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Showing posts with label Cash. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cash. Show all posts
8/14/19
USA: Dow Jones plunges more than 8oo points
7/7/19
Britain - Brexit: Boris Johnson attacked for being 'out for himself ' after receiving £43,000 for speech backing no-deal Brexit - by Rob Merrick
Boris Johnson was paid almost £43,000 for the speech that set Britain on course for a no-deal Brexit, sparking fresh criticism of his lucrative earnings.
The likely next prime minister pocketed the sum when he delivered his vow to leave the EU on 31 October “deal or no deal”, at an economic conference in Switzerland.
The lucrative speech – made within hours of Theresa May’s tearful resignation – was a toughening of Mr Johnson’s stance, immediately seen as making a crash-out Brexit far more likely.
With the EU refusing to renegotiate the existing divorce deal, it slashed the odds on a no-deal Halloween departure if, as expected, he grabs the Tory leadership crown later this month.
Matthew Pennycook, Labour’s
shadow Brexit minister, said: “If you needed any more proof that Boris
Johnson is out for himself and entirely unfit to be prime minister, then
here it is.
Read more at: Boris Johnson attacked for being 'out for himself ' after receiving £43,000 for speech backing no-deal Brexit | The Independent
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The likely next prime minister pocketed the sum when he delivered his vow to leave the EU on 31 October “deal or no deal”, at an economic conference in Switzerland.
With the EU refusing to renegotiate the existing divorce deal, it slashed the odds on a no-deal Halloween departure if, as expected, he grabs the Tory leadership crown later this month.
Read more at: Boris Johnson attacked for being 'out for himself ' after receiving £43,000 for speech backing no-deal Brexit | The Independent
The Digest Group
Almere-Digest
EU-Digst
Insure-Digest
Turkish-Digest
For additional information, including advertising rates - e-mail: Freeplanet@protonmail.com
11/24/18
Sweden: Cash Versus Plastic Cards": Sweden’s Push to Get Rid of Cash Has Some Saying, ‘Not So Fast’ - by Liz Alderman
Few countries have been moving toward a cashless society
as fast as Sweden. But cash is being squeezed out so quickly — with
half the nation’s retailers predicting they will stop accepting bills
before 2025 — that the government is recalculating the societal costs of
a cash-free future.
The financial authorities, who once embraced the trend, are asking banks to keep peddling notes and coins
until the government can figure out what going cash-free means for
young and old consumers. The central bank, which predicts cash may fade
from Sweden, is testing a digital currency
— an e-krona — to keep firm control of the money supply. Lawmakers are
exploring the fate of online payments and bank accounts if an electrical
grid fails or servers are thwarted by power failures, hackers or even
war.
“When you are where we are, it
would be wrong to sit back with our arms crossed, doing nothing, and
then just take note of the fact that cash has disappeared,” said Stefan
Ingves, the governor of Sweden’s central bank, known as the Riksbank.
“You can’t turn back time, but you do have to find a way to deal with
change.”
Ask most people in Sweden how often they pay with cash, and the answer
is “almost never.” A fifth of Swedes, in a country of 10 million people,
do not use automated teller machines anymore. More than 4,000 Swedes
have implanted microchips
in their hands, allowing them to pay for rail travel and food, or enter
keyless offices, with a wave. Restaurants, buses, parking lots and even
pay toilets depend on clicks rather than cash.
Read more at: Sweden’s Push to Get Rid of Cash Has Some Saying, ‘Not So Fast’ - The New York Times
12/23/16
Money Laundering: EU tables new rules to counter money laundering- by Irene Kostaki
The European Commission on December 21 proposed the tightening of controls on cash and precious metals that are transferred to the bloc from non-EU countries.
The proposal is part of the EU’s action plan to cut financing to Islamic State. It comes after the December 19 attack in Berlin in which 12 people were killed when a truck ploughed into a crowd at a busy Christmas market.
Under the new proposals, customs officials in EU member states will be given the powers of checking freight payments via cards and prepaid/debit cards.
This means that anyone carrying more than €10,000 in cash will be required to declare this at customs when entering the EU.
EU officials also said some of the recent attacks in Europe were carried out with limited funds, sometimes sent from outside the EU. These amounts probably originated from criminal activities, such as drug dealing, according to Vera Jourova, the EU Commissioner for Justice.
She presented the Commission’s proposal on freezing terrorists’ financial resources and on confiscating assets – even from those who are only suspected of being connected to criminals.
