It looks like the French are onboard with China buying in to one of their biggest corporations, Ubisoft. Tencent, the CCP owned and run corporation, is going to be allowed to invest $297 million, which buys a lot of influence over a creator serving a world market.
Tencent has made a $297 million investment into Assassin’s Creed maker Ubisoft. Ubisoft announced Tuesday that Tencent acquired a minority stake in Guillemot Brothers Limited, the company through which Ubisoft’s founders have managed the greater Ubisoft corporation. Ubisoft CEO and co-founder Yves Guillemot said Tencent’s increased stake was done to secure Ubisoft’s value for the future. Martin Lau, president of Tencent, said this strengthened partnership will also bolster both companies’ footprint in the mobile gaming market.
“We are excited to expand our engagement with the founders, the Guillemot family, as Ubisoft continues to develop immersive game experiences, and to bring some of Ubisoft’s most well-known AAA franchises to mobile,” Lau said in a news release. “This agreement also aligns with our philosophy to invest alongside creative founders with full confidence that they will lead their companies to new heights.”
De-globalisation is inevitable, but the global corpostate ruling class do NOT want this and will fight tooth and nail to prevent it. The heyday of being able to buy anything from almost anywhere and being able to travel relatively inexpensively will be over soon, enjoy it while you can.
Local financial self-reliance and energy and food independence will become as essential as local governance that provides fair rules, free exchange, peace, and security. While these things may seem theoretical today, over the next 5 years we will see an increasing demand for local communities that can care for their own own and financially sustain themselves.
As you may see from the video below, the trend toward deglobalisation is happening now and higher ranking economic and political authorities are beginning to take serious notice. Outsourcing the economy and specialization are out, self-sustaining self-reliance are moving in as key economic concerns for policy makers.
The Roman Republic fell when 1/3 of the revenues were being paid into the welfare state. The Roman Republic collapsed from within, not due to external forces. You can only rob Peter to pay Paul for so long without fresh tax-payer revenue coming in to keep the system afloat.
Let’s consider the reality of the United States by looking at the Federal Budget. If Rome fell when 33% of revenues were going into the welfare system, and the whole economy collapsed under that weight, it would be fair to say that America is less than that as we have not collapsed. Look at the numbers, and we will see:
In fiscal year 2020, look at the mandatory programs:
• Social Security: $1.092T • Medicare: $694B • Medicaid: $447B • Other Mandatory Programs: $743B
Official Federal Budget
Those total $2.975 trillion. The receipts category (total revenue) equals $3.706 trillion. That’s 80.3% of all Federal tax revenue that goes out towards entitlements like Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, WIC, and other programs.
Social Security technically is not an entitlement, as we pay into it our entire life in exchange for a retirement years income stream, but it cannot be taken away easily. Therefore, like all other entitlements, they become sticky.
The Roman Empire collapsed under 33% of revenue going towards entitlement programs. In 2020/21 the United States was at 80.3%. This is unsustainable.
Add to this the net interest on the national debt, which at around 2.0% interest on a 30-year bond is a whopping $376 Billion. At the lowest interest rates in the history of America, the net interest plus entitlement payments equal 90.4% of all US federal tax revenue. The eerie implications of the massive amount of unsustainable debt are devastating in impact on small interest rate moves.
Consider what the Net interest on $27 trillion of federal debt will be when interest rates are the following:
When interest rates reach 3%, then net interest plus entitlements equal 100% of the entire federal tax revenue. Interest rates are cyclical and throughout history move from high to low or low to high around every 28 years. Interest rates in 1983 were 18% of a 30 year bond.
U.S. Interest Rates 171 Years
The interest rate cycle is at the end of its downward trend and can only go up from here. Sadly, state pension funds are not the only things facing insolvency. So is America. Consider the official Federal Budget that shows the massive number of expenditures as a percentage of revenue that entitlements and mandatory payments occupy.
Unfortunately, America is poised for default or is setting the state for a hyper-inflationary phase in the economy that will erode the wealth, standard-of-living, and livelihood of all Americans.
Mr. Sune Hojgaard Sorensen, a strategic and economic Advisory Board Member of the BFI Capital Group, has identified what he calls three defining mega-trends he believes will feature prominently in the next decade, all of which have been massively accelerated by Covid.
1. DIGITALIZATION AND TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION
“According to a study conducted by McKinsey & Co in November of last year, in response to the crisis, companies have accelerated the digitalization of their customer interactions, accomplishing three or four years of progress in just seven months!” Further, Sorensen notes that “Value has moved from the tangible to the intangible, or a combination thereof.”
In 1975, only 17% of assets on the S & P 500 were intangible (patents, brand value, customer data, etc.), while 83% were tangible (buildings, equipment, cash, inventory, etc.). Today, 90% of assets are intangible. Digital finance, tele-health, remote work, online education, virtual entertainment, automation, and robotics will only increase in use.
2. THE RISE OF THE EAST
Consider that over 3.3 billion live in the countries of India, China, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Japan alone. The world’s largest shipping hubs are now in the East, and Asia’s market share has massively expanded in the past 100 years. Despite the talk of “decoupling” from China, many businesses have shown little interest in doing so.
According to MacroPolo, “Foreign businesses are just one gauge of decoupling, but they are particularly important leading indicators of shifts in supply chain ecosystems. In 2020, the respective portions of US (87%) and European (89%) businesses indicating no intention to leave China are as high or even higher than they’ve been in recent years.”
According to MacroPolo, “Foreign businesses are just one gauge of decoupling, but they are particularly important leading indicators of shifts in supply chain ecosystems. In 2020, the respective portions of US (87%) and European (89%) businesses indicating no intention to leave China are as high or even higher than they’ve been in recent years.”
World’s Largest Shipping Hubs Data
1. BIG GOVERNMENTS, BIGGER DEBT
Essentially, the US has transitioned from real engineering to financial engineering. Sorenson highlights the Congressional Budget Office projections, which predict that US Debt to GDP will pass the historical high of 106 in 2023, and in 2050 will hit 2.5x what they were at the end of 2020.
But Sorensen believes this could spell opportunity for strategic investors. “Beyond the debasement and the financial repression, big government and even bigger debt will also bring plenty of opportunity to those entrepreneurs and investors who can take a pragmatic approach, see through the smoke and mirrors, and identify the sectors that stand to benefit from all this largesse, deploying their efforts and capital accordingly.”
Consider that while millions lost their fortunes in the Great Depression, those who understood the times and were wise enough to get out early (like Joe Kennedy, Sr.) were able to buy stock after the crash for pennies on the dollar, becoming millionaires in the process.
U.S. regulators have selected e-commerce giant Alibaba (NYSE:) Group Holding Ltd and other U.S.-listed Chinese companies for audit inspections starting next month, three sources familiar with the matter said.
The move follows Friday’s landmark audit deal between Beijing and Washington allowing U.S. regulators to vet accounting firms in mainland China and Hong Kong, potentially ending a long-running dispute that threatened to boot more than 200 Chinese companies from U.S. stock exchanges.
Alibaba has been notified that it is among the first batch of Chinese companies whose audits will be inspected by the U.S. audit watchdog – Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) – in Hong Kong, the sources told Reuters.
Western Europe has long existed in a bubble of safety devoid of any real connection to the past outside of a few major events that rarely go further back than Hitler. For Europe, America mostly defended her lands, so the cost of defending one’s home from all enemies foreign and domestic was lost on a people that have been protected by America since the end of World War Two.
Russia has delivered to Europe a lesson in forgetting what that cost really is. Europe must now come to terms with the fact that they have no real military deterrence without the United States. Their green virtue signalling policies of relying on dirty energy from foreign powers have produced disastrous dependencies on energy from the very threat that has popped the bubble of safety they’ve long been living inside.
The invasion of Ukraine has increased Europe’s desire for alliances and security. Finland and Sweden are on a fast track to become new members of NATO. The German center-left coalition government have announced the intention to build a new robust military that many predict can quickly become the most powerful military in Europe. Additionally, the German Prime Minister, Klaus Sholz, told NATO that the Germans would increase their contribution to NATO.
Meanwhile the EU is making plans to also increase their military strength. With Ukraine seeking membership to the EU, Britain agreeing to a military partnership, and Ireland expanding its military involvement, the once diminishing European Union is looking attractive once again.
Almost every European nation has a green party within it, a party that primarily identifies as being committed to taking radical steps to save the planet from man-made climate change. But yet, the cost of Green Puritanism is increasing, as Europe comes to terms with what we like to call, the “blood and bone cost of the reality of power.”
Many wealthy nations virtue signal green by preventing non-green energy development at home while making their nation-states dependent on foreign-purchased non-green energy to meet their actual daily energy needs.
