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If volatility spikes, positions are going to be reduced en masse. Or
to put it another way and to borrow the lyrics from the Eagles Hotel
California:

Mirrors on the ceiling,
The pink champagne on ice
And she said “We are all just prisoners here, of our own device” Last
thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
“Relax,” said the night man,
“We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave! “
What is clear is that we are at the fag-end of this party.

Conclusions

It took a long time to unwind but unwind it will

Home Thoughts

Starry night with distant aurora; astronomers at Concordia Station
search for planets beyond our solar system, from 3233m on the high
polar plateau of #Antarctica. The ASTEP 400 telescope detects distant
exoplanets transiting stars, pic Marco Buttu PNRA/IPEV @ItaliAntartide
@esa

One of Elsa's successors at the Meru National Park. Kenya's famous
feline was immortalized by Joy Adamson's 1960 book Born Free and the
blockbuster movie that followed. The orphaned lioness was raised by
Adamson and her husband in a part of the remote Kenya bush that's now
Meru National Park. The Adamson camp was just below a rock outcrop now
called Elsa's Kopje (+254 730 127 000), while her grave lies about an
hour away on the north bank of the Ura River.

2 women & 2 young children are led away by a group of soldiers. They
are blindfolded, forced to the ground, and shot 22 times.

#BBCAfricaEye investigated this atrocity. This is what we found...

Russian Minsiter of Defense Shoigu announces that "[Syria] will be
supplied with S-300 air defense missile system within two weeks" and
that "Russia will jam sat navigation, on-board radars and comms
systems of combat aircraft which attack target Syria."

With less than six months to go until the U.K. leaves the European
Union, Labour seems to have grasped the reality that the Conservative
Party’s crisis over Brexit presents the biggest opportunity the party
has seen in nearly a decade to retake power. But that might mean
overcoming Labour’s own Brexit divisions and encouraging the very
chaos it claims to want to avoid.

Corbyn has been under pressure — from unions, Labour constituencies
and campaigners — to push for a new vote on Brexit. After a five-hour
debate Sunday, Labour delegates managed to agree on a motion that will
be put to the conference for a vote on Tuesday. It reads: “If we
cannot get a general election, Labour must support all options
remaining on the table, including campaigning for a public vote.” You
can see the hesitation in the wording.

James Dean was an iconic American actor, who tapped into the universal
yearning and angst of nearly every adolescent human being with a raw
connection that has surely not been surpassed since. In one of his
most consequential films, Rebel without a Cause, two players (read,
teenage boys) decide to settle a dispute (read, teenage girl) by way
of near-death experiences. Each speeds an automobile towards a cliff.
A simple rule governs the challenge: the first to jump out of his
automo- bile is the chicken and, by universally accepted social
convention, concedes the object in dispute. The second to jump is
victorious, and, depending on context, becomes gang leader, prom king,
etc.

Alibaba’s Jack Ma has warned that the ongoing US-China trade war could
last at least 20 years. As we’ll see, it’s actually more like 30 – up
to 2049, the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the People’s
Republic of China (PRC).
Steve Bannon always boasted that President Trump was bound to conduct
a “sophisticated form of economic warfare” to confront China
The logic underpinning the warfare is that if you squeeze the Chinese
economy hard enough Beijing will submit and “play by the rules.”
The Trump administration plan – which is, in fact, trade deficit hawk
Peter Navarro’s plan – has three basic targets:
Displace China from the heart of global supply chains.
Force companies to source elsewhere in the Global South all the
components necessary for manufacturing their products.
Force multinational corporations to stop doing business in China.
The overarching concept is that unending confrontation with China is
bound to scare companies/investors away.
There’s no evidence South Korean or German conglomerates, for
instance, would withdraw from the vast Chinese market and/or
production facilities.
What’s certain is that Beijing, as confirmed by a rash of editorials
in Chinese state media, will not just play defense.
Beijing sees the trade war as “protracted.” A Commercial Cold War 2.0
atmosphere is now in effect but China is fighting the ideological war
on two fronts. At home, Beijing is using strong language to define its
position against the US but taking a significantly softer approach in
the international arena.

Donald Trump has adopted many contradictory positions since taking
office, but he has been unwavering on one point: that Russia played no
role in putting him in the Oval Office. Trump dismisses the idea that
Russian interference affected the outcome of the 2016 election,
calling it a “made-up story,” “ridiculous,” and “a hoax.” He finds the
subject so threatening to his legitimacy that—according to  The
Perfect Weapon,” a recent book on cyber sabotage by David Sanger, of
the Times—aides say he refuses even to discuss it. In public, Trump
has characterized all efforts to investigate the foreign attacks on
American democracy during the campaign as a “witch hunt”; in March, he
insisted that “the Russians had no impact on our votes whatsoever.”

Speaking for himself, however, he told me that “it stretches credulity
to think the Russians didn’t turn the election.”

Ordinarily, Congress would aggressively examine an electoral
controversy of this magnitude, but the official investigations in the
House and the Senate, led by Republicans, have been too stymied by
partisanship to address the ultimate question of whether Trump’s
victory was legitimate. Although the Senate hearings are still under
way, the Intelligence Committee chairman, Richard Burr, a Republican,
has already declared, “What we cannot do, however, is calculate the
impact that foreign meddling and social media had on this election.”

