Miscellaneous News

Unintended consequences... LOL. But hey, they can either ask their master ('murikkka) for compensation or find new work in wanwanland...their bestie.


VILNIUS – Lietuvos Gelezinkeliai (Lithuanian Railways, LTG) said on Thursday it is planning to lay off around 2,000 of its 9,000-plus employees, with around a quarter of the state-owned group's managerial staff at various levels set to leave.
The company said in a press release that 6 million euros will be allocated for severance payments to employees.

The planned layoffs will affect around 1,200 workers in LTG Cargo, the group's freight transportation subsidiary, about 500 in LTG Infra, the infrastructure subsidiary, and some 300 in LTG. The group currently has around 9,200 employees in total.

Both LTG and the Employment Service will provide assistance to the redundant workers, according to the press release.
The company has said earlier that it may lose some 150 million euros in revenue this year as freight volumes are forecast to halve, compared to last year, to around 26.5 million tons.

LTG has lost around 11 million tons in annual freight because of EU and US sanctions against Belarus' potash giant Belaruskali, which will trim its annual revenue by 61 million euros.

The railway company is set to lose another 2.6 million tons of freight and 12.8 million euros in revenue due to EU sanctions on the owner of Lithuania's phosphate fertilizer producer Lifosa.

The EU's sanctions on Russian coal and Poland's refusal to buy it will result in a loss of 2.5 million tons of coal shipments and 12 million euros in revenue for LTG.

The railway group will lose another 1.4 million tons of freight and 17 million euros in revenue as a result of Belarus' ban on the transit of oil and oil products and fertilizers from Lithuania. Ninety-five percent of these shipments were destined for Ukraine.
Lithuania's draft revised 2022 budget, approved by the Cabinet, earmarks 155 million euros in additional financing for LTG.

US was harassing Chinese companies but even they never committed robbery by seizing assets. Now i understand that US is a giant power and cant be fought in a tit for tat fashion but India?? Why is China allowing India to harass Chinese companies? The Indian campaign against Chinese companies started long back and has now reached the stage of asset seizure.

This must certainly demoralize Chinese companies abroad that they can be hounded up anytime by the host and the parent nation wont do anything about it.

Many Indian MNCs have operations in China. How about return the favour? Starting with TATA/JLR who derive sizeable income from China yet donate to BJP back home? Indians only respect power and its time China shows it in the economic domain.

Kaeshmiri said:

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

This must certainly demoralize Chinese companies abroad that they can be hounded up anytime by the host and the parent nation wont do anything about it.

Many Indian MNCs have operations in China. How about return the favour? Starting with TATA/JLR who derive sizeable income from China yet donate to BJP back home? Indians only respect power and its time China shows it in the economic domain.

Click to expand...

Nah, the Chinese government doesn’t have to do anything. Serve Xiaomi right for investing in manufacturing in India

China meets banks to discuss protecting assets from US sanctions​

Officials concerned that measures taken against Moscow could also be applied to Beijing
Chinese regulators have held an emergency meeting with domestic and foreign banks to discuss how they could protect the country’s overseas assets from US-led sanctions similar to those imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, according to people familiar with the discussion.

Officials are worried the same measures could be taken against Beijing in the event of a regional military conflict or other crisis. President Xi Jinping’s administration has maintainedthroughout the crisis but Chinese banks and companies remain wary of transacting any business with Russian entities that could trigger US sanctions.

The internal conference, held on April 22, included officials from China’s and finance ministry, as well as executives from dozens of local and international lenders such as HSBC, the people said. The ministry of finance said at the meeting that all large foreign and domestic banks operating in China were represented.

They added that the meeting began with remarks from a senior finance ministry official who said Xi’s administration had been put on alert by the ability of the US and its allies to freeze the Russian central bank’s dollar assets.

The officials and attendees did not mention specific scenarios but one possible trigger for such sanctions is thought to be a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which China claims as its territory and has threatened to invade it if Taipei refuses to submit to its control indefinitely
“If , decoupling of the Chinese and western economies will be far more severe than [decoupling with] Russia because China’s economic footprint touches every part of the world,” said one of the people briefed on the meeting.

Andrew Collier, managing director of Orient Capital Research in Hong Kong, said the Chinese government was right to be concerned “because it has very few alternatives and the consequences [of US financial sanctions] are disastrous”.

