93 million USD spent on this project not including future maintenance costs and upkeep. The projected ROI is what, exactly?

HONG KONG -- China's banking regulator announced on Friday that two local banks in the northeastern province of Liaoning have entered bankruptcy procedures. The cases seem relatively modest, but the careful handling by authorities highlights the latent risks carried by the country's smaller lenders.

The China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC) said it has "in principle agreed" to the bankruptcy applications made by Liaoyang Rural Commercial Bank and Liaoning Taizehe Village Bank. In two separate but virtually identical announcements on its official webpage, the regulator demanded both banks to "strictly abide by the relevant laws and regulations in conducting follow-up works."

The commission also said the banks are required to report in a timely manner "if any serious situation occurs."

Local financial regulators in Liaoning provided a few more details about the situation. According to the joint statement issued on Friday, the banks were engaged in "operations that violated the laws and regulations," and they have "gravely destroyed local financial orders, bringing about serious risks."

The statement neither elaborated on what kind of illegal activities have occurred nor on what sort of situation is emerging on the ground.

Interestingly, the local regulators began taking action much earlier than the official announcements on Friday. The joint statement revealed that all personnel, branches and deposits were being accepted by Shenyang Rural Commercial Bank, another local bank based in the provincial capital Shenyang. Actually, the two statements approving the entrance into bankruptcy proceedings that the CBIRC posted on Friday are dated Aug. 3 and 4, respectively.

The preparedness likely reflects the level of wariness among authorities in the wake of a series of bank runs and instances of social unrest triggered by small, village-level banks in Henan Province that last month refused to allow ordinary depositors to withdraw their own cash. The CBIRC later stepped in to reimburse depositors.

The Liaoning regulators in the Friday statement stressed that "the interests of depositors and other creditors are sufficiently guaranteed."

Elaine Xu, an analyst at Fitch Ratings, pointed out the potential risk involving smaller banks in China. "They generally have weaker profitability and thinner capital buffers than their larger peers because of their smaller franchises, weaker funding profiles and lack of strong shareholder support or linkage with the central government," she wrote in a report published on Monday. According to Fitch, small regional banks account for about 30% of the sector's total assets in China.

In China, bank liquidations are rare. The most recent case came in 2020, when Baoshang Bank, based in Inner Mongolia, was declared insolvent. The bank was controlled by Tomorrow Holding, led by Chinese-Canadian billionaire Xiao Jianhua, who went missing from Hong Kong's Four Seasons Hotel in January 2017 and apparently spirited away to mainland China. Xiao was sentenced to 13 years in prison by a Shanghai court last week on multiple charges, including illegally absorbing public deposits, betraying the use of entrusted property, and the illegal use of funds and bribery. Tomorrow Holding was fined 55.03 billion yuan ($8.01 billion), while Xiao was fined 6.5 million yuan.



https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/China-debt-crunch/Two-Chinese-local-banks-enter-bankruptcy-procedures

Attorney General Merrick Garland has until Sept. 5 to determine what, if any, new laws are necessary for the Fed to move forward with a digital dollar.

A bipartisan campaign is underway to push the Federal Reserve to launch a digital dollar — a crypto-friendly breakthrough that could transform payment systems, big banks and the virtual asset industry itself.

But as lawmakers and the Biden administration position the potential central bank digital currency as a key tool for maintaining the dollar’s global supremacy, banking and crypto powerbrokers are building a case for Washington to stay away.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has until Sept. 5 to determine what, if any, new laws are necessary for the Fed to move forward with a digital dollar. In Congress, House Financial Services Chair Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and Republican Rep. Patrick McHenry (N.C.) are expected to soon announce a bill that would order a study of a Fed currency as well as set new rules for stablecoins — privately issued digital tokens whose value is linked to the dollar.

A central bank digital currency, or CBDC, would mimic cash in many respects — allowing consumers to conduct transactions using digital wallets that would likely be maintained by banks or other financial intermediaries. Those services promise to offer speedier, cheaper and more secure services than what’s now available through commercial banks, fintechs or crypto.

Its arrival is hardly assured. But as lawmakers from both sides of the aisle line up behind the idea, they are on a collision course with the banks, crypto firms and private stablecoin issuers who say it would be disastrous.

“There is a ‘don’t take my cheese’ opposition coming largely from the banks who view the CBDC as a potential disrupter of their very profitable payment systems,” said Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), who released a Fed digital dollar proposal earlier this year. “It’s not a coincidence that pretty much every single bank and every single bank association has been in my office.”

Private stablecoin issuers have the same “parochial objection that the banks do,” Himes added. “They see CBDCs — and I think rightly so — as a potential threat.”

Banks and credit union groups have flooded the Fed, Treasury and Commerce Departments with letters calling CBDCs risky, unnecessary or — depending on its design — a slow-moving torpedo that would drain deposits from commercial banks. Digital asset groups and stablecoin businesses are making similar arguments, claiming that a digital dollar would disrupt the development of blockchain-based payment systems that facilitate trades for popular cryptocurrencies.

A CBDC could “end up becoming the equivalent of the FAA flying planes and building jet engines as opposed to designating competition rules-based safe conduct in the skies,” said Dante Disparte, the chief strategy officer and head of global policy at Circle, the world’s second-largest stablecoin issuer.

