Binance has withdrawn its application, so there is nothing coming out of that.


Binance has never in the last past years gone through acquiring a license, that's their modus operandi and I'm surprised people really believe they will try it this time for real.

I got a message from my UK bank saying they will no longer allow payments from debit/ credit cards to Binance.  This is all to do with the UK FCA ban but I thought it was not going to affect us being able to use the Binance.com site, seems I was wrong  Binance will loose a lot of UK revenue if they do not become FCA regulated like Coinbase has done

An unusual number of vice presidents are leaving for prominent jobs at public companies or high-growth start-ups.

SEATTLE — When Andy Jassy is elevated to chief executive of Amazon on Monday, taking the reins from its founder, Jeff Bezos, it will be one of the most closely watched executive handoffs in years.

But a much less heralded — though still deeply meaningful — change has already been underway at the company. Dozens of executives in Amazon’s upper ranks have departed in the past 18 months, many after working there for over a decade.

It is an unusual level of disruption inside the business. The departing executives don’t represent a huge slice of the top ranks, with hundreds of vice presidents now. But for years, Amazon’s leaders were considered lifers. Many had been there since the company’s earliest days. They were loyal to Amazon, whose rising stock price often made them wealthy.

Mr. Bezos epitomized that relationship. So did Jeff Wilke, who led the global consumer business, and Steve Kessel, who ran its physical stores, and others who introduced and ran key programs, including Alexa, free delivery and large parts of its cloud business. Now those leaders are gone.

Having Mr. Wilke and Mr. Bezos leave so close together amounts to “epic, tectonic shifts,” said David Glick, a former Amazon vice president who is now the chief technology officer at Flexe, a logistics start-up.

Mr. Wilke and Mr. Kessel both retired, but many vice presidents are leaving for top jobs at public companies or high-growth start-ups. Teresa Carlson, who over a decade built Amazon’s government cloud business, in April became the chief growth officer of Splunk, which provides data software, and Greg Hart, who once shadowed Mr. Bezos for a year and then launched Alexa and Echo, is now the chief product officer at the real estate firm Compass. Maria Renz, another former Bezos shadow who started at Amazon in 1999, is now a senior executive at SoFi, the personal finance company.

“Amazon has done a better job than anyone in the history of the world at staying Day 1 longer,” said Mr. Glick, referring to a phrase Mr. Bezos used regularly to encourage employees to act as if they were at a start-up. “But you get to a point where you are so big, it can be hard to get things done. People want the fun of getting a little bit closer to the metal.”

He talks “every day,” he said, with Amazon leaders debating if they should make a jump.

“You have this set of people who got to V.P. and it’s like ‘OK, what do I do now?’” he said.

Amazon is facing a shift that earlier generations of tech companies experienced as they grew and their strong founders stepped aside, said David Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School who served on Intel’s board for 29 years. Amazon’s overall work force has doubled in the past year, to more than 1.3 million.

“Intel, Microsoft, Oracle — you see this pattern,” he said.

Even before a founder leaves, executives sense a business is approaching a new era, he said.

“People get the idea that Jeff is going to be transitioning, and that leads people to start thinking about other options,” he said, adding that as companies get large, executives can often find less bureaucracy and more financial upside if they leave.

“We’ve had and continue to have remarkable retention and continuity of leadership at the company,” said Chris Oster, an Amazon spokesman. The average tenure is 10 years for vice presidents and more than 17 for senior vice presidents, he added.

Mr. Bezos long played up the longevity of deputies. At a forum in 2017, an employee asked him about the lack of diversity on his senior team, known as the S-Team, which was almost exclusively white and male, and Mr. Bezos said it was a benefit that his top deputies had been by his side for years.

Any transition on the team, he said, would “happen very incrementally over a long period of time.”

In recent years, Mr. Bezos has stepped back from much of Amazon’s day-to-day business, focusing instead on strategic projects and outside ventures, like his space start-up, Blue Origin, giving his deputies even more autonomy.

Mr. Bezos, 57, re-engaged on day-to-day matters early in the pandemic. But in February, he announced that he planned to step down from running Amazon and would become executive chairman of the company’s board. On July 20, he is scheduled to fly aboard the first manned spaceflight of his rocket company.

