A French NGO has been caught kidnapping African children for their “own good”.
Mexico has been hit with serious flooding that temporally halted oil exports.
Oil hit 97 dollars a barrel. It is almost there.
This chart may reveal who the next bad news boys of the banking world will be.
China has been letting its currency appreciate a little bit lately. This from Brad Setser’s blog…
In his most recent post, Mr. Pettis notes that the RMB’s pace of appreciation picked up last week. That’s true, but the rapid appreciation last week came after an extended period when the RMB was stuck at 7.5 even as the dollar was falling.
China basically sat out the dollar’s fall in September and October — or rather, it opted to follow the dollar down v. host of currencies. A bit of appreciation against the dollar just undoes some of the RMB’s recent depreciation against the euro.
More importantly, as Mr. Pettis notes, expectations of RMB appreciation have picked up. If the market is right and the RMB appreciates by 7% over the next year, simple Chinese bank deposits look mighty attractive.
This is something to watch. China may decided that faster appreciation may be just the ticket to deal with its fuel problems. After all, if the RMB can buy more dollars it can also buy more oil. I don’t think 7% is enough to greatly help though. But if oil prices keep going up in dollar terms, it may encourage them to increase the pace of appreciation.
This would increase the pressure on the dollar (because China would not be supporting it as heavily) and would raise the price of US imports. This would increase US inflation.
In other news, Citi bank has confessed that they have lost between $8 billion to $11 billion more than originally confessed to. They also got rid of their CEO. Calculated Risk had this to say about the Citi press release…
The press release is stunning – this could just be the beginning of the write downs! They claim they will be able to maintain their dividend – I doubt it.
These losses are very dependent on house prices – “fair value of these super senior exposures is based on estimates about, among other things, future housing prices” – I’d love to see their estimate of future price declines (they are probably too optimistic.)
What happens if one of those many Citi pier loans goes bad? Ouch.
If the markets share Calculated Risk’s reaction, this could be an interesting week on Wall Street. One thing that ought to worry anyone with enough sense to keep their heart beating is the fact that Citi still seems to have no clue of what their losses are going be. Either that or they are lying through their teeth. I suspect that it is some of both.
And while all this is all very interesting, the world does not solely revolve around American and its economic issues. Things like politics and religion come into play as well. That is why it is worth keeping your eye on Pakistan. Musharraf has just declared emergency rule. As the Christian Science Monitor says…
In a dramatic move that made explicit his desperation to preserve near-absolute power, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency Saturday, effectively eliminating the opposition that has built against him in recent months.
In doing so, Mr. Musharraf introduced a new “provisional constitutional order” – a move many say looks more like martial law. Despite his assertions to the contrary, his decision has little to do with terrorism, analysts say, adding that his was a political calculation. With the Supreme Court threatening to declare his presidency illegal in a ruling this week, Musharraf struck preemptively against his foes.
Under the emergency order, he has sacked more than half of the Supreme Court, jailed up to 500 opposition party leaders, and shut down the independent media – assuming that the US has invested too much in him and the war on terror to withdraw its patronage. The order may also delay parliamentary elections, which had been scheduled to take place before Jan. 15.
This is a pattern that has been repeated many times in Pakistan’s history. Typical, the army eventually gets tired of backing an unpopular ruler and they kick him out. But is there really anyone out there that the Pakistani Army can stomach? Maybe if Musharraf becomes too much of a liability they will just replace one general with another.
Idang Alibi’s rant entitled “I Agree with Dr Watson” has everything we want in a good rant. It is heartfelt, politically incorrect, and it hits hard. Yet we were reluctant to post this rant to Ethereal Voice because of how people on the internet were approaching Mr. Alibi’s rant.
The predictable howls of outrage from the liberals and other professional victims did not concern us. But the smug satisfaction from a certain group of conservatives/libertarians who feel that IQ is some total of a person’s worth gave us pause. What is the point of posting a rant that makes people feel smug?
But Mr. Alibi’s does not really believe that IQ matters in a way that many conservatives and libertarians do. His lament is really related to moral character of his culture. We who live in more functional cultures then Mr. Alibi read his rant and feel fear, not smugness. 500 years ago, most European cultures were no more functional then his. If we keep destroying the moral underpinnings of our cultural, we will go back to that level.
This from Aviation Week….
Syria’s internal politics might have contributed to the apparent success of the Sept. 6 mission. The target was so highly classified in Damascus that the military wasn’t briefed and, therefore, air defenses were unprepared, says an Israeli official.
