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NATO Is Harboring ISIS, And Here’s The Evidence
NATO Is Harboring ISIS, And Here’s The Evidence
For the better part of a year, Turkey remained on the sidelines in the “fight” against ISIS.
Then, on July 20, a powerful explosion ripped through the town of Suruc. 33 people were killed including a number of Socialist Party of the Oppressed (ESP) and Socialist Youth Associations Federation (SGDF) members who planned to assist in the rebuilding of Kobani.
The attack was promptly attributed to Islamic State who took “credit” for the tragedy the next day.
To be sure, the attack came at a rather convenient time for President Tayyip Erdogan. A little over a month earlier, the ruling AKP party lost its absolute parliamentary majority in part due to a strong showing at the ballot box for the pro-Kurdish (and PKK-aligned) HDP. What happened in the wake of the Suruc bombing was nothing short of a largely successful attempt on Erdogan’s part to use fear and violence to scare the electorate into restoring AKP’s dominance in snap elections that took place earlier this month.
In short, Erdogan used Suruc as an excuse to begin a “war on terror.” Part and parcel of the new campaign was an invite from Ankara for Washington to use Turkey’s Incirlik air base. Subsequently, Erdogan reminded the world that the PKK is also considered a terrorist organization and as such, the anti-ISIS campaign would also include a crackdown on Kurdish militants operating in Turkey. Erdogan proceeded to focus squarely on the PKK, all but ignoring ISIS while simultaneously undercutting the coalition building process on the way to calling for new elections. Unsurprisingly, AKP put on a much better showing in the electoral redo, and with that, Erdogan had succeeded in using ISIS as a smokescreen to start a civil war with the PKK, in the process frightening voters into restoring his party’s grip on power.
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Why It Really All Comes Down To The Death Of The Petrodollar
Why It Really All Comes Down To The Death Of The Petrodollar
Last week, in the global currency war’s latest escalation, Kazakhstan instituted a free float for the tenge. The currency immediately plunged by some 25%.
The rationale behind the move was clear enough. The plunge in crude prices along with the relative weakness of the Russian ruble had severely strained Kazakhstan, which is central Asia’s largest crude exporter. As a quick look at a chart of the tenge’s effective exchange rate makes clear, the pressure had been mounting for quite a while and when China devalued the yuan earlier this month, the outlook for trade competitiveness worsened.
What might not be as clear (on the surface anyway) is how recent events in developing economy FX markets following the devaluation of the yuan stem from a seismic shift we began discussing late last year – namely, the death of the petrodollar system which has served to underwrite decades of dollar dominance and was, until recently, a fixture of the post-war global economic order.
In short, the world seems to have underestimated how structurally important collapsing crude prices are to global finance. For years, producers funnelled their dollar proceeds into USD assets providing a perpetual source of liquidity, boosting the financial strength of the reserve currency, leading to even higher asset prices and even more USD-denominated purchases, and so forth, in a virtuous (especially if one held US-denominated assets and printed US currency) loop. That all came to an abrupt, if quiet end last year when a confluence of economic (e.g. shale production) and geopolitical (e.g. squeeze the Russians) factors led the Saudis to, as we put it, Plaxico’d themselves and the US.
The ensuing plunge in crude meant that suddenly, the flow of petrodollars was set to dry up and FX reserves across commodity producing countries were poised to come under increased pressure. For the first time in decades, exported petrodollar capital turned negative.
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Kuwait “Over-Supply” Concerns Send WTI Tumbling Back To $42 Handle
Kuwait “Over-Supply” Concerns Send WTI Tumbling Back To $42 Handle
Reversing all of yesterday’s FOMC-inspired idiocy, WTI has plunged back to reality this morning. Following comments by Kuwait’s comments that OPEC had no choice but to keep production steady, refocusing the market on global oversupply, April WTI is back down to a $42 handle.
All of yesterday’s idiocy unwound…
Kuwait’s oil minister said on Thursday he was concerned by the 50 percent drop in oil prices since June because of its impact on the Gulf Arab state’s budget, but saidOPEC had no choice but to keep output steady.
“We don’t want to lose our share in the market,” Ali al-Omair told reporters.
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Iran will weather oil price slide, Saudi Arabia will suffer – Rouhani
Iran will weather oil price slide, Saudi Arabia will suffer – Rouhani
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Tuesday that Iran can cope with the economic turmoil of falling oil prices, adding that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will be harder hit.
Rouhani said that while oil now only accounts for one-third of Tehran’s budget, some of the Gulf states are up to 95 percent reliant on it.
