Image is of container ships waiting outside the canal. While there is usually some number of ships waiting for passage, the number has increased significantly lately.
In order to move ships through the Panama Canal, water is needed to fill the locks. The water comes from freshwater lakes, which are replenished by rainfall. This rainfall hasn’t been coming, and Lake Gatun, the largest one, is at near record low levels.
Hundreds of ships are now in a maritime traffic jam, unable to cross the canal quickly. Panama is attempting to conserve water and have reduced the number of transits by 20% per day, among other measures. The Canal’s adminstrators have warned that these drought conditions will remain for at least 10 months.
It is unlikely that global supply chains will be catastrophically affected, at least this year. Costs may increase for consumers in the coming months, especially for Christmas, but by and large goods will continue to flow, around South America if need be. Nonetheless, projecting trends over the coming years and decades, you can imagine how this is yet another nudge by climate change towards dramatic economic, environmental, and political impacts on the world at large. It also might prompt discussions inside various governments about nearshoring, and the general vulnerability of global supply chains - especially as the United States tries, bafflingly, to go to war with China.
After some discussion in the last megathread about building knowledge of geopolitics, some of us thought it might be an interesting idea to have a Country of the Week - essentially, I/we choose a country and then people can come in here and chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants, related to that country. More detail in this comment.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week’s discussion post.
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i too am a disciple of bidenomics but am a bit confused when i try to put everything together. my basic thesis was thus:
having a hard time fitting it to ffr data though, and it looks more like rates tend to spike before major conflicts/geopolitical events and are actually trending down as the situations resolve themselves. i’m looking at post-volcker spikes around plaza accords 1985, gulf war/soviet dissolution 1990-1, dotcom/afghanistan 2000-1, gfc 2007-8. yugoslav wars and asian financial crisis were excluded because the mid-90s were mostly flat, and i attribute this to america’s relative stability during that period, no need to increase rates to look more attractive.
at this point i’m sort of leaning towards modifying the thesis such that high rates are used to help precipitate conflicts while rates need to be lowered as the conflict resolves itself in order to snap up as many assets as possible (both of these feel off to me and i think the second is the more off of the two). i am working with absolute values here and i wonder if % rate change would be more enlightening. it is notable how the current hikes aren’t in line with previous ones wrt the conflict in ukraine in being pumped up prior and getting slowly wound down during, but rather increased after the fact and have yet to come down. makes me think things will continue to be drawn out and perhaps larger support packages may still be in the works to disrupt the stabilizing market and clear the way for near future predatory investments globally.
this is the ffr data i used.
Glad to see a fellow bidenomics enjoyer lol.
I will study your thesis more carefully (I’m no expert though) but just some quick remarks: I think the current rate hike is special because of the past 13 years of zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP). If you look at the Fed fund rate chart you linked, the US has never had a prolonged period of near-zero interest rates until Obama flattened it in the wake of 2009 financial crisis (there was a gradual rise near the end but was quickly knocked back down again after covid).
The ZIRP era completely changed market behavior because everyone had expected that the low interest environment to last forever (which is also why you can throw all the “investment strategies” you hear from “financial geniuses” over the past 15 years out the window because everything was predicated on a low interest rate environment). The sudden rate hike in 2022 (supposedly in response to price inflation) caught everyone off guard, which precipitated in the Silicon Valley Bank collapse and a few other banks earlier March this year.
What’s so special about the current rate hike though, is that the US treasury has grown to such massive scale that the short-term interest income payout is actually injecting trillions of dollar liquidity into the system, not taking them out!
Look at this chart here:
An estimated $2T US dollars are being added to the system this year, with $1-1.5T supposedly coming from interest income channel (i.e. from the rate hikes), so you no longer need to reduce the interest rates for money to flow out again, increasing the interest rates is actually - paradoxically - injecting money into the system (and of course, rendering the entire financial system unstable in the process).
The elephant in the room that I don’t see people addressing is - where the heck is all those money going to go? They can’t stay in stocks and bonds forever with so much interest income being paid out, so if Biden is smart, he would direct them to the foreign sector and dollarize the world once again. That would seriously put a dent on the BRICS de-dollarization effort, which in my opinion is going far too slowly (probably realistic, but vulnerable to the shenanigans the gigantic US financial system can do to them).
So yes, the US can really eat everyone’s lunches, and we will have to wait and see what BRICS will do to counter this threat.
Edit: also would be interesting to see how the $1.6T student loan repayment in the US will screw up the global financial system even more.
it’s mostly in line with your previous posts, i got the original framework from some guy on r/sino a couple years back. my modified thesis is now:
as an aside for the less econobrained, it should be noted that the capital flight represents the surplus value gleaned from workers in the rest of the world by their national bourgeoisie; rich people from other parts of the world get scared and like to park their money in the US where it’s safe and won’t get taken away from them when things around them start getting hairy
on the international angle: i think this is still the most probable turn of events, but i also think many countries are becoming more aware that dollarization is directly connected to the question of sovereignty which may give them some room for pause, particularly with climate change looming on the horizon. my question here was more about the specifics: where and how are they going to invest? i guess the trivial answer might be in low level resource extraction to support eventual US re-industrialization? are they just going to buy out the BRI? can they even do that?
moving on to the domestic possibilities, this is also where things start getting really fuzzy for me. i understand this interest rate situation as the US suddenly having an excess of money lying around, and again i have questions: i get that bonds are not profitable in this environment, but why not stocks? what happens if the bubble doesn’t pop (revolution ig)? if biden invests in domestic industry/subsidies, why would they not just keep doing buybacks with the money? what is so unattractive about domestic investment vs foreign investment aside from keeping the world dollarized?