Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Yes, Lying about Self Driving Cars Is a Bad Thing, Elon

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The NTSB has called out Elon Musk and Tesla for serial lying about their self driving capabilityes, saying that this puts the driving public at risk.

This is not a surprise. 

Tesla’s culture comes from the height of the Dot Com bubble, with a, “We’ll fix it in Beta,” mentality, which is negligent at best, and potentially criminal when dealing with 4000 pound high speed death machines like automobiles:

The National Transportation Safety Board has filed comments blasting the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for its permissive regulation of driver-assistance systems. The letter was dated February 1 but was only spotted by CNBC’s Lora Kolodny on Friday. The letter repeatedly calls out Tesla’s Autopilot for its lax safety practices and calls on NHTSA to establish minimum standards for the industry.

The dispute between federal agencies is the result of Congress dividing responsibility for transportation safety among multiple agencies. NHTSA is the main regulator for highway safety: every car and light truck must comply with rules established by NHTSA. NTSB is a separate agency that just does safety investigations. When there’s a high-profile highway crash, NTSB investigators travel to the scene to figure out what happened and how to prevent it from happening again. NTSB also does plane crashes and train wrecks, allowing it to apply lessons from one mode of transportation to others.

………

Under then-President Donald Trump, NHTSA largely let automakers do what they liked when it came to advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and prototype driverless vehicles. NHTSA has generally waited until safety problems cropped up with ADAS systems and dealt with them after the fact. NTSB argues NHTSA should be more proactive, and it put Tesla and Autopilot at the center of its argument.

………

The NTSB also calls for NHTSA to require driver-monitoring systems to ensure drivers are paying attention to the road while driver-assistance systems are active.

“Because driver attention is an integral component of lower-level automation systems, a driver-monitoring system must be able to assess whether and to what degree the driver is performing the role of automation supervisor,” NTSB argued. “No minimum performance standards exist for the appropriate timing of alerts, the type of alert, or the use of redundant monitoring sensors to ensure driver engagement.”

………

Finally, NTSB argues that NHTSA should require automakers to limit use of driver-assistance systems to the types of roads they’re designed for. For example, some ADAS systems are designed to only work on limited-access freeways. Yet few cars actually enforce such limitations. Many systems can be activated on roads the systems weren’t designed for.

………

The NTSB mentions Tesla 16 times in the report—far more than any other automaker. This is partly because Tesla vehicles have figured so prominently in the NTSB’s work. NTSB says it has investigated six crashes involving driver-assistance or self-driving systems between May 2016 and March 2019. Four of those were fatal. One of these four was the 2018 death of Elaine Herzberg after she was hit by an Uber self-driving prototype. The other three were Tesla owners who relied too much on Autopilot, and it cost them their lives.

………

In its report on the crash, NTSB noted that, at the time of the crash, Autopilot software was only designed for use on controlled-access freeways—not rural highways where cars and trucks can enter the highway directly from driveways and side streets. NTSB pointed out that its report on the Brown crash “recommended that NHTSA develop a method to verify” that companies selling driver-assistance systems like Autopilot have safeguards to prevent customers from using the systems on roads they aren’t designed for. Such a system might have prevented Brown from activating Autopilot on the day of his death.

………

“The NTSB remains concerned about NHTSA’s continued failure to recognize the importance of ensuring that acceptable safeguards are in place so the vehicles do not operate outside of their operational design domains and beyond the capabilities of their system designs,” the agency wrote. “Because NHTSA has put in place no requirements, manufacturers can operate and test vehicles virtually anywhere, even if the location exceeds the AV control system’s limitations.”

NTSB then called out Tesla again, specifically criticizing the decision to release its “full self-driving beta” software to a few-dozen customers.

“Tesla recently released a beta version of its Level 2 Autopilot system, described as having full self-driving capability,” NTSB wrote. “By releasing the system, Tesla is testing on public roads a highly automated AV technology but with limited oversight and reporting requirements.”