Even the Clinton campaign has stopped short of attributing its loss to
the Russians. Joel Benenson, the campaign’s pollster, told me that “a
global power is fucking with our elections,” and that “every American
should be outraged, whether it changed the outcome or not.” But did
the meddling alter the outcome? “How will we ever know?” he said. “We
probably won’t, until some Russians involved in it are actually
prosecuted—or some Republican, in a moment of conscience, talks.”

Politicians may be too timid to explore the subject, but a new book
from, of all places, Oxford University Press promises to be
incendiary. “Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a
President—What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know,” by Kathleen Hall
Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of
Pennsylvania, dares to ask—and even attempts to answer—whether Russian
meddling had a decisive impact in 2016. Jamieson offers a forensic
analysis of the available evidence and concludes that Russia very
likely delivered Trump’s victory.

The book, which is coming out less than two months before the midterm
elections, at a moment when polls suggest that some sixty per cent of
voters disapprove of Trump, may well reignite the question of Trump’s
electoral legitimacy. The President’s supporters will likely
characterize the study as an act of partisan warfare. But in person
Jamieson, who wears her gray hair in a pixie cut and favors silk
scarves and matronly tweeds, looks more likely to suspend a
troublemaker than to be one. She is seventy-one, and has spent forty
years studying political speeches, ads, and debates. Since 1993, she
has directed the Annenberg Public Policy Center, at Penn, and in 2003
she co-founded FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan watchdog group. She is
widely respected by political experts in both parties, though her
predominantly male peers have occasionally mocked her scholarly
intensity, calling her the Drill Sergeant. As Steven Livingston, a
professor of political communication at George Washington University,
puts it, “She is the epitome of a humorless, no-nonsense social
scientist driven by the numbers. She doesn’t bullshit. She calls it
straight.”

Indeed, when I met recently with Jamieson, in a book-lined conference
room at the Annenberg Center, in Philadelphia, and asked her
point-blank if she thought that Trump would be President without the
aid of Russians, she didn’t equivocate. “No,” she said, her face
unsmiling. Clearly cognizant of the gravity of her statement, she
clarified, “If everything else is a constant? No, I do not.”

Her case is based on a growing body of knowledge about the electronic
warfare waged by Russian trolls and hackers—whom she terms “discourse
saboteurs”—and on five decades’ worth of academic studies about what
kinds of persuasion can influence voters, and under what
circumstances. Democracies around the world, she told me, have begun
to realize that subverting an election doesn’t require tampering with
voting machines. Extensive studies of past campaigns, Jamieson said,
have demonstrated that “you can affect people, who then change their
decision, and that alters the outcome.” She continued, “I’m not
arguing that Russians pulled the voting levers. I’m arguing that they
persuaded enough people to either vote a certain way or not vote at
all.”

The effect of such manipulations could be momentous in an election as
close as the 2016 race, in which Clinton got nearly 2.9 million more
votes than Trump, and Trump won the Electoral College only because
some eighty thousand votes went his way in Wisconsin, Michigan, and
Pennsylvania. In two hundred and twenty-four pages of extremely dry
prose, with four appendixes of charts and graphs and fifty-four pages
of footnotes, Jamieson makes a strong case that, in 2016, “Russian
masterminds” pulled off a technological and political coup. Moreover,
she concludes, the American media “inadvertently helped them achieve
their goals.”

Last year, while Jamieson was trying to determine what could have
caused viewers’ perception of Clinton’s character to fall so
consequentially, the Washington Post asked her to write an op-ed
addressing whether Russian operatives had helped to elect Trump.
Jamieson agreed to do so, but, she admitted to me, “I frankly hadn’t
thought about it one way or the other.”

Before the hearings, Facebook’s chairman and C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg,
had maintained that the amount of Russian content that had been
disseminated on social media was too small to matter. But evidence
presented to the Senate committee revealed that material generated by
the Kremlin had reached a hundred and twenty-six million American
Facebook users, leading Senator Dianne Feinstein to call the
cyberattack “cataclysmic.”

House Democrats later released not only the ads but also their
“targeting data”—the demographics and the geographic locations of
users receiving them—which indicated to Jamieson “whom the Russians
were going for.” Among other things, she could discern that the
Russians had tried “to minimize the vote of African-Americans.” Bogus
Kremlin-sponsored ads that had circulated online—including one
depicting a black woman in front of an “african-americans for hillary”
sign—had urged voters to tweet or text rather than vote, or to “avoid
the line” and “vote from home.”

