Author Archives: Andi Howe

Entrepreneur Alert: Raising Bees and Pesticides

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Nature magazine writes:   The impact of neonicotinoid insecticides on insect pollinators is highly controversial. Sublethal concentrations alter the behaviour of social bees and reduce survival of entire colonies   However, critics argue that the reported negative effects only arise from neonicotinoid concentrations that are greater than those found in the nectar and pollen of pesticide-treated plants.

Furthermore, it has been suggested that bees could choose to forage on other available flowers and hence avoid or dilute exposure.  Here, using a two-choice feeding assay, the honeybee, Apis mellifera, and the buff-tailed bumblebee, Bombus terrestris, do not avoid nectar-relevant concentrations of three of the most commonly used neonicotinoids, imidacloprid (IMD), thiamethoxam (TMX), and clothianidin (CLO), in food.

Moreover, bees of both species prefer to eat more of sucrose solutions laced with IMD or TMX than sucrose alone. Stimulation with IMD, TMX and CLO neither elicited spiking responses from gustatory neurons in the bees’ mouthparts, nor inhibited the responses of sucrose-sensitive neurons. Our data indicate that bees cannot taste neonicotinoids and are not repelled by them. Instead, bees preferred solutions containing IMD or TMX, even though the consumption of these pesticides caused them to eat less food overall. This work shows that bees cannot control their exposure to neonicotinoids in food and implies that treating flowering crops with IMD and TMX presents a sizeable hazard to foraging bees.

Bees

Supporting TPP?

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The rocky road to globaliation.  Should we support the TPP?

Jeffrey Frankel writes: Agreement among negotiators from 12 Pacific Rim countries on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) represents a triumph over long odds. Tremendous political obstacles, both domestic and international, had to be overcome to conclude the deal. And now critics of the TPP’s ratification, particularly in the United States, should read the agreement with an open mind.

Many of the issues surrounding the TPP have been framed, at least in US political terms, as left versus right. The left’s unremitting hostility to the deal – often on the grounds that the US Congress was kept in the dark about its content during negotiations – carried two dangers. A worthwhile effort could have been blocked, or President Barack Obama’s Democratic administration could have been compelled to be more generous to American corporations, in order to pick up needed votes from Republicans. In fact, those concerned about labor rights and the environment risked hurting their own cause. By seeming to say that they would not support the TPP under any conditions, Obama had little incentive to pursue their demands.

Seen in this light, the TPP that has emerged is a pleasant surprise. The agreement gives pharmaceutical firms, tobacco companies, and other corporations substantially less than they had asked for – so much so that US Senator Orrin Hatch and some other Republicans now threaten to oppose ratification. Likewise, the deal gives environmentalists more than they had bothered to ask for.

Perhaps some of these outcomes were the result of hard bargaining by other trading partners (such as Australia). Regardless, the TPP’s critics should now read the specifics that they have so long said they wanted to see and reconsider their opposition to the deal.Supporting TPP

TPP Support?

Taking on Wall Street in 2016

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Matt Taibbi writes:  When Bill Clinton took office, it was still illegal in the United States for commercial banks to merge with investment banks and insurance companies. But toward the end of Clinton’s second term, he signed a bill called the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that essentially created Too Big to Fail “supermarket” banks like Citigroup.

This isn’t the only reason the financial system is so dangerous now. There’s also the matter of the extreme interconnectedness of the financial services industry. This problem came violently into play in 2008, when the failure of a single idiot investment bank, Lehman Brothers, caused a chain reaction that nearly blew up the whole financial system.

This latter problem was partially a consequence of another Clinton-era law, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which deregulated derivatives like swaps that were the agent of many of those chain-reaction losses.

Hillary Clinton has problems with a financial system that became dangerously over-concentrated thanks to multiple laws passed during her husband’s administration.

Mrs. Clinton says:  “Well, my plan is more comprehensive. And, frankly, it’s tougher because of course we have to deal with the problem that the banks are still too big to fail. We can never let the American taxpayer and middle-class families ever have to bail out the kind of speculative behavior that we saw. But we also have to worry about some of the other players: AIG, a big insurance company; Lehman Brothers, an investment bank. There’s this whole area called ‘shadow banking.’ That’s where the experts tell me the next potential problem could come from.”

