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Pipeline Deaths Put China’s Urbanization in Focus

Explosions at a pipeline that left dozens dead and upended cars and sidewalks in a busy Chinese port city have renewed focus on industrial facilities in densely populated areas—an issue of rising importance as Beijing pushes an ambitious urbanization plan. Regulators and the pipeline’s operator, China’s largest refining company, began exchanging blame on Monday over the Friday incident in the eastern city of Qingdao, which drew widespread attention across the country and prompted a visit by President Xi Jinping to a local hospital to meet with victims. Authorities on Monday raised the death toll to 55, with 136 injured and nine still missing. Chinese authorities said Monday that the blasts exposed problems caused by human error and that the accident was a “very serious dereliction of duty,” China’s official Xinhua news agency said, citing Yang Dongliang, director of the State Administration of Work Safety. Mr. Yang said the problems […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Pipeline Deaths Put China's Urbanization in Focus

Explosions at a pipeline that left dozens dead and upended cars and sidewalks in a busy Chinese port city have renewed focus on industrial facilities in densely populated areas—an issue of rising importance as Beijing pushes an ambitious urbanization plan. Regulators and the pipeline’s operator, China’s largest refining company, began exchanging blame on Monday over the Friday incident in the eastern city of Qingdao, which drew widespread attention across the country and prompted a visit by President Xi Jinping to a local hospital to meet with victims. Authorities on Monday raised the death toll to 55, with 136 injured and nine still missing. Chinese authorities said Monday that the blasts exposed problems caused by human error and that the accident was a “very serious dereliction of duty,” China’s official Xinhua news agency said, citing Yang Dongliang, director of the State Administration of Work Safety. Mr. Yang said the problems […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Putin Bets on Gazprom Purge as Slowdown Threatens Legacy

Vladimir Putin wasn’t having a great day. The Russian president had spent the August morning in a helicopter over Khabarovsk, near the Chinese border, surveying flood damage that had left tens of thousands of people homeless. Then he met with senior advisers who were on the trip, for a briefing on economic issues. They drew parallels to another brewing storm: The energy-export model Putin had relied on to restore Russia’s economic strength had run its course, he was told, said two officials on the trip. The state-dominated economy needed a shock, and, to prevent stagnation as growth slowed, a reset. Something had to be done. The solution Putin chose will ripple through the entire Russian economy starting next year: He elected to freeze prices at such powerful state companies as OAO Gazprom (GAZP) and OAO Russian Railways. The plan is to set off a chain reaction that will lead […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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No one wants Russia to implode but optimists have their work cut out

No one wants Russia to implode but optimists have their work cut out For the state of Russia’s economy is parlous. A couple of weeks ago, the Russian ministry of economy slashed its forecast for average annual growth between now and 2030 from 4pc to 2.5pc. In fact, Russia’s economy has recently been extremely weak. It fell into technical recession in the first half of the year and it looks likely to post growth of only about 1pc this year, down from an average over the past decade of just under 5pc. Russia’s previously strong growth earned her inclusion in the group of countries known as the BRICs. In fact, this gave a misleading impression of Russia’s underlying dynamism. Russia’s strong past growth reflected a series of one-off factors which cannot be repeated. Most importantly, over the past 10 years, higher oil prices have increased Russia’s export earnings, and […]

Posted On : Published By : ASPO-USA
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China Announces That It Is Going To Stop Stockpiling U.S. Dollars

China just dropped an absolute bombshell, but it was almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media in the United States.  The central bank of China has decided that it is “no longer in China’s favor to accumulate foreign-exchange reserves”.  During the third quarter of 2013, China’s foreign-exchange reserves were valued at approximately $3.66 trillion .  And of course the biggest chunk of that was made up of U.S. dollars.  For years, China has been accumulating dollars and working hard to keep the value of the dollar up and the value of the yuan down.  One of the goals has been to make Chinese products less expensive in the international marketplace.  But now China has announced that the time has come for it to stop stockpiling U.S. dollars.  And if that does indeed turn out to be the case, than many U.S. analysts are […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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China Fires Shot Across Petrodollar Bow: Shanghai Futures Exchange May Price Crude Oil Futures In Yuan