This is negligent behavior, both on the part of Tesla and on the part of the NHTSA, and it has already gotten people killed.

The Grift is Strong in These Ones

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It turns out that the Trump family tradition of exploiting charities for personal gains even extends to rescue dogs. 

In this case, it’s Eric’s wife Lara, who has diverted millions of dollars to the Trump organization from Big Dog Ranch Rewsuc Rescue.

It’s pretty cold to steal from rescue dogs.

On the bright side, it probably means that her campaign for US Senate is dead before it even started:

A dog rescue charity that has links to Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, has spent almost $2m at Trump properties in the last seven years, according to US media reports.

While other companies and groups have distanced themselves from the Trumps since the 6 January attack on the capital, the Florida-based Big Dog Ranch Rescue is expected to spend another $225,000 at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago country club for an event this weekend, according to a permit filed with the town of Palm Beach, which was reported by HuffPost.

………

HuffPost reported that Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filings show that the charity has spent as much as $1,883,160 on fundraising costs for events at Mar-a-Lago and a nearby Trump golf course since 2014. Lara Trump, who is married to Eric Trump, has been a chairwoman for charity events since 2018.

Donald Trump’s Trump Foundation, which was dissolved in 2019, and Eric Trump’s Eric Trump Foundation are known to have used money from donors for events and other expenses at Trump properties. Donald Trump admitted in court documents that he used charity money to buy a portrait of himself.

They really are a repulsive lot, aren’t they?

It’s Called Pleading the Belly, and it is Bullsh%$

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In the latest twist in Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes efforts to evade justice, she is now trying to delay the trial because she is pregnant.

Tis is not an uncommon legal strategy, it’s called “Pleading the Belly”, which has its own Wikipedia page. 

I rather fear that her privilege is going to win out again.

The alleged Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes is pregnant, according to a new court filing, potentially delaying her trial by several weeks.

Holmes is being charged with fraud for her role at the helm of Theranos, a blood-testing startup that was a rising star in Silicon Valley before it emerged it had misrepresented the effectiveness of its technology.

Lawyers for Holmes asked the judge on 2 March to delay the start of jury selection to 31 August, after her due date.

“The parties have met and conferred, and both parties agree that, in light of this development, it is not feasible to begin the trial on July 13, 2021, as currently scheduled,” said the filing.

There is no reason to delay jury selection.

Absent her being in active labor, pregnancy does not prevent a defendant from participating in jury selection or in the pretrial motions.

Were she not white or rich (her parents come from money), she’d be waiting in jail for the trial to start.

Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud

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In Arizona, State Representative John Kavanagh kist said. “We don’t mind putting security measures in that won’t let everybody vote – but everybody shouldn’t be voting.”

We’ve always known it to be the case that Republicans don’t just object to the Democratic Party, they object to Democracy:

A Republican lawmaker in Arizona has defended GOP-sponsored legislation to restrict ballot access as a means to protect “the quality of votes” and arguing that “everybody shouldn’t be voting” as Republicans in at least 43 states introduce dozens of bills to curb voting rights, compelled by spurious fraud claims and election conspiracy theories in the wake of 2020 elections and disproportionately impacting Black voters.

Arizona state Rep John Kavanagh, who chairs the state legislature’s Government and Elections Committee, told CNN that Democrats are “willing to risk fraud” by expanding voter access, and that “Republicans are more concerned about fraud, so we don’t mind putting security measures in that won’t let everybody vote – but everybody shouldn’t be voting.”

Mr Kavanagh was referencing a measure that could purge thousands of people from a list of voters who automatically receive popular mail-in ballots during elections. Arizona lawmakers are considering roughly two dozen other bills.

………

Mr Kavanagh also suggested that Democrats’ voter registration and ballot collection drives can “greatly influence the outcome of the election” by targeting “uninformed” voters.

When Dick Tuck said, after losing a campaign for Congress, said, “The people have spoken, the bastards,” he was making a joke to liven up what was a somber moment.

The Republicans really mean it.