First, it’s definitive now that Hillary has no intention of reinstating Glass-Steagall.

The second and probably more important observation is about Hillary’s rhetorical choices.

Hillary, like her close advisor Barney Frank, has been pushing an idea that banks aren’t at the root of any financial instability problem. Last night, she pointed a finger instead at “shadow banking,” non-bank actors like AIG, and a dead investment bank in Lehman Brothers. (Interesting she didn’t mention a still-viable investment bank like Goldman, Sachs, which has hosted her expensive speaking engagements.)

This squeamishness about criticizing banks is laughable to people in the industry. But of course, that’s probably the point – that the average voter won’t know how absurd and desperate it is to point to faceless “shadow” financiers as villains when the real bad guys are famed mega-firms that are right out in the open, with their names plastered all over every second city block.

The root of the 2008 crisis lay in a broad criminal fraud scheme, in which huge masses of home loans were given to people who couldn’t afford them. Those loans in turn were bought back up by giant banks and resold to investors who weren’t told how crappy the merchandise was.

The question there is how to make sure companies are small enough that the really corrupt ones can be allowed to implode organically, rather than requiring mass bailouts.

How do you make Too Big to Fail companies smaller and safer? Probably, you just do it. Mrs. Clinton will not.

Too Big to Fail

Lagarde Advocates Carbon Tax

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Christine Lagarde says it’s time for a carbon tax.

Christine Lagarde said it was also the “right moment” to eliminate energy subsidies, which the IMF says will cost the world USD 5.3 trillion this year – 6.5 per cent of the global economy.

The time is right for governments to introduce taxes on carbon emissions, which would help fight global warming and raise badly needed revenue, IMF chief Christine Lagarde has said.

“It is just the right moment to introduce carbon taxes,” Lagarde said at the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Lima, Peru yesterday.

The issue is in the spotlight two months from a key United Nations conference in Paris tasked with delivering a comprehensive carbon-cutting pact to save the planet from the potentially catastrophic impact of global warming.

Besides discouraging pollution, Lagarde said, taxing greenhouse gas emissions would have the added bonus of helping governments boost their revenues at a time when many countries have dipped heavily into their “fiscal buffers” to get through a prolonged rough patch for the global economy.

“Finance ministers are looking for revenues. That’s the fate of finance ministers. But it’s particularly the case at the moment because many have already used a lot of their fiscal buffers… and are always in need of some fiscal buffers in order to fight the next crisis,” she said.

Lagarde urged governments to tax carbon emissions rather than rely on emissions trading, a competing system already in place in Europe in which governments essentially issue permits to pollute that can then be traded on an open market.

“I know that a lot of people would rather do emissions trading systems, but we believe that carbon taxation would be a lot better,” she said.

Lagarde said revenues from carbon taxes could contribute to rich nations’ funding target of USD 100 billion a year by 2020 to help poorer nations fight the impacts of climate change.

The world was still USD 38 billion short of that target last year, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said in a new report.

Carbon Tax

Nigerian President to Tackle Corruption in Oil Funds

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Four long months after taking office Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari finally announced his cabinet positions, with the most controversial and lucrative – oil – going to himself.

Whether Buhari, himself a former oil minister, can clean up an industry that two years had $20 billion in missing funds is quite unclear. Critics say the new president is over-reaching with what amounts to a full-time second job.

Grace Obike writes:  Oil provides 70 percent of Nigeria’s government revenue but is an industry plagued with malfeasance. Two years ago the central bank reported $20 billion in missing oil-related funds.

As Africa’s biggest oil producer, crude runs through the arteries of the Nigerian economy.

But mismanagement and the theft of billions have also plagued the ministry for decades. Most oil is stolen through accounting and oversight gaps. But much goes missing far away from the minister’s eyes: from oil fields, pipelines, and even from the export terminals.

Buhari said last week he is taking the oil ministry job because he doesn’t trust anyone else. His plans include stepped-up accounting of oil receipts and recovering of stolen funds..