Jamieson argues that the impact of the Russian cyberwar was likely
enhanced by its consistency with messaging from Trump’s campaign, and
by its strategic alignment with the campaign’s geographic and
demographic objectives. Had the Kremlin tried to push voters in a new
direction, its effort might have failed. But, Jamieson concluded, the
Russian saboteurs nimbly amplified Trump’s divisive rhetoric on
immigrants, minorities, and Muslims, among other signature topics, and
targeted constituencies that he needed to reach. She noted that
Russian trolls had created social-media posts clearly aimed at winning
support for Trump from churchgoers and military families—key
Republican voters who seemed likely to lack enthusiasm for a
thrice-married nominee who had boasted of groping women, obtained
multiple military deferments, mocked Gold Star parents and a former
prisoner of war, and described the threat of venereal disease as his
personal equivalent of the Vietcong. Russian trolls pretended to have
the same religious convictions as targeted users, and often promoted
Biblical memes, including one that showed Clinton as Satan, with
budding horns, arm-wrestling with Jesus, alongside the message “
‘Like’ if you want Jesus to win!” One Instagram post, portraying
Clinton as uncaring about the 2012 tragedy in Benghazi, depicted a
young American widow resting her head on a flag-draped coffin. Another
post displayed contrasting images of a thin homeless veteran and a
heavyset, swarthy man wearing an “undocumented unafraid unapologetic”
T-shirt, and asked why “this veteran gets nothing” and “this illegal
gets everything.” It concluded, “Like and share if you think this is a
disgrace.” On Election Day, according to CNN exit polls, Trump,
despite his political baggage, outperformed Clinton by twenty-six
points among veterans; he also did better among evangelicals than both
of the previous Republican nominees, Mitt Romney and John McCain.

In her Post article, Jamieson wrote that it was “hard to know” if
Russian propaganda and dirty tricks—including the steady release of
hacked e-mails, starting with Democratic National Committee
correspondence that was leaked just before the Party’s convention—had
made a decisive difference in 2016. Nevertheless, she argued, the
“wide distribution” of the trolls’ disinformation “increases the
likelihood” that it “changed the outcome.”

During the second debate, on October 9th, before 66.5 million viewers,
one of the moderators, Martha Raddatz, relayed a question submitted by
a voter: Did Clinton think that it was acceptable for a politician to
be “two-faced”? The question referred to a leaked passage from one of
Clinton’s previously unreleased paid speeches; Russian hackers had
given the passage to WikiLeaks, which posted it two days before the
debate. In the speech, Clinton had cited Steven Spielberg’s film
“Lincoln” as an example of how politicians sometimes need to adopt
different public and private negotiating stances. The point was
scarcely novel, but the debate question—which took her words out of
context, omitted her reference to the movie, and didn’t mention that
Russian operatives had obtained the speech illegally—made Clinton
sound like a sneaky hypocrite. When Clinton cited “Lincoln” in order
to defend the statement, Trump pounced.

“She got caught in a total lie!” Trump said. “Her papers went out to
all her friends at the banks—Goldman Sachs and everybody else. And she
said things, WikiLeaks, that just came out. And she lied. Now she’s
blaming the lie on the late, great Abraham Lincoln!”

The fact-checking organization PolitiFact later concluded that Trump
had incorrectly characterized Clinton’s speech, but the damage had
been done. Jamieson’s research indicated that viewers who watched the
second and third debates subsequently saw Clinton as less forthright,
and Trump as more forthright. Among people who did not watch the
debates, Clinton’s reputation was not damaged in this way. During the
weeks that the debates took place, the moderators and the media became
consumed by an anti-Clinton narrative driven by Russian hackers. In
“Cyberwar,” Jamieson writes, “The stolen goods lent credibility” to
“those moderator queries.”

As Jamieson reviewed the record further, she concluded that the
Russian hackers had also been alarmingly successful in reframing the
American political narrative in the crucial period leading up to the
second debate. On Friday, October 7th, two days before it took place,
three major stories landed in rapid succession. At 12:40 p.m., the
Obama Administration released a stunning statement, by the Department
of Homeland Security and the director of National Intelligence,
accusing the Russian government of interfering in the election through
hacking. This seemed certain to dominate the weekend news, but at 4:03
p.m. the Washington Post published a report, by David Fahrenthold, on
an “Access Hollywood” tape that captured Trump, on a hot mike,
boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy.” Then, less than half an
hour later, WikiLeaks released its first tranche of e-mails that
Russian hackers had stolen from Podesta’s account. The tranche
contained some two thousand messages, along with excerpts from the
paid speeches that Clinton had tried to conceal, including those that
would be mentioned in the subsequent debates. (Julian Assange, the
head of WikiLeaks, has denied working with the Russian government, but
he manifestly despises Clinton, and, in a leaked Twitter direct
message, he said that in the 2016 election “it would be much better
for GOP to win.”)

If the WikiLeaks release was a Russian-backed effort to rescue Trump’s
candidacy by generating a scandal to counterbalance the “Access
Hollywood” tape and the intelligence report on Russian interference,
Jamieson writes, it worked splendidly. The intelligence community’s
report faded from the headlines; that Sunday morning, none of its
authors were invited on any major talk show. Instead, the programs
breathlessly discussed the “pussy” tape and the Clinton campaign’s
e-mails, which were portrayed as more or less exposing both candidates
as liars. Jamieson notes, “Instead of asking how we could know that
the Russians were behind the hacking, the October 9 Sunday show
moderators asked what effect the disclosures would have on the
candidates’ respective campaigns and what the tape and speech segments
revealed about the private versus public selves of the contenders.” If
not for WikiLeaks, she writes, the media discourse in those crucial
days likely would have remained locked on two topics advantageous to
Clinton: Russian election subversion and Trump’s treatment of women.

