. If it continues like this, capital allocators will wonder: ‘Do I want to stay allocated to the US?’” Mohi-uddin says.

This cuts across asset classes. In stocks, the preference for Europe is clear — markets are streaking ahead of the US in a highly unusual pattern. But flighty stock markets are just the surface. The bit that really matters is the international use of the dollar, and dollar bond markets, as the supposedly risk-free bedrock of global finance.

This is already starting to show. On Tuesday, for instance, despite the shock of new US trade tariffs on Canada and Mexico, the dollar is not climbing in its usual fashion. Deutsche Bank says this in part reflects “the potential loss of the dollar’s safe-haven status”.

“We do not write this lightly,” wrote currencies analyst George Saravelos. “But the speed and scale of global shifts is so rapid that this needs to be acknowledged as a possibility.” What was once outlandish is now becoming plausible.

Economists close to Trump have been clear that they view the dollar’s status as the world’s pre-eminent reserve currency as a blessing and a curse — “burdensome” as adviser Stephen Miran put it. It remains a possibility — again unthinkable just a few weeks ago — that the US could seek to pull the dollar lower in an effort to support domestic manufacturing. But the US could also dismantle its own exorbitant privilege through accident rather than design by pushing the big beasts of bond markets — foreign central banks and other official reserve managers — into the arms of other nations.

The dollar makes up more than 57 per cent of global official reserves, according to benchmark data from the IMF, far in excess of the US’s slice of the global economy. The euro accounts for 20 per cent, and everyone else is picking up scraps.

Starry-eyed optimists have argued for years that the euro’s slice of the pie should be bigger, but they have been fighting reality. Europe’s bond markets are fragmented into constituent states, with Germany at the centre. The monetary cohesion is there but not the fiscal or strategic cohesion. No national market is simultaneously large, safe and liquid enough to suit a reserve manager’s needs. Super-sized trades leave a mark and in an emergency, these big hitters find only the slick US government bond market will do.

The EU has struggled to offer an alternative. That is where this moment in history comes in. Its urgent need for defence spending simply overwhelms the capacity of its individual national bond markets. Joint borrowing — easily said but devilishly tricky to do — is the obvious answer. The result could well be that Europe is thrust further to the centre of the global financial system.

The Covid-19 pandemic offered a taste of how pooling resources might work at scale. Then, bonds issued by the EU itself, rather than individual states, were met with enormous demand. The urgency of the present situation offers little choice but to move fast. “Collective action could be an answer, even if consensus has not built yet,” said analysts at rating agency S&P Global in a note last month.

If the EU could seize this moment, it would tap in to a deep well of willing buyers keen to trim US exposure. “Plenty of reserve managers could shift very quickly,” says Mohi-uddin. “There would be huge take-up.” US dominance of global debt markets does not have to end with a bang. Large, slow-moving investors would simply have to accumulate other assets rather than necessarily dumping their Treasuries. But over time, the result would be the same. Regime shifts of this kind do not happen often. But they do happen. Sterling was the global reserve currency once too.

Leave it to Comrade Trump to achieve the impossible, folks.

The question is what are they moving their assets into? Bitcoin and gold? lmao.

cuck n chad ranking: blast from the past edition

Note: RUS vs UKR back in first row

Another one