Much of the malfeasance appears to have taken place under Diezani Alison-Madueke, the oil minister under former president Goodluck Jonathan, Buhari’s predecessor. Ms. Alison-Madueke was arrested Oct. 2 in London on charges of bribery and money laundering. Her five-year reign at the ministry is widely seen as a period of rampant corruption and theft.

Alison-Madueke’s arrest underscores the complexities in the petroleum sector. But while it could open a path for Buhari to address corruption in an industry he served as government minister for in the 1970s, some question if Buhari’s effort to take charge of oil is constitutional and whether he is the right person for the job.

Buhari’s biggest obstacle may be reining in the NNPC. The huge state oil firm is Nigeria’s largest employer. It’a also the according the least transparent oil company in the world, according to Transparency International and Revenue Watch.

The NNPC has diverted more than $30 billion in oil revenue from the state since 2009, according to a Nigerian watchdog agency. A 2013 PricewaterhouseCooper audit stated that the oil behemoth had a “blank check” to spend without oversight.

Buhari knows the company intimately. He oversaw its creation in the 1970s while he was oil minister. It is this expertise that many say could help him clean up the organization.

Local investigations into Alison-Madueke’s conduct as oil minister, for example, have yielded little result. After she left office, the new government said that between 2012 and 2015, some $19 billion in oil revenue is unaccounted for.

Moving forward, a critical question is whether the arrest of the former oil minister is the beginning – or the end – of Buhari’s NNPC probe. 

Corruption in Oil

TPP Trudging Forward?

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TPP paving the rocky road to globalizaton?

A tentative trade pact agreed on Monday and known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would bind 12 nations into the largest economic bloc, covering 40 percent of the world’s economy. It would eliminate 18,000 tariffs. It might boost incomes by 0.5 to 1 percent for the countries involved. For sure, prices on imported products and services would be lower and exports higher.

But the nonnumerical benefits of the TPP, if approved by the US Congress and the other nations’ legislatures, lie in driving the huge Asia-Pacific market – and thus the world – to update and adopt rules of commerce that would be more fitting to 21st-century economies.

Trade rules, like the golden rule, reflect a way for each country to seek a common good. The qualities of trade are as important as its quantities. Values are as critical as value.

This agreement would set modern rules for the free flow of digital information across borders, create better incentives for innovation through the enhanced protection of patents and copyrights, improve working conditions, and curb wildlife trading. Countries with government-run enterprises, such as in Vietnam and Malaysia, would need to show more bureaucratic transparency and less nationalistic favoritism.

Most of all, securing this pact would create an interdependency in a region that needs more cooperation on issues such as climate change and peaceful settlement of territorial disputes. It would also more closely bind the United States to Asia, where American forces have largely kept the peace for decades.

Perhaps these intangibles help explain why the TPP talks took nearly a decade to get this far. Even President Obama was at first wary until he saw an agreement as a way to revitalize the post-World War II international economic order and prevent state-run economies, such as China, from imposing a mercantile approach to trade that would mainly harness free markets for authoritarian rule.

The pact comes as Asia-Pacific leaders are due to meet in November, and perhaps in time for Congress to decide quickly on approving it in an up-or-down vote before the politics of the presidential race get into high gear by next summer.

China, which is not party to the pact but is Asia’s largest economy, can still join it. The pact is structured to easily let in new members. China is already helping set Asia’s agenda, such as a new Beijing-led infrastructure bank. The values in TPP are consistent with those of China’s economic reformers.

But back to the math. This pact could revive the growth of global trade, which has fallen from 6 percent to about 3 percent since 2010. Without new rules of the road to reflect modern values, that number may not pick up. TPP is the Tesla of trade, redefining wholly new ways to speed up the intangible benefits.


 heights

Warren Fighting for Americans, Not Running for President

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“You’re one of the household names in American politics,” Colbert said, “and yet you are one of the few household names that is not running for president of the United States. Are you sure you’re not running for president of the United States? Have you checked the newspapers lately? Because a lot of people have jumped in. You might have done it in your sleep.”

“I’m sure I’m not,” Warren said.

“These days, politicians actually have to check the opt-out button,” Colbert said. But he wasn’t ready to give up.