Page added on November 21, 2013 With the US shale revolution set to make America the largest exporter of crude, however briefly, the influence of Saudi oil is rapidly declining. This has been felt most recently in the cold shoulder the US gave Saudi Arabia and Qatar first over the Syrian debacle, and subsequently in its overtures to break the ice with Iran over the stern objections of Israel and the Saudi lobby (for a good example of this the most recent soundbites by Prince bin Talal ). But despite the shifting commodity winds and the superficial political jawboning, the reality is that nothing threatens the US dollar’s hegemony in what many claim is the biggest pillar of the currency’s reserve status – the petrodollar, which literally makes the USD the only currency in which energy-strapped countries can transact in to purchase energy. This may be changing soon following […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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New report: jobs from shale gas development greatly exaggerated by industry

There’s a new report out from the  Multi-State Shale Research Collaborative , which consists of independent, nonpartisan research and policy organizations in New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia that monitor employment trends, tax policy, economic development, and the community impacts of energy extraction in the Marcellus and Utica Shale region. The Collaborative has an advisory committee of academic experts. The new report is entitled: Exaggerating the Employment Impacts of Shale Drilling : How and Why . It contains a lot of great data and important analysis. Among the key findings: Between 2005 and 2012, an estimated 3.7 jobs were created for every well […]

Posted On : Published By : ASPO-USA
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Krugman Goes Splat

I was fairly amazed to read Paul Krugman’s latest op-ed in the New York Times, titled “ A Permanent Slump? ” He seemed to be coming remarkably close to saying what several of us have been trumpeting for the past few years—that world economic growth is ending and we’d better retool accordingly. “What if the world we’ve been living in for the past five years is the new normal?,” he writes. “What if depression-like conditions are on track to persist, not for another year or two, but for decades?” Wow. That’s a gutsy statement, given that it’s coming from one of the high priests of the Religion of No Limits (otherwise known as economics). What’s even more remarkable is that Krugman’s sudden insight was evidently triggered by comments from Larry Summers (who was almost nominated to be the next Fed Chairman), in a speech at a recent IMF conference […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Raw Sewage and Anger Flood Gaza’s Streets as Electricity Runs Low

Raw sewage has flooded streets in a southern Gaza City neighborhood in recent days, threatening a health disaster, after a shortage of electricity and cheap diesel fuel from Egypt led the Hamas government to shut down Gaza’s lone power plant, causing a pump station to flood. Three more sewage stations in Gaza City and 10 others elsewhere in the Gaza Strip are close to overflowing, sanitation officials here said, and 3.5 million cubic feet of raw sewage is seeping into the Mediterranean Sea daily. The sanitation department may soon no longer be able to pump drinking water to Gaza homes. “Any day that passes without a solution has disastrous effects,” Farid Ashour, director of sanitation at the Gaza Coastal Municipalities Water Utility, said Tuesday in an interview. “We haven’t faced a situation as dangerous as this time.” The sewage crisis is the most acute of an […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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To tackle pollution, China to drop pursuit of growth at all costs

* Govt officials no longer to be judged solely on economic growth * "Unified regulation" pledge could augur stronger ministry in new year By David Stanway BEIJING, Nov 18 (Reuters) – China will steer local governments away from the pursuit of economic growth at all costs and beef up their powers to punish polluters as part of a campaign to reverse the damage done by three decades of unchecked expansion. In wide-ranging economic and social reforms unveiled last week, the ruling Communist Party said it would put more emphasis on environmental protection when assessing officials, and would also hold local authorities directly responsible for pollution. The document, which also pledged to relax its "one-child policy" and further free up its markets, said China would draw an "ecological protection red line" that would limit the economic development of environmentally vulnerable regions. Three decades of industrialisation and double-digit growth in China […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple