WRAPUP 2-Watchdog leaves EU banks in dark on capital

Europe's banking watchdog has delayed telling individual lenders how much capital they must raise to safeguard their survival until EU finance ministers can agree on broader plans to shore up confidence in the financial system.

The delay is a blow to banks and investors keen to get to grips with how much cash is needed as the bank sector faces multiple risks that threaten to spill over to the real economy.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) had planned to finalise by Wednesday how much cash banks need to meet a minimum 9 percent core capital -- a preliminary estimate had put it at 106 billion euros ($141.5 billion) for the 70 lenders under scrutiny.

But European Union finance ministers (Ecofin) meeting to discuss the euro zone debt crisis need to help banks as part of a wider plan. If they agree on the bank measures, the EBA is likely to release details next week, a spokeswoman for the EBA said.

The euro zone crisis has shown how closely banks are tied to the health of their country, which continues to hurt Greece's lenders. Some 13-14 billion euros of deposits left Greek banks in September-October, and the outflows continued in the first 10 days of November, the country's central bank chief said.

Cyprus's largest lender, Bank of Cyprus also showed the risk of sovereign troubles spilling over borders, as it slumped to a loss after losing 1 billion euros on its holdings of Greek government bonds.

Banks are under pressure from worries about sovereign health, capital and liquidity, analysts said.

"For the funding markets to reopen, banks need a minimum of 160 billion euros (more capital) in a mild recession and 215 billion in a stress scenario," said Kian Abouhossein, analyst at JPMorgan.

If the credit market doesn't reopen, he said banks could face a "systemic problem" as they need to refinance 680 billion euros of debt next year. "We see funding as one of the key challenges in 2012," he said.

The European bank sector was down 0.1 percent by 1700 GMT, languishing not far from a more than 2-1/2 year low set last week.

BROADER PACKAGE

Banks across Europe are stepping up plans to shrink balance sheets in the face of these difficulties, prompting Portugal's banking regulator to warn its banks to shrink slowly to limit damage to its fragile economy.

Germany's Commerzbank may shift bad assets from its loss-making property arm Eurohypo to the German state, sources close to the bank told Reuters.

The move could allow it to avoid a potentially punitive fresh state-aid inquiry by the European Commission. It has been ordered by the Commission to sell Eurohypo by the end of 2014 as a condition for approving state aid in 2008/09.

France's Societe Generale is selling property loans worth more than 600 million euros ($801 million) as it seeks to slash its exposure to the volatile sector and bolster its balance sheet, a person close to the situation said.

Rivals BNP Paribas and Credit Agricole and banks in Italy, Spain, Germany, Britain and Ireland are also deleveraging aggressively to meet tougher capital rules and ease funding strains.

That could put more pressure on sovereign debt or squeeze lending to the economy, according to a report prepared for the Ecofin meeting.

"There are serious concerns about a possible inappropriate deleveraging by banks when implementing the measures that would prejudice an adequate supply of lending to the real economy or put excessive additional pressure on sovereign debt," officials wrote in the report seen by Reuters.

Sweden's central bank told its lenders to adopt tougher global rules on liquidity ahead of the deadline, ratcheting up pressure on the sector just days after introducing tougher capital requirements than European rivals.

The Riksbank said Swedish banks should speed up changes to short-term liquidity and the way they fund themselves in the longer term so that their assets and liabilities match better.

The EBA said it had made progress in finalising its recapitalisation plan, but it was part of a broader package also including improving long-term funding and dealing with losses on Greece's debt. Funding appears to be the sticking point for policymakers.

A public guarantee scheme was considered to support banks' access to term funding, but there were objections to a pooled guarantee and now national guarantees are on the cards.

The EBA is also due to publish guidelines for banks that want to issue hybrid debt known as contingent capital to help fill any capital shortfall.

Source http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/29/banks-europe-idUSL5E7MT23V20111129

Anti-capitalism rebellion in progress in US

They are in a rebellious mood against their economic system as it is grinding to a halt. During the past week alone some $4 trillion of paper assets on the global stock exchanges went down the drain, because they were speculative ‘assets’ that had no real material (real economy) base.