“Can you tell us why you’d be such a terrible choice?” Colbert said. “… Why we shouldn’t be clamoring for an Elizabeth Warren presidency?”

“I’m out there every single day,” Warren said, “in the middle of a huge fight. And it’s a fight about what this country is going to look like going forward. The game is rigged.”

“What is the game you’re talking about?” Colbert said.

“I’m talking about our country and how it’s run,” the senator said. “… We have a federal government that works great for millionaires, it works great for billionaires, it works great for giant corporations.”

But many, Warren said, were left out.

“For the rest of America, it’s just not working,” Warren said. “It’s time for us to take that government back.”

Colbert’s crowd erupted in applause.

“Well, you don’t sound like you’re running for president,” the show’s host said.

In Colbert’s previous life as a buffoonish right-winger on Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report” in 2014, the talk-show host needled Warren about the benefits of lax financial regulation – mostly to her benefit.

“Have you ever heard of the invisible hand of the market?” Colbert said. “You can’t put handcuffs on an invisible hand. The cops can’t find it… . What you call breaking the law, I call pushing the envelope.”

“You can put handcuffs on people that break the envelope,” Warren said. “When they break the law, they deserve to have handcuffs.”

warren

EU’s Survivablity

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Ronald Tiersky writes:  Remembering history is crucial to understanding the present. Its lessons can be ignored or badly played, but a knowledge of history helps steer us away from exaggerated, immediate conclusions anchored in the flow of the quotidian.

European integration provides a stellar example. The history of this process frames the deal just reached between Greece and its creditors. It helps us to understand.

The European Union’s pattern has always been to make significant advances by crisis. After the trouble ebbs, a period of stability follows as the new order is established, until stagnation or some outside event leads to a new crisis, with a new solution that works more or works less but sets up the cycle anew.

Europe should take some comfort in the fact that in politics, nothing is absolutely certain, and nothing is forever. The euro currency, the European monetary system — indeed, even European integration itself — could always end in catastrophe. Yet if history is good enough of a guide, this is anything but a foregone conclusion.

Another truism: In politics nothing is ever permanently won or lost. European integration has been written off many times before yet it has survived — perhaps with different structures than intended, and with solutions that are less than perfect, but it has come a long way. (And as Charles de Gaulle wrote, “the future lasts a long time.”)

The most historically informed criticism of EU Economic and Monetary Union, which was set up in the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, argues that the arrangement lacked the necessary precondition to be run effectively: that is, political union. Choices in macroeconomic policies are fundamentally political decisions. Absent the political concessions on national sovereignty necessary for decisionmaking, on the euro and on monetary policy in general, the euro currency would hit a mortal crisis and fail, and monetary union would collapse. EU Survivor

Immigration Monday EU

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EU countries struggled  to agree on several measures aimed at addressing the migration crisis, and ministers failed to reach a unanimous agreement on a controversial European Commission proposal to relocate 120,000 refugees.

Slovakia and the Czech Republic opposed the plan to relocate the additional migrants, as proposed by the Commission, unless it is clear that it will be carried out on a voluntary basis, EU diplomats said. Diplomatic sources said a clash between France’s Bernard Cazeneuve and Slovakia’s Robert Kalinak made a final deal more difficult to reach.

The Commission has pushed for the relocation quotas to be mandatory for EU countries.

The meeting put a great emphasis on the quick set up of hotspots to quickly detect those in need of protection in Italy and Greece as a pre-condition of relocation, said Asselborn.

At the end of the meeting the final conclusions stated that the Council has “agreed in principle to relocate an additional 120,000 persons,” but the decision was not taken unanimously. The final document was issued by the Presidency and not by the whole Council.

The conclusion does not mention from which states the refugees will be relocated. In the Commission’s proposal, refugees were expected to be relocated from Italy, Greece and Hungary

In a press conference with Cazeneuve while the meeting was still going on, German interior minister Thomas de Maizière confirmed there had been no breakthrough deal on a mandatory quota system. On Friday European Council President Donald Tusk said he would call an emergency summit of EU leaders if this meeting failed to produce “a concrete sign of solidarity.”