Jamieson also argues that, in most hotly contested elections, the
candidates blunt each other’s messages, which results in fairly
balanced media coverage. In 2016, she believes, Russia’s involvement
upset this equilibrium. She asks readers to imagine how different the
2016 election might have been if Trump’s campaign had also been
hacked, disgorging the e-mails of Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen,
Michael Flynn, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump, Jr. Among other
things, this would have exposed correspondence about the notorious
June, 2016, Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer, and Trump’s
payoffs to a pornographic actress and to a Playboy model. Documents
that Trump has kept concealed, such as his tax returns, also might
have come to light. Instead, Jamieson writes, throughout the autumn of
2016 a steady stream of content stolen from the Clinton campaign—which
the press generally described as coming from WikiLeaks, rather than
from Russia—“reweighted the news environment in Trump’s favor.”

As Jamieson dug further into Russia’s discourse saboteurs, she decided
that she had the makings of a book. Most discussions about the 2016
election results, she believed, had been misguidedly framed around the
question of whether the Russians had “changed votes directly.” There
wasn’t evidence for this. Instead, she suspected, the Russians had
“influenced who voted, or didn’t vote, and that could have changed the
outcome.”

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty
thousand e-mails that are missing,” adding, “I think you will probably
be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Joel Benenson, the Clinton pollster, was stunned when he learned, from
the July indictment, that the Russians had stolen his campaign’s
internal modelling. “I saw it and said, ‘Holy shit!’ ” he told me.
Among the proprietary information that the Russian hackers could have
obtained, he said, was campaign data showing that, late in the summer
of 2016, in battleground states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and
Pennsylvania, an unusually high proportion of residents whose
demographic and voting profiles identified them as likely Democrats
were “Hillary defectors”: people so unhappy with Clinton that they
were considering voting for a third-party candidate. The Clinton
campaign had a plan for winning back these voters. Benenson explained
that any Clinton opponent who stole this data would surely have
realized that the best way to counter the plan was to bombard those
voters with negative information about Clinton. “All they need to do
is keep that person where they are,” he said, which is far easier than
persuading a voter to switch candidates. Many critics have accused
Clinton of taking Michigan and Wisconsin for granted and spending
virtually no time there. But Benenson said that, if a covert
social-media campaign targeting “Hillary defectors” was indeed
launched in battleground states, it might well have changed the
outcome of the election.

A new book suggests that Russian interference “very likely” won Donald
Trump the 2016 presidential election, largely by convincing
on-the-fence voters in battleground states to either switch their vote
or not vote at all. The New Yorker reports Monday that Cyberwar: How
Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President—What We Don’t,
Can’t, and Do Know, analyzes polling data alongside Russian
interference tactics and concludes that all other things being equal,
Trump wouldn’t be president without help from Russian hackers. The
book, written by University of Pennsylvania Prof. Kathleen Hall
Jamieson, highlights the role of the WikiLeaks email dump, noting that
the messages provided by Russian hackers that were released just ahead
of the second presidential debate allowed Trump, the media, and debate
monitors alike to take Hillary Clinton’s words out of context and
paint her as untrustworthy. Hall also emphasizes that the email dumps
obscured news that would have been more favorable to Clinton,
including Obama’s announcement of Russia’s attempt to hack the
election, and Trump’s Access Hollywood tapes. Furthermore, she notes
Russian agents stole internal voter data from the Clinton campaign and
used it to target voters who were waffling on voting for her. “I’m not
arguing that Russians pulled the voting levers,” Hall told The New
Yorker. “I’m arguing that they persuaded enough people to either vote
a certain way or not vote at all.”

“We have a deviate, Tomahawk.”
“We copy.  There’s a voice.”
“We have gross oscillation here.”
“ There’s some interference. I have gone redundant but I’m not sure
it’s helping.”
“We are clearing an outframe to locate source.”
“ Thank you, Colorado.”
From feeding hot-house conspiracy frenzy on line (‘’a constant state
of destabilised perception’’), timely and judicious doses of
@wikileaks leaks which drained @HillaryClinton’s bona fides & her
turn-out and motivated Trump’s, what we have witnessed is remarkable
and noteworthy.

Funds and speculators have been growing increasingly bearish on the
pound since April, when it traded above $1.42. Their aggressive
selling helped to drive it below $1.27 last month.

They have increased their net short position in sterling in the latest
week to 79,258 contracts, according to the latest Commodity Futures
Trading Commission figures from U.S. futures exchanges. That’s a $6.51
billion bet against the pound.

But those figures are for the week ending Sept. 18. That was Tuesday,
before the European Union summit in Salzburg on Thursday, which laid
bare the chasm between Britain and the EU on Brexit.

Euro 1.1756
Dollar Index 94.30
Japan Yen 112.92
Swiss Franc 0.9666
Pound 1.3101
Aussie 0.7252
India Rupee 72.815
South Korea Won 1119.51
Brazil Real 4.0927
Egypt Pound 17.9123
South Africa Rand 14.3890

In an era of lashings of surplus oil, the crude oil markets had priced
‘’geopolitical’’ risk at close to zero. Since late June, the markets
have been re-pricing ‘’geopolitical’’ risk

Bank of America Corp. joined JPMorgan Chase & Co. in predicting higher
prices. Adding to positive sentiment are forecasts for a decline in
U.S. stockpiles.

“OPEC gave a clear answer to Trump, who criticized the group for
pushing for higher prices -- they obviously refused to submit,” said
Satoru Yoshida, a commodity analyst at Rakuten Securities Inc. in
Tokyo. “While the escalation of the U.S.-China trade war is a negative
factor, it’s overshadowed by OPEC’s bullish comment.”

Brent for November settlement traded at $81.45 a barrel on the ICE
Futures Europe exchange, up 25 cents, at 11:59 a.m. in Tokyo. The
contract climbed $2.40 to $81.20 on Monday. The global benchmark
traded at a $9.16 premium to West Texas Intermediate for the same
month.

WTI for November delivery traded at $72.29 a barrel on the New York
Mercantile Exchange, up 21 cents. The contract climbed $1.30 to $72.08
on Monday. Total volume traded was about 45 percent below the 100-day
average.

@alexlongley1 wins friends at the Brent party by reminding everyone
that despite breaking above $80 four times this year, it has yet to
settle at that level and has pulled back as much as 7% after peaking.

Turkey's lira gains, with speculation a detained American pastor could
be freed next month

Does anyone want to guess where it will erupt?
The world's dollar shortage is just beginning

Frontier Markets

A Turkish company is generating part of Ghana’s power supply. Another
one just this month finished a flashy new terminal at the country’s
international airport. A Philippine utility is about to take over
running the Electricity Company of Ghana, the largest distributor in
west Africa. Even Ghana’s biggest flyover, named after liberation hero
Kwame Nkrumah, was built by Brazilians.

Ghana, one of the fastest-growing economies in the world this year, is
a tiny microcosm of forces that are radically reshaping Africa’s
interaction with the world. A new group of outside powers — from China
to Brazil and from Russia to Turkey — is gaining a commercial and
strategic foothold across a vast continent that was, until recently,
dominated by former European colonial powers and the US.

In what some have called a “new scramble for Africa”, these
non-western nations are sniffing out commercial opportunities and
seeking to project themselves in a difficult but dynamic part of the
world. While China has been taking the lead over the past decade, a
host of other countries has begun to follow its path.

Whether it is states from the Gulf and the Middle East jockeying for
influence in the Horn of Africa, Chinese companies locking up cobalt
assets vital for electric cars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or
India replacing the US as the biggest importer of Nigerian crude, all
over Africa new participants are making their presence felt.

Africans, understandably, object to the idea of a “scramble”, with its
connotations of the 19th century, when European powers squabbled for a
slice of what Leopold II of Belgium called this “magnifique gateau
Africain”. Instead, many regard wider interest in their continent as a
golden opportunity to catalyse a different phase of development by
breaking away from what they regard as the paternalistic — or
downright extractive — relationships they had with traditional powers.

Carlos Lopes, a development economist from Guinea-Bissau, says he has
yet to meet an African leader who is not animated by the new
possibilities opening up in an era that might be termed
“post-post-colonial”.

“It gives Africans much more room to manoeuvre,” he says. “The level
of ambition from leaders has gone up very much in response to these
incentives to do more with infrastructure and financing and to dare
defy western pressure. They are finding it very exciting.”

The changing patterns of engagement — which have led Washington and
Europe to reassess their stance towards the continent — are reflected
in trade. China supplanted the US as Africa’s biggest trading partner
back in 2009. Last year, China-Africa trade was $170bn, off its 2014
peak but still nearly 20 times higher than at the start of the
millennium. By contrast, US trade with sub-Saharan Africa was just
$39bn.

Where China has led, others have followed. From a lower base, several
countries have seen their exposure to Africa rise dramatically.
Africa-India trade jumped more than 10-fold from $7.2bn in 2001 to
$78bn in 2014 — making India Africa’s fourth biggest trading partner,
according to the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Between 2006 and
2016, the Brookings Institution calculates, African imports from
Russia and Turkey rose 142 per cent and 192 per cent
respectively.China has invested about $125bn in African countries in
the decade to 2016, according to the China-Africa Research Initiative
at Washington’s Johns Hopkins University. This month, some 40 African
leaders travelled to Beijing to hear President Xi Jinping pledge $60bn
more over the next three years.

Washington is watching this growing influence with alarm. Last year,
China opened its first overseas military base in the tiny country of
Djibouti, adding to the presence of the US and others. Djibouti, now
heavily indebted to China, is a prime example of what some US critics
have labelled “debt diplomacy”, in which Beijing is said to be
parlaying loans into political influence. China has also been accused
of using debt to take over entitiesin Zambia, including the national
power utility.

This August, several US senators wrote to Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury
secretary, and Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, accusing Beijing of
“weaponising capital” in Africa, as well as Asia, by using debt to
create an economic world order in China’s image.

The growing sense that the US is losing influence on the continent
helps explain President Donald Trump’s decision to back a big
expansion of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a private
sector focused development agency whose lending limit is to be more
than doubled to $60bn. Legislation, which has bipartisan support, has
already passed the House but is waiting Senate approval.Backers of the
so-called Better Utilization of Investments Leading to Development
(BUILD) Act explicitly link it to national security and China’s
growing influence in Africa.

Kwasi Prempeh, executive director of the Center for Democratic
Development in Accra, says Washington is still too focused on threats
in Africa and not enough on opportunities. “The US continues to be a
player, but it’s caught in the post-Iraq era,” he says. “Its policy is
driven by the ‘securocrats’.”

Europe, too, has been slow to see Africa’s potential, say critics, and
is only now trying to respond to the advances made by other countries.

Last month, Theresa May, the British prime minister, danced through a
three-nation tour of Africa to drum up post-Brexit business and to
assert Britain’s relevance. Because of the historical presence of
UK-listed companies on the continent, including large interests in oil
and mining, Britain is still the second-biggest investor in Africa in
stock terms. It also remains a big aid donor. But what many drew from
Mrs May’s visit — which, incredibly, included the first by a British
prime minister to Kenya for 30 years — was how diplomatically
disengaged London has become.“Poor Mrs May really has a lot of
catching up to do,” says Mark Malloch Brown, a British diplomat and
former deputy UN secretary-general under Kofi Annan. In the early
2000s, he says, “We started hearing complaints about what China was
doing in Africa, grumbling from the British and the Americans. But, my
God, they have created a competitive spur to the rest.”

There are signs that, belatedly, Europe is waking up to the diplomatic
and commercial challenge. Last year, Germany launched what it called a
“Marshall Plan with Africa”, pledging public money to companies
investing on the continent. “We are going to create more security for
ourselves and we will put an end to trafficking,” said German
chancellor Angela Merkel, launching a scheme that has been slow to get
off the ground.

“They are responding to a domestic constituency agitated about the
influx of migrants,” says Mr Prempeh. “They’re thinking: ‘If we can
get these countries to be economically viable, either through direct
investment or aid, then maybe we can stem the flow’.” He points to a
commitment by Volkswagen to assemble 5,000 cars in Ghana as an example
of such efforts.Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, has also sought
to articulate a new vision for the continent. Stressing that he was
born after African states had won their independence, he has urged a
relationship shorn of colonial baggage. He has also stressed the
commercial opportunities for French companies, including small and
medium-sized ones, in the English and Portuguese-speaking parts of the
continent, as well as in their traditional francophone stamping
ground.

But, like Ms Merkel, Mr Macron’s motives for greater engagement are
tinged with alarm. In a speech last December in Ouagadougou, capital
of Burkina Faso, he warned of dangers that, he said, “could
irreversibly sweep away Africa’s stability, and also Europe’s
stability”.

Whether driven by fear or a sense of commercial and diplomatic
opportunity, the wider variety of actors has presented African leaders
with greater choice. “This has allowed for competition in a way we
never had it before,” says Vera Songwe, executive secretary of the UN
Economic Commission for Africa.

Part of the rising interest is opportunistic. “At the end of the cold
war, the west very much withdrew and stopped asserting its interest in
Africa,” says Howard French, a professor at the Columbia School of
Journalism and an expert on Africa. “It has taken all this time for
the vacuum that this created to draw in a panoply of new players.
China is the most obviously important, but Malaysia, India, Vietnam,
Turkey, Brazil, Russia and the Gulf states have all been drawn in,” he
says. “I think something important is going on.”In spite of Africa’s
well-documented problems, companies with a cheaper cost base than
European or American rivals can often turn a good profit. “The Turkish
decided years ago they wanted to do more business in Africa,” says
Edward Effah, chairman of Ghana’s Fidelity Bank. “They opened
embassies, opened up export-credit facilities and started more
flights,” he says, referring to Turkish Airlines, which now operates
routes to more than 40 African cities.

Many businesses also see longer-term commercial prospects in the
African demographics that are causing concern over migration in
European capitals. From 2018 to 2035, the UN predicts that the world’s
10 fastest-growing cities will all be African. With a median age of
just 19, the continent’s population is expected to double to more than
2bn by 2050 and to double again by the end of the century.

Even without a big improvement in living standards, the increase in
numbers virtually guarantees robust growth for decades. And some
African countries are showing signs of gaining economic momentum. Of
the world’s top 10 fastest-growing economies this year according to
the World Bank, six are in Africa, including Ethiopia, a country of
105m people where China, Turkey and the Gulf states are all active.

Several countries, including Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan wants to break out of dependence on European markets, have
seen the logic of greater engagement. Mr Erdogan has visited 23
African nations since he became leader in 2003.

Just this June, the United Arab Emirates provided Ethiopia with $3bn
in aid and investments, helping to avert a foreign currency crisis. A
month later, Saudi Arabia promised President Cyril Ramaphosa of South
Africa $10bn of investment, mainly in the power sector.

Russia, hugely influential on the continent during the cold war, is
reasserting itself, striking military co-operation deals with the DRC,
Ethiopia, Central African Republic and Mozambique, and agreeing arms
sales to Nigeria and Angola. “We are well behind everyone, but it’s
temporary,” Evgeny Korendyasov, a former ambassador to several African
countries, told the Financial Times.

All this new attention, whether motivated by fear of immigration or
terrorism or by commercial logic, is providing Africa with new
opportunities, enabling governments to shop around for deals and play
one suitor off against another.

But there are pitfalls too. Civil society groups across Africa are
seeking to keep their leaders in check, accusing many of cutting
corrupt deals that are lucrative for them but bad for the country.
Loans from China and other new arrivals often lack transparency, say
critics, and the projects they finance cannot always make sufficient
returns to pay back the underlying debt.

Ms Songwe stresses the importance of striking good deals and sharing
experience across the continent. She also says the move towards a
continental free trade area, signed in principle this year, will
strengthen Africa’s hand by creating the economic scale hampered by
the Balkanisation of the continent.

