Early Headlines: Comcast Announces Watchable, Pakistan Set Up to Fail, New Explosions in China, EU Guarantees Greek Deposits and More

Early Bird Headlines 15 August 2015

Econintersect: Here are some of the headlines we found to help you start your day. For more headlines see our afternoon feature for GEI members, What We Read Today, which has many more headlines and a number of article discussions to keep you abreast of what we have found interesting.

Global

• Comcast is about to launch a major video platform called Watchable to rival Facebook and Google (Business Insider) Comcast is preparing to launch a major new video platform with content from big-name partners in the coming weeks. Econintersect: Sounds like this may be a more “professional” media platform (“big-name partners”) but the real strength of Facebook and YouTube is the venue provided for amateur producers and home video (and photos) material. Comcast may be aiming more at Netflix with this new platform than the “amateur hour” folks. Will be very interesting to see how this plays out – and who the big-names are. What if one of them is Netflix. Who then is the target?
• The world has a bigger problem than China’s currency devaluation (The Washington Post) Currency devaluations are merely a symptom of the bigger problem: weak economic growth.
  
• The Best Wrong Way to Implement a Nuke Deal (Foreign Policy) As the real work of the Iran nuke deal begins, we should bear in mind the lessons of the failed North Korea nuke deal.
• Oil at 6-Year Low Amid Global Glut. How Low Can It Go? (ThinkAdvisor) The experts are giving advice and it doesn’t agree: Gary Shilling says crude is headed to between $10 and $20, while Jeff Saut expects “outstanding opportunities” to buy oil-related securities, including MLPs. The cover of Barron’s is screaming “Buy Commodities“. Well, after a wild week oil tried to move Friday but ended up not going much of anywhere – see next article.
• Crude Oil Streaming Chart (Investing.com) WTI Crude tried to rally above $42.70 Friday, but then fell back to $42.05 – $42.15 range.

Click for latest live streaming chart at Investing.com.

U.S.

• ‘Violent displacement’ in the name of conservation must end, group says (Al Jazeera) A campaign launched this week to prevent the further spread of the American preservationist model of conservation. A new indigenous rights campaign called “Stop the Con” is trying to prevent the American conservation model of national parks and reserves from being further exported around the world.  Econintersect: Very suspicious. We expect that there is more behind this than an uprising of indigenous people.
  

Greece

• EU Aims to Lure Greek Deposits Back to Banks With Bail-in Shield (Bloomberg) Euro-area finance ministers shielded Greek bank depositors from any losses resulting from the restructuring of the nation’s financial system, as part of Friday’s deal on an 86 billion-euro ($96 billion) bailout. Senior bondholders will be at risk if Greek banks are required to dip into any financial stability funds provided by the EU, but depositors will be expressly protected from bail-ins. This is a form of deposit guarantee from the EU. Econintersect note: Bail-in refers to the process whereby a bank seizes deposits and issues in place thereof equity in the bank. This was done in the Cyprus crisis a couple of years ago.

Pakistan

• Why Is Pakistan Such a Mess? Blame India. (Foreign Policy) After a year in office, Modi’s gestures of conciliation toward Islamabad have gone nowhere. That’s because India’s founding fathers set Pakistan up to fail.

China

• New explosions reported in Tianjin disaster zone as officials declare 3km ‘no-man zone’ and mass evacuations (South China Morning Post) New explosions rocked a chemical warehouse in northern China Saturday as police ordered residents to evacuate buildings within a 3-kilometre radius amid lingering concerns about a chemical contamination in the industrial zone.
• Yuan rebounds but investors head for the exits (South China Morning Post) The yuan strengthened yesterday for the first time in four days after strong policy support by the central bank, but a spike in interbank rates suggests capital outflow following the shock devaluation continues unabated. For day-by-day coverage, see GEI News: China Joins the Currency Wars: Updated.
• China Not Immune to Contagious Quantitative Easing and Massive Printing of Cheap Money (Frank Holmes, U.S. Global Investors) FH has contributed to GEI. Frank Holmes says the reaction to China’s yuan renminbi devaluation is “hugely overblown“. He is of the opinion that a 3% revaluation is far from a “currency war”.
  

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