Bolivia’s ex-interim president arrested in opposition crackdown | Bolivia | The Guardian

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There have been arrests in Bolivia of the former interim President as well as other participants in the coup over the past few days.

Good.

Their first actions when they seized power were to unleash lethal force against protesters, and they did their level best to suppress all political activities from both the poor and indigenous communities. 

When someone comes after you with lethal force, if your response is to suggest tea and crumpets, you are inviting more of the same.

Some Foresight Here

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I did not expect the Democrats to insert a section into the stimulus bill preventing states from cutting taxes with relief money, but this is what they did.

I guess that they have enough experience in dealing with Republican ideology to realize that giving money to states would be subject to sabotage otherwise:

A last-minute change in the $1.9 trillion economic relief package that President Biden signed into law this week includes a provision that could temporarily prevent states that receive government aid from turning around and cutting taxes.

The restriction, which was added by Senate Democrats, is intended to ensure that states use federal funds to keep their local economies humming and avoid drastic budget cuts and not simply use the money to subsidize tax cuts. But the provision is causing alarm among some local officials, primarily Republicans, who see the move as federal overreach and fear conditions attached to the money will impede upon their ability to manage their budgets as they see fit.

………

Under the new law, $25 billion will be divided equally among states, while $169 billion will be allocated based on a state’s unemployment rate. States can use the money for pandemic-related costs, offsetting lost revenues to provide essential government services, and for water, sewer and broadband infrastructure projects.

But they are prohibited from depositing the money into pension funds — a key worry of Republicans in Congress — and cannot use funds to cut taxes by “legislation, regulation or administration” through 2024.

………

Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, explained why he pushed for the language in a briefing this week, arguing that states should not be cutting taxes at a time when they need more money to combat the virus. He urged states to postpone their plans to cut taxes.

It sounds like Joe Manchin, for once, did something useful.  (You could knock me over with a mackerel)

Still, the tax language has angered Republicans — none of whom voted for the rescue package — and on Thursday, Senator Mike Braun, Republican of Indiana, introduced legislation to reverse it.

Oh, you poor delicate snowflakes.

Your Semi Regular Cuomo Implosion Update

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It has been common knowledge for years that Andrew Cuomo deliberately managed a, “Toxic Workplace,” so the allegations of sexual harassment should not be a surprise:

Cuomo’s leadership style often confuses ruthlessness with greatness, abuse with strength. Interviews with dozens of former Cuomo employees and those who have worked with or adjacent to his administration reveal a governing institution that has been run, at times, like a cultish fraternity, and at others, like a high-school clique — a state executive chamber in which the maintenance of power, performance of pecking orders, and pursuit of competitive resentments matter as much as policy.

Sexual harassment is not really a matter of sex, it is a matter of power, and since before his days as New York State Attorney General, Cuomo has been consistently crapping on people who are under his authority.

What’s more, Cuomo has always operated in a thoroughly corrupt manner, not just with his quid pro quo with nursing home chains, “You donate to me, and I’ll get you immunity,” but in other more profoundly explicit ways, such as his steering bond deals to donors in direct contravention of federal law.

He’s not just a bully and a dirt-bag, he is a corrupt bully and dirt bag: (Even if he never personally touches that money)

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has since 2012 taken in more than $131,000 in campaign contributions from three major financial firms that were then tapped by his administration to manage state bond work, according to an International Business Times review of campaign finance documents and state bond prospectuses. The Democratic governor accepted the money — and his officials handed out the government business without competitive bids — despite federal rules that bar campaign contributors from receiving taxpayer-financed state bond work.

Last week, Cuomo officials designated the three banks that contributed the campaign funds — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America — as the dealers for a $33 million bond issue, enabling the firms to reap lucrative fees. That came on top of the Cuomo administration assigning the firms to manage a $68 million bond issue last fall, even as federal law enforcement officials were investigating allegations that New York lawmakers were doing favors for political donors.

