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But Pyongyang said Trump’s “unilateral cancellation of the summit was
unexpected and very regrettable”.

US officials also complained North Koreans did not show up to
preparatory meetings and would not answer calls. During a television
appearance, Trump left open the possibility talks could still be held.
“It’s possible that the existing summit could take place, or a summit
at some later date. Nobody should be anxious. We have to get it
right,” he said. “If and when Kim Jong-un chooses to engage in
constructive dialogue and actions, I am waiting.”

US allies in Asia were blindsided by the announcement. The South
Korean president, Moon Jae-in, called an emergency meeting just before
midnight local time, saying: “I am very perplexed and it is very
regrettable that the North Korea-US summit will not be held.”

“You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and
powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used,” Mr.
Trump wrote. But then he added, “I felt a wonderful dialogue was
building up between you and me, and ultimately it is only that
dialogue that matters. Someday, I look very much forward to meeting
you.”

Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, John R. Bolton, infuriated
North Korean officials by proposing the voluntary disarmament of Libya
in 2003 as a precedent for North Korea. Under that deal, Libya gave up
its entire arsenal without receiving any incentives.

Then, Mr. Pence warned that Mr. Kim could meet the same fate as
Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, if he did not make a deal
with the United States. Libyan rebels, aided by a NATO bombing
campaign, killed Colonel Qaddafi during the Arab Spring upheavals in
2011. That prompted a North Korean official to call him a “political
dummy.”

The cancellation creates a crisis for Mr. Moon of South Korea, who
said it was “disconcerting and very regrettable.”

“It was obvious from the president’s tweets that he had not studied
the prior negotiations with North Korea,” said Michael J. Green, a
former Asia adviser to President George W. Bush. “If he had spent time
with anyone who had done this before, it was clear that North Korea
was going for sanctions relief and de facto recognition as a nuclear
weapons state.”

North Korea has said it is still willing to hold direct talks between
its leader Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump, calling the planned summit
“desperately necessary” to resolve potential hostilities after the US
cancelled the meeting.

“We express our willingness to sit down face-to-face with the US and
resolve issues anytime and in any format,” North Korea’s vice foreign
minister Kim Kye-gwan said in a statement. “Our commitment to doing
our best for the sake of peace and stability for the world and the
Korean Peninsula remains unchanged, and we are open-minded in giving
time and opportunity to the US.”

The Question remains as follows. Kim Jong-Un can hardly forget what
happened to Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, both of whom met their
Ends after being de-fanged. So my Question remains, what security
guarantees can Trump provide to Kim? that convince him to
denuclearise. Offering up bullet-proof security guarantees is the
equivalent of threading the needle.

The Events that took place on Friday at the truce village of Panmunjom
and during the Inter-Korean Summit were breathtaking for the Hollywood
Optics. The Opening Shot of Kim Jong Un surrounded by a Phalanx of
North Korean Officials [later replayed as Chairman Kim sat in his
Presidential Vehicle surrounded by his Ninja bodyguards] was almost as
good as the opening Sequence in PT Anderson's Boogie Nights [Steadicam
operator Andy Shuttleworth]. This was Cinema of the highest level
which is no surprise when You consider that Kim Jong-Il the Father was
obsessed with Cinema and amassed arguably the world’s largest personal
film collection: over 20,000 bootlegged 35mm screening copies. Kim
Jong-Il also had a penchant for Hennessy Paradis cognac and for two
years in the mid-1990s, he was the world's largest buyer of Hennessy
Paradis cognac, importing up to $800,000 of the stuff a year.  Kim
Jong-Il began his career as the head of the state’s propaganda and
agitation department and its clear that Kim Jong-Un's sister Kim Yo
Jong who holds the same role and evidently handles all the optics, is
a chip off the old Block. Friday was tip-top Geopolitical Optics. Mike
Pompeo, the newly minted US Secretary of State [His predecessor was
fired via Twitter] had visited Pyongyang the previous week and
pronounced; that the young North Korean leader was "a smart guy who's
doing his homework"

Marwan Bishara was a little jaded by the Optics tweeted

''When pictures are the news and symbols are the facts, cliches become
truths and media turns into propaganda or BS''

''For now, We are short on facts long on images and hence any
perspective is likely to be speculative. Globally, we are being played
in a ‘game of nations’ which could produce more of the same or
different ...''

“Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock,
which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft,
and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another
paradox: What is soft is strong,” Lao Tzu

South Korea is set to be peeled off and going by his puppy dog smiles
President Moonriver will be in PyongYang before you can pronounce Kim
Yo Jong correctly. Russia always had their back. China was never
interested in bringing him to heel. After all, he is the buffer state
between China and more than 30,000 US soldiers parked on their
doorstep in South Korea.

Gravity’s Rainbow is a 1973 novel by Thomas Pynchon which is about the
design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military.
In particular, it features the quest undertaken by several characters
to uncover the secret of a mysterious device named the “Schwarzgerät”
(black device), slated to be installed in a rocket with the serial
number “00000”. As the world watches PyongYang, I cannot help
wondering if Kim Jong-Un has read Pynchon which speaks of “A screaming
comes across the sky” and North Korea.

“But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the
parabola.  They must have guessed, once or twice -guessed and refused
to believe -that everything, always, collectively, had been moving
toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no
surprise, no second chance, no return.’’

They all have had tiny little hands like the Elves in the Elves and
the Shoemaker. And this country has nuclear weapons and on its border
with its neighbour South Korea sit 25,000 American soldiers.

This is not a good enough reason to break up the JCPOA nuclear deal
with Iran that Europe, Russia and China so value. Europe must call a
halt to this.

