#$100bn

[news-ld]

First Republic Bank's shares plunge as it reveals more than $100bn of withdrawals | Business News

Shares in First Republic Financial institution have tumbled to a brand new file low after the troubled US regional lender admitted final month's banking disaster sparked a buyer deposit flight of more than $100bn.The financial institution, which was saved from doable collapse by a $30bn money injection agreed by main lenders, noticed its inventory drop by 29% on Tuesday. It adopted the discharge of its first quarter earnings report that exposed the extent of the problem it confronted to get better the enterprise.First Republic stated the deposit outflow, which amounted to more than half its pre-crisis whole, had cooled because the rescue money was introduced however it was but to get better any significant deposits.Monetary market analysts stated the quantity, which was greater than the market had anticipated, had revived fears that First Republic may turn out to be the third US financial institution to fail after the collapse of Silicon Valley Financial institution and Signature Financial institution. The disaster of confidence additionally noticed Switzerland's Credit score Suisse, which endured a £55bn deposit outflow, compelled to merge with rival UBS.The saga was largely born out of considerations that rising rates of interest imposed by central banks to deal with inflation had broken their steadiness sheets. Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video participant 0:58 March: Will First Republic be subsequent financial institution to fall? San Francisco-based First Republic stated it would transfer to shrink its steadiness sheet and slash prices.Govt pay cuts, it stated, could be adopted by 1000's of job losses to be accomplished by the top of June. The financial institution stated it anticipated to axe between 20%-25% of its workforce, which was reported at 7,200 on the finish of final yr.Its outcomes assertion did little to assist shares of different US regional lenders, with some seeing shares down by more than 5%.Learn more from Sky News: Hundreds of jobs in danger as Ocado reveals warehouse closure Chancellor blames pandemic and power invoice assist for 'eye-watering' authorities borrowingAnalysts stated the sector, however particularly First Republic, needed to guarantee clients that their deposits remained protected and buyers that they'd the liquidity to function successfully.Susannah Streeter, head of cash and markets at Hargreaves Lansdown, stated: "It appears the lifeline thrown to First Republic by massive lenders hasn't stopped confidence sinking."With nearly 1 / 4 of the workforce being axed and a quick-fire asset sale getting underway, buyers are sensing panic and fleeing the inventory and worries are rising about one other banking collapse." Read the full article

[soverik]

The USA just signed off a nearly 100b military aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. But one of these is not like the others.

Ukraine was invaded by Russia.

Taiwan has been pressured to unify with the mainland and in some cases is actively erased and written off as part of china (eg. some airline companies are forbade from flying to Taiwan by china because 'Taiwan doesn't exist')

Israel is the aggressors, they're committing genocide. Palestine is the one being invaded, erased and demonised.

26 billion dollars is to be spent on 'military aid' for Israel, most of which will be weapons. The news articles often focus on Ukraine because it got the most money, the billions that are going towards the Gaza genocide barely get a mention in US news.

And any mention describes the funding as 'to fight Hamas militants and fend off airstrikes from Iran', not 'massacring Palestinians and antagonising other countries'.

It's fucking sick.

Don't be swayed by the propaganda, don't be ignorant, don't forget.

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

[quotesfrommyreading]

African countries are being forced to spend billions of dollars a year coping with the effects of the climate crisis, which is diverting potential investment from schools and hospitals and threatens to drive countries into ever deeper poverty.

Dealing with extreme weather is costing close to 6% of GDP in Ethiopia alone, equating to a spend of more than $1 repairing climate damage for every $20 of national income, according to research by the thinktank Power Shift Africa.

The warning comes just before the major new scientific report from the global authority on climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This report, the second part of the IPCC’s comprehensive summary of global climate science, will set out the consequences of climate breakdown across the world, looking at the floods, droughts, heatwaves and storms that are affecting food systems, water supplies and infrastructure. As global temperatures have risen in recent decades, and as the impact of extreme weather has become more apparent around the world, efforts to make infrastructure and communities more resilient have largely stalled.

Africa will be one of the worst-hit regions, despite having done least to cause the climate crisis. According to the Power Shift Africa study, titled Adapt or Die: An analysis of African climate adaptation strategies, African countries will spend an average of 4% of GDP on adapting to climate breakdown.

These countries include some of the world’s poorest people, whose responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions is many times less than those of people in developed countries, or in large emerging economies such as China. Sierra Leone will have to spend $90m a year on adapting to the climate crisis, though its citizens are responsible for about 0.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a year each, while US citizens generate about 80 times more.

Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, said: “This report shows the deep injustice of the climate emergency. Some of the poorest countries in the world are having to use scarce resources to adapt to a crisis not of their making. Despite only having tiny carbon footprints compared with those of the rich world, these African countries are suffering from droughts, storms and floods which are putting already stretched public finances under strain and limiting their ability to tackle other problems.”

He called for more funding from developed countries, which promised at the Cop26 UN climate summit to double the money available to help poor countries adapt to the climate crisis. Rich countries promised in 2009 to provide $100bn a year to help poor countries cut their greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the effects of climate breakdown. But so far they have fallen short of that target, and most of the funds that have been provided have gone to projects to cut emissions, such as windfarms and solar panels, rather than efforts to help countries adapt.

The study examined national adaptation plans submitted to the UN by seven African countries: Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, South Sudan and Togo. South Sudan, which is the world’s second poorest country, was hit by floods last year that displaced 850,000 people, and led to outbreaks of water-borne diseases. The country is to spend $376m a year on adaptation, about 3.1% of its GDP.

Chukwumerije Okereke, director of the centre for climate change and development at the Alex Ekwueme Federal University in Nigeria, said rich countries must respond to the findings, and to the IPCC report.

“It is both irresponsible and immoral for those that are the chief cause of climate change to look on while Africa, which has contributed next to nothing to climate change, continues to bear a disproportionate share of the impact,” he said. “The time for warm words is long gone. We need urgent, scaled-up, long-term support from the world-leading climate polluters.”

  —  African countries spending billions to cope with climate crisis

[upsettingandunfortunateclasshate]

Workers in the UK are among the least likely to take sick days, especially compared with other OECD and European countries, experts said. They are more likely to turn up at work while sick.

The enormous impact of presenteeism, where staff are unable to perform to the best of their abilities and are more likely to make mistakes, is causing a significant loss in productivity, the IPPR found.

Dr Jamie O’Halloran, a senior research fellow at the IPPR, said: “Too often, UK workers are being pressured to work through sickness when that’s not appropriate – harming their wellbeing and reducing productivity. This can be because of a bad workplace culture, poor management, financial insecurity or just weak understanding of long-term conditions among UK employers.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Rich G7 nations owe poor ones an estimated $13 trillion in unpaid development aid as well as support in the fight against climate change, British charity Oxfam says.

Instead of fulfilling their obligations, the International Group of Seven nations and their banks are demanding debt repayments of $232m per day, the organisation said on Wednesday.

“Wealthy G7 countries like to cast themselves as saviours but what they are is operating a deadly double standard – they play by one set of rules while their former colonies are forced to play by another,” Oxfam’s interim Executive Director Amitabh Behar said in a statement.

“It’s the rich world that owes the Global South: the aid they promised decades ago but never gave, the huge costs from climate damage caused by their reckless burning of fossil fuels, the immense wealth built on colonialism and slavery.”

Developed countries promised in 2009 to transfer $100bn annually between 2020 and 2025 to vulnerable states hit by increasingly severe climate-linked impacts and disasters – but that target was never met.

[...]

Oxfam said the G7 leaders are meeting as billions of workers face pay cuts and steep price rises.

“Global hunger has risen for a fifth consecutive year, while extreme wealth and extreme poverty have increased simultaneously for the first time in 25 years,” it said.

The G7 is home to 1,123 billionaires with a combined wealth of $6.5 trillion, and their wealth has grown in real terms by 45 percent over the past 10 years, noted Oxfam.

Carbon emissions from rich nations are estimated to have caused $8.7 trillion in losses and damage to low and middle-income countries, the charity added.

“The G7 must pay its debts. This is not about goodwill or charity – it is a moral obligation,” Behar said.

[zvaigzdelasas]

[AlJazeera is Qatari State Media]

Ivory Coast produces around 45 percent of the world’s cocoa beans, but receives only around four percent of the chocolate industry’s estimated annual worth of $100bn.[...] Since 2020, several attempts by the Ivorian government to make chocolatiers pay premiums on the price of cocoa have failed as large companies push back on anything that will eat into their margins.

22 Dec 22

[mariacallous]

[fleshadept]

while the criticism of glass onion being a bourgeois art piece hegemonically negotiating hatred of the 1% into standard discourse is understandable, i think it's important to remember that rian johnson and daniel craig and whoever you want to criticise for making "performative" art about the systemic ways in which the ultrawealthy maintain power and specifically marginalize women of color are far closer in wealth to the average american than they ever will be to elon musk or any billionaire. daniel craig's net worth is $8 million dollars. his WHOLE net worth. you have to multiply that by 19,500 to get anywhere near elon musk's net worth of $156,000,000,000. and that's after he's lost $100bn this YEAR.

it's true that people shouldn't count watching movies as activism and definitely shouldn't see media produced by huge corporations as praxis, but that doesn't mean what political standpoints they do contain lack value or are disingenuous. the human mind is literally incapable of conceptualizing numbers after a certain point, so it's easy to think of hollywood rich and billionaire rich as similar, because both kinds of people live lives that most of us could barely dream of with privileges and access to resources that we will never have. but the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is the difference between being able to make a movie starring daniel craig and being able to bankroll dozens of politicians and buy one of the largest social media websites used by millions of people daily on a whim

as "rich people bad" movies go, glass onion deals with it REALLY well. the scene at the end when helen destroys miles's house demonstrates a very nuanced understanding of how billionaires maintain power; blanc recognizes and tells helen that even though they found the truth, they can't do anything legally because miles burned their only physical evidence and the courts will unequivocally side with the billionaire. again. so in lieu of any justice system that will work, helen starts breaking shit. but miles doesn't even care that much, because what's a dozen million dollar glass art pieces to a man who accrues that in interest every minute? even when everyone else joins in, he doesn't care. it's annoying, but it doesn't mean anything. so the other "disruptors" stop after they've gotten their minimal catharsis, having done no real damage to his reputation or, frankly, their reliance on him.

helen burning the mona lisa to take him down, and that being presented as the best option, is really significant. as movies go, taking the stance of "destroying priceless art and private property is not only justified and moral but effective in the face of a system that gives you no other option for justice" is pretty damn rare.

it's true that if glass onion or other high budget films actually tangibly threatened the system in any way they would never get funded or see the light of day. but the cool thing about stories, and about art, is that you can't predict the effects they have on people. anti-billionaire bourgeois art isn't direct action, it isn't activism, and it isn't even important politically, but that doesn't mean it has no effect on the discourse whatsoever and can't be important to how people see the 1%

[capitalism-is-parasitism]

George Monbiot: TAX THE RICH, TAX THEM HARD (Labour is already failing)

We need a genuine levelling up, across regions and across classes. The austerity inflicted on us by the Conservatives was unnecessary and self-defeating and Labour has no good reason to sustain it.

The new government insists it is ending austerity. It isn’t. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) pointed out in June, Labour’s plans mean that public services are “likely to be seriously squeezed, facing real-terms cuts”. Similarly, the Resolution Foundation has warned that, with current spending projections, the government will need to make £19bn of annual cuts by 2028-29. However you dress it up, this is austerity.

We are constantly told: “There’s no money.” But there is plenty of money. It’s just not in the hands of the government. The wealth of billionaires in the UK has risen by 1,000% since 1990. The richest 1% possess more wealth than the poorest 70%. Why do they have so much? Because the state does not; they have not been sufficiently taxed.

There are two reasons for taxing the rich and taxing them hard. The first is to generate revenue: this is the one everyone thinks about. But the second is even more important: to break the spiral of patrimonial wealth accumulation. Unless you stop the very rich from becoming even richer, it’s not just their economic power that continues to rise, but also their political power. Democracy gives way to oligarchy, and oligarchy is intensely hostile to everything Labour governments seek to achieve, including robust public services and a strong economic safety net. When oligarchs dominate, you can kiss goodbye any notion of the public good.

Last year, I tried to estimate how much it would cost to restore a viable, safe and inclusive public realm after 14 years of Tory vandalism. While my effort was very rough, the sum came to between £65bn and £100bn of extra spending a year: between seven and 10 times more than Labour’s total. It’s a lot, although it’s dwarfed by the money the previous government spent on the pandemic: between £310bn and £410bn over two years.

While these sums are ambitious, and would require expanded borrowing (which Labour has foolishly ruled out) as well as taxation, there are plenty of opportunities to raise taxes on the rich. The government could, for example, replace inheritance tax with a lifetime gifts tax kicking in at £150,000, a level that would affect only wealthy people. This would increase revenue while ending a major form of tax avoidance. The government should raise capital gains taxes: it’s perverse that unearned income is taxed at a lower rate than earned income. It should close the carried-interest loophole, which ensures that private equity bosses pay less tax than their cleaners: a pledge on which it already seems to be backtracking.

The government could also levy a wealth tax, a luxury goods tax and a tax on second homes and holiday homes. It could make the windfall tax on fossil fuel revenues permanent. It could replace business rates with land value taxation, and council tax with a progressive property tax based on contemporary property values: both shifts would be fairer and would raise more money. But the only extra taxes the government propose are, as the IFS remarks, “trivial”.