“If Iran suffers from the drop in oil prices, know that other oil-producing countries such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will suffer more than Iran,” he said.
He added that “Kuwait’s budget is 95 percent reliant on oil,” and 90 percent of Saudi Arabia’s “annual exports are related to oil.”
READ MORE: Oil plummet: Crude dives below $45 for first time since 2009
Rouhani was addressing a crowd in the southern city of Bushehr – home to a nuclear power plant built with the help of the Russians, which became operational in 2011.
He also said that falling prices for crude oil are the result of “a plot that will be overcome with unity and resistance.”
“Those [countries] who have planned the oil price reduction against some countries should know that they will regret it,” he said, without elaborating on what countries he meant.
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Oil Producers Betting on Price Drop With OPEC Not Curbing Output
Oil Producers Betting on Price Drop With OPEC Not Curbing Output
The oil industry was listening as OPEC talked down crude prices to a more than five-year low.
Drillers, refiners and other merchants increasedbets on lower prices to the most in three years in the week ended Jan. 6, government data show. Producers idled the most rigs since 1991, with some paying to break leases on drilling equipment.
Companies are hedging more and drilling less amid concern that the biggest slump in prices since 2008 will continue. Oil dropped for a seventh week after officials from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwaitreiterated they won’t curb output to halt the decline.
“Producers are desperately hedging their production in a drastically falling market,” Phil Flynn, a senior market analyst at the Price Futures Group in Chicago, said by phone Jan. 9. “They’re trying to lock in prices because they are convinced that the market will stay down for a while.”
WTI slid $6.19, or 11 percent, to $47.93 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange on Jan. 6, settling below $50 for the first time since April 2009. Futures for February delivery declined $1.02 to $47.34 in electronic trading at 10:06 a.m. London time.
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Crude Crash Set To Continue After Arab Emirates Hint $40 Oil Coming Next | Zero Hedge
Crude Crash Set To Continue After Arab Emirates Hint $40 Oil Coming Next | Zero Hedge.
In space, no one can hear you scream… unless you happen to be Venezuela’s (soon to be former) leader Nicolas Maduro, who has been doing a lot of screaming this morningfollowing news that UAE’s Energy Minister Suhail Al-Mazrouei said OPEC will stand by its decision not to cut crude output “even if oil prices fall as low as $40 a barrel” and will wait at least three months before considering an emergency meeting.
In doing so, OPEC not only confirms that the once mighty cartel is essentially non-existant and has been replaced by the veto vote of the lowest-cost exporters (again, sorry Maduro), but that all those energy hedge funds (and not only) who hoped that by allowing margin calls to go straight to voicemail on Friday afternoon, their troubles would go away because of some magical intervention by OPEC over the weekend, are about to have a very unpleasant Monday, now that the next oil price bogey has been set: $40 per barrell.
Luckily, this will be so “unambiguously good” for the US consumer, it should surely offset the epic capex destruction that is about to be unleashed on America’s shale patch, in junk bond hedge funds around the globe, and as millions of high-paying jobs created as a result of the shale miracle are pink slipped.
According to Bloomberg, OPEC won’t immediately change its Nov. 27 decision to keep the group’s collective output target unchanged at 30 million barrels a day, Suhail Al-Mazrouei said. Venezuela supports an OPEC meeting given the price slide, though the country hasn’t officially requested one, an official at Venezuela’s foreign ministry said Dec. 12. The group is due to meet again on June 5.
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There Are 300,000 Iraqi Barrels Signaling Oil Glut Will Deepen – Bloomberg
There Are 300,000 Iraqi Barrels Signaling Oil Glut Will Deepen – Bloomberg.
Not only is OPEC refraining from cutting oil output to stem the five-month plunge in prices, it’s adding to the supply glut.
Just five days after the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries decided to maintain production levels, Iraq, the group’s second-biggest member, inked an export deal with the Kurds that may add about 300,000 barrels a day to world supplies.
In a global market that neighboring Kuwait estimates is facing a daily oversupply of 1.8 million barrels, the accord stands to deepen crude’s 38 percent plunge since late June. Or as Carsten Fritsch, a Frankfurt-based analyst at Commerzbank AG, put it: there’ll be “even more oil flooding the market that nobody needs.”
Benchmark Brent crude slumped immediately after the deal was signed yesterday inBaghdad, dropping 2.8 percent to $70.54 a barrel. The price, which slipped another 0.2 percent today, is down 9 percent since OPEC’s Nov. 27 decision and 17 percent over the past 30 days.
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