While much of Europe is now confronting the cost of going green, thanks to Russia, both for the Ukraine invasion and the natural gas pipeline shut-down threat, The Netherlands is coming to terms with another hard reality, when policy confronts real human action. The consequences have been ongoing protests, freedom convoys, police shootings, disruptions, and refusals to even meet with the government under the unrealistic terms given to the farmers now fighting for their very lives.
When you enact policies that destroy your internal food production at a time when food shortages are spreading throughout the globe, your government is about to face the cost of ignoring the facts. This is the blood and bone cost of the reality of power that the “experts” of the Netherlands hardly ever took into consideration.
There are protests now forming across Europe, including everything from resisting censorship, to taxes, to academic policy making with no regard for the people it harms. There are new parties forming and radical parties rising.
Europe is set to become a cauldron of competing radical powers, some doubling down even more on leftist suicide, and others promising to restore order, security, and common-sense morality.
We have great hope for our nation here in America to survive this liminal time, a time between what was and what will next be, but Europe seems set for a generation of turmoil and upheaval, terrorism and continued diminishment of quality of life. They won’t be alone, but their geographical and historical context leads us to believe they will be one of the hardest hit by the continued upheavals to come.
As noted by Bloomberg’s infographic, Russia and Ukraine account for almost one-quarter of global grains supply.
Both Russia and Ukraine have cut off grain exports. Geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan notes that the world was already facing “the worst fertilizer situation in modern history in terms of supply” before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Zeihan says, “even if the war were to stop tomorrow, it’s already too late. It’s too late for the planting season for the Northern Hemisphere this year.”
Iowa farmer Ben Riensche told Tucker Carlson, “Soaring fertilizer prices are likely to bring spiked food prices. If you’re upset that gas is up a dollar or two a gallon, wait until your grocery bill is up $1,000 a month, and it might not just manifest itself in terms of price. It could be quantity as well. Empty-shelf syndrome may be starting.”
The globalist World Economic Forum writes, “We are currently witnessing the beginning of a global food crisis, driven by the knock-on effects of a pandemic and more recently the rise in fuel prices and the conflict in Ukraine.”
Swiss asset manager Egon von Greyerz warns that the world is facing “a global monetary and Commodity infer of nuclear proportions.” Greyerz asserts, “The world will obviously blame Putin for the catastrophe which will hit every corner of our planet. But we must remember that neither Putin nor Covid is the reason for the economic cataclysm that we are now approaching.” Indeed, war would simply be the prick that burst the global bubble, a scapegoat for financial collapse and rising inflation.
Greyerz continues, “If a miracle doesn’t stop this war very quickly (which is extremely unlikely), the world will soon be entering a hyperinflationary commodity explosion (think both energy, metals, and food) combined with a cataclysmic deflationary asset implosion (think debt, stocks, and property).”
Taken together, fertilizer shortages, food shortages, commodity shortages, energy shortages, and supply chain disruptions will increase what Willem Middelkoop calls “super inflation.”
According to the WSJ, Blackstone is the final stages of raising a new real-estate fund that would set a record as the biggest vehicle of its kind, defying market volatility and a crowded landscape for fundraising.
The private-equity giant said in a regulatory filing Wednesday it has closed on commitments totaling $24.1 billion for Blackstone Real Estate Partners X, the latest iteration of its main real-estate fund.
According to the WSJ, Blackstone is committing about $300 million of its own capital and has allocated an additional $5.9 billion to investors, which will bring the fund to $30.3 billion when it is finalized. The firm raised the fund, expected to be the largest traditional private-equity vehicle in history, in just three month. It was also Blackstone that set the prior record, with the $26 billion buyout fund it raised in 2019. The new real-estate fund will be 50% larger than its predecessor, a $20.5 billion pool raised in 2019.
The workers at the Amazon Staten Island site were successful in voting for a union, but now the union is accusing Amazon of using intimidation and fear tactics to try to stop workers from voting for a union. Accusations include threats to reduce salaries should the union vote win. Amazon accused of threatening workers during union vote
The workers at the Staten Island warehouse secured the first successful union election in Amazon’s history on April 1. Amazon immediately challenged the results of the election, accusing both the Amazon Labor Union and the NLRB itself of breaking labor laws before the election. The NLRB will hold hearings on those challenges before the union win can be officially certified.
“Our focus remains on working directly with our team to make Amazon a great place to work. The allegations in NLRB complaint are without merit, and we look forward to showing that through this process,” Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokesperson, wrote in an email to Protocol.
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