By seeking to raise revenue through economic growth rather than redistribution, Labour avoids the necessary confrontation with economic power. Not only is the strategy uncertain of success (economic growth here is subject to global forces); not only does growth load even more pressure on the living planet; but this approach also fails to break the grip of the ultra-rich. Isn’t this the whole damn point of a change of government, after 14 years of Tory appeasement? Unless you seek to change the structures of power and redistribute wealth, the rich will continue to harvest the lion’s share of growth while using some of their money to buy the politics that expands and fortifies their dominion.

[azspot]

If generative AI becomes an albatross around the necks of Google, or Microsoft, or Amazon — which I believe it will — these companies will face serious pressure to curtail their investments and their capex spending. Investors will ask why these companies are spending a collective (estimated) additional $100bn in CapEx spending in 2025 on a technology that likely won’t drive any revenue growth, when it could be used for things like dividends and stock buybacks instead.

Burst Damage

[weatherman667]

Forest City: China Built a $100bn City in Malaysia... and No One Lives T...

China takes a strong stance against anything financial, as that what parasites do.

China has nothing to invest their money in, while having the same fun with inflation we do.

Only thing they have to invest in is housing.  Most of their owned housing are not even finished, as finished apartments share the feng shui of the previous tenants.  So, they buy the apartment, and live with their parents.  Because China going to China.

Crash the local real estate bubble.  What do you do now?  Build one in Malaysia.

Hoes does Winnie-the-Pooh react, you ask?  Limiting China citizens to $50,000 per year in foreign investments.  Because they have to prevent the Chinese from having the illusion they have a way to protect their family from Chinese financial bullshit.

Runtime:  16:20

[programmerhumour]

When a 100bn dollar gargentua is dependent on your node package

[notwiselybuttoowell]

“Money is being spent on militarization rather than on climate action,” said Nick Buxton, a researcher with the Transnational Institute, “though the climate crisis is the biggest [common] security threat that we face today.”

By diverting just 5% of global military budgets, the world could raise $110.4bn for climate finance – more than enough to meet a repeatedly broken annual climate finance target of $100bn, the organization has found.

The world’s militaries produce at least 5.5% of greenhouse gas emissions – more than the total footprint of Japan – according to one 2022 estimate. But no country is required to provide data on military emissions thanks to successful lobbying by the US at the Kyoto conference in 1997. Leaders removed the exemption in 2015 but made reporting military emissions optional.

Military spending has grown by more than a quarter in the past decade, exceeding $2.2tn in 2022. During the same time period, attempts to mobilize funds for climate finance have faltered.

In 2009, for instance, rich countries agreed to spend $100bn on climate finance for developing world annually by 2020, but they broke that promise, providing only $90bn for climate finance in 2021.

[upsettingandunfortunateclasshate]

This is fucked. So much important info I and probably most people don't know, like this:

"The estimated cost of running and cleaning up the site have soared. Sellafield is so expensive to maintain that it is considered a fiscal risk by budgetary officials. The latest estimate for cleaning up the Britain’s nuclear sites is £263bn, of which Sellafield is by far the biggest proportion. However, adjustments to its treatments in accounts can move the dial by more than £100bn, more than the UK’s entire annual deficit."

[thoughtlessarse]

Governments of wealthy countries must pledge hundreds of billions more in overseas aid payments channelled through the World Bank to avert the worst effects of the climate crisis, civil society experts and economists have said. The International Development Association fund, the arm of the World Bank that disburses loans and grants to poor countries, is worth about $93bn (£75bn) but that figure must be roughly tripled by 2030, according to economic experts. Governments are expected to discuss new aid pledges this week at the World Bank’s annual spring meetings in Washington DC. The World Bank, its fellow publicly funded development banks around the world and the International Monetary Fund are under pressure to show they can lead the world to the low-carbon transition needed. Ajay Banga, the president of the World Bank, told journalists the climate crisis would be a priority. “The world is facing a set of intertwined challenges: the climate crisis, debt, food insecurity, pandemics, fragility, and there is clearly a need to accelerate access to clean air, water and energy,” he said. “The [World Bank] needs a fit-for-purpose mission and vision, and that is to create a world free from poverty on a liveable planet.”

continue reading

Hundreds of billions. I'll not hold my breath. The rich countries were at least 3 years late with their first $100bn, and I'm not sure if they met that in full. There will be a lot of humming and hawing about the costs but had they heeded the warnings and started phasing out fossil fuels sooner, in the '80s or '90s the costs would have been far, far lower.