Image is of container ships waiting outside the canal. While there is usually some number of ships waiting for passage, the number has increased significantly lately.
In order to move ships through the Panama Canal, water is needed to fill the locks. The water comes from freshwater lakes, which are replenished by rainfall. This rainfall hasn't been coming, and Lake Gatun, the largest one, is at near record low levels.
Hundreds of ships are now in a maritime traffic jam, unable to cross the canal quickly. Panama is attempting to conserve water and have reduced the number of transits by 20% per day, among other measures. The Canal's adminstrators have warned that these drought conditions will remain for at least 10 months.
It is unlikely that global supply chains will be catastrophically affected, at least this year. Costs may increase for consumers in the coming months, especially for Christmas, but by and large goods will continue to flow, around South America if need be. Nonetheless, projecting trends over the coming years and decades, you can imagine how this is yet another nudge by climate change towards dramatic economic, environmental, and political impacts on the world at large. It also might prompt discussions inside various governments about nearshoring, and the general vulnerability of global supply chains - especially as the United States tries, bafflingly, to go to war with China.
After some discussion in the last megathread about building knowledge of geopolitics, some of us thought it might be an interesting idea to have a Country of the Week - essentially, I/we choose a country and then people can come in here and chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants, related to that country. More detail in this comment.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week's discussion post.
China dropped the mortgage down payment minimum (usually 40% to 30%) to 20% and caused a huge uptick in home sales in Shanghai and Beijing.
From here: https://archive.ph/3kCoZ
Not sure if this will be repeated in the Teir 2 and below cities, and it doesn't do anything to unwind much of the mess created by China's property market, where a significant amount of wealth is tied up in real estate rather than "real" sectors of the economy, but I guess it's a start.
Property prices, especially Tier 2 and bellow cities are seeing sustained drops on average. So this is an accompanying measure and not the start. The CPC has been slowly deflating and deleveraging their property market for 1-2 years now (with ups and downs and regional differences) but it is happening and it is intentional even if it barely has moved the needle in a lot of places. If anything home sales are still static or lower now because often people are expecting the prices to drop further so they are holding on. So this measure is probably a way to push some to buy now
Also general the "meat" of China’s future RE market is not in the 200 million who live in the richest cities or the 400 million who’ve reached urban middle class but the next 1 billion who are still climbing the development ladder .So income growth vs RE prices in 3rd tier and below is very important and its showing positive trends and results, even if first tier housing prices ,speculation and bubbles may persist and go back and forth for years
Also the numbers about Chinese GDP being 30% real estate etc are western third party guestimates and include any activity remotely related or including real estate. Its a big issue but not at that scale. Government figures put it closer to just being some 5-6 % points higher than western countries
Will this not just make the housing market worse? Allowing prices to continue to climb while saddling people with even more debt?
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Interesting, thanks for the additional info and for the work in translating that video. I just read it. I'd be really interested to see what he says in part 2.
The way real estate has been used to drive up gdp globally, especially in the core countries, seems like a terrible problem no one seems able to deal with. Does China include impuded rent in their GDP calculation?
I'm assuming you meant billion, right?
One Trillion Americans
Isn't a solution to twist the construction industry towards infrastructure, towards foreign labour, or towards high-labour boutique construction?
I think they're focusing on the "let's make sure our largest property developers don't collapse and take down the rest of the economy with them" part first, then trying to reform later. China has too much of its assets tied up in real estate, where a massive drop in the value of the real estate market would bring down a lot of unrelated firms who have many of their assets tied up in teal estate.
I agree this in the long run might make things worse, but I imagine it's a short term measure to buy time more than anything else. Highly recommend the translation of Wen Tiejun (great Chinese economist) one of our comrades made in the last news mega to go over this: https://hexbear.net/comment/3867398
It just seems like another bandaid to push the problem forward into the future. Eventually you have to deal with it, and clearly the private real estate market just wants to produce speculation bubbles and drive the price of housing to unaffordable levels.
Thanks for the reminder to read that comment, I saved it but forgot to back to read it. I'll give it a read soon.
Yeah it's been a long time coming. There's been rumblings of this since what, 2020 when Evergrande had that liquidity scare? Sooner or later there's got to be a long term plan to deflate the bubble that involves drastic action, something the Party as of late seems loth to do.
I mean very very slow on average deflation is happening rn and for the last year or smth. But mainly in tier 2 and bellow cities. Prices are falling overall compared to 2 years ago, in a lot of cities by 15-20%