It’s “a solution looking for a problem,” he added.

That problem could be pressure from overseas. At least 25 countries have launched or piloted their own central bank digital currencies — a list that includes China, Russia and Saudi Arabia, according to the Atlantic Council. Roughly one-in-five Chinese citizens had downloaded a digital wallet linked to a pilot version of the digital yuan as of the end of last year.

Last month, Waters said the bill that she and McHenry are sponsoring would “require the Federal Reserve to research and develop a central bank digital currency, so we remain competitive globally.”

The banking and crypto sectors are politically strange bedfellows.

Even as banks pitch blockchain projects and digital asset partnerships, they have been applying pressure on Congress and federal agencies to take a tougher line against lightly regulated digital exchanges and lenders. Crypto industry leaders, for their part, say their products will eventually stand toe-to-toe with banks when it comes to payment systems and financial services.

Their shared skepticism of a CBDC stems from what could occur if the Fed amasses customer deposits that are connected to widely used payment systems, said Paul Merski, who oversees congressional relations and strategy at the Independent Community Bankers of America.

“Whether it’s private commercial banks or private companies dealing in cryptocurrencies, the Fed is viewed as competition to those projects,” he said.

The Fed, along with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, has spent more than a year researching the technical and financial plumbing that’s needed for a CBDC to work. While the central bank hasn’t taken a position on whether the U.S. should move forward, Fed Vice Chair Lael Brainard warned the House Financial Services Committee in May that delays could be perilous if other countries develop successful, widely used CBDCs that could be used at scale in cross-border transactions.

“I would hate for Congress to decide, five years from now, ‘You, Federal Reserve, you need to catch up. China’s out there, the [European Central Bank] is out there,” she said at the time.

Fed officials say they have no intention of moving forward without “clear support” from Congress and the executive branch. But they did release a discussion paper in January — prior to President Joe Biden’s executive order directing the exploration of a digital dollar — that offers clues on how the central bank could proceed should it receive the green light.

The Fed made clear it doesn’t envision consumers having deposit accounts directly at the central bank. Instead, it suggested that banks or other regulated financial firms would offer online wallets to manage holdings and process payments

Unlike money deposited in commercial checking or savings accounts, which banks can then lend out and invest, customers’ digital dollars would be in the equivalent of a black box; banks couldn’t touch it. Those holdings would be considered a liability of the Fed — similar to cash — which means they wouldn’t need deposit insurance.

The banking industry fears that this “intermediated” model could prompt customers to withdraw money from their checking and savings accounts and pour it into new digital wallets, eliminating funding that banks use to dole out mortgages, car loans and other credit products. A retail model where the Fed issued digital dollars directly to customers — bypassing banks entirely — could be even more dangerous.

“A CBDC would remain a liability of the Federal Reserve — remain on the balance sheet of the federal reserve — regardless of how it’s distributed,” said Brooke Ybarra, the head of the American Bankers Association’s office of innovation. “Because that liability stays on the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, it’s effectively a competitor of retail bank deposits and limits the ability of that money to be lent back out into the economy.”

Those challenges aren’t insurmountable, said Jessica Renier, the Institute of International Finance’s managing director of digital finance. They do, however, reflect just how much the design of a digital dollar would ultimately affect the health of traditional financial institutions.

Many Republicans — as well as some Democrats — are just as concerned about what a digital dollar might mean for the domestic development of crypto payment businesses and reserve-backed stablecoins. Those products are largely used on digital asset exchanges and decentralized finance platforms, but certain companies — including Circle — are pushing to incorporate their dollar-pegged tokens into commercial payment systems.

Last year, GOP members of the House Financial Services Committee — led by McHenry — put out a statement saying that any Fed-issued digital asset “should not impede the development and utilization” of stablecoins like Circle or other dollar-pegged digital tokens that have yet to be developed.

And even though the Fed’s outline included language to ensure customer privacy, there are concerns about surveillance and the potential to block digital transactions.

“The prospect of government surveillance of Americans’ individual financial transactions through a CBDC and Fed accounts raises serious privacy concerns, not to mention concerns about government control and politicization of loans, online payments, credit scores, tax compliance, federal contracts, monetary policy and the like,” said Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.), who also sits on the Financial Services Committee.

While stablecoins are hardly beloved by many in the banking sector, there are questions about the extent to which a CBDC would solve problems that are already being addressed by existing programs like FedNow — a central bank-managed system for near-instant payments that’s set to go live next year, three banking industry policy experts told POLITICO.

At least one key member of the Fed has had the same thought.

“FedNow will help transform the way payments are made through new services that allow consumers and businesses to make payments conveniently, in real time, on any day, and with immediate availability of funds for receivers,” Federal Reserve Governor Michelle Bowman said in a speech on Wednesday. “My expectation is that FedNow addresses the issues that some have raised about the need for a CBDC.”


https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/22/crypto-fed-digital-dollar-00052515

The US mortgage industry is seeing its first lenders go out of business after a sudden spike in lending rates, and the wave of failures that’s coming could be the worst since the housing bubble burst about 15 years ago.