Senior regulators including Yi Huiman, president of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, and Xiao Gang, who headed the CSRC from 2013 to 2016, asked bankers in attendance what could be done to protect the nation’s overseas assets, especially its $3.2tn in foreign reserves.

China’s vast dollar-denominated holdings range from more than $1tn US Treasury bonds to New York office buildings. State-owned Dajia Insurance Group, for example, owns the Waldorf Astoria New York.

“No one on site could think of a good solution to the problem,” said another person briefed on the meeting, “China’s banking system isn’t prepared for a freeze of its dollar assets or exclusion from the Swift messaging system as the US has done to Russia.”
HSBC did not respond to a request for comment.

Some bankers suggested that the central bank could require exporters to exchange all of their foreign exchange revenues for renminbi to increase its onshore dollar holdings. Exporters are currently allowed to retain a portion of their foreign exchange earnings for future use.

Others suggested a “significant” cut to the $50,000 quota that Chinese nationals are allowed to purchase every year for overseas travel, education and other offshore purchases.

When one official asked Chinese bankers if they could diversify into more yen or euro-backed assets, they replied that the idea was not practical.

Some bankers present, however, doubted whether Washington could ever afford to cut economic ties with China given its status as the world’s second-largest economy, huge holdings of dollar assets and close trade relationship with the US.

“It is difficult for the US to impose massive sanctions against China,” agreed Collier. “It is like mutually assured destruction in a nuclear war.”

4Runner said:

NASDAQ is already in bear territory.
View attachment 88016


S&P 500 is on the verge.
View attachment 88017

Not looking good. Conventional wisdom days November is going to be a bloodbath.

Click to expand...

Will this result in an economic meltdown similar in scale to the 2008 financial crisis? Or worse? 1929 market crash?

If this does happen, will China bail the US out this time like she did back in 2008?

If China refuses to bail the US out this time, how would the forecoming crisis affect the world economy?

The answer is quite simple really.

Massively expand the OBOR project. Dump all the foreign reserves into expanding other regional powers which can act as counterbalances to the Western economic system. The easiest and quickest way is dump a huge chunk of it into AIIB or similar and use it to provide loans to those countries. Those countries will then spend the money and provide revenues back to China better than US treasury bonds ever will. Internationalize Chinese companies by opening more facilities in non-Western nations.

Increase the reserves of strategic commodities.

Improve on the ways to convert the Rmb into other currencies and vice-versa. Increase the amount of Rmb used in international settlements. Enhance the Chinese financial industry so it can better compete with the Western one by providing more advanced products. This might be a commodities exchange denominated in RMB, or a stock market network that international investors can invest in with RMB, or a futures exchange denominated in RMB.

Make sure CIPS can function even in a degraded environment where there are sanctions on a given expense category, account, bank, or nation, basis. This can be done with a protocol which has smart contracts in the transactions. Make sure banks with CIPS have branches in every country with a RMB settlement scheme. Then provide e-banking services denominated in Rmb and the local currency in a franchise type of service. Make an online currency exchange which enables trades with all the superfluous foreign currency reserves. This is the internal CIPS which can only be used in China. The external CIPS, for international transactions, has none of that extra meta data, doesn't know what an expense category is, has no smart contracts.

Put banking secrecy laws in place. Like add the option for numbered accounts where external entities can't identify the other party. Make opaque investment vehicles to insulate Chinese companies from potential sanctions. Insulate commerce transactions within China from international commerce as much as possible. Insulate RMB settlements from settlements in other currencies. Make Chinese companies provide unbranded or off brand products to Russia, in case they fear sanctions. At one point, ASUS feared Intel would screw them over if they made AMD compatible motherboards, and guess what they came unmarked and in a plain white box.

KYli said:

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

China meets banks to discuss protecting assets from US sanctions​

Officials concerned that measures taken against Moscow could also be applied to Beijing
Chinese regulators have held an emergency meeting with domestic and foreign banks to discuss how they could protect the country’s overseas assets from US-led sanctions similar to those imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, according to people familiar with the discussion.

Click to expand...

