New Zealand Development Scholarships for African Students 2016/2017

Brief description: New Zealand Aid Programme Scholarships offers the opportunity to people from targeted African countries to undertake development-related studies at tertiary education institutions in New Zealand

Eligible Fields of study: Preference will be given to candidates who apply to study in academic disciplines relating to one or more of the following:

Agriculture development

• Agri-business management, agricultural economics, agricultural systems and management, rural development, domestic supply chains and distribution, Natural Resource and Environmental Management
• Biology, vegetable production, livestock/animal husbandry, crop management, sericulture (silk production), forestry, fisheries, aquaculture, agricultural pest management
• Phytosanitary, bio-security, biotechnology, agricultural trade,
• Food production, food sciences/technology, post-harvest processing, food storage and packaging, food safety

Renewable energy

• Geothermal, solar, hydro engineering and wind energy, renewable energy distribution systems

About Scholarship

New Zealand Development Scholarships (NZDS) give candidates from selected developing countries an opportunity to gain knowledge and skills through study in specific subject areas which will assist in the development of their home country. Awardees are required to return to their home country for at least two years after the completion of their scholarship to apply these new skills and knowledge in government, civil society or private business organisations.

Scholarship Offered Since: Not Specified

Who is eligibility to apply? Applicants must meet the following conditions to be eligible for a New Zealand Scholarship:

• Be a minimum of 18 years of age at the time of commencing your scholarship.
• Be a citizen of the country from which you are applying for a scholarship.
• Not have citizenship or permanent residence status of New Zealand, Australia, USA, Canada, European Union countries, United Kingdom, Japan, Israel, South Korea, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia. Have resided in your home country for at least two years immediately prior to commencing your scholarship. Have at least 2 years of work experience (part time or fulltime, paid or voluntary).
• Not be serving military personnel.
• Be able to satisfy Immigration requirements for international student entry to New Zealand or the country in which you will undertake your scholarship (i.e. medical checks, police clearances/character checks, etc.)
• Be academically and linguistically able to obtain an Offer of Place for the proposed programme of study from the tertiary institute where you will undertake your scholarship.
• Not have been previously terminated from a New Zealand Government Scholarship
• Seek a qualification that will contribute to the sustainable development of your home country
• Commit to return to your country for a minimum of 2 years at the end of your scholarship.

Number of Scholarship: Several

What are the benefits? New Zealand has first-rate education institutions that offer world-recognised qualifications. Successful applicants will have access to excellent academic knowledge in quality facilities. The scholarships include financial support for tuition, living costs while in New Zealand, and airfares. The partners of students are eligible for a work visa that allows them to live and work in New Zealand for the duration of their partner’s study.

Duration of sponsorship:

• Masters Degree (1 – 2 years)
• PhD (3 – 4 years)

Eligible Commonwealth countries in Africa include: Botswana,  Cameroon, Ghana,  Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia

Eligible non Commonwealth countries in Africa include: Algeria, Angola, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gambia, Morocco, Senegal, Tunisia, Zimbabwe

To be taken at (country): New Zealand

Application Deadline:

15 April 2016 