Mr. Bezos’ handoff came not long after Mr. Wilke, long seen as a potential successor, announced his departure.

“So why leave?” Mr. Wilke wrote in an email to staff in August announcing his plan to retire. “It’s just time.” His last day was March 1.

Mr. Bezos anointed Mr. Jassy, 53, a long-serving deputy who built and ran the cloud computing division, to take over as chief executive. Mr. Jassy has worked so closely with Mr. Bezos that he has been viewed as a “brain double,” helping conceive and spread many of the company’s mechanisms and internal culture.

Shifts at the top have trickled down. With Mr. Jassy’s ascent, Amazon Web Services needed a new chief executive. It hired Adam Selipsky, who ran Tableau, a data visualization company that Salesforce acquired in 2019. Mr. Selipsky had worked at AWS until 2016, when the cloud business was a less than a third the size it is now.

Dave Clark, who had run Amazon’s logistics and warehousing operations, was promoted to Mr. Wilke’s former role, running the company’s entire consumer business. He had already taken over responsibility for Amazon’s physical stores after Mr. Kessel, an S-team member who started at Amazon in 1999, retired early last year.

Many of the senior leaders it has brought in from the outside have run large, mature businesses.

Alicia Boler Davis, a former General Motors executive and a protégé of G.M.’s chief executive, Mary Barra, joined Amazon in 2019 to run its vast fulfillment operations. Last year, she became the first Black member of the company’s senior leadership team. A former Boeing executive, David Carbon, now runs Amazon’s drone delivery team, and its video and studio business is led by Mike Hopkins, the former chairman of Sony Pictures Television.

Many other jobs are opening up, too. In April, the online business news site Insider tallied at least 45 vice presidents and other executives who had left Amazon since the start of 2020, and since then, at least a half-dozen more have departed.

Some have gone to leadership roles in public companies or well-funded start-ups, like American Airlines, Redfin, Stitch Fix and Stripe.

This week, Dorothy Li joined Convoy, a digital trucking network, after more than 20 years at Amazon. She said the pandemic had made her rethink her priorities. She saw how critical logistics were to serving people, and she was optimistic that making trucking more efficient could reduce emissions.

“There is a desire to go back to build, and the mission for Convoy really resonated with me,” she said.

As Convoy’s technology chief, she said, she viewed herself as a key part of the strategic leadership team. Three days into the new role, she said, “It’s exciting, exhilarating and a little nerve-racking, which is frankly part of what attracted me.”

Mr. Yoffie, the former Intel board member, said to expect even more shifts in the months ahead, as Mr. Jassy begins making changes as chief executive.

“They want to put their stamp on it,” Mr. Yoffie said. “They always do.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/technology/amazon-leadership-exits-bezos.html

Chineh, the 62-year-old leader of the country's main communist party, called digital money "an inevitable trend." Apart from crypto, Vietnam will also focus on implementing such advanced technologies as big data, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality.

Major hurdles still lie ahead if countries want to revamp the global tax system.

The world just agreed to overhaul how companies pay tax, but politics in the United States and European Union could soon torpedo the deal.

A total of 130 countries on Thursday agreed to an international accord aimed at introducing new levies for the world’s 100 biggest companies and setting a global minimum corporate tax rate of 15 percent. Nine countries, including low-tax jurisdictions like Ireland and Barbados, said no.

Finance ministers from G20 countries will rubber-stamp the deal next week, paving the way for a new world order by 2023 designed to sideline tax havens and ensure multinationals — including U.S. tech giants — pay their fair share in dues. Negotiations over the fine print will continue until October.

But resistance from within the EU and bipartisan battles in the U.S. threaten to undermine the agreement even before the ink is dry. The reason? The 27-country bloc is not in agreement over how to write the new rules into national law, while Democratic and Republican politicians in Washington are already arguing over whether to approve the global pact.

In Europe, Estonia, Hungary and Ireland all opposed the deal amid concerns that setting a 15 percent global effective corporate tax rate would undermine their ability to attract future international business. Their opposition leaves Brussels’ policymakers with the difficult task of implementing the global agreement into EU law, as tax proposals require unanimity across all member countries to be approved.

