There isn't a mysterious censorship blackout at all. In the EU, the deficit is calculated per member state:

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Government_finance_statistics


If you download the document it should show you the actual numbers in billions and trillions.

The EU28 are all the countries in the EU (including the UK in this particular calculation). The EU19 are the 19 countries of the eurozone.

They're not feeble-minded. Just pointing out that GDP is flawed and can be manipulated. We've only been obsessed with GDP since the 1960's - prior to that people had other methods of judging whether an economy was doing well. For example, if your tax rates stay steady from year to year, but tax receipts fall, then the economy is doing badly no matter what GDP says.

These problems are basically self-solving problems. People think that we should stop it before it is too late but it will stop even if it is too late, just not with humanity. For example, the world is going into a climate change right now right? Do you really think world will stop because all humans die?

That's not my reading of what he said. It's more about the fact that GDP doesn't reflect "the big picture": living standards, inequality, environmental issues. Only looking at GDP makes everything about achieving growth at any cost.

How would this be closing doors, ending opportunities?

Thousands gathered in downtown Hong Kong on Monday night for a rally to condemn a police crackdown on a major fundraising platform for anti-government protesters and to call for sanctions against HSBC, which shut down its account earlier.

Before the authorised rally began at 7pm in Central, there were minor scuffles between protesters and riot police at a nearby pedestrian underpass, when officers checked booths distributing masks to participants. As police left the scene, they were verbally abused by protesters.
The organiser estimated 45,000 joined the assembly in Edinburgh Place, near the bank’s Hong Kong headquarters. Police put the turnout at 3,300.

Last Thursday, police froze about HK$70 million (US$9 million) raised by activists via the Spark Alliance platform to support protesters and arrested four people for money laundering.

Officers suspect the funds were used for personal gain and other illegal activities, including participation rewards for young demonstrators.
But Sunny Cheung, one of the organisers of Monday’s “Sparking the World Afire Assembly” and spokesman for a group called Hong Kong Higher Education International Affairs Delegation, said the police’s action was arbitrary.

“This is actually detrimental to Hong Kong’s status as an international financial hub,” Cheung said. “We condemn the government for using politics to override the economy.”

The organiser also called for action against HSBC, which closed Spark Alliance’s bank account in November. Cheung urged the US government and businesses to sanction or boycott the banking giant.

Earlier, in a rare statement and without stating names, the city’s largest bank said the decision to shut down the account was in accordance with international regulatory standards.

Ventus Lau Wing-hong, another of the assembly’s organisers, said freezing the bank account would not lessen support for the protests.
“For any of us who have donated to Spark Alliance, we could now be labelled as criminals,” Lau said. “But that does not scare us.”

He said Spark Alliance was formed out of a belief for revolution, to support frontline protesters and go against the tyranny of political and business pressure.

A 52-year-old saleswoman, who gave her name as Catherine, said she had donated a few hundred dollars to Spark Alliance when she joined peaceful gatherings in the past.

“The money I donated came from my own hard work at my job, it’s not ‘black money’ at all,” she said. “Police are just using any excuse to cut off support for the young protesters.”

A clerk in her thirties, who only gave her surname as Cheung, made a one-off donation of about HK$1,000 to Spark Alliance via an interbank online payment system.

“Even though I made my donation through the bank, I still have a thin line of trust that my account activities will not be handed over to police,” she said.

Cheung, who holds an HSBC account, said she was considering switching to another bank.

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3043325/thousands-join-hong-kong-rally-condemn-crackdown

Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz would like gross domestic product (GDP) to go the way of the pyramid inch and the Arabic mile. “The world is facing three existential crises: a climate crisis, an inequality crisis and a crisis in democracy,” he writes. “Yet the accepted ways by which we measure economic performance give absolutely no hint that we might be facing a problem.” He’s right! In the United States, GDP is on the upswing, yet Los Angeles burns regularly, and the U.S. president faces impeachment.

