tyb
wasn't there a golf pro that something like that habbened to?. De-pressurized and it flew until it ran out of fuel.
Shortages plague Cuba as U.S. sanctions sharpen economic woes
After Cuba started limiting sales this month, partly blaming tightened U.S. economic sanctions on the Communist-run island, a couple wanted to buy as much as possible and lined up for three hours under the Caribbean sun to get tickets guaranteeing them their rations.
Inside, they lined up again to collect two bags of chicken thighs each, as fellow shoppers elbowed one another in pursuit of their own rations, and headed for the checkout feeling like they had won the lottery.
“We were born in this revolution and are used to rough times,” said Hidalgo, a 61-year old blacksmith. “We are bracing ourselves for it to get worse.”
Long lines outside shops with mostly bare shelves are increasingly common in Cuba, and the government has indeed signaled that things are going from bad to worse.
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel, in a speech last month, accused the Trump administration of engaging in an “asphyxiating financial persecution that makes the import of goods and resources of primary necessity particularly difficult.”
sucks when you have the black money cut huh?.
The degree to which new U.S. sanctions, due in part to Cuba’s support for Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, have compounded its economic woes is open to debate.
The economy had already stagnated in recent years in tandem with the implosion of strategic ally Venezuela, resulting in cuts in fuel and energy use by state entities and this year shortages of basic goods such as bread, chicken and eggs.
But the increase in sanctions, which have hit the key tourism sector and added to investor and bank jitters about dealing with Cuba, has some economists predicting the economy will slip from stagnation into a full-blown recession later this year.
The economy has averaged 1% annual growth over the last three years, compared with the 5% to 7% rate economists say is needed to recover fully from the depression caused by the fall of its former benefactor, the Soviet Union, in 1991.
“While the crisis will not be as bad as in the 1990s, it will have a worrying social impact on the most vulnerable households, which are already on subsistence salaries,” said Pavel Vidal, a former Cuban central bank economist who teaches at Colombia’s Universidad Javeriana Cali.
Bracing for harder economic times, the government has resorted to what it knows best to manage the crisis and prevent social unrest: more control.
Interior Commerce Minister Betsy Diaz said two weeks ago the government would “temporarily” ration sales of a handful of basic products like eggs on a monthly basis, using ration books distributed after the 1959 Revolution, and limit the sale of others like chicken to ensure everyone gets their fair share.
“This could be a critical moment that generates the consensus necessary to apply changes,” said Vidal. “The government needs to give more space to the private sector and investment.”
Cuba has enacted some economic reforms in recent years, including expanding the private sector from 2010 onward and introducing a new foreign investment law that cut taxes by around 50% in 2014.
But local economists like Omar Everleny say the reforms undertaken have been too cautious so far. The government has backtracked on overhauls of areas like agriculture and the dominant public sector remains deeply inefficient.
Cuba was already behind on an estimated $1.5 billion (ÂŁ1.1 billion) in short-term commercial debt and warning of austerity before U.S. President Donald Trump started the latest round of tightening of the decades-old U.S. trade embargo.
Aid from Venezuela, in the form of subsidized oil, had long masked the true extent of Cuba’s economic problems, but it started to fall from 2015 when a drop in oil prices roiled that OPEC nation’s economy.
Venezuela’s crude shipments to Cuba are now about half what they were four years ago, and they could soon fall further. Last month, the United States also began targeting vessels and companies that ship oil to the island from Venezuela for sanctions, threatening the energy grid and transportation.
U.S. sanctions against its old Cold War foe are also hitting the two bright spots in the otherwise glum economy: tourism and foreign investment. Both had boomed briefly after the announcement of a Cuba-U.S. detente in 2014.
Tourism revenues dropped by 4.6% in 2018, according to official data released last month. The announcement in 2017 of tighter travel restrictions on U.S. citizens played a role.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-economy/shortages-plague-cuba-as-u-s-sanctions-sharpen-economic-woes-idUSKCN1SX1P1
Chinese Bond Market Roiled By First Ever Bank Failure
Late last Friday, we reported that several hours after the market close, China's financial regulator and central bank made a shocking announcement: for the first time in nearly 30 year, China would take control of a bank, in this case the troubled inner Mongolia-based Baoshang Bank, due to the serious credit risks it poses.
The news which highlights the potential for increased stress at regional lenders that piled into off-book financing in recent years, was strategically timed to hit ahead of the weekend, and with the market closed, it avoided an immediate panic selling waterfall. However, the fact that in China banks are now fair game for failure, and will soon join the record surge in Chinese corporate defaults.
Defaults(or the threat of them) slammedthe country’s financial sector on Monday, sending funding costs sharply higher and underscoring the potential for increased stress at regional lenders that piled into off-book financing in recent years.
This is there system rushing to buy credit default swaps or insurance against asset failure.-See Blythe Master's at JP Morgan.
While a full-blown bank run has yet to emerge, Baoshang Bank’s negotiable certificates of deposits and other bonds were suspended from trading Monday morning. Analysts said the takeover will hurt market sentiment on debt and shares of smaller banks and their issuance of NCDs could be harder from now on. The outstanding bonds of other city and rural commercial banks in similar situations could be sold off, China Merchants Bank said in a note.
For those who missed our prior post on the bank collapse, here is some context:
Founded in 1998, Baoshang has more than 8,000 staff and reported total assets of 576 billion yuan ($83 billion) at the end of September 2017 – a fraction of CCB’s 23 trillion yuan last year. The smaller bank’s so-called investment receivables, which analysts have said are often loans disguised as investments, stood at 153 billion yuan, accounting for more than a quarter of total assets.
Yet despite promises of recovery, with the Mongolian bank now insolvent, China's Caixin reported that interbank creditors with deposits above 50m yuan may get back 70% of principal payment and corporate creditors may get no less than 80% at early stage. More concerning is that depositors will also be burned: while small, individual savings at the bank will be guaranteed by the government, corporate deposits and interbank liabilities above 50 million yuan will be negotiated, the regulators said on Sunday.
Finally, the cost on China’s one-year interest-rate swaps, a measure of traders’ expectations for liquidity conditions, surged 7 basis points to 2.82%. That’s largest increase in a month.
In short, what has just transpired is a bail-out with Chinese bail-in characteristics, and in other words, this may well have been the first domino to fall in China's banking sector which earlier today reported a record 268.5 trillion yuan ($38.9 trillion) in liabilities and 246.2 trillion yuan ($35.6 trillion) in assets, both up roughly 8% Y/Y, and well over double the size of the American banking sector.
Translation: nobody knows yet if this bank failure will result in a bank run, even as the market is clearly recoiling from the bail out. If a bank run does indeed materialize, and some of those $35 trillion in Chinese bank liabilities (i.e. deposits) flee… well, not only are all bets off, but Trump can celebrate an early victory in the US-China trade war.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-27/big-wake-call-chinese-bond-market-roiled-first-ever-bank-failure
Would if I was one of them. remember these were the ones who "took care" of the people after fukushima. In reality it appears this was part of the entire plan to keep abe neutralized and making them look like the good guys.