Federal rules bar states from awarding bond work to parties who have donated to gubernatorial campaigns within the last two years (more than $86,000 of the campaign cash from the firms flowed to Cuomo in the last two years). The rules aim to prevent financial firms from gaining influence over officials who have the power to select which firms receive the lucrative bond business. The rules explicitly seek to stop financial companies from circumventing those strictures: They prohibit firms from channeling contributions to bond overseers through PACs, which are giant pools of money distributed to multiple campaign war chests.

“The pay-to-play rules are very clear,” said Craig Holman, an ethics expert at the watchdog group Public Citizen. “If Andrew Cuomo’s receiving any money from a PAC controlled by a municipal dealer, he’d be in violation of pay-to-play rules.”

On the sexual harassment front, we now have a much larger number of women claiming inappropriate behavior, as well as an increase in the severity of the behavior reported, which has resulted in a formal referral of the matter to the Albany police.

In addition, leaders in the state house, and most of New York’s Democratic Congressional delegation have called for him to resign, including Chuck Schumer and Kristen Gillibrand, who wouldn’t take a dump without poll testing it.

I really hope that he is done.  He is a truly odious human being.

Headline of the Day

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The Problem with Moving to Florida Is You Have to Live in Florida!

—The Daily Mail

It appears that expats from New York City have decided that the diminished quality of life in Florida is not worth the lower taxes and are returning to the Empire State:

Wall Street titans who moved to Miami amid New York City’s coronavirus lockdown are already eyeing a return to the Big Apple, according to a new report.

Late last year, Florida was touted as the future hub of American finance as a slew of billion-dollar businesses opened up offices in the Sunshine State.

The uber-wealthy were lured to Florida by better weather, lower taxes and fewer  restrictions imposed on residents amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

But Bloomberg claims that a number of billionaires are now having second thoughts about life in Miami because the cultural and educational opportunities just don’t compare to those in the Big Apple.

‘The main problem with moving to Florida is that you have to live in Florida,’ Jason Mudrick, who oversees $3 billion at Mudrick Capital Management in NYC, told the publication.

(emphasis mine)

Yeah, and this is with Florida having a relatively mild hurricane season. (The rest of the Caribbean basin and Carolinas were not so lucky)

In addition, you have Ron Desnatis, Rick Scott, Jeb Bush, an infestation of pythons, cane toads, mass shootings, and a Grim Reaper on the beach.

Better, But Still Not Good, Initial Claims Data

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Initial claims fell from 754,000 to 712,000 last week, indicating an improving, though still dismal, job market:

New filings for unemployment benefits last week neared their lowest level since the pandemic fueled a surge in layoffs last March, adding to evidence of renewed labor-market growth.

Jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, fell to a seasonally adjusted 712,000 in the week ended March 6, down about 200,000 from an early January peak and close to a pandemic low point reached last November.

The four-week moving average, which smooths out volatility in week-to-week numbers, was 759,000 for the week ended March 6, slightly higher than the previous pandemic low recorded last November. The weekly average in 2019, the year before the pandemic started, was 218,000.

The recently passed $1.9 Trillion stimulus bill should lead to further improvements. 

It should be noted though that the employment population ratio is still crap, and improving VERY slowly.

One of Teddy Kennedy’s Worst Legacies Ends

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The Blue Hashed Bit

After literally years of obstruction by Edward M (Ted) Kennedy, it looks like will finally be constructing a wind farm off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.

He had objections to the project, because it was visible from the Kennedy compound.

I consider Kennedy’s legacy to be quite positive, but this piece of it I am very glad to see go:

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has issued its long-awaited final environmental impact study (FEIS) for the Vineyard Wind project off Massachusetts, which will be the first commercial-scale offshore wind farm in federal waters.

BOEM is leaning towards a preferred alternative that would combine several of the development options examined in the draft EIS. The preferred option would allow Vineyard Wind to build the desired 800 MW wind farm, but with 84 larger GE Haliade-X turbines instead of 100 smaller MHI Vestas turbines; no turbines in the northernmost portion of the lease site; and north-south / east-west row alignment with one nautical mile spacing between foundations. These terms broadly align with the parameters submitted by Vineyard Wind itself in its construction and operations plan (COP).