In other words, Syria’s military did not know that they had a sensitive nuclear site that they needed to defend. Hence, it was not defended.
You can never be sure how effective a military technology really is. It all depends on the people involved. People are talking about how Israel’s recent strike in Syria proves what great and wonderful technology they have.
But the human factor always seems to play a bigger role then the technological. Maybe Syria’s air defense technology would have been effective in competent hands.
There was a riot in Berlin between the Turks and Kurds on sunday…
For most Germans, the conflict between Turkey and the Kurdish separatist group PKK on the country’s border with Iraq seems, no doubt, far away. But Berliners on Sunday got a taste of the tiff up close and personal.
An anti-PKK demonstration in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district degenerated into violence between young Turks and Kurds on Sunday afternoon. By evening, a threatening mass of nationalist Turks had gathered around a Kurdish cultural center.
Poor Kurds. No matter where they go they can’t get away from the Turks.
Russia imposed price controls on food….
Russia is introducing Soviet-style price controls on some basic foods in an effort to prevent spiralling prices from denting the Putin administration’s popularity ahead of parliamentary polls in December.
The country’s biggest food retailers and producers have reached an agreement, expected to be signed with the Russian government on Wednesday, to freeze prices at October 15 levels on selected types of bread, cheese, milk, eggs and vegetable oil until the end of the year.
Russia’s move is the latest sign of surging agricultural prices becoming an international political issue. Big retailers will limit their mark-up on those goods to 10 per cent.
China has also agreed to food price controls; Egypt, Jordan, Bangladesh and Morocco are increasing subsidies or cutting import tariffs to lower domestic prices. Rich countries are not immune: Italian consumer groups organised a pasta boycott last month in a protest over prices.
The Russian economy ministry is also examining whether to increase a 10 per cent export tariff on wheat planned for November to 30 per cent to keep its domestic market well supplied. That prospect has pushed wheat prices up 6 per cent in Chicago in the past week, giving Moscow’s fight against rising food prices an effect beyond its borders.
Similar price controls are why it is hard to buy fuel in China.
Egypt is going to build nuclear power plants legitimately….
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Monday announced plans to build several nuclear power plants, joining several Middle East Arab countries that recently have said they are kick starting their nuclear energy ambitions.
Mubarak said in a speech broadcast live on national television that the decision to build the nuclear power stations was to diversify Egypt’s energy resources and preserve the country’s oil and gas reserves for coming generations.
“I announce before you Egypt’s position to prepare the program for building several nuclear power stations. We believe that energy security is a major part of building the future for this country and an integral part of Egypt’s national security system,” Mubarak said at a ceremony inaugurating the second phase of construction of an electrical power plant north of Cairo.
I wonder why it has taken them so long. First, they need to power. And second, it gives them cover should they ever want to build the bomb.
Hamas is trying to one up Hezbollah…
Hamas is trying to establish a bunker system as well as fortified rocket-launching and surveillance positions along the security fence with the Gaza Strip, Brig.-Gen. Moshe (Chico) Tamir, head of the Gaza Division, said Monday.
Tamir said that Hamas was “building an army” in the Gaza Strip and had obtained unprecedented capabilities through smuggling tunnels between Gaza and Egypt. On Monday, head of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) Yuval Diskin said that since Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, the Palestinians have smuggled over 112 tons of explosives into the Strip.
“They are trying to dig tunnels, build surveillance positions and mortar-fire stations along the fence,” Tamir told reporters during a briefing concerning the death of IDF reservist Ehud Efrati during clashes with Hamas gunmen early Monday morning. “They are trying to build this up and we are trying to stop them.”
Oil prices hit another record high…
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Crude-oil futures rose past $93 a barrel for the first time on Monday, after bad weather forced a halt to production in Mexico and the dollar touched the lowest level against the euro in more than eight years.
Crude futures for December delivery rose for a fourth day and closed at a new record high of $93.53 a barrel on New York Mercantile Exchange. Earlier it reached an intraday high of $93.8 a barrel.
Mexico’s state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos, one of the largest crude suppliers to the U.S., halted production of 600,000 barrels a day due to inclement weather on Sunday. Petroleos Mexicanos, also known as Pemex, said it hopes to resume production in days.
And this I intend to write more on sometime…
Federal Reserve policymakers meet Wednesday to decide what action, if any, to take on interest rates. Speculation has centered on whether the Fed will keep rates steady, cut a quarter-percentage point or trim a half-percentage point. The consensus is looking for a quarter-point cut, but a few experts expect the Fed may leave rates unchanged at 4.75%.