They were paper assets acting as parasites on the real economy. The meltdown of the bubble economy that begun in 2008 is now in full swing because despite the pumping in by the US government of large amounts of dollars into the economy through ‘stimulus packages’ the recession did not ebb. Instead it worsened into what is now being called a ‘double dip recession.’ The result has been that the US unemployment rate has continued to worsen. It is now standing at 9.1 per cent and as a result it is creating problems for Obama’s second term re-election hopes.

Last week the Governor of the Federal Reserve abandoned all efforts of pumping more printed dollars into the economy to help ‘quick start’ the recovery with what the Federal Reserve has recently called “Operation Twist” after it abandoned the “Quantitative Easing” of printing more dollars as the appropriate response.

In Europe, the Euro zone is in the grip of the Greek ‘sovereign debt’ crisis due to the worsening of the economic recovery in that zone. Many of these countries adopted stringent budgetary controls as a response to the meltdown, but these strategies have not produced any astounding results.

In the case of the UK, these policies have led to serious social tensions that erupted in the city riots that threatened to burn Britain down. The Greek debt crisis has threatened the Euro Zone as a regional monetary system. Countries are pulling back into their national cocoons to run away from supporting Greece. Many members are insisting that the holders of the Greek state bonds should also contribute to solving the crisis. The Italian credit system has recently been downgraded from A+ to A. The other ‘PIGS’ countries (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) are on the edge.

In the meantime, the increasing inequality in the distribution of wealth all over the world, which is capitalism’s main weakness, has begun to have toll on the billionaire’s confidence. They are increasingly being looked upon as the real problem for the world economy because of their insatiable greed. The mood among the large numbers of unemployed is beginning to turn rowdy and rebellious. The recent British riots were a clear warning to the Western leaders of the upcoming upheavals. Now the anger is beginning to emerge in the US where there have been plans by the youth to occupy Wall Street, the headquarters of American financial capitalism.

According to a recent article in the Guardian, the rebellion begun on Saturday September 17, when over 5,000 young Americans descended on to the financial district of lower Manhattan with signs, banners, drums, slogans and proceeded to walk towards what they called the “financial Gomorrah” of the nation as they vowed to “occupy Wall Street” and to “bring justice to the bankers.”

Although the New York police thwarted their efforts temporarily, locking down the symbolic street with barricades and checkpoints, the protestors were undeterred. They walked around the area before holding a people’s assembly and setting up a semi-permanent protest encampment in a park on Liberty Street, a stone’s throw from Wall Street and a block from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Three hundred of them spent the night in the streets and several hundred reinforcements arrived the next day to back them up. Using the social network, the protesters sent messages to the world that they were hungry and a nearby pizzeria received $2,800 in orders for delivery in a single hour. Emboldened by an outpouring of international solidarity, the protestors said they’d be there to greet the bankers when the stock market opened the following Monday. The police, according to the Guardian realised they could not stop them. The ABC News reported that even though the demonstrators did not have a permit for the protest they were nevertheless” digging in for a long-term occupation.”

According to news reports, the campaign to “Occupy Wall Street” was inspired by the “People’s Assemblies of Spain,” which were in turn inspired by the “Arab Spring.” Although the concept “Occupy Wall Street” was floated in a double-page poster in the 97th issue of Adbusters magazine, it was nevertheless spearheaded, orchestrated and carried out by independent activists. It all started when Adbusters magazine asked its network of culture jammers to flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens and peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. The idea caught on immediately on social networks and the unaffiliated activists seized the idea and built an open-source organising site.

A few days later, a general assembly was held in New York City and 150 people showed up. These activists became the core organisers of the occupation. The mystique of Anonymous pushed the idea into the mainstream media with a video communiqué endorsing the action. This attracted 100,000 views resulting in a warning from the Department of Homeland Security addressed to the nation’s bankers about what was going on. But the ‘indignation’ was spreading in other cities. When, in August, the ‘indignados’ of Spain sent word that they would be holding a solidarity event in Madrid’s financial district, activists in Milan, Valencia, London, Lisbon, Athens, San Francisco, Madison, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Israel and beyond vowed to do the same.