The study paves the way for a formal record of decision on Vineyard Wind’s EIS review, and it will almost certainly result in a permit approval matching BOEM’s preferred alternative option. As such, it represents a landmark victory for the developer and for the U.S. offshore wind industry, which has been closely watching the permitting process for this pace-setting development.

About damn time.

Not Enough Bullets

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Peter Diamandis, a tech entrepreneur who seems to won every single game of bullsh%$ bingo that he has ever played, just topped himself.

He held a conference that doubled ad a Covid-19 superspreader event, and then he tried to convince people to buy his quack cures. 

No charges, of course, because nothing is a crime any more if you are rich:

In late January, tech impresario Peter Diamandis hosted an exclusive, indoor conference for a group of ultra-wealthy patrons in Los Angeles. As MIT Technology Review reported last month, the get-together, where no masks were required, became a covid-19 superspreader event.

Four days later, as staff, speakers, and attendees began testing positive for the virus, an email went out to those who had taken part. It invited them to join an “informational webinar” featuring a doctor who had been at the event—an attempt to put their minds at ease.

Diamandis had held the Abundance 360 Summit, or A360, in violation of a ban on private gatherings during a covid surge. At least 86 people were present, some having flown in from around the world; many had paid $30,000 in assorted fees for the privilege of attending in person. Everyone was tested daily, but the virus took hold nonetheless, and at least 32 people contracted covid either directly or indirectly as a result of the four-day program.

The webinar on January 30 featured Matt Cook, a trained anesthesiologist from the San Francisco Bay Area who had started a medical practice using alternative therapies. A follow-up email sharing the URL to view a recording of the call was accompanied by an order form for products from Fountain Life, a company focused on longevity treatments, of which Diamandis is a cofounder and director.

Between the webinar and the Fountain Life order form, attendees were told about a range of products that were claimed to either treat covid-19 or prevent it outright. What they were not told was that seven of the recommended products were also classified by the US Food and Drug Administration as “covid-19 fraudulent.”

The fraudulent cures included amniotic fluid, the liquid that surrounds a baby in utero and is rich in stem cells, and colloidal silver, a suspension of metal particles often touted as having antimicrobial effects, but which the FDA has said “is not safe or effective for treating any disease or condition.” Cook recommended taking both of them as an inhaled mist using a nebulizer, an electric machine similar to an asthma inhaler.

In a more enlightened time, this guy would be in jail awaiting trial. 

If it were just the rich people who were exposed, I would not be outraged, but you have to figure that a lot of people who caught this were ordinary Joes who were bartending, serving canapes, and generally submitting to the whims of said rich folks.

Adding to the List

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The list of, “They Who Must Not Be Named,” of course.

In this case, I am referring to actor Armie Hammer, who, somewhat like Peter Thiel, is alleged to aspire to be a vampire, though for more carnal reasons than does Thiel, who is questing for immortality.

As an aside, I do have a bit of a personal connection to the actor, in that my Grandmother came in second to his great grandfather, Armand Hammer, in a high school debate competition to him back in the day.

So, absent something like his running for US Congress, I will not mention him again.

Then again I never had cause to mention him before.

I Picked the Right Time to Switch to Verizon®

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As I noted yesterday, my family and I changed my provider from Sprint® to Verizon®.

To be sure, the problem was not with Sprint® per se, it was because Verizon® gave us a better deal, particularly since we were already FIOS®, the land line fiber service, customers, particularly with regard to getting new phones for Sharon, Natalie, and Charlie.  (We’ll be saving about $50 a month including various discounts, and replacing Sharon’s* and the kid’s decrepit cell phones for free.)

That being said, I have had some misgivings about the T-Mobile®‘s takeover of Sprint® a few years back, and the increasing move to T-Mobile®-ize Sprint was concerning.