“I would like to think that we on the continent know what we want and
how we want it,” she says, dismissing the idea of a scramble.
“Scramble sounds like the Wild West, but I don’t believe the continent
is in the Wild West phase any more. We have moved towards clarity of
purpose and objectives.”

East Africa has three power cores: the Nile River Basin, the Kenyan
Highlands and the Ethiopian Highlands. The Ethiopian Highlands — which
run roughly from Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, to the center of
modern-day Ethiopia in the capital of Addis Ababa, continuing along
the Great Rift Valley — have been crucial to Ethiopia's development.

In the modern era, the loss of the coastal province of Eritrea
stripped Ethiopia of its access to the sea, increasing the costs of
imports and exports and making port access a priority for the
country's leaders. Ethiopia has come to rely on tiny Djibouti, which
has harnessed its strategic position on the Bab el-Mandeb strait to
great effect, to transport some 95 percent of its imports and exports,
an arrangement that exposes its large and growing market to supply
chain risk.

Abiy is a new kind of Ethiopian leader: He is young compared to his
predecessors, at 42 years old; he is also a member of the Oromo ethnic
group, which has played a prominent role in protests since 2016, and a
former military officer. And after the previous administration, backed
by ethnic Tigray hard-liners, strove to crack down on dissent, Abiy is
reaching out to different ethnic groups, ending draconian security
measures, and promising free and fair elections in the years ahead. So
far, rebel groups and other dissidents have warmed to his overtures,
though Ethiopia's internal cohesion problems persist.

Abiy's efforts are notable for their speed, but his strategies for
stabilizing his country and the region still follow Ethiopia's core
imperatives. The prime minister, for example, has focused on
normalizing relations between Ethiopia and its nemesis, Eritrea, in
support of his country's need for port access. In fact, his government
has also increased its stakes in ports in nearby Djibouti, Sudan and
Somaliland — a semiautonomous region of Somalia — and promised to
forge stronger ties with Somalia itself, all in the name of improved
supply chain connectivity.

PM Abiy Ahmed met with a delegation from IMF who are here for the
annual “Article IV Consultations.” The #IMF team presented their
findings on the economic & financial developments in #Ethiopia. PM
Abiy noted sustaining Ethiopia’s rapid & stable growth is his utmost
priority.

Daily life in China is gated by security technology, from the body
scanners and X-ray machines at every urban metro station to the demand
for ID numbers on social media platforms so that dangerous speech can
be traced and punished. Technologies once seen as potentially
empowering the public have become tools for an increasingly
dictatorial government—tools that Beijing is now determined to sell to
the developing world.

Many parts of Africa are now essentially reliant on Chinese companies
for their telecoms and digital services. Transsion Holdings, a
Shenzhen-based company, was the No. 1 smartphone company in Africa in
2017. ZTE, a Chinese telecoms giant, provides the infrastructure for
the Ethiopian government to monitor its citizens’ communications.
Hikvision, the world’s leading surveillance camera manufacturer, has
just opened an office in Johannesburg.

The latest is CloudWalk Technology, a Guangzhou-based start-up that
has signed a deal with the Zimbabwean government to provide a mass
facial recognition program. The agreement is currently on hold until
Zimbabwe’s elections on July 30. But if it goes through, it will
enable Zimbabwe, a country with a bleak record on human rights, to
replicate parts of the surveillance infrastructure that have made
freedoms so limited in China. And by gaining access to a population
with a racial mix far different from China’s, CloudWalk will be better
able to train racial biases out of its facial recognition systems—a
problem that has beleaguered facial recognition companies around the
world and which could give China a vital edge.

The deal between CloudWalk and the Zimbabwean government will not
cover just CCTV cameras. According to a report in the Chinese state
newspaper Science and Technology Daily, smart financial systems,
airport, railway, and bus station security, and a national facial
database will all be part of the project. The deal—along with dozens
of other cooperation agreements between Harare and Chinese technology
and biotech firms—was signed in April. Like every other foreign deal
done by a Chinese firm of late, it has been wrapped into China’s
increasingly all-encompassing Belt and Road Initiative

The CloudWalk deal is the first Chinese AI project in Africa. Google
is opening its first Africa AI research center in Ghana this year, but
Eric Olander, founder of the China Africa Project—a podcast and online
resource that examines the relationship between China and Africa—noted
that many Western companies “aren’t willing to make that step that the
Chinese are willing to do. … [The Chinese] are willing to make an
investment in a market as volatile as Zimbabwe, where companies from
other countries are not.”

Angola’s state prosecutor placed Jose Filomeno dos Santos, the son of
former Angolan president Jose Eduardo dos Santos, under preventive
detention, according to a statement by the prosecutor’s office on
Monday.
Jose Filomeno is accused of taking part in the illegal transfer abroad
of $500 million and for crimes related to his management of Angola’s
sovereign wealth fund. Jose Filomeno’s friend and business partner,
Jean Claude Bastos de Morais, also was arrested, the state prosecutor
said. Both men are accused of crimes including corruption, money
laundering and the misappropriation of funds.
The arrest of Jose Filomeno, who was previously untouchable, marks the
first time the son of former President Dos Santos has been detained.
Angolan President Joao Lourenco, who replaced Dos Santos at the helm
of Africa’s second-biggest oil producer a year ago, has put fighting
graft at the center of his policies.
Angolan authorities last week arrested former Transport Minister
Augusto da Silva Tomas for embezzlement and the misappropriation of
funds, state-owned Televisao Publica de Angola reported on Sept. 21,
citing a statement from the state prosecutor.
Jose Filomeno’s lawyer, Benja Satula, was unreachable on his mobile phone.

 like what I am seeing in Angola. I am keen on being long on Angolan
risk. The devil is in the detail of the execution, however. I would
probably look to be long Angola Eurobonds.

