Tag Archives: political economy

This is News?

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US Secretary of State John Kerry on Sunday urged Britain and the European Union to manage their divorce responsibly for the sake of global markets and citizens….

Kerry said

The most important thing is that all of us, as leaders, work together to provide as much continuity, as much stability, as much certainty as possible[.]

Empty remarks by the motorboat skipper who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair.  After all, what else would he say—that the EU and Great Britain should go for each other’s throats, and the first slash wins?

On the other hand, after President Barack Obama threatened the Brits should they go against their Betters and vote to leave, maybe this is news.

EU and Taxes

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The European Union agreed Tuesday on a set of rules and standards aimed at closing loopholes that allow wealthy multinationals to shift profits and avoid footing large tax bills.
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“Today’s agreement strikes a serious blow against those engaged in corporate tax avoidance,” said Pierre Moscovici, the bloc’s tax affairs commissioner.

Notice that.  There’s not the slightest glimmer of a concept of discouraging corporate tax avoidance by lowering tax rates.  No, it’s not the corporation’s money; it’s the EU’s, and they’ll decide how much of the money gained by a corporation the EU will permit it to retain.

Trailing

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The People’s Republic of China now has the fastest supercomputer in the world.  In fact, it has the two fastest.  There’s more to it than this, too, as Horst Simon, Deputy Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, noted:

The fact that every single piece is Chinese-made is huge.

side from minor matters like predicting the weather and the investment markets, these kinds of computers are useful in identifying and solving complex problems involved in design of equipment, weapons, defense weapons, collating intelligence information and making serious predictions based on that information, and on and on and on.

This is an area in which we can’t afford to lag.  Especially to trail our enemies.

Boeing, Iran, and Aircraft Sales

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Iran reportedly reached an agreement Sunday to buy 100 planes from Boeing, pending the final authorization from US Treasury officials.

These are passenger aircraft, ostensibly destined for Iranair and other Iranian airline companies.

There are a couple of questions about this deal, though.  One is where will the money (in the neighborhood of $17 billion) come from with which Iran will pay for these aircraft?  Who will lend Iran the money?

The second question has more dire possibilities.  Regardless of Boeing’s motives (and I do not doubt them), in the end, these are fundamentally transport aircraft.  What assurances can there be that Iran won’t turn them over to their military for transport of equipment and soldiers, whether to support Iranian military adventurism (Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, for instance) or to support Iranian terrorist clients (Hamas and Hezbollah, for instance)?

Laughingstock

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The Pentagon held a video-teleconference with Russian defense officials Saturday, two days after Russia bombed Pentagon and CIA-backed rebels not once, but twice on Thursday near Syria’s border with Iraq and Jordan.

And especially [emphasis added]

The second wave of strikes occurred after the US military called Russia on an emergency byline established following Russia’s deployment of dozens of fighter jets and attack helicopters to Syria in late 2015.

This is how seriously Russia takes President Barack Obama’s (d) administration.  This is the contempt Vladimir Putin has for this President and for Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her Reset that she wants to extend.  A Reset that is too expensive, indeed.

Elections have consequences.