There’s no systemic meltdown coming this time around, because there hasn’t been the same level of lending excesses and because many of the biggest banks pulled back from mortgages after the financial crisis. But market watchers nonetheless expect a string of bankruptcies broad enough to trigger a spike in layoffs in an industry that employs hundreds of thousands of workers, and potentially an increase in some lending rates. More of the business is now controlled by independent lenders, and with mortgage volumes plunging this year, many are struggling to stay afloat.

“The nonbanks are poorly capitalized,” said Nancy Wallace, chair of the real estate group at Berkeley Haas, the business school at University of California, Berkeley. “When the mortgage market tanks they are in trouble.”

In 2004, only about a third of the top 20 lenders for refinancings were independent firms. Last year, two-thirds of the top 20 were non-bank lenders, according to LendingPatterns.com, which analyzes the industry for mortgage lenders. Since 2016, banks have seen their share of the market shrink to about a third from about half, according to news and data provider Inside Mortgage Finance. 



Image link:  https://i.ibb.co/VjPJCSQ/us-mortgage.jpg

Many of the so-called shadow lenders will emerge from this slowdown relatively unscathed. But some lenders have already stopped operating or scaled down dramatically, including and Sprout Mortgage and First Guaranty Mortgage Corp. Both specialized in riskier lending that isn’t eligible for government backing.

First Guaranty, a company that according to court papers is majority owned by fixed-income giant Pacific Investment Management Co., filed for bankruptcy, saying it failed after it made loans earlier this year that dropped in value. It was holding onto those loans until it had enough to bundle into bonds and sell to investors, and it had been temporarily funding them with a line of credit.

Once interest rates started to climb, lending volume shrank across the industry, according to court papers. That meant the company could no longer find enough new loans to bundle, or get enough financing to keep operating, said First Guaranty’s chief executive officer, Aaron Samples. Firms included Flagstar Bank and Customers Bank are owed about $418 million, according to court documents.

First Guaranty employed 600 people before it filed bankruptcy in June and made $10.6 billion in loans last year, according to court records. Days before seeking court protection, the company fired 471 workers because it couldn’t get enough financing to overcome a cash crunch.

Independent lenders gained a toehold in the market because banks pulled back so much after the 2008 financial crisis, which started with excessive lending in mortgages. Regulators have often encouraged the retreat, and it’s still happening: Wells Fargo & Co., the biggest Wall Street firm in the US mortgage business, plans to shrink its home loan empire, Bloomberg reported this week.

Unlike banks, independent lenders often don’t have emergency programs they can tap for financing when times get tough, nor do they have stable deposit funding. They depend on credit lines that tend to be short-term and depend on mortgage prices. So when they’re stuck with bad assets, they face margin calls and potentially go under.

Many independent lenders have managed their risk well, and for lenders that work extensively with government-backed companies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the situation is less dire. They can often get emergency funding from government-sponsored enterprises if they run into difficulty. But those lenders that make riskier loans and work less often with the GSEs have fewer options when they face margin calls.   

“Part of the reason these companies are distressed is because the loans can’t go to the GSEs for funding,” said David Goodson, head of securitized credit at Voya Investment Management, in a phone interview. “The options for funding are more limited which is especially painful when financial conditions are tightening.”

Margin Calls

Many other lenders have seen the value of their loans drop, said Scott Buchta, head of fixed-income strategy at Brean Capital, an independent investment bank. The Federal Reserve has tightened rates by 2.25 percentage points this year in an effort to tame inflation, and 30-year US mortgage rates have surged above 5% for government-backed loans. That’s close to their highest levels since the financial crisis, from around 3.1% at the end of last year. 

That’s beaten down the value of home loans made just a few months ago. A mortgage made in January and not eligible for government backing could have traded in early August somewhere around 85 cents on the dollar. Lenders usually try to make loans worth somewhere around 102 cents to cover their upfront costs.

For a lender whose loans dropped to 85 cents, the losses can be debilitating, even if they aren’t realized yet. On top of that, business is broadly plunging. Overall mortgage application volume has plunged by more than 50% this year, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. These business conditions are spurring banks that provide lines of credit known as warehouses to make margin calls and cut credit.

“The warehouse lenders in this industry seem to be extremely on top of things in this downturn, unlike in ‘08,” said bankruptcy attorney Mark Power, who is representing creditors in the First Guaranty bankruptcy. “They are making margin calls quickly.”

Banks have emergency funding they can tap in times of crisis, which can often allow them to stay afloat in hard times. But not always: emergency financing from the Federal Reserve is usually only available for solvent institutions with a chance of recovering. In the last downturn, so many banks had so many soured loans and struggling assets of all kinds that hundreds failed. Nonbanks went bust as well.



https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-19/mortgage-lenders-are-starting-to-go-broke-as-loan-volumes-plunge

There have been reports for a long time that a lot of the UK's sewage ends up being dumped in rivers - I'm not sure why it doesn't get used to produce fertiliser (as long as it's used controllable as a biofuel too and the useful products are extracted - not the whole thing as that could cause a lot of contamination).