The problem, he says, is that politicians see positive GDP figures and continue with the status quo. GDP gives no hint of environmental degradation or resource depletion, nor inequality, middle-class suffering, or lower standards of living. “If growth is not sustainable because we are destroying the environment and using up scarce natural resources our statistics should warn us,” he says. “It is clear that something is fundamentally wrong with the way we assess economic performance and social performance.” Preach.

His new book, Measuring What Counts: The Global Movement for Well-Being, cowritten with French economists Jean-Paul Fitoussi and Martine Durand, provides a blueprint for how countries can use more appropriate metrics that account for details such as sustainability and—imagine!—how people feel about their lives.

This all began a decade ago, when Nicolas Sarkozy, then the president of France, asked Stiglitz and fellow Nobel winner Amartya Sen, along with Fitoussi, to set up a commission studying GDP. They published their early deliberations in a book called Mismeasuring Our Lives.

From an economist’s perspective, metrics are the key to everything. “If we measure the wrong thing, we will do the wrong thing,” writes Stiglitz.


https://www.fastcompany.com/90435788/a-nobel-winning-economist-says-its-time-to-kill-the-gdp

Is there a committee or organization that overlooks what the federal reserve does? Or are they higher than government and other entities?

Because lets be realistic , if you had a money printer , wouldn't you just go absolutely nuts with it and distribute back to the population at interest?

What if,... you're just watching someone on a Casino that suddenly keeps winning for a streak then after that he notice you and gave some money as a tip for his luck. Would you use the money he gave you to try your luck on that game (or any game you like) ? Or just keep the money for yourself for a good cause?

Are we heading towards recession like 2008 wherein people have cut down their spendings and companies are laying off their employees, we can see cost-cutting everywhere, is it really a recession or just the panic about an uncertain future which is creating a gloomy atmosphere everywhere?

Greeks will be hit with a hefty fine if they do not spend almost a third of their income electronically in an unprecedented bid by the new government to stamp out rampant tax evasion.

The government expects to raise more than €500 million ($808 million) every year from the initiative that will force Greeks to spend 30 per cent of their income electronically, Alex Patelis, the prime minister's chief economic adviser, revealed.

Individuals that fail to meet the target will be hit with a 22 per cent fine on the shortfall. Therefore, if an individual spends just 20 per cent of their income through electronic means, they would face a 22 per cent tax on the remaining 10 per cent bar some exclusions.

The scheme is a radical attempt to cast some light on Greece's huge shadow economy, the world's largest, and is part of new prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis's sweeping overhaul to revive growth.

"This is a big initiative next year that will either raise more revenue because [people] will pay the penalty or more likely because of the [higher] VAT receipts," Mr Patelis told The Telegraph.

The revenue predicted is likely to be at the "lower end" of estimates and the country's banks will help impose the measures by reporting spending to the authorities.

If a Greek earned €1,000 per month and only paid 15 per cent of their income electronically, they would pay a fine of around €400 every year, for example. The government is confident it will not drive more workers into the country's booming shadow economy and tempt them to understate their earnings, a key problem in Greece.

Greeks can use debit cards, credit cards, bank transfers and ecommerce for the electronic transactions, which includes rent.

But many workers are paid their wages in cash, which they then use to pay their rent and bills. Greece also has one of the lowest internet usage rates in the EU at 72 per cent. This suggests that some in the country could struggle to meet the 30 per cent target.

Southern Europe, particularly Greece, have booming shadow economies. A study by the Institute for Applied Economic Research in 2017 found that Greece had the largest in the world, being equivalent to 22 per cent of gross domestic product.

Individuals and businesses are enticed to under report earnings and avoid taxation due to high rates and cumbersome bureaucracy.

Tax evasion has been labelled a "Greek national sport" and it was estimated in 2016 to cost the country's coffers up to €16 billion every year, largely through fraud on VAT or income tax.