“Embarrassing is quite an understatement” if the EU fails to implement the agreement, the European Commission's tax chief, Paolo Gentiloni told POLITICO in an interview, ahead of the culmination of the global talks at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Brussels plans to propose the minimum corporate tax, based on Thursday's announcement, early next year. “I can’t imagine such an important new global rule without the EU.”

Across the Atlantic, lawmakers like Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the U.S. House of Representatives' powerful Ways and Means Committee, described the global tax deal as “a dangerous economic surrender that sends U.S. jobs overseas, undermines our economy, and strips away our U.S. tax base.” Congress is split down party lines on how to proceed, including whether it should approve White House plans to overhaul the country's domestic tax rules that are central to Washington's involvement in the international accord.

That spells trouble for U.S. President Joe Biden, who needs bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. That includes convincing Republicans to back draft rules on Stopping Harmful Inversions and Ending Low-Tax Developments (SHIELD), which would deny key tax deductions to companies whose international profits are stashed in foreign jurisdictions that don’t adopt the minimum tax.

The administration similarly will need two-thirds of the U.S. Senate to approve the global tax plan when it's finalized later in the year — a hard sell amid ongoing bipartisan bickering in Washington. The Senate is divided evenly between Democrats and Republicans, with Vice President Kamala Harris' tie-breaking vote giving Democrats narrow control of the upper chamber.

Failure within the U.S. to adopt the rules would be a deal-breaker for the EU’s largest economies, especially France, which has long fought for taxing American tech companies operating across the bloc. U.S. lawmakers are also reticent to back the deal until some European countries, including Italy and the United Kingdom, scrap their domestic digital services taxes targeted solely against American tech giants.

“These discriminatory digital taxes from the Europeans are in effect a digital dagger aimed at our high-skill, high-wage workers," Democratic U.S. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a staunch critic of these unilateral levies, told POLITICO ahead of the global deal's announcement.

Brussels vs. Washington

Domestic politics — both in the EU and the U.S. — are not the only likely hurdles.

Even as officials put the final touches on the global tax agreement Thursday, the Commission is finalizing its own, separate so-called digital levy that will be unveiled on July 14. Those plans, according to EU policymakers, will go ahead even after the OECD agreement, and are aimed at asking the largest 9,000 digital companies across the bloc to help pay for its €750 billion recovery fund related to the coronavirus pandemic.

Such plans have already run into hot water in Washington, where officials and lawmakers suspect Brussels is trying to sidestep the global tax agreement to continue targeting Silicon Valley's most high-profile names. Many in Brussels and EU national capitals believe the likes of Google, Amazon and Apple are not paying their fair share into governments’ coffers amid record-setting profits earned during the pandemic as much of daily life moved online. The companies say levies specifically targeting the digital economy would be discriminatory and break global trade rules.

The Commission has tried to reassure Washington that the proposed “soft levy” will target all digital companies operating in the EU and doesn’t discriminate against American firms. That will include scores of European firms, and not just the American tech giants.

But those reassurances have fallen on deaf ears. The U.S. administration has stressed that its participation in the global deal is contingent on other countries withdrawing their national digital taxes — and that includes the EU's upcoming proposals. Failure to do so may scupper the global agreement even before its details have been hammered out by late 2021.

“The EU Digital Levy, even if different from previous digital services taxes, threatens the work undertaken via the OECD/G20 process,” Biden’s administration wrote to EU diplomats this week in a position paper obtained by POLITICO. “We urge you to work with the European Council and the European Commission to delay the release of the EU Digital Levy proposal.”

https://www.politico.eu/article/global-tax-agreement-oecd-washington-eu-hurdles/

"We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes non work."  --Milton Friedman (nobel prize winning economist)

Is it healthy for the economy?

Best parlay ypu ever won or seen a story on?

For example, in a school of a country that does not give opportunity to its people, where most of the students are poor, it is unlikely that the teachers will induce them to think big or have big dreams...more likely they will aim to keep them apart from drugs, avoid problems with the government and try to imbue some basic skill for life. The ultra-poor do not even get that - which actually may be better.