There is thus a shared feeling on the streets around the world that the global economy is a ‘Ponzi scheme’ run by and for ‘Big Finance,’ meaning the billionaires who do not want to pay taxes. People everywhere are waking up to the realisation that there is something fundamentally wrong with a system in which speculative financial transactions add up, each day, to $1.3 trillion, which is 50 times more than the sum of all the production and commercial transactions. Meanwhile, according to a United Nations report, “in the 35 countries for which data exist, nearly 40 per cent of jobseekers have been without work for more than one year. A jobless Vietnam veteran protestor said the demonstration was “a worthy cause because people on Wall Street are blood-sucking warmongers”.

The indignation was an expression of a feeling among the protestors that the standard solutions to the economic crisis proposed by leading politicians and mainstream economists such as stimulus packages, budget cuts, debt management, low interest rates, neo-Keynesian propping up of ‘demand’ though increased consumption were all false approaches that would not work.

This is not just a concern of the Western unemployed youth, it is also increasingly becoming an issue among rural folk in Uganda in areas such as Buliisa where people’s lands are being grabbed by the oil speculators and Bugisu where the peasant farmers cooperators are determined to ‘walk naked’ to demand the restoration of their cooperative union. These rural folk have also decided to join hands with the New York and Madrid ‘indignados.’ This mood amongst the world’s poor is bound to reverberate for some time to come and who knows what is likely to come out of the protests - a World Revolution?

Source http://www.monitor.co.ug/Magazines/ThoughtIdeas/-/689844/1245982/-/bms5nc/-/

The rebellion continues

Jeff Stone, the Riverside County supervisor who's become the latest to float a breakup of California, continues to press the idea --- creating a website complete with manifesto and even a Facebook page whose fans have already created the "South California" flag.

If you can judge from our recent online poll, the sentiment for a divorce remains very strong in the north state as well. Only one problem: Under Stone's plan, South California's secession --- which would carve off some of the more conservative-leaning parts of the state --- would leave our equally conservative region lumped with the even more liberal remainder.

Just to put it in perspective, voter registration in today's California is 44 percent Democratic, 31 percent Republican, which has given Democrats a complete lock on the state government.

Without the counties of "South California," it would skew even more strongly --- 48 percent Democratic and just 20 percent Republican.

For those many Shasta County conservatives who feel alienated from the state government and the values it embodies, this particular breakup plan would make things far, far worse.

Source http://blogs.redding.com/bross/archives/2011/07/the-rebellion-c.html

The social rebellion will burst into violence

This protest is the start of a broader and much more serious social rebellion. It is an expression of terrible anger that will burst out in violence," the owner of a large consumer products factory told "Globes" today.

He added, "Bibi is a nice guy, he has created a free economy, flourishing, but the partners to this prosperity are the owners and a very thin socio-economic layer of talented and young people in senior positions in high-tech, in industry and in the banks. 50% of the population have sub-normal salaries and are not part of the celebrations."

He continued, "In the end it will be like a bomb hitting our heads. We cannot carry on with 10% of the population living and 50% of the population earning the minimum wage plus a little. A democratic state will be here for many years only if there is a very strong middle class. There cannot be a polarization of the rich when most of the population has their heads in the ground. I'm hurting."

What's hurting you? You yourself belong to the top 10%.

"I also want my children to be millionaires and I don't want them to be in a position where they will say to us. Hello hello bring us your money."

How exactly?

"They will impose a tax and take 20% of our property and that will go to the Treasury. I think there is such a possibility because the polarization will lead to revolution. There are many Israelis that are not going out onto the streets but they have good reason to do so. And in the end they will go out."