Unless you are a real military nerd, you probably have never heard of the Su-30 family of warplanes (the number of variants in this family of fighters can get confusing, but they are all pretty similar). But if an American fighter plane is ever shot down by a hostile jet in the near future, it will probably be a Su variant that does it.
This is not just the opinion of an armchair general. It is also based on the results of the US Air Forces own studies according to this quote from Aviation Week and Space Technology…
THE SCENARIO in which the Su-30 “always” beats the F-15 involves the Sukhoi taking a shot with a BVR missile (like the AA-12 Adder) and then “turning into the clutter notch of the F-15’s radar,” the Air Force official said. Getting into the clutter notch where the Doppler radar is ineffective involves making a descending, right-angle turn to drop below the approaching F-15 while reducing the Su-30’s relative forward speed close to zero. This is a 20-year-old air combat tactic, but the Russian fighter’s maneuverability, ability to dump speed quickly and then rapidly regain acceleration allow it to execute the tactic with great effectiveness, observers said.
If the maneuver is flown correctly, the Su-30 is invisible to the F-15’s Doppler radar–which depends on movement of its targets–until the U.S. fighter gets to within range of the AA-11 Archer infrared missile. The AA-11 has a high-off-boresight capability and is used in combination with a helmet-mounted sight and a modern high-speed processor that rapidly spits out the target solution.
Positioned below the F-15, the Su-30 then uses its passive infrared sensor to frame the U.S. fighter against the sky with no background clutter. The Russian fighter then takes its second shot, this time with the IR missile, and accelerates out of danger.
“It works in the simulator every time,” the Air Force official said. However, he did point out that U.S. pilots are flying both aircraft in the tests. Few countries maintain a pilot corps with the air-to-air combat skills needed to fly these scenarios, said an aerospace industry official involved in stealth fighter programs.
Computer simulations are not the only thing that leads people to believe that Su-30’s could shoot down current American war planes. Recent exercises against the India’s Air Forces have lead to the same conclusion. From an article in Inside the Air Force…
<
i>Although service officials have been reluctant to detail how the Indians performed against the six F-15Cs from the 3rd Wing that participated in Cope India, Rep. Duke Cunningham (R-CA) said in a Feb. 26 House Appropriations defense subcommittee hearing that U.S. F-15Cs were defeated more than 90 percent of the time in direct combat exercises against the IAF.
Officials from the 3rd Wing at Elmendorf did not provide specifics about how their aircraft fared, but said the experience is causing the service to reevaluate the way it trains its pilots for air-to-air operations.
“What happened to us was it looks like our red air training might not be as good because the adversaries are better than we thought,” Snodgrass said. “And in the case of the Indian Air Force both their training and some of their equipment was better than we anticipated.”
“Red air” refers to the way the Air Force simulates enemy capability in air combat training. Because the service has assumed for years that its fighters are more capable than enemy aircraft, the U.S. pilots that simulate the enemy, known as “red” forces, in air combat training are required to operate under rules that constrain their combat capability.
“We have always believed that our technology was superior to everyone else’s technology, that we would fight a somewhat inferior adversary, so we have had to supply a simulated adversary from our own resources; we call that ‘red air,’” Snodgrass said.
The key to the Su-30 family’s success has been Mikhail Simonov’s focus on super maneuverability. To learn about this concept you should read this interview with Mr. Simonov. Since he is in charge of the Su program, you can’t expect him to be objective. But given the success of his planes, it is worth reading. In the interview Simonov explains such things as how super maneuverability can make a plan invisible to radar for a short space of time and how super maneuverability helps with getting into firing position.
Why is it worth learning about the Su-30 family of fighters?
This quote from Global Security says it all….
<
i>On 30 July 2007 the Jerusalem Post reported that Iran was negotiating with Russia to buy 250 Sukhoi Su-30 “Flanker” fighter-bombers. Israeli defense officials were investigating the potential Iran-Russia deal, in which Iran would pay $1 billion a dozen squadrons’ worth of the jets. Iran would also buy 20 Ilyushin Il-78 Midas tankers that could extend the fighters’ range as part of the deal. The move was seen as a response to the new American plans to sell billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to potential Iranian adversaries in the Middle East – Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel. This report came soon after other deals to sell advanced Su-27 and Su-30 combat fighters to Indonesia, Malaysia and Venezuela.