“There are a lot of new ways of transferring money and not all of those are covered in the EU-US scheme,” Julian King, the Commissioner for the Security Union, told a news conference in Brussels. He also said the Commission will study the impact of a possible EU programme and “report back by next summer”.
Read more: EU tables new rules to counter money laundering
The proposal is part of the EU’s action plan to cut financing to Islamic State. It comes after the December 19 attack in Berlin in which 12 people were killed when a truck ploughed into a crowd at a busy Christmas market.
Under the new proposals, customs officials in EU member states will be given the powers of checking freight payments via cards and prepaid/debit cards.
This means that anyone carrying more than €10,000 in cash will be required to declare this at customs when entering the EU.
EU officials also said some of the recent attacks in Europe were carried out with limited funds, sometimes sent from outside the EU. These amounts probably originated from criminal activities, such as drug dealing, according to Vera Jourova, the EU Commissioner for Justice.
She presented the Commission’s proposal on freezing terrorists’ financial resources and on confiscating assets – even from those who are only suspected of being connected to criminals.
“There are a lot of new ways of transferring money and not all of those are covered in the EU-US scheme,” Julian King, the Commissioner for the Security Union, told a news conference in Brussels. He also said the Commission will study the impact of a possible EU programme and “report back by next summer”.
Read more: EU tables new rules to counter money laundering
8/5/16
IRAN: The US did not pay a $400 million “ransom” to Iran. Here’s what actually happened - bt Zack Beauchamp
On the morning of January 17, several wooden pallets arrived at Tehran’s Mehrabad airport. The unassuming pallets were stuffed with foreign cash — $400 million worth, to be exact. Their origin point? The United States.
That same day, four US citizens detained by Iran were released from Iranian custody.
These facts, uncovered in a recent Wall Street Journal piece, have set off a major firestorm inside the United States. Republicans and conservatives, including Paul Ryan and Donald Trump, have alleged that the payment was part of secret ransom deal the Obama administration made with Iran to free the prisoners.
"If true, this report confirms our longstanding suspicion that the administration paid a ransom in exchange for Americans unjustly detained in Iran," Ryan’s outraged statement read. "It would also mark another chapter in the ongoing saga of misleading the American people to sell this dangerous nuclear deal."
It’s easy to see how the timing is suspicious. But Ryan, Trump, and other critics have the facts wrong. The Wall Street Journal story is actually describing a payment that President Obama announced back in January. What’s more, the payment was the result of a 35-year case in international court — and had nothing to do with any "hostage" payments.
Once you understand these facts, you will understand that this isn’t actually a story about the Obama administration paying a secret ransom to Iran. It’s a story about the way Washington’s debate over Iran is fundamentally broken.
In very simple terms, this payment is the first installment of a refund for a weapons purchase America never delivered. It starts in 1979, the year of the Iranian Revolution.
In November 1979, a group loyal to the revolutionary regime took 52 Americans hostage at the US Embassy in Tehran. In response, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Iran and froze Iranian assets in America.
Crucially for the present issue, it also halted a delivery of fighter jets that Iran’s pre-revolution government had already paid $400 million for. Normally the US would return the money if it wasn’t going to deliver the planes — countries don’t just break formal agreements like that. But it had frozen Iranian assets in the US as punishment for the hostage-taking — and that included the $400 million.
The hostage crisis was eventually resolved in 1981, at a conference in Algiers. But the Algiers Accords didn’t resolve every outstanding issue — including the legal status of the $400 million.
Instead, it set up an international court, based in the Hague, to deal with any legal claims that the governments of Iran and the United States had against each other, or that individual citizens of the two countries had against the other country.
This court, called the Iran–United States Claims Tribunal, functioned as a kind of binding arbitration. In any case, the involved parties could either negotiate a settlement out of court or take it to a panel made up of three US-appointed judges, three Iranian-appointed judges, and three neutral judges. The panel would then hear the case and issue a binding ruling.
This process, as you might guess, was very, very slow. By the time Obama’s second term in office began, the tribunal still had not come to a ruling on the issue of the $400 million. Sometime afterward, the Associated Press’s Matt Lee reports, the US government apparently concluded that it was going to lose the case — and lose big: Iran was seeking $10 billion in today’s dollars.
"US officials had expected a ruling on the Iranian claim from the tribunal any time, and feared a ruling that would have made the interest payments much higher," Lee writes.
So the Obama administration decided to settle out of court, opening up negotiations with Iran on the terms of the settlement. It did this at the same time it was negotiating the nuclear deal and the return of four US citizens who had been detained by Iran more recently. However, the people working on the nuclear deal and the prisoner release were different from the team working on the court case — some of whom had been involved with the claims tribunal for years.