Canada’s Barrick Gold is to combine with Randgold Resources, its
UK-listed rival, in an $18bn deal that will create the world’s biggest
gold miner.
The new company will produce more than 6.5m ounces of gold a year,
eclipsing its nearest competitor, US-listed Newmont.
The group will be listed in Toronto and New York, meaning that London
will lose its biggest gold stock.
Randgold shareholders will own 33.4 per cent of the combined company,
with the rest controlled by investors in Toronto-based Barrick.
The all-share agreed deal values each Randgold share at around £49,
its closing price on Friday night. On Monday morning the shares opened
up 3.8 per cent at £51.12.
Barrick is offering 6.128 of its shares for each Randgold share and
has agreed to a $300m break fee. Shares in Barrick closed at C$13.52
on Friday.
John Thornton, former Goldman Sachs executive and executive chairman
of Barrick, will keep his role and direct company strategy. The
company will be run day to day by Randgold chief executive Mark
Bristow.
Mr Thornton said the combination of Barrick and Randgold would bring
together the world’s largest collection of ‘Tier One’ gold assets.
“Our overriding measure of success will be the returns we generate and
not the number of ounces we produce, balancing boldness and prudence
to deliver consistent and growing returns to our fellow owners, a
truly simple but radical and achievable concept,” he said.
Shares in Barrick have dropped 25 per cent amid criticism of its
strategy, while Randgold has fallen 34 per cent as it has struggled
with a number of operational issues, including a strike at one of its
biggest mines.
That is a worse performance than the gold price, which is down by 9
per cent year-to-date to $1,206 a troy ounce, hit by a stronger US
dollar.

Dollar versus Rand 6 Month Chart INO 14.3890
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 17.9123
http://quotes.ino.com/charting/index.html?s=FOREX_USDEGP&v=d3&t=c&a=50&w=1

Nigeria All Share Bloomberg -15.14% 2018
http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/NGSEINDX:IND

Ghana Stock Exchange Composite Index Bloomberg +7.64% 2018
http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/GGSECI:IND

A third of all people living in sub-Saharan Africa face severe food
insecurity. They do not have enough money, or the resources to grow
food, and regularly go for more than a day without food.
The bad news is the situation is getting worse. Of the just under a
billion people in sub-Saharan Africa, 230-million were undernourished
last year, an increase of 10-million from 2016. That’s also an
increase of 25-million since 2014.
That’s according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture
Organisation. Its State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World
report has become an annual marker of how the world is dealing with
feeding its nearly eight billion people. The 2018 edition, released
last week, makes for grim reading.

"In 2018 we have more than doubled our annual imports of baobab fruit
powder into the United States alone," it said in a statement.

The tree can take up to 200 years to bear fruit, but watering them
every day can see that time reduced to 30 years. A tree then produces
fruit annually for nearly 200 years.

With a fortune that runs into billions of shillings, his decision to
sell all his Kenyan properties, estimated to be worth Sh76.99 billion,
must have caught everyone by surprise — but not those who know him.
“He was not getting well with some government people,” a source who
knows him told us without getting into details.
Whether he has seen warning signs ahead in the real estate market or
he is escaping from uncertainty is not clear.
Some pundits see this dramatic decision as either a vote of no
confidence in the economy or a feeling that he can no longer survive
the changing political atmosphere.
For over three decades, Mr Chatur built an enviable empire with
several properties on hundreds of acres spread across the country,
which he claims, rose from an electronic shop that he opened in River
Road, Nairobi, in 1977.

Par Value:                  0.05/-
Closing Price:           25.00
Total Shares Issued:          40065428000.00
Market Capitalization:        1,001,635,700,000
EPS:             1.38
PE:                 18.116

EPS: 5
PE: 8.050

EPS: 6.43
PE: 6.182

Market Capitalization:       40,897,372,519
EPS:1.37
PE: 4.781

Par Value:                  20/-
Closing Price:           4.65
Total Shares Issued:          1951467045.00
Market Capitalization:        9,074,321,759
EPS:             3.72
PE:                 1.250

Market Capitalization: 13,197,960,020
EPS: 6.9
PE: 10.145

Market Capitalization: 23,327,415,020
EPS: 1.67
PE: 9.491

Nairobi All Share Bloomberg -12.76% 2018
http://www.BLOOMBERG.COM/quote/NSEASI:IND

149.35 +3.86 +2.65%

Nairobi ^NSE20 Bloomberg -22.6% 2018
http://j.mp/ajuMHJ

2,873.04 +40.56 +1.43%

Every Listed Share can be interrogated here
http://www.rich.co.ke/rcdata/nsestocks.php