And of course, India (which puts Israeli electronics in their Su -30s), China (which makes them under licenses), Algeria, and a number of states that use to be part of the former Soviet Union also fly these planes. The fact that an increasing number of countries are flying the Su-30s is one of the main reasons that US Air force feels that the F-22 is so critical to future America air superiority. I imagine that some time in the future we will find out if the F-22 has any greater success against the Su-30 family then the F-15 has had. After all, the developers of the Su-30 are not sitting on their hands.
If you are the type of person who prefers visual information to the written word, watch the u-tube clip below of a Venezuelan Su-30 going through its paces. Without doing at least some reading on the SU-30 family, I don’t think that you will recognize the maneuvers that you are seeing (especially since the camera zooms in so much that it is hard to keep your sense of perspective). But it should still give you some idea of why the Su-30 family are the most maneuverable fighter planes in the world.
Edit: Old clip was taken down by whoever put it up. Below are two new clips.
The Cobra maneuver from far enough back that can see what it looks like.
and a longer clip showing all the same maneuvers as the old clip except that that camera is zoomed in so much it is harder to understand what the plane is doing.
A record shot by the Canadians. But I don’t think that this a testament to their skill so much as it show what the .50 caliber sniper rifles can do.
The study of history is indispensable to the understanding of the present. How many people understand that Turkey has Kurdish problem because of how they did away with the Armenians?
Spengler’s essay entitled Turkey fears Kurds, not Armenians is an excellent example of the type of historical analysis that you should see more often. How many other discussions of Turkey’s “Kurdish problem” in the newspapers make reference the devils bargain that the Turks made with the Kurds in 1915?
The only problem with Spengler’s excellent essay is its conclusion. Spengler has long argued that that America should embrace the instability in the Middle East and use it for its own ends. In past essays, Spengler has held up as his model for American actions the British Empire’s method of playing tribe against tribe and nation against nation to secure their own ends.
But I think that Spengler “realism” is a fundamental misreading of history. It is true that the British often played a Machiavellian game. But the British goal was always the creation of stability. They wanted the competing powers to balance each other out so that they could play the broker. By definition, you can not control chaos.
It was chaos that eventually destroyed the British system. It was the uncontrolled fighting between Hindus and Muslims in India. It was the fighting between Jew and Arab in the Middle East. It was the fighting between blacks and whites in Africa. The effort to maintain stability became more then British people could bear and their empire fell apart.
With chaos threatening to sweep through the Middle East; with Russia in the middle of a demographic death spiral and sitting on one of the largest stocks of nuclear weapons in the world; with China one serious economic crises away from military adventuresome (how else would the goverment maintain legitimacy?); the US is faced with the prospect of so much chaos that its super power status will cease to have any real meaning.
It does not do you much good to be captain of a sinking ship or a superpower in world without stability.
Comparing the capabilities of historical figures is always a little ridicules. There are so many variables involved that who is to say that this person is better then that person. But even allowing for that, I think that it is fairly safe to say that Masud was far better commander then Musharraf is.
After all, Masud had the Taliban fought to a standstill for years. And all during this time, Pakistan and radical Arabs were providing heavy support for the Taliban. There are even reliable reports of Pakistani military officers directing artillery fire on Masud positions for the Taliban. And all during this time, Masud received next to nothing from outside sources. It was for being such a pain that they brought guys all the way from Algeria just to assassinate Masud.
Contrast this with Musharraf. He is in command of a massive army that has all kinds of modern weapons. He has received billions of dollars in aid from the US. Presumably the Taliban are not receiving nearly as much aid from outside sources as they use to get. And yet, the Taliban are overrunning Musharraf’s military bases.
It would be one thing if Musharraf was having trouble chasing the Taliban out of the mountains. Every major military in the world has had trouble with guerrillas. America in Vietnam, Russia in Afghanistan, and France in Algeria just to name a few. But it was almost unheard of for the military forces of those nations to lose a fortified military out posts to a guerrilla force. In other words, they were driven out by attrition. Not by losing ground.
By contrast, The Pakistani military is losing ground to Taliban.
I use to think the relatively poor performance of the Pakistani military was because Musharraf did not want to push too hard for domestic reasons. But the latest battle resulted in hundreds of dead Pakistani solders, scores of Pakistani solders held captive, and overrun Pakistani military outposts being used by Taliban. Now the Pakistani government is begging for peace.
Maybe Musharraf has been trying all along to defeat the Taliban and has just been getting his but kicked.
Is the drop in shipping rates charged by oil tankers in the Middle East a sign that OPEC is not able to meet its production targets?
Is the low amount of shipping traffic coming into America’s ports just noise in the data or is it a sign that we are going to have a really bad Click Here to continue reading.