What I did not expect T-Mobile® to do though was to attempt to aggressively spy on its customers to collect ad dollars, but is what they did, as the folks at The Register noted, ” Privacy Purists Prickle at T-Mobile Us Plan to Proffer People’s Personal Web, App Pursuits to Ad Promoters.” (Seriously, El Reg’s headline writers should get a Pulitzer) 

T-Mobile is requiring users to opt out in order for them not to share data like, phone location, apps installed on the phones,  web browsing habits.

T-Mobile® is claiming that the data is “Anonymized”, but each phone user will have a unique identifier, and by aggregating as few as 5 data points, the likelihood of specifically identifying a user becomes well more than 90%. (The term is “Profiling” or “Stalking”)

What’s more, as the folks at Ars Technica note the opt-out process is (unsurprisingly) not working reliably, “We’ve heard from customers who say they’ve had problems opting out so you may have to try multiple links or make multiple attempts,” because ATAB (All Telcos Are Bastards).

It’s a rather depressing turn of events for a wireless company that markedly improved consumer treatment in the US market a few years ago.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Busy Day

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It turns out that the phone that I wanted to bring from Sprint to Verizon was simply not compatible.

So this evening, with the aid of Craigslist, I got a cheap phone so that I have something that I can use at the office.  (No phone, but I have a phone number and voice mail, not figured out why, but it’s more convenient to use the cell phone, at least until I couldn’t.)

All back to normal now though.

Went through ads, found a phone with more computing power than the entire Apollo program new for 70 bucks.

It’s not ruggedized, but it does have a removable battery, and it’s new in the box, a Moto E6.

So I gotta phone, and my Bluetooth so I can go hands free during meetings.

Royal PITA though.

Also, It appears that I have about a dozen updates to download.

I Missed This on Friday

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The Return of the Scariest Job Chart Ever


Workforce participation is still at a 45 year low

Largely because we changed cell phone providers, and my attempts to BYOD have been ineffective. (Not having a cell phone right now is a major drag).

The February employment report came out on Friday, and it was generally positive from a month-to-month perspective, but the job numbers are still worse than they were at the depths of the 2007-2012 recession.

As Calculated Risk observes: (They are also responsible for the graph pr0n)

The current employment recession was by far the worst recession since WWII in percentage terms.

At the worst of the Great Recession, employment was down Down 6.29% from the previous peak.

Currently employment is down 6.21% – the current unemployment situation is about the same as the worst of the Great Recession (and there was no pandemic to contend with in 2009).

I think that saying that we, “Are not out of the woods yet,” is too week a metaphor.

I don’t think that we have even reached the halfway point in Mirkwood.

SoftBank-Funded ……… Is Never a Good Start for a Sentence

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It is remarkable just how many enterprises that Softbank funds are fraudulent, criminal, or fraud and criminality adjacent.

When one looks at their investment targets, like WeWork, Uber, and DoorDash, which are basically criminal enterprises, with defrauding investors, evading transportation and safety regulations, and stealing from delivery boys (respectively) being central to their business models.

And now another SoftFank funded dodgy outfit has blown up, Greensill, which financed supply chains.

It’s model was to pay suppliers immediately at a discount, and then collect the difference when the large firms actually buying the stuff paid on a 90 day, and frequently longer, cycle. 

Its finances were sufficiently sketchy that their insurer stopped writing them policies, and then the house of cards collapsed:

Supply chain finance disruptor Greensill is undone by its own financial alchemy, putting at risk thousands of jobs in the UK, Australia and the EU. The timing could not be worse for already buckling supply chains.

Disruptor seems to be a synonym for criminality and ignoring the lessons of finance learned over more than 500 years of fractional reserve banking.

On Monday, the supply chain finance firm Greensill Capital filed for insolvency after defaulting on a $140 million loan it owes to Credit Suisse. Its parent company in Australia had already filed for insolvency there. According to UK court documents, Greensill had “fallen into severe financial distress” and can no longer pay off its debts. Over the past week many of the company’s directors have been frantically jumping ship, including its chairman Maurice Thompson, Australia’s former foreign minister Julie Bishop and former Morgan Stanley executive David Brierwood.