However, Mr Mitsotakis' government is cutting the tax burden of workers and businesses in an attempt to shock the Greek economy back into life.

Greece has returned to growth but its economy remains sluggish with output still a quarter below pre financial crisis levels.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/greeks-set-to-face-heavy-fines-if-they-don-t-spend-30-per-cent-of-their-income-electronically-20191209-p53i14.html

Individuals and businesses are enticed to under report earnings and avoid taxation due to high rates and cumbersome bureaucracy.

However, Mr Mitsotakis' government is cutting the tax burden of workers and businesses in an attempt to shock the Greek economy back into life.

The Justice Department seems to be arguing that his "highly technical information" constitutes unlicensed provision of "services" or "technology" to North Korea, which is a sanctions violation.

It strikes me as a bit odd too. Things like nuclear or chemical engineering materials, military-related stuff.......I get that. This makes it seem like you can't bring anything into North Korea, not even words.

One library was available for only two days, but the second was live for nearly a year.

The Python security team removed two trojanized Python libraries from PyPI (Python Package Index) that were caught stealing SSH and GPG keys from the projects of infected developers.

The two libraries were created by the same developer and mimicked other more popular libraries -- using a technique called typosquatting to register similarly-looking names.

The first is "python3-dateutil," which imitated the popular "dateutil" library. The second is "jeIlyfish" (the first L is an I), which mimicked the "jellyfish" library.

The two malicious clones were discovered on Sunday, December 1, by German software developer Lukas Martini. Both libraries were removed on the same day after Martini notified dateutil developers and the PyPI security team.

While the python3-dateutil was created and uploaded on PyPI two days before, on November 29, the jeIlyfish library had been available for nearly a year, since December 11, 2018.

STEALING SSH AND GPG KEYS
According to Martini, the malicious code was present only in the jeIlyfish library. The python3-dateutil package didn't contain malicious code of its own, but it did import the jeIlyfish library, meaning it was malicious by association.

The code downloaded and read a list of hashes stored in a GitLab repository. The nature and purpose of these hashes was initially unknown, as neither Martini or the PyPI team detailed the behavior in great depth before the library was promptly removed from PyPI.

ZDNet asked today Paul Ganssle, a member of the dateutil dev team, to take a closer look at the malicious code and put it in perspective for our readers.

"The code directly in the `jeIlyfish` library downloads a file called 'hashsum' that looks like nonsense from a gitlab repo, then decodes that into a Python file and executes it," Ganssle told ZDNet.

"It looks like [this file] tries to exfiltrate SSH and GPG keys from a user's computer and send them to this IP address: http://68.183.212.246:32258."

"It also lists a bunch of directories, home directory, PyCharm Projects directory," Ganssle added. "If I had to guess what the purpose of that is, I would say it's to figure out what projects the credentials work for so that the attacker can compromise that person's projects."

DEVELOPERS ADVISED TO REVIEW PROJECTS
Both of the malicious libraries were uploaded on PyPI by the same developer, who used the username of olgired2017 -- also used for the GitLab account.

It is believed that olgired2017 created the dateutil clone in an attempt to capitalize on the original's library popularity and increase the reach of the malicious code; however, this also brought more attention from more developers and eventually ended up in exposing his entire operation.

Excluding the malicious code, both typosquatted packages were identical copies of the original libraries, meaning they would have worked as the originals.

Developers who didn't pay attention to the libraries they downloaded or imported into their projects should check to see if they've used the correct package names and did not accidentally use the typosquatted versions.

If they accidentally used any of the two, developers are advised to change the all SSH and GPG keys they've used over the past year.

This is the third time the PyPI team intervenes to remove typo-squatted malicious Python libraries from the official repository. Similar incidents have happened in September 2017 (ten libraries), October 2018 (12 libraries), and July 2019 (three libraries).

https://www.zdnet.com/article/two-malicious-python-libraries-removed-from-pypi/