A draft set of conclusions circulated before Monday’s meeting began retained the commitment to relocate the 120,000, but left out crucial details on how it would be carried out — and how the burden would be shared.

Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker last week made the proposal a centerpiece of his State of the Union address, saying Europe needed “immediate action” to address the crisis.

But by Monday afternoon the Commission was lowering its expectations. In a briefing before the ministers’ meeting, a spokeswoman said that for the Commission “mandatory is the best way forward” but that “if the result is achieved, that is the most important thing.”

The numbers being discussed by ministers are still only a fraction of the potential influx of refugees, which Germany’s Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel estimated in a letter to members of his Social Democratic party (SPD) could be as high as one million people this year — in Germany alone.

Germany’s decision to reintroduce border controls along its frontier with Austria also complicated talks. The question of whether the relocation of refugees in Europe should be mandatory or voluntary has been one of the main problems for many nations, especially Eastern European and Baltic countries.

EU officials say Hungary’s reluctance to be considered a front-line border state was a problem in the negotiations.  But after the proposal was unveiled by Juncker, Budapest backtracked, asking not to take part in the relocation package even though it would result in 54,000 refugees being moved out of Hungary (as well as 50,400 from Greece and 15,600 from Italy).

“I told the Hungarians that they should be the solution and not the problem,” said Jean Asselborn, the minister of foreign and European affairs of Luxembourg, “We want to help them. But the key to Europe’s functioning is not in the hands of Mr. Orbán. I hope we will find a solution.”

Interior ministers from Germany, France, Hungary, Italy and Greece held a separate meeting with representatives of the European Commission and the Luxembourg EU presidency ahead of the start of the Council, officials said.

Commission officials said Germany’s move to reinstate border controls was justified under the current circumstances and that Berlin had given assurances that the move was temporary.

They added that if it appeared that there would be a domino effect of too many countries enacting controls, they could ask the Council to assess the situation on the ground and intervene. But EU officials stressed this was not currently the case.

Borders

 

Warren and Corruption in US

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  • Pam Martens and Russ Martens write:  The Insurance Industry Pays Incentives Like a Mercedes-Benz Lease to Push Annuity Sales

Increasingly it feels to Americans that the bulk of the news about scams to separate them from their life savings is coming from one Senator from Massachusetts — Elizabeth Warren.

Ripoffs in financial services, insurance, and real estate – known as F.I.R.E. on Wall Street – are being exposed by Warren, typically in bold pronouncements in Senate Banking hearings where Warren has a chair and a respected voice, and are rapidly amplified in the media.

In 2013, it was only because of Senator Warren that we learned that the so-called Independent Foreclosure Reviews to settle the claims of 4 million homeowners who had been illegally foreclosed on by the bailed out Wall Street banks were a sham. The “independent” consultants were hired by the banks, paid by the banks, and the banks themselves were allowed to determine the number of victims.

It was Senator Warren who put the high frequency trading scam described in the Michael Lewis book, “Flash Boys,” into layman’s language.

“High frequency trading reminds me a little of the scam in Office Space. You know, you take just a little bit of money from every trade in the hope that no one will complain. But taking a little bit of money from zillions of trades adds up to billions of dollars in profits for these high frequency traders and billions of dollars in losses for our retirement funds and our mutual funds and everybody else in the market place. It also means a tilt in the playing field for those who don’t have the information or have the access to the speed or big enough to play in this game.”

In 2013, Warren, together with Senators John McCain, Maria Cantwell and Angus King, introduced the “21st Century Glass-Steagall Act.” Warren explained why the legislation is critically needed:

“By separating traditional depository banks from riskier financial institutions,” said Warren, “the 1933 version of Glass-Steagall laid the groundwork for half a century of financial stability. During that time, we built a robust and thriving middle class. But throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, Congress and regulators chipped away at Glass-Steagall’s protections, encouraging growth of the megabanks and a sharp increase in systemic risk. They finally finished the task in 1999 with the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which eliminated Glass-Steagall’s protections altogether.”

Nine years later, the financial system crashed, leaving the economy in the worst condition since the Great Depression.  Warren and Wall Street

Elizabeth Warren Against Corruption