That'd be more like a formal diplomatic notice to US, rather than an actual serious meeting looking for genuine solutions. Everyone in the meeting would play dumb as all of them knew the meeting itself was just a cover to send the message across that US better pay attention to not do something stupid like what they did to Russia to China on a Russian scale. One cannot sincerely expects those foreign banks in the meeting to be complete idiots to say something like how to kill US financial system in case SWIFT goes offline for Chinese banks. They won't see the next day sunrise, or at least their careers won't. It's a game both side can play and will play to inflict maximum damage to the other side. There's no doubt the nastiest of the nastiest formulae are bubbling and brewing in secret and in silence. One thing one would agree though is that US dollar is the curse for China like what silver was to her for the last millennium.

gelgoog said:

The answer is quite simple really.

Massively expand the OBOR project. Dump all the foreign reserves into expanding other regional powers which can act as counterbalances to the Western economic system. The easiest and quickest way is dump a huge chunk of it into AIIB or similar and use it to provide loans to those countries. Those countries will then spend the money and provide revenues back to China better than US treasury bonds ever will. Internationalize Chinese companies by opening more facilities in non-Western nations.

Increase the reserves of strategic commodities.

Improve on the ways to convert the Rmb into other currencies and vice-versa. Increase the amount of Rmb used in international settlements. Enhance the Chinese financial industry so it can better compete with the Western one by providing more advanced products. This might be a commodities exchange denominated in RMB, or a stock market network that international investors can invest in with RMB, or a futures exchange denominated in RMB.

Make sure CIPS can function even in a degraded environment where there are sanctions on a given expense category, account, bank, or nation, basis. This can be done with a protocol which has smart contracts in the transactions. Make sure banks with CIPS have branches in every country with a Rmb settlement scheme. Then provide e-banking services denominated in Rmb and the local currency in a franchise type of service. Make an online currency exchange which enables trades with all the superfluous foreign currency reserves.

Click to expand...

Current CIPS weakest link is the good old fashioned correspondence accounts, which must pass through SWIFT if someone in the CIPS loop doesn't have sort of a header ID registered within the CIPS. GMEI, LEI, etc, makes it even harder to hide transmissions. The only hope is to totally bypass all these legacy messaging systems with a novel fintec and digital currency solutions that allows authorities to completely control both messaging and gross clearing from end to end, including all retail, wholesale, inter bank and cross border transactions.
Or slowly allows Americans and Europeans to own Chinese assets under Chinese jurisdiction and on Chinese soil, for equal measures, just like what regulators are saying hey we could allow some of those listed ones to give you audit reports while we'd take away the critical ones. Let them smell the money and they'd hack their mom's left tit and sell it.

I am not at all familiar with the majority of the PLA military hardwares nor am I well versed in knowing and understanding the qualitative nature of the PLA in today's day and age. However because of poor perception about anything made in China as just bad or low quality this tag has also been carried over towards it's military hardware products in all services, especially the criticism leveled towards it's exported products. This article pretty much accused Chinese/PLA hardwares as garbage. I understand that the article itself was written by an Indian person but is what he's alleging true?

Beijing had gifted two 1970s era Ming class Type-035G submarines to Bangladesh valued at $100-million each in 2017. These were later re-inducted by the Bangladesh Navy as BNS Nobojatra and BNS Joyjatra.

However, both the platforms have been lying idle due to technical issues and could not be used as intended. The year 2020, witnessed China gifting Dhaka with two Chinese 053H3 frigates — BNS Umar Farooq and BNS Abu Ubaidah.

According to sources, the Type-053H3 frigates gifted to the Bangladesh Navy have defects in fire control system as well as in the helicopter fuelling and defueling system.

Defects have also been discovered in the gyro compass. The frigates were supplied by Poly Technologies Inc. Poly Technologies is a subsidiary of China Poly Group Corporation, a trade company with headquarters in Beijing, which deals with missiles and other military hardware.

With regard to naval platforms built by China Shipbuilding and Offshore International Co. Limited, issues that have surfaced are poor metallurgy, lack of spare part support, machinery failure, defective radars and poor armaments.

Defects have also been detected in basic trainer aircraft and K-8 aircraft for the Bangladesh Air Force and short-range air defence system for the Bangladesh Army.

With the money quote: "The world over, reliability and quality of defence equipment are known as the true mark of a nation’s technology, manufacturing ability and maintenance practices."

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Karma is a bitch...