Satellite imagery shows nearly 400 buildings on a reef occupied by
China in the South China Sea, and experts say it indicates Beijing
might eventually deploy troops there.

Using images from DigitalGlobe satellites, the nonprofit Earthrise
Media analyzed photos of Subi Reef, which is closer to Vietnam and the
Philippines than mainland China, and discovered that a large number of
buildings, parade grounds, radar equipment, and even basketball courts
had been built since 2014.

There were nearly 400 permanent, free-standing buildings, Earthrise's
founder, Dan Hammer, told Reuters. Subi has seen the most construction
by any country on an island in the South China Sea, the news outlet
reported.

China's parabolic rise has been simply breath-taking. Xi Jinping's One
Belt One Road [OBOR] program binds the World to Beijing because all
the roads and railways have but one destination and that is China. In
fact, far from being a unipolar World, we have entered a bipolar or
even a Tripolar World [US, China and Russia].

Apart from a few half-hearted and timid FONOPs [freedom of navigation
operations], China has established control over the South China Sea.
It has created artificial Islands and then militarised those
artificial islands across the South China Sea. It is a mind-boggling
geopolitical advance any which way you care to cut it. China has
advanced its footprint in Pakistan where it has leased the Gwadar Port
[giving China and Central Asia access to the Gulf region and the
Middle East] for 43 years. Sri Lanka which gorged on Chinese debt has
had to disgorge the Hambantota Port to its Creditor.And recently, we
saw China formally open a Facility in Djibouti. These moves taken
together speak to a material Chinese Advance. The Pivot to Asia which
was supposed to contain China is dead in the water and China has
sprung that Trap. China is also in Narendra Modi's face in the Doklam
Plateau which sits at  the tri-junction region of Bhutan, China and
India. Its as if Xi Jinping is goading Narendra Modi who would be
seriously ill-advised to take on the Chinaman in that remote plateau.

Once upon a time, the Chinese built the Great Wall of China to keep
the Barbarians out and President Trump and other ‘wannabe’ Wall
Builders seem to have entered a worm-hole and are now following that
ancient Chinese script, which China itself long ago jettisoned.

Meanwhile, China has jumped its wall and is advancing with a surety of
purpose which is quite remarkable.

Euro 1.1670
Dollar Index 93.97
Japan Yen 109.35
Swiss Franc 0.9920
Pound 1.3327
Aussie 0.7571
India Rupee 67.78
South Korea Won 1077.88
Brazil Real 3.6501
Egypt Pound 17.9185
South Africa Rand 12.5119

Netflix raises $82.5 million in its initial public offering, with a
total valuation of $300 million.

Blockbuster Video had raked in about $800 million in late fees that same year.

Netflix goes on to gain 15,000%, Blockbuster goes extinct.

Frontier Markets

Sub-Saharan Africa is confronting a pronounced rise in public debt. At
the end of 2017, average public debt in the region was 57% of its GDP,
an increase of 20 percentage points in just five years. While this is
well below the peaks of the early 2000s, the current spike is
concerning.

According to our most recent Regional Economic Outlook for Sub-Saharan
Africa, six of the region’s 35 low-income countries (LICs) are in
“debt distress,” meaning they are unable to service external
commitments. A further nine LICs are classified as being at “high risk
of debt distress.”
In the broadest sense, three factors account for the current debt
challenges. For starters, the region’s commodity exporters, and
particularly its oil exporters, were hit hard by the 2014-2016 slump
in prices. Africa’s lost output and associated debt increases are
comparable to the experience of advanced economies following the
global financial crisis. Today, eight of the region’s fifteen
debt-troubled LICs are commodity exporters.

Additionally, most countries that have funded development and
infrastructure through borrowing have failed to generate sufficient
additional tax revenues to repay that debt. In many cases, countries
have not been effective at capturing the return on their investments
through their tax systems.

Finally, in many Sub-Saharan countries, portions of the debt build-up
can be traced to shocks in the migration of liabilities – such as
losses by state-owned enterprises – to the public-sector balance sheet
and exchange-rate depreciations. In a handful of countries, poor
governance can also be blamed for unsustainable debt practices.

Dollar versus Rand 6 Month Chart INO 12.5119
http://quotes.ino.com/charting/index.html?s=FOREX_USDZAR&v=d6&t=c&a=50&w=1

Egypt Pound versus The Dollar 3 Month Chart INO 17.9185
http://quotes.ino.com/charting/index.html?s=FOREX_USDEGP&v=d3&t=c&a=50&w=1

Egypt EGX30 Bloomberg
http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/CASE:IND

Nigerians will see their real income per head fall every year until at
least 2023, according to forecasts by the IMF, a potentially painful
squeeze for a country with per capita gross domestic product of just
$1,994.
If realised, Africa’s most-populous country — projected to have almost
400m people by 2050, behind only India and China — will suffer at
least eight straight years of declining income per capita.

“If the IMF is right that would obviously be awful, a very depressing
result,” said John Ashbourne, Africa economist at Capital Economics, a
consultancy.

“They have a very rapidly growing population. If they are not able to
diversify their economy faster than they have before, a huge number of
these people will end up being trapped either in agriculture or
low-skilled service jobs.”

Moreover, Nigeria is among the minority of countries in the region
that saw their export complexity decline between 1995 and 2015, as
depicted in the second chart, suggesting the problem is getting worse.

There is a sense of increasing optimism that the Government is set to
deal wit the problem.

Word at the Ground level is its now or its never

Nairobi All Share Bloomberg   +3.13% 2018 (-10.180% since record high
of 196.57 set on April 5th)
http://www.BLOOMBERG.COM/quote/NSEASI:IND

Nairobi ^NSE20 Bloomberg -8.22% 2018
http://j.mp/ajuMHJ