Poverty Is Worse For Kids Than Being Born To A Crack-Using Mother

July 23, 2013

A decades-long study has found almost no differences between babies born to a crack mother and those born to a non-addicted mother — when the two groups are matched up by their socioeconomic status.
Both groups of low-income children were at a significant disadvantage when compared to an average child, which means that being born into poverty had more of an impact on that child's IQ scores and long-term accomplishment than did being born to a drug-addicted mother.

https://www.businessinsider.com/crack-baby-myth-debunked-2013-7

We know that the whole world has become one global village, and that everyone is watching what is happening in the US, but I think it is still excessive to direct all attention to one country as a measure of the economic situation in the post-pandemic world.

As the world economy awakens from the 15-month slumber caused by the pandemic, Deutsche Bank has launched a series of research articles to spark debate and discussion about pressing post-pandemic economic issues.

On June 7, Deutsche Bank issued its first report of the new series, titled “Inflation: The defining macro story of this decade.”

According to the report, “US macro policy and, indeed, the very role of government in the economy, is undergoing its biggest shift in direction in 40 years. In turn we are concerned that it will bring about uncomfortable levels of inflation.”

That could be deemed an understatement considering that the U.S. economy is already experiencing “uncomfortable” inflation.

Consider: Based on the most recent inflation report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “In April, the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers rose 0.8 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis; rising 4.2 percent over the last 12 months.”

An annual inflation rate of 4.2 percent is more than “uncomfortable.” But the looming threat of inflation seems to have fallen on deaf ears in Washington, D.C., over the past year, as Congress has supercharged spending to levels unseen since World War II.

As Deutsche Bank notes, “The current fiscal stimulus is more comparable with that seen around WWII. Then, US deficits remained between 15-30% for four years. While there are many significant differences between the pandemic and WWII we would note that annual inflation was 8.4%, 14.6% and 7.7% in 1946, 1947 and 1948 after the economy normalised and pent-up demand was released.”

If the U.S. economy descends into an inflation spiral like that experienced after World War II, we could be on the brink of excruciating economic pain.

However, the profligate spending by Congress is only part of the problem.

According to Deutsche Bank, “Monetary stimulus has been equally breath-taking. In numerical terms, the Fed’s balance sheet has almost doubled during the pandemic to nearly $8tn. That compares with the 2008 crisis when it only increased by a little more than $1t, and then increased another $2tn in the subsequent six years.”

As any economist will tell you, printing gobs of money over a short period (which is what the Federal Reserve has done during the pandemic) is a key inflation ingredient.

We have seen this happen many times over the past century. From Weimar Germany to present-day Venezuela, massive money printing never works and always spurs out-of-control inflation.

The Deutsche Bank report concludes with this dire warning, “We worry that inflation will make a comeback. Few still remember how our societies and economies were threatened by high inflation 50 years ago. The most basic laws of economics, the ones that have stood the test of time over a millennium, have not been suspended. An explosive growth in debt financed largely by central banks is likely to lead to higher inflation. … Rising prices will touch everyone. The effects could be devastating, particularly for the most vulnerable in society. Sadly, when central banks do act at this stage, they will be forced into abrupt policy change which will only make it harder for policymakers to achieve the social goals that our societies need.”

As mentioned above, the German people are well aware that skyrocketing inflation in and of itself can spark more than just economic upheaval. Hyperinflation, like that experienced in post-World War I Germany, can also lead to social disorder and political chaos.

In fact, one of the reasons Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Weimar Germany was the public's resentment concerning the hyperinflation they suffered as a result of endless money printing by Germany’s central bank in the 1920s to pay off World War I reparations.

Of course, the rise of Hitler was not solely due to hyperinflation in Weimar Germany. But when out-of-control inflation takes hold, people (reasonably) panic.

Throughout history, we have seen inflation-spurred panic manifest in social, political and economic turmoil. The looming question is how Americans will deal with the strong possibility of a post-pandemic inflation environment the likes of which could be unprecedented in our nation’s history.

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/557743-deutsche-bank-issues-dire-economic-warning-for-america