By January 2016, the countries had struck a deal — the US would pay Iran $1.7 billion, which amounts to about $300 million in interest on top of the originally frozen assets (accounting for inflation).
The settlement was announced the same day in January as Iran received its first round of sanctions relief from the Iran deal.
The $400 million payment, delivered in foreign cash because US law prevents the government from giving Iran dollars, was the first installment toward the $1.7 billion total. Getting together large amounts of foreign cash is hard, apparently — hence the installment plan.
So there you have it. The payment, which sounds really shady out of context, was actually the end of a boring, decades-old international legal case totally unrelated to the hot-button nuclear and prisoner issues.
Read more: The US did not pay a $400 million “ransom” to Iran. Here’s what actually happened. - Vox
That same day, four US citizens detained by Iran were released from Iranian custody.
These facts, uncovered in a recent Wall Street Journal piece, have set off a major firestorm inside the United States. Republicans and conservatives, including Paul Ryan and Donald Trump, have alleged that the payment was part of secret ransom deal the Obama administration made with Iran to free the prisoners.
"If true, this report confirms our longstanding suspicion that the administration paid a ransom in exchange for Americans unjustly detained in Iran," Ryan’s outraged statement read. "It would also mark another chapter in the ongoing saga of misleading the American people to sell this dangerous nuclear deal."
It’s easy to see how the timing is suspicious. But Ryan, Trump, and other critics have the facts wrong. The Wall Street Journal story is actually describing a payment that President Obama announced back in January. What’s more, the payment was the result of a 35-year case in international court — and had nothing to do with any "hostage" payments.
Once you understand these facts, you will understand that this isn’t actually a story about the Obama administration paying a secret ransom to Iran. It’s a story about the way Washington’s debate over Iran is fundamentally broken.
In very simple terms, this payment is the first installment of a refund for a weapons purchase America never delivered. It starts in 1979, the year of the Iranian Revolution.
In November 1979, a group loyal to the revolutionary regime took 52 Americans hostage at the US Embassy in Tehran. In response, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Iran and froze Iranian assets in America.
Crucially for the present issue, it also halted a delivery of fighter jets that Iran’s pre-revolution government had already paid $400 million for. Normally the US would return the money if it wasn’t going to deliver the planes — countries don’t just break formal agreements like that. But it had frozen Iranian assets in the US as punishment for the hostage-taking — and that included the $400 million.
The hostage crisis was eventually resolved in 1981, at a conference in Algiers. But the Algiers Accords didn’t resolve every outstanding issue — including the legal status of the $400 million.
Instead, it set up an international court, based in the Hague, to deal with any legal claims that the governments of Iran and the United States had against each other, or that individual citizens of the two countries had against the other country.
This court, called the Iran–United States Claims Tribunal, functioned as a kind of binding arbitration. In any case, the involved parties could either negotiate a settlement out of court or take it to a panel made up of three US-appointed judges, three Iranian-appointed judges, and three neutral judges. The panel would then hear the case and issue a binding ruling.
This process, as you might guess, was very, very slow. By the time Obama’s second term in office began, the tribunal still had not come to a ruling on the issue of the $400 million. Sometime afterward, the Associated Press’s Matt Lee reports, the US government apparently concluded that it was going to lose the case — and lose big: Iran was seeking $10 billion in today’s dollars.
"US officials had expected a ruling on the Iranian claim from the tribunal any time, and feared a ruling that would have made the interest payments much higher," Lee writes.
So the Obama administration decided to settle out of court, opening up negotiations with Iran on the terms of the settlement. It did this at the same time it was negotiating the nuclear deal and the return of four US citizens who had been detained by Iran more recently. However, the people working on the nuclear deal and the prisoner release were different from the team working on the court case — some of whom had been involved with the claims tribunal for years.
By January 2016, the countries had struck a deal — the US would pay Iran $1.7 billion, which amounts to about $300 million in interest on top of the originally frozen assets (accounting for inflation).
The settlement was announced the same day in January as Iran received its first round of sanctions relief from the Iran deal.
The $400 million payment, delivered in foreign cash because US law prevents the government from giving Iran dollars, was the first installment toward the $1.7 billion total. Getting together large amounts of foreign cash is hard, apparently — hence the installment plan.
So there you have it. The payment, which sounds really shady out of context, was actually the end of a boring, decades-old international legal case totally unrelated to the hot-button nuclear and prisoner issues.
Read more: The US did not pay a $400 million “ransom” to Iran. Here’s what actually happened. - Vox
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