“The eggs of most intestinal worms are pretty tough, otherwise you’d digest them and they’d never get to reproduce and infect other people,” says Mitchell, who was part of another team that recently found parasites in the 4,500 year-old poop left by the builders of Stonehenge. “The tough wall that stops you digesting them also makes it hard for soil fungi and bacteria to break these things down. So many of them can survive in soil for hundreds or thousands of years in the right kind of conditions.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-were-medieval-monks-so-susceptible-to-intestinal-worms-180980608/

The pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and the ensuing supply-chain chaos have collectively driven up the prices of everything from wheat and sunflower oil to lemons and avocados.

While the supply-chain has been in a state of disruption since the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020, the dislocations have been compounded by the war between Russia and Ukraine, both of which are major wheat exporters. This has contributed to food inflation that's hitting the most vulnerable especially hard, according to Mercy Corps, a humanitarian organization that distributes aid to the needy globally.

"Skyrocketing food prices in 2022 have meant that the cash assistance we provide vulnerable families doesn't go as far," Tjada D'Oyen McKenna, the CEO of Mercy Corps, told Insider. "The main constraint to accessing food is decreased purchasing power coupled with increased food prices."

Last month, Ukraine and Russia reached an agreement brokered by the United Nations and Turkey that allows Ukraine to restart grain exports out of the Black Sea. The move has offered some relief to global markets: The UN Food and Agriculture Organization Food Price Index — which tracks a basket of commonly trade commodities — fell for the fourth consecutive month in July after hitting a record high earlier in 2022.

But, the price declines are unlikely to trickle down to the consumers immediately.

"While many food prices have been decreasing in recent weeks, with some returning to prewar levels, markets will continue to be volatile and even if global prices come down, local markets may not see price adjustments for upwards of a year," said McKenna.

And by then, we could see a new chapter in the food crisis that could push up prices again. Here's how the food crisis could change — for the worse — in 2023.

This year, it's a logistics problem. Next year, it could be a supply issue.

This year's food crisis is mostly due to a logistics disruption tied to issues in shipping Ukrainian and Russian grains out of the countries. But next year, the food supply itself could be in peril — particularly in Ukraine.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, launched on February 24, threw a wrench into the annual farm cycle and disrupted the spring sowing season in April and May. Another sowing cycle takes place from September to November.

In July, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy took to Twitter to warn that the country's farm harvest could be halved this year due to the war. "Ukrainian harvest this year is under the threat to be twice less," Zelenskyy tweeted.

In an August 17 report, consultancy firm McKinsey forecast a sharp drop in harvest volumes: It estimates Ukraine's production of grains, such as wheat, will drop by 35% to 45% in the next harvesting season.

"The ongoing conflict is interfering with farmers' ability to prepare fields, plant seeds, and protect and fertilize crops, which will likely result in even lower volumes next harvest season," McKinsey wrote in the report about global food security amid the Ukraine war and impact from climate change.

Per McKinsey forecasts, Ukraine's harvest will be 30 to 44 million tons below normal levels this year. This is due to fewer plantings on an acreage basis, reduced farmer cashflow as much of their last harvest can't be shipped, and the possibility of grain left untended or unharvested, the consultancy firm said.

"In the next planting season, due to the war's disruption of Ukrainian planting and harvesting and combined with less-than-optimal inputs into Russian, Brazilian, and other growing countries' crops, supply will likely tighten," wrote McKinsey. The consultancy interviewed local growers and reviewed local data for its report.

Soaring fertilizer prices and climate change add to supply shock

Russia accounted for almost one-fifth of 2021 fertilizer exports, but the war in Ukraine has caused severe disruption to the supply of crop nutrient. Prices of urea, a common nitrogen fertilizer, have more than doubled from a year ago, according to Bloomberg's Green Markets service. As a result, farmers around the world are using less fertilizer.

"Fertilizer shortages and higher prices for fertilizers are also expected to reduce yields in countries that depend heavily on fertilizer imports, such as Brazil. This will likely further decrease the volume of grain on the world market," McKinsey wrote in its report.

Mercy Corps has observed the same trend. "Farmers we work with in Guatemala have been unable to invest in the next production cycle either because they cannot afford to buy fertilizers and other inputs derived from oil, such as plastics for padding and pipes for irrigation systems, or because they cannot find agricultural inputs in the market," said McKenna.

Given that the shocks to farming and supply come at a time of extreme climate conditions, including severe droughts in Europe and floods in Australia, McKinsey expects the next food crisis to be worse than those in 2007 to 2008, and from 2010 to 2011.

"The conflict in Ukraine is shaking important pillars of the global food system in an already precarious context," the consultancy said.



https://www.businessinsider.com/next-food-crisis-supply-logistics-war-fertilizer-prices-harvest-2022-8

Russia accounted for almost one-fifth of 2021 fertilizer exports

The U.S. Supreme Court has lately polarized Americans with controversial verdicts on abortion, guns, climate change and more. Another case on its docket, by contrast, will get intense scrutiny mainly from millions of Americans living abroad.

Alexandru Bittner v. United States is about some of the tax and compliance rules the U.S. slaps on its own expats. These can be so draconian as to amount to criminalizing the sheer act of living outside the U.S.

Bittner is a businessman and a dual citizen of the U.S. and Romania. He used to live and work in Romania and, naturally, had to open financial accounts there. What he apparently didn’t know—many expats don’t—is that he had to declare all these accounts every year to the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, on a form colloquially known as the FBAR.

