“America can certainly afford to stand with Israel and to support Israel’s military needs and we also can and must support Ukraine in its struggle against Russia,” Yellen said, adding that the U.S. economy is doing “extremely well.”
“Inflation has been high and it’s been a concern to households, it’s come down considerably. At the same time, we have about the strongest labor market we’ve seen in 50 years with 3.8% unemployment. And at the same time, America, the Biden administration, has passed legislation that is strengthening our economy in years to come for the medium term.”
And so the debate circles round and round. The US, the “most wealthy nation on the planet”, has a food security problem and is on the verge of an inflationary calamity for millions of low income citizens, all while it spends hundreds of billions of dollars on pointless climate change programs, diversity and inclusion initiatives and proxy wars. Something has to give, and the chances are growing that it will be the American consumer.
But the eNaira launch came nine months after the CBN effectively banned cryptocurrencies, which were used to fund anti-police brutality protests that swept the country in late 2020. The CBN claimed crypto jeopardized the financial system and could be used to fund terrorism and froze protestors’ bank accounts.
The US and its President Biden has been looking sillier and sillier to America’s global audience the past months. Take the inane “Chinese spy balloon” hullabaloo the shadowy anti-China political-media network concocted in February, Pentagon just a few days ago, on June 30, now officially admits “did not collect intelligence while flying over the country.” Yet, that spy thriller concoction delayed Blinken’s “reconciliation” visit to China by five months, pushing through only on June 18.
The twin crashes in US commercial real estate and the US bond market have collided with $9 trillion uninsured deposits in the American banking system. Such deposits can vanish in an afternoon in the cyber age.
Crisis-hit Pakistan has made various economic modifications including hikes in fuel prices, raising taxes, and others demanded by IMF to unlock the loan program.
In 2018, Imran Khan became Prime Minister of Pakistan. For this, they arranged friendly loans from Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and China to avoid tough IMF conditions. In 2019, when economic conditions worsened, they went to IMF for the twenty-second time for a loan of US$1 billion. IMF gave loan based on conditions such as hike in energy tariffs, removal of energy subsidy, increase in taxation, privatization of public entities and fiscal policies to the budget.
The programs have long been targets of Republicans, despite the fact that Social Security is fully funded through 2035 and is able to pay for 90% of benefits for the next 25 years, even without Congress acting to expand it.
Just two business days after the crypto exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy and headlines swirled around the world suggesting it had used its crypto token to perpetuate a massive fraud reminiscent of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, the New York Fed thought this would be an ideal time to announce it was launching a digital token pilot with the serial fraudster, Citigroup. (See here for the unintelligible, jargonized version from the New York Fed; here for the decrypted translation from CoinDesk; and here for a sampling of Citigroup’s rap sheet.)
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