NC Renegades

Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said Moscow would cut gas supplies to Ukraine on Tuesday or Wednesday because Kiev had not paid up front for more gas and might also halt coal supplies to Ukraine in retaliation for a power blackout of Crimea.

Alexander Novak, in comments to Vesti FM radio station, was speaking as Russian-annexed Crimea continued to rely on emergency generators to meet its basic power needs after unknown saboteurs blew up electricity pylons supplying the peninsula with electricity over the weekend.

Pro-Ukrainian activists have so far prevented repairs to the damaged pylons and associated power lines.

“Today or tomorrow gas deliveries will be stopped because of lack of advance payment,” said Novak, saying Ukraine was in any case using very little Russian gas.

More…

by Robert Gore

Writers are advised to avoid descriptions that read like catalogs, and instead use a few telling details that convey to the reader the essence of what’s being described. In the same vein, a few details may be all that’s necessary to understand the global economy and where it’s headed.

Detail one: the government of Portugal recently issued 12-month debt at a negative interest rate (“The Mad Euro Project Just Got A Lot Madder,” by Don Quijones). Detail two: the Chinese producer price index (PPI) has fallen for 44 straight months (“The Great Fall Of China Started At Least 4 Years Ago,” by Raúl Ilargi Meijer). Detail three: the so-called FANG stocks—Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google—have accounted for the S&P 500’s entire 1 percent gain this year (as of November 20). Their market capitalizations have gone up 60 percent versus a combined increase in earnings of 13 percent. Without those four, the S&P is down 2.5 percent (“When Wall Street Gets DeFANGed———Look Out Below!” by David Stockman).

It is a truism of human psychology that a dollar today is worth more to us than a dollar in the future. To be induced to give up a dollar today, we need to be paid more than a dollar in the future. That premium is interest, and the psychological truism implies that it will always be at a positive rate. How then is Portugal able to borrow money and repay less than the amount it’s borrowing twelve months hence? It’s like seeing water run uphill.

More…

More…

h/t Robin S

Source

The 7th largest economy on the entire planet, Brazil, has been gripped by a horrifying recession, as has much of the rest of South America.  But it isn’t just South America that is experiencing a very serious economic downturn.  We have just learned that Japan (the third largest economy in the world) has lapsed into recession.  So has Canada.  So has Russia.  The dominoes are starting to fall, and it looks like the global economic crisis that has already started is going to accelerate as we head into the end of the year.  At this point, global trade is already down about 8.4 percent for the year, and last week the Baltic Dry Shipping Index plummeted to a brand new all-time record low.  Unfortunately for all of us, the Federal Reserve is about to do something that will make this global economic slowdown even worse.

Throughout 2015, the U.S. dollar has been getting stronger.  That sounds like good news, but the truth is that it is not.  When the last financial crisis ended, emerging markets went on a debt binge unlike anything we have ever seen before.  But much of that debt was denominated in U.S. dollars, and now this is creating a massive problem.  As the U.S. dollar has risen, the prices that many of these emerging markets are getting for the commodities that they export have been declining.  Meanwhile, it is taking much more of their own local currencies to pay back and service all of the debts that they have accumulated.  Similar conditions contributed to the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, the Asian currency crisis of the 1990s and the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.

More…

A series of videos apparently leaked by the Russian Defense Ministry reveal the presence of Iranian F-14 and MiG -29 fighters in Syrian skies for the first time. They were shown by “The Aviationist,” Italian magazine, escorting heavy Russian bombers, including the Tupolev TU-160, the heaviest, fastest and most destructive bomber ever built, on missions no more than 150 km from Israel’s northern border.

The ageing F-14s, built in the 1970s by American aviation giant Grumman, were originally sold to Iran when the Shah was in power and taken over by the reorganized Iranian air force after the 1979 Islamic revolution. Upgraded many times, the F-14s now feature state-of-the-art avionics, weapons and navigation systems, procured byTehran despite the strict UN embargo on their sale to the Islamic Republic.

More…