All parties in the case agree that Bittner’s failure to make timely and proper disclosures was “non-willful,” meaning unintentional. Even so, the penalties are stiff. One appeals court assessed his fine at $50,000, or $10,000 for each of the five years in which the FBAR was omitted. Another court put the punishment at $2.72 million, or $10,000 for each account that should have been on each FBAR, each year.

The first amount is painful, the second ruinous—and, frankly, insane. The Supreme Court now has to decide which is lawful.

This question mark about penalties is one of many ambiguities about FBARs. But even FBARs are just the tip of the iceberg.

Americans abroad suffer a long list of indignities in trying to comply with U.S. laws. Most of them don’t owe the IRS any actual tax (because they usually pay at higher rates to their host countries, and subtract those amounts from their American liabilities). But they must still fill out incomprehensible forms demanding information that’s often unavailable or ambiguous—at great cost of time, worry and money.

Some expats, for example, find themselves owning plain-vanilla mutual funds registered in their host country—employers sometimes put such investments into occupational retirement schemes by default. To the IRS, these are PFICs, or “passive foreign investment companies”—a synonym for toxic. The resulting paperwork is considered the most complex in the entire American tax code, and the taxation tantamount to confiscation.

Depending on what an American expat does next, there’s more misery to come. If she marries a “foreigner” (the reason why many Americans move overseas in the first place), she may face nightmares about joint accounts, inheritance and more, even before considering any children. More punishment awaits those who own a foreign business or do pretty much anything interesting.

U.S. expats may also struggle to open—or keep open—financial accounts abroad. Foreign banks and brokers must report on “U.S. persons” (citizens or Green Card holders) to the U.S. Rather than run the risk of American retaliation for errors and omissions, many financial institutions prefer to have no American customers at all. This particular problem is a consequence of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), notorious Obama-era legislation that has upended the lives of many U.S. expats.

But the original reason for the entire hairball of complexity is the peculiar American way of taxation, which is in effect unique in the world (only Eritrea has something vaguely similar). That approach is called citizenship-based taxation (CBT). It means that a person’s passport or Green Card, not the place of residence, determines tax status and liability.

The unintended consequences are legion. One is to snare “accidental Americans” in the nets of the IRS and FinCEN. These are people who—usually because their parents happened to be in the U.S. when they were born—have U.S. citizenship but otherwise no connection to America. One day, they may receive a letter informing them of bureaucratic torment on a scale that would impress Franz Kafka.

This (largely coincidental) intertwining of citizenship law and tax law over the decades has made the U.S. unique. All countries want to crack down on tax cheats who hide money in offshore accounts—that’s why ever more governments are agreeing to share financial information with one another. But only the U.S. hits millions of expats who have modest assets and little clue every time it targets rich and sophisticated tax dodgers living stateside.

In a sign of growing desperation, a guerrilla insurgency of litigation is now forming from Canada to Israel to Europe. In the U.K., a woman named Jenny Webster, American-born but British, has been taking the British authorities to court for sharing her financial information with the U.S., arguing that this amounts to violations of her data privacy.

In France, Fabien Lehagre, born in the U.S. but French by upbringing, founded the Association of Accidental Americans. He’s got legal cases under way in several countries. With his input, France’s National Assembly recently passed a measure that would make its government stop sending people’s financial data to the U.S. in accord with FATCA, unless the U.S. reciprocates by sending information about French taxpayers in return. But the bill was nixed in the French Senate.

In the Netherlands, a court recently prohibited a local bank from closing the accounts of Accidental Americans in the country. And the European Parliament sent a delegation to Washington, DC, to discuss the problems caused by FATCA.

But all these efforts only treat the symptoms of the underlying aberration, which is citizenship-based taxation. So another group of lawyers—including Marc Zell, an Israeli-American, and John Richardson, a Canadian-American—wants to challenge the constitutionality of CBT as such, at least in its current form. They’re now building their case.

There are lots of reasons why people born in the U.S. at some point find themselves living abroad. It shouldn’t be U.S. government policy, even implicitly, to make such lives unnecessarily difficult. America must treat all its citizens equally, whether they live at home or overseas.

The nine robed justices now have an opportunity to send the first small sign that they got that message. Alexandru Bittner shouldn’t be financially ruined just because he made unintentional errors while he lived abroad. Nor should any other American—or indeed anybody at all.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-08-26/supreme-court-decides-how-to-punish-us-expats-with-overseas-taxes

Yes bamboo wood dry faster and can burn well but bamboo stick or wood can not give the heat needed in those countries. Bamboo wood burns like fuel. It does not last

I didn't find any reference to generating the H2 in-place, they seem to only store and transfer it.

A hydrogen filling station was built in Bremervörde for the H2 trains, which is operated by Linde. The facility has a storage capacity of 1,800 kilograms of hydrogen, distributed over 64 500-bar high-pressure storage tanks. Six hydrogen compressors supply the two dispensers where the trains can refuel with hydrogen around the clock. For the time being, the hydrogen will be supplied, later it will be produced on site by means of electrolysis and regeneratively generated electricity – corresponding expansion areas for this plant are available.