The senior executive is harshly critical of the government. He said, "What sort of government do we have? What sort of idea was it to raise excise on fuel? It's OK to take excise on fuel but what's the point of putting up excise when the price of all fuels is going up? The government is putting up all prices all the time and without any limits."

He added, "They are asking women to go out to work. And who will look after the kids? How can a young couple where both partners are working spend NIS 5,000 on two children per month? Why do we need such surpluses in the government coffers? To build more roads in the territories? While putting the age of compulsory kindergarten down to three, give something to ordinary citizens."

Isn't industry contributing to the situation?

It is not the role of industry to set the minimum wage. In my company there is no concept of the minimum wage, we pay 5% more than the minimum wage without thinking about it but I cannot speak about all industry. If a factory can't pay the minimum wage or more, it shows that that industry has a problem."

If you sat in the government what would you do?

I see the macroeconomic picture. Those in the government only see a picture where they need to air the opinion that it is possible to raise the minimum wage. The revolutions in the Arab countries are not happening because of Mubarak's corruptness but because of 40% unemployment among young people. If we want to prevent that we need to give to the population. I'm in favor of enlightened capitalism not greedy capitalism."

Source http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=1000660613

Robot to Throw First Pitch at Phillies Game

Has technology gone too far? Will it ever stop? How long will it be until humans are a second-class race, fighting a war of rebellion against our machine overlords? Google saves your chats, Facebook sells ads tailored to your personal information, and now we have the most frightening development yet: a robot will throw out the first pitch for tomorrow's game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Milwaukee Brewers.

The robot's name is PhillieBot, and it was designed by (presumably evil) engineers at the University of Pennsylvania who obviously want to usher in the age of machine dominance over humanity. You can read all of the details here, but apparently the engineers used a Segway as the base of the robot, because building other machines is the only practical use a Segway serves. From there they attached a pneumatic tube to power the arm, which relies on software to direct velocity and accuracy of the pitch.

Sound familiar? How long is it until we're fighting robots who have been sent to kill our mothers? I had previously thought that the greatest threat to humanity was the rise of the octopus rebellion, but it looks like we now have to worry about an army of killer pitching robots who will inevitably destroy us.

Source http://www.ology.com/sports/skynet-approaches-robot-throw-first-pitch-phillies-game

Rabih Mroue, the Lebanese artist starting a creative rebellion

Theatre director, visual artist, actor, writer: there are many feathers to Rabih Mroue's cap.

The Lebanese artist, whose performances, video works and installations deal with Lebanon's troubled history, is currently enjoying increasing visibility on the world's stage.

With two exhibitions currently in Europe (one in London and one in Sweden), Mroue is gaining more and more admirers, though cinephiles may already know him from his role in 2008 film "Je Veux Voir," in which his character traverses Beirut's destroyed neighborhoods with French actress Catherine Deneuve, following the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war.

His exhibitions, which feature video work ruminating on his country's tumultuous past as well as his own personal history, also respond to recent events across the Arab world, with a window work in London entitled "The People are Demanding," also the title of the exhibition.

"There is no particular precise thing (that triggered the new work), but what is happening in the region is really something big and one cannot ignore it," he said.
It's one of the conditions of being a human being -- to think, and to produce abstract ideas
--Rabih Mroue, artist

"It is in a way a problematic word, 'people,'" the artist continued, speaking about the popular slogan "The People are Demanding," which was chanted during the mass demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt that toppled their respective governments.

He points out that in Arabic, the word "people" is always singular. "We say, "The people is demanding" and in this sense, it's as if you're reducing the people into one quantity," he said.

The window display at London's Institute of International Visual Arts features numerous imagined demands that protesting individuals might make: the right to overthrow a government, the right to love, even the right to tweet -- all written across the window.

"It's in a way a playful piece of work, which starts with a very serious demand and goes to the very basic needs of every human being," he said.

Mroue adds that while he supports events across the Arab world, he is wary of Arab people being dissolved in one mass with a single view.

Tensions like these are at the heart of Mroue's work, which often deals with complex issues such as the desire to remember traumatic events in his country's history, but also the desire to consign them to the past and move on.

"For me, it's a question of, 'What should we remember? And what we should not remember?' What should we forget and what should we not forget, and who decides on these issues?" he said.

He is referring to the amnesty declared in Lebanon following its painful civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990, and what he sees as the state's desire to foreground certain things from the past and eliminate others.

"It's all about history -- about writing history -- because history in this sense erases something and highlights something else," Mroue said.
It's all about history, about writing history because history in this sense, erases something, and highlights something else
--Mroue

"If one looks at Lebanese art and contemporary culture, without generalizing or essentializing, one would see that there is a certain kind of obsession for collecting images and traces of a lost life," said Cosmin Costinas, curator of Mroue's exhibitions at the Lunds Konsthall in Sweden, and in London.

"I would interpret (Mroue's) work as a reaction to a certain kind of archival instinct, which you have in contemporary culture," said Costinas.

Mroue began producing theatrical work in the early 1990s. He became central to a loose community of Beirut-based artists and intellectuals and soon found his work crossing over into the realms of visual and performance art.

But Mroue says that both he and others are forced to navigate the thorny issue of censorship. His plays and performances have, in the past, been altered by the state's censors. One particular performance from 2007 was banned by the authorities, though later staged following a public outcry.

"To use the words of the censorship department, they tell us: We don't censor you, we just play with the contrast, we make it less sharp, just make it more gentle, not so violent or provocative," he explained.

He gets around the censors, he said, by only putting on performances for short periods, and not charging people to see them.

Though it gets an easier reception in the West, Mroue's work doesn't shy away from potentially provocative subjects. One work in the London exhibition, entitled "Grandfather, Father and Son," features meticulously filed library index cards belonging to his intellectual grandfather, who was assassinated, aged 80, by Islamic fundamentalists.

"It's one of the conditions of being a human being -- to think, and to produce abstract ideas," Mroue pointed out.

"This is what distinguishes us from animals, that we are allowed to produce and to write about abstract ideas, about justice, injustice, mathematics," he continued.

Having the courage to think about and articulate these abstract ideas is, he believes, an important form of resistance.

Source http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/meast/04/05/lebanon.artist.mroue/

Libya: arming rebellion 'would turn tide'

The Libyan rebel movement could legally be supplied with weapons from abroad in a move that would rapidly bring the conflict to an end, defence experts have said.

The United Nations resolution that was made before that governing the no-fly zone prevented Col Muammar Gaddafi's government from obtaining arms but analysts say that it would still be possible to arm a provisional rebel government.

There are growing doubts that the rebels will be able to prevail over Col Gaddafi's forces without outside intervention, and there are worries too that a costly and dangerous stalemate will follow a lack of decisive military action.

Brig Ben Barry, of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, said however that if a provisional council was recognised by the United Nations, it would be able to accept arms, and could quickly overthrow Gaddafi loyalists or persuade the Libyan ruler's inner circle to oust him.

"If this went on for months and months then equipping the rebels would make a difference. The UN arms embargo only proscribes the current Libyan government so if another state recognised a provisional council as the new government it could then agree to requests for assistance including weapons and other military supplies.

"If significant parts of the Libyan military capability were destroyed it could change the minds of those within the regime who might then view Gaddafi as more part of the problem rather than the solution."

Lt Col Richard Williams, the former SAS commander, said that the first thing the rebels needed was a political leader "who can offer to pro-Gaddafi people something that will not terrify them".

Prof Malcolm Chalmers of the Royal United Services Institute, said: "If we get into a stalemate over the coming months then I think arms supply would make a real difference. Rebels will be better organised to provide a sustained and sufficient back bone."

However British defence chiefs admit they are struggling to understand the rebel groups. "We are trying to understand what they want and what they are doing," said a military planner in the Ministry of Defence. "There's no cohesion and there are factions from Benghazi to Misurata and those in Benghazi are not necessarily the right people to talk to. I think stalemate is distinct possibility."

Source http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8401856/Libya-arming-rebellion-would-turn-tide.html