News Dump Tuesday: NIRP coming to a saving account near you edition

It was inevitable. How it plays out is another story.
paying for a bank to hold your money

ABN Amro business clients may soon feel the effects of the European Central Bank’s low interest rates. From October 1st, the Dutch bank is adjusting its conditions to state that the bank can give negative interest rates to account holders with a business checking or -savings account, ANP reports.

RBS gearing up too

The RBS banking group has warned 1.3 million customers they could be charged negative interest rates if the Bank of England cuts base rates below zero.
The group, which includes NatWest, wrote to its business and commercial account holders about the potential changes, which mean they could lose money even when they are in credit.

Hedge fund problems

Hedge funds suffered some big redemptions in June, with investors pulling approximately $20.7 billion in the month alone, making it one of the largest non year-end outflows since 2009, according to a new eVestment Hedge Fund Asset Flows report.
As a result, net flows to hedge funds for the second quarter were negative $10.68 billion. The first half of 2016 saw net flows of negative $27.95 billion.
This also marks the third consecutive quarter of negative flows from the hedge fund industry.

U.S.-backed forces collapsing

The FSA forces aren’t holding anything right now, as reports of the resignation of division commander and every single one of his assistants has left the group without any official orders, stuck on standby.
The commanders resigned citing non-specific “medical reasons,” and while what’s left of the brigade is waiting for new orders and a new command structure, with the forces in surrounded districts in Aleppo it’s also highly possible that the FSA will just disband Division 16 outright.

Trading Places

Under the rules of war, militaries are permitted to kill civilians or destroy their property, even if such collateral damage is deemed likely before an attack, if the target is militarily critical. That reasoning is unacceptable for police departments, given their primary mission of protecting the public. The militarization of police with SWAT teams, armored vehicles, etc. is threatening enough to citizens’ liberty without the unnecessary use of military-grade explosives to endanger the civilians whose welfare they are supposed to be safeguarding.
And if the police are being militarized at home, the military has lately been used as a police force overseas. Instead of fighting other uniformed armed forces, the U.S. military has been bogged down in fighting police actions against non-uniformed guerrilla forces, which attack and then blend back into the population. As the U.S. military gradually learned during the Vietnam War and has had to painfully relearn in the quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq, the use of the heavy firepower, normally used against regular foreign armies, is counterproductive against elusive guerrillas. The more civilians that are killed, the more the rising rage among the local populace leads to the recruitment of additional guerrilla fighters from their midst. Thus, eventually in all three wars, the military was forced to adopt what are called counterinsurgency (COIN) tactics, which have a primary goal of protecting the local population and even wining their "hearts and minds," rather than simply killing guerrillas. If this sounds like what a police force would do, it is.

Does this count as voter suppression?

Election officials in northern Thailand think they can buy off a gang of monkey vandals with fresh fruit and vegetables, after about 100 macaques tore up voter lists publicly posted ahead of next month's referendum on a proposed constitution.
District official Surachai Maneeprakorn said a large population of the monkeys lives behind the Buddhist temple where the polling station they raided Sunday is set up in an open hall.
"For some reason they were being very naughty and started tearing up the lists," he said.
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Arrow's picture

Bernie monkeys...or it's...the Russians...that's it!

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I want a Pony!

elenacarlena's picture

aren't they giving it away? I'd take it off their hands. Biggrin

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Please check out Pet Vet Help, consider joining us to help pets, and follow me @ElenaCarlena on Twitter! Thank you.

Charging you for a savings account is their way of passing along the costs.

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sojourns's picture

What would happen if much of the trillions of dollars sacked away by the uber wealthy and multi-national corporations were suddenly made available? Hyper inflation!

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"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
John Cage

elenacarlena's picture

of politicians to fix the problem?

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You mean the anti-war people were righ?

The Islamic State’s latest suicide attack in Baghdad, which killed nearly 330 people, foreshadows a long and bloody insurgency, according to American diplomats and commanders, as the group reverts to its guerrilla roots because its territory is shrinking in Iraq and Syria.

Already, officials say, many Islamic State fighters who lost battles in Falluja and Ramadi have blended back into the largely Sunni civilian populations there, and are biding their time to conduct future terrorist attacks. And with few signs that the beleaguered Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, can effectively forge an inclusive partnership with Sunnis, many senior American officials warn that a military victory in the last urban stronghold of Mosul, which they hope will be achieved by the end of the year, will not be sufficient to stave off a lethal insurgency.

“To defeat an insurgency, Iraq would need to move forward on its political and economic reform agenda,” Lt. Gen. Sean B. MacFarland, the top American commander in Iraq, said in an email.

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Following the US-led "liberation" or "occupation", depending on which side of the fence you stand, Iraq’s economy continues to struggle. Iraq, using the Human Development Index which takes into consideration income per capita, is ranked 121st globally. Although officially leaving Iraq in 2011, the neoliberal reforms implemented by Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), famously referred to as Bremer's 100 orders, remain entrenched in Iraq’s constitution, much to the benefit of Western economies and no elected Iraqi officials have the authority to undo these reforms.

These reforms included maintaining corporate tax at a low rate of 15 percent, privatisation of Iraqi state-owned facilities and granting foreign contractors immunity from Iraqi legislation, including private security companies. Within days of Saddam Hussein’s grip on Iraq breaking, the Ministry of Oil in Baghdad was secured by the US armed forces and reopened. The Chilcot Inquiry itself highlighted the important role oil interests had in the lead-up to the war in ensuring British oil companies would have a share of Iraqi oil production.

Paul Bremer implemented four orders under George W Bush’s supervision when he was head of the CPA in Iraq. These orders included "the full privatisation of public enterprises, full ownership rights by foreign firms of Iraqi businesses, full repatriation of foreign profits… the opening of Iraq’s banks to foreign control, national treatment for foreign companies and…the elimination of nearly all trade barriers" (see Antonia Juhasz’s Ambitions of Empire: The Bush Administration Economic Plan for Iraq). Such a sudden reform to the Iraqi economy caused a massive collapse of the Iraqi infrastructure.

The freeing up of the market destroyed what was left of Iraq’s self-sustainability.....
Walking around Baghdad, it is now near to impossible to find any Iraqi goods for sale in the streets. Following the US-led invasion, a once-proud manufacturing nation has been shackled with strict Ricardian economics, focusing merely on that which it is supposedly good at, a failing oil production industry. The opening up of the market has left the wealthy entrepreneurs in Iraq to search for the cheapest options for production.

In Iraq the only flights fully booked in or out of the country are those going to China, where businessmen make deals to bring the cheapest possible products into Iraq. Even the Al-Safafeer market, once a proud centrepiece of Iraq’s manufacturing industry, has been affected by the importing of cheaper products from abroad. Al-Safafeer market was world famous for selling brass products designed and embroidered with beautiful patterns by the merchants themselves.

Walking the street, all you would be able to hear was the banging of metal as the designers carved out their trade. Sadly today, the bronzework that is sold all comes from China and is decorated by machines. The market owners speak reminiscently of the days in the 70s and 80s when they would see tourists from all over the globe traipsing the very same markets in search of souvenirs to take home. Not only is trade being lost, but a beautiful skill too, and with that, jobs and livelihoods have been taken away.

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TheOtherMaven's picture

that would show the world the wonders of untrammeled free market capitalism.

Well, they did just that, but the "wonders" are not at all what their delusional ideology led them to expect.

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.