Wall Street’s biggest banks have largely avoided investing directly in cryptocurrencies. But many are quietly working to integrate blockchain, the technology behind crypto, into trading and other businesses.

Goldman Sachs GS -1.48%▼ Group Inc. is already trading some bonds and other debt securities for clients on blockchain-based networks such as Ethereum, and the bank is building its own blockchain-based trading platform. JPMorgan Chase JPM -2.47%▼ & Co. already has a platform in place, called Onyx.

Big Wall Street firms help make the economy run, connecting buyers and sellers of securities and lending money to businesses. But their sophisticated trades are often run on creaky old systems. Goldman and others hope they will be able to run faster, less costly, and ultimately more profitable systems based on blockchains.

The blockchain, sometimes called distributed ledger technology, is the plumbing that keeps crypto markets running. It is basically a software program that uses an open record-keeping system—a central ledger—to track assets and record transactions and information about ownership of those assets. Every participant operates off the same central ledger.

Blockchain-driven systems on Wall Street would be different in some respects from the systems behind bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. They would be permissioned networks, meaning a central party—such as a bank or a consortium of banks—would decide who is allowed on.

Outside of banking, Walmart Inc. WMT -1.47%▼ has used blockchain for tracking its supply chains. In real estate, some title companies have used it for recording homeownership.

Goldman and others say that using blockchain in trading platforms should lower the risk associated with trading partners. Backers also say it could make it easier for issuers to track who owns their shares or other assets.

“Blockchain technology is going to rewire all financial services,” said Tom Farley, the former president of the New York Stock Exchange.

That said, Wall Street firms have been experimenting with blockchain projects for at least the past five years. Despite much hype, few have had a widespread impact on how financial transactions take place.

Others have thrown in the towel. A group of European insurance companies formed a consortium called B3i in 2016 to explore blockchain uses in their industry. In July, the consortium shut down after failing to raise new capital.

Regulatory issues could also be a challenge, especially for multinational banks dealing with a host of overseers. Rules about risk management, custody, and collateral are still being developed in the U.S. and overseas. For instance, the international Basel Committee on Banking Supervision is developing a set of regulations that could require banks to set aside capital against what it called unforeseen risks arising from blockchain networks.

Challenges aside, few banks want to run the risk of being left out of potential new technology. The biggest are engaged in an arms race to build competing platforms.

At Goldman, Mathew McDermott runs the digital-asset group, which has about 70 full-time staffers specializing in areas such as engineering, compliance, and legal and government affairs. Mr. McDermott said he was a skeptic when he first heard of the blockchain, but no more. The same is true of many top Wall Street bankers, who initially scoffed at the idea that bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies were more than a fad.

“I’m not doing this just to satisfy my curiosity,” said Mr. McDermott, who has worked at Goldman for 16 years and led the group since 2020. “Everything has a commercial driver.”

Goldman declined to disclose financial information about the group, including how much the bank has invested in it or whether it has turned a profit. The firm expects the blockchain-based trading platform it is building to serve itself and its clients, but also possibly be used by other banks as well.

Some rivals are also planning for wider platforms. JPMorgan’s Onyx platform, launched in 2020, can be used by other banks. Goldman, BNP Paribas BNPQY -3.66%▼ and others have been using it to trade repos, or repurchase agreements. JPMorgan said Onyx has processed more than $350 billion of repo transactions.

“They’re doing real trades,” said Yuval Rooz, the chief executive of Digital Asset, which writes blockchain software and counts Goldman and the Australian Stock Exchange ASX -0.22%▼ among its clients. Still, he said, competition is tight: “There are the likes of Mat in every bank.”

Last year, Goldman arranged a $100 million, two-year bond issue for the European Investment Bank that was registered in France and handled on the Ethereum network. Normally, a bond sale like that would settle in five days. Mr. McDermott said it settled in just an hour.

What that means in practice is that money that might otherwise be tied up for days between counterparties will be freed up. It also means there is far less time to worry about counterparty risk, the odds that one party or the other to a trade won’t hold up its end of the transaction.

The bank has more clients for such digital bonds, Mr. McDermott said and expects to complete more sales.



https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-crypto-slumps-goldman-sachs-aims-for-a-wall-street-built-on-blockchain-11661169781

The existence of the 50-year mortgage shows lenders are desperate

The New Statesman is not usually in the business of giving financial advice, but following the announcement that a new lender, Perenna, has been awarded a licence to bring 50-year mortgages to the UK market, I will make an exception and tell you this: do not apply for a 50-year mortgage. These are ludicrously expensive products that the government should never have allowed, and the very fact that they exist suggests that the housing boom is at an end.

The idea might not sound too bad to begin with: 50 years of paying 4.5 per cent interest, and never having to worry about where interest rates will go. Just buy a house, and very slowly pay for it. A slight snag is that to achieve full ownership of your home by the current average retirement age of 65, you’ll need to have found that house, plus a good job to pay for it (and also probably a life partner) by the time you’re 15.