The firm has been in trouble for some time, as I warned in a previous NC post. A number of its client companies already collapsed in 2020. In the aftermath attention switched to the financial menage á trois Greensill had formed with its primary backer, Soft Bank, and Swiss mega-lender Credit Suisse. Greensill was also under investigation by German banking regulator BaFin and the Association of German Banks, an industry group, over its German subsidiary Greensill Bank’s huge exposure to a single client: U.K.-based steel magnate Sanjeev Gupta.

Yep, SoftBank.  

When you want to get in on a fraud, pump it up, and get out leaving suckers holding the bag.

Greensill’s fall from grace was as spectacular as its meteoric rise, writes the FT‘s John Plender:

Greensill Capital went from nothing in 2011, when Lex Greensill abandoned a big-bank career, doing global supply chain financing at Morgan Stanley and Citibank, to go it alone. By 2019 this upstart non-bank says it had extended $US143 billion ($185.5 billion) of financing to 10m-plus customers and suppliers in 175 countries. Its founder also notched up powerful contacts in government and hired former UK prime minister David Cameron as an adviser.

Yeah, hiring David Cameron as an adviser is another tell that they are relying on smoke and mirrors more than anything else. 

It turns out that the model Greensill used was “Working” in the short term because it allowed companies to cook the books:

For large companies the advantages are twofold: they get to preserve cash on-hand by extending payment terms with vendors. They can also record the amount they owe to the supply chain finance firm or bank as accounts payable on the balance sheet rather than as debt. This makes their liquidity position appear healthier than it actually is. And that can be dangerous. Companies can conceal the true size of their debt for longer, leaving investors and creditors bearing bigger losses when they finally collapse, as happened with Spanish green energy giant Abengoa in 2015, UK outsourcing giant Carillion in 2018 and NMC Health, the former FTSE 100 private hospital company, in 2020.

They then repackaged and resold the debt, but this was dependent on these bonds being insured, and when their insurer decided to stop writing policies, and the debt became profoundly unattractive to put it mildly. so the house of cards collapsed.

Once again, though, the principals of the firm will be fine, but this collapse is ricocheting around the trans-national supply chain, and we don’t know when this game of musical chairs will end.

If this sounds familiar to you, it’s because it’s rather similar like Bear Stearns in 2008.

One hopes that the repercussions are less severe.

Another CIA Operation Goes Pear Shaped

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A court has overturned the patently bogus conviction of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which means that he can run for the Presidency of Brazil in the next election.

Given that he is the most popular politician in Brazil by a lot, he is very likely to win. 

The short version of the story is that the judge overseeing the trials colluded with prosecutors to convict da Silva of taking bribes to refurbish an apartment that he never lived in, and probably never owned.

One hopes that Lula has learned his lesson, and understands that so long as they remain in positions of power, his opponents will stop at nothing to destroy him, up to, and probably including violence and assassination against him, his family and his supporters.

They need to be turfed out, sooner rather than later:

Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva could be set for a sensational comeback attempt after a supreme court judge annulled a series of criminal convictions against the leftist icon and restored his political rights.

The ruling, which analysts called a political bombshell, means Lula is almost certain to challenge Brazil’s incumbent president, Jair Bolsonaro, in the 2022 presidential election.

………

Lula was president of Latin America’s largest economy for two terms, between 2003 and 2011, and oversaw a historic period of commodity-fuelled growth and poverty reduction. The Workers’ party (PT) politician, who is now 75, had hoped to seek a third term in 2018 but was sidelined after being jailed on disputed corruption charges, paving the way for Bolsonaro’s landslide victory.

Lula was released from prison in November 2019 after 580 days behind bars but remained unable to seek election after being stripped of his political rights.

The entire “Car Wash” affair, and the ascension of Bolsonaro that followed, is yet another indication of just how toxic US meddling in Latin America has been over the past 250 years.