Let’s imagine you are a happily married 15-year-old with two children and a solid career: the 50-year mortgage is still a terrible idea. Borrowing any amount of money over such a long time is a bad idea because mortgages are amortising loans. This means each payment is made up of a payment towards the balance, plus an interest charge. These interest charges are highest towards the beginning of the term (because there’s more interest to pay on a bigger balance), but to keep your payments equal for the whole term, the lender just takes a bigger portion of the earlier payments. What this means in practice is that your first year of payments on a mortgage is almost all interest, which your bank keeps, and the last year is almost all balance, which you keep (as the bricks and mortar you’ve bought). The longer the period of any amortising loan, the longer it takes to start really paying it off.

An amortisation calculator is a useful tool to show why a 50-year mortgage is such a terrible product: a £250,000 mortgage at 4.5 per cent will have payments of around £1,000 a month. After 20 years of these payments, you’ll have spent more than £240,000 but cleared less than £45,000 from the debt. It will take 37 years to clear half the loan, and after 50 years, that £250,000 mortgage will have cost more than £629,000.

Clearly, almost no one is going to make it to the end of a 50-year mortgage. The average first-time buyer, now in their early 30s, would need to be able to guarantee their income (and probably their relationship with their partner) well into their 80s to do so. But the fact that there is a market for them – and that the government supports them – is a strong indicator that house prices are due to fall.

Danny Dorling, a professor of human geography at Oxford University and author of All That is Solid: The Great Housing Disaster (2014), told me the 50-year mortgage indicates that Britain’s housing market has reached “a point of desperation”, and that the product itself is the “last gasp” of an industry that is on the brink of running out of demand. The huge increase in energy costs coming in October, the current inflation in prices across the economy, the arrival of a new cohort of school and university leavers just as companies see their bills rising still further, and the arrival of a new prime minister will all bring a number of new challenges to Britain’s already struggling economy this autumn. A government that has spent tens of billions inflating house prices may find it can no longer afford to do so: “The choice,” said Dorling, “may be between propping up the housing market, or ensuring that people don’t freeze over the winter.”

Everyone considering buying a house will be thinking about this. “This is the most predicted recession ever,” Dorling said. “And as soon as you get hunkering down, and the feeling of ‘wait and don’t buy now’, that’s it. It’s all it takes.” The signs are already beginning to emerge: no-fault evictions have risen by 41 per cent over pre-pandemic levels, and there are signs that this may be a result of buy-to-let landlords deciding that the market has peaked. Dorling said landlords, who buy and sell more quickly, are a “key indicator” of where demand is headed.

But the most telling sign is the 50-year mortgage itself. In the 1970s, as mortgages were rationed, buyers scrabbled for new long-term deals before the market slumped. In 1989, many couples rushed to buy at inflated prices before tax relief was outlawed; within a few years the average London property had lost almost a third of its value. The fact that once more people are being encouraged to use a new and yet more desperate measure, when house price affordability had dropped to a level not seen since the late 19th century, is a very strong sign that the pattern is about to repeat.

https://www.newstatesman.com/quickfire/2022/08/will-housing-market-crash-50-year-mortgages

Skyrocketing prices for natural gas have Europeans scrambling for alternative energy sources. In Germany, where households face a 480 euro rise in their gas bills, people are resorting to stockpiling firewood.

The fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sunk Europe into the worst energy crisis in decades. From Italy to the UK, governments are racing to replace natural gas supplies from Russia and curtail the higher costs for industry and households. But consumers, too, are having to adapt, from cutting back on showering to firing up the chimney.

The German word for firewood, “brennholz”, reached peak search volume on Google in mid-August:



Image link:  https://i.ibb.co/Hqm5Mbd/zeroone.jpg

The rising cost of natural gas and firewood

Almost 50% of homes in Germany are heated by natural gas, with another 25% using heating oil. In the past, less than 6% used firewood.

That share is set to be higher this year. As natural gas prices soared, so have those for firewood and wood pellets:



Image link:  https://i.ibb.co/Qmx9rBz/zerotwo.jpg

Heating furnaces and wood stoves are also selling out.

Suppliers of the raw material are struggling to keep up, leading to scarcity of firewood. Earlier this summer, Germany’s Federal Firewood Association said the market was all out of wood.

The lion’s share of firewood used in Germany—80% according to the association—is typically sourced domestically. Now German firewood suppliers are buying from Poland, leaving some residents in both countries to collect brushwood. To prevent panic-buying, one seller has been rationing purchases to three boxes of wood at a time.

The process for drying out wood is long, compounding the ability to meet demand. Ideally, it takes six months to a year, because the more moisture wood contains, the less efficient it is at burning.

Over the long run, the firewood rush also raises environmental concerns. Trees do not replenish quickly and are not a viable substitute for replacing oil and gas, according to scientists. The fumes from burning wood also contain toxic chemicals.

Although Germany’s government deems burning wood for fuel as carbon-neutral, experts say the designation is not clear-cut. The combination of burning wood and cutting down forests may increase carbon emissions.


https://qz.com/germans-are-looking-to-firewood-for-energy-as-natural-g-1849461406

The green space will link five Rio de Janeiro favelas, ultimately covering an area the size of 15 soccer fields.

The city of Rio de Janeiro is working with local favelas to build what organizers say will the biggest urban garden in the world, as part of a government-funded initiative known as “Hortas Cariocas” intended to popularize the consumption of organic produce and provide a source of income to disadvantaged families.

Once completed, the urban garden will span several surrounding favelas connected by a green strip of land alongside the Madureira Mestre Monarco Park, located in the north zone of the city, including the communities of Cajueiro, Palmeirinha, Serrinha, Buriti and Faz-Quem-Quer. The green corridor will be formed between the communities of Madureira and Guadalupe. When the expansion is finished, the garden will be as large as 15 soccer fields.

Up to 100,000 families will eventually benefit from the project every month, according to Julio Cesar Barros, the founder of Hortas Cariocas and director of agroecology organic gardening for Rio de Janeiro’s municipal environment agency.

Making organic food more affordable and accessible is one of the main drivers of the project, Barros said. “The result of our project is not to have a beautiful garden,” Barros said. “A beautiful garden is a consequence of our work. The result of our production is to see how many plates of food we [are] able to serve.”

Seed by seed, Hortas Cariocas has grown considerably since it was created in 2006: It now has 56 active community gardens, of which 29 are located in favelas and 27 in schools across the city. About 50,000 families are already involved with the project, which serves as a source of fresh food for some and income for others.

This year, the goal is to produce 80 tons of food across all 56 gardens, according to William Fernandes Souza, who works at Madureira Park. Once the project is completed, he expects production will double. The need is acute: More than 33 million Brazilians are facing hunger.

The objective of building the world’s largest urban garden has strong support from Rio de Janeiro Mayor Eduardo Paes, who made it a goal of his administration to have the garden fully operational by 2024.

The current project will expand existing gardens in the ​​communities of Cajueiro and Palmeirinha, creating an 11-hectare green space for the cultivation of organic produce for gardeners to sell and donate across surrounding communities. The area will consist of thousands of garden beds and open soil where different kinds of vegetables and fruits will be grown.

So far, roughly 400 to 500 garden beds have been built, Barros said, which amounts to only 4% of the total to be constructed over the next two years. The gardens at Madureira Park currently have 38 gardeners working on a weekly basis, but once it’s fully operational, Barros estimates there will be nearly 90 — or approximately five to eight per hectare.

All gardeners are compensated for their work, with lower-level gardeners receiving a monthly R$500 ($98) stipend while team leaders and coordinators receive R$630 ($122) and R$1,000 ($192), respectively. To fund the stipends, Barros said the city spends R$140,000, or nearly $27,000, per month.

Of the produce cultivated, 50% is donated to people in need and the other 50% is sold by gardeners at affordable prices for the community. The goal is for each garden to become self-sustainable and ultimately independent, Barros said. The decision to ‘emancipate’ is made by the gardeners and volunteers in each community.

Community interest in the gardens has grown substantially in recent years, Fernandes Souza noted. “During the pandemic, many of our locations received an increasing amount of demand from families looking for donations, and the project was able to meet its social goal, donating more items than selling,” he said. “As the situation got better, people started coming back looking for donations as well as to buy. It popularized the idea.”

In addition to economic gains, Barros said the project offers an even bigger social benefit by helping individuals distance themselves from drug trafficking, which was once common in the vicinity. The area used to be known as “cracolândia,” Rio de Janeiro’s biggest area for crack cocaine consumption. “Before, you would open your door and see the ‘crackland,’” Barros said. “Today, you open your door and see a garden.”

The ambition behind Hortas Cariocas isn’t new. Back in 2013, the team recovered an area in the Manguinhos community and began planting seeds. Today, the Manguinhos Garden is the largest urban garden in Latin America, growing more than 2 tons of organic vegetables and fruits every year, including cassava, collard greens, strawberries and bananas.

Besides encouraging the community to grow organic produce, the project also created jobs and generated income for those who needed it the most — including Ezequiel Dias.

For Dias, a Manguinhos resident and coordinator of the garden, the project changed his life — and his community. Dias was unemployed for five years before he was introduced to Hortas Cariocas and began working at the Manguinhos Garden. He started as a gardener, cultivating vegetables and building garden beds. After years of involvement, he now works as coordinator, where he leads a team of 25 gardeners.

“Life in our community is very precarious. You have to fight,” Dias said. “There are people who don’t have food to eat. So the garden changed the lives of families because there were people who were unemployed but now have a job. You are inside your home, working and earning your income, and as a result, eating healthier.”

As the project continues to grow, Barros said he hopes that more families are fed and able to adopt healthier lifestyles while earning income from the work put into each garden. He said the end goal is to encourage urban sustainability.

“It’s possible to produce food in a major urban city and not depend on trucks coming from out of town, creating carbon dioxide and greenhouse [gases] warming up the planet,” Barros said. “We must always work around the concept of fertile cities, cities that can produce and grow their own food. It’s possible.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-21/rio-de-janeiro-brazil-set-to-build-world-s-largest-urban-garden

Who the hell would want to live in the American desert?
All those visionaries, who are dreaming of creating utopian cities have to pick a good location first. Creating a city in the desert has two main benefits:
1.Cheap land.
2.Sunny weather for the solar panels.
Those are the only benefits I can think of. The problems are way more:
1.The weather is going to be hot during the entire year.
2.Finding enough water supplies.
3.Finding people, who would want to live in a city in the desert.
4.Creating good infrastructure around the city.
The people, who are building such innovative cities are missing one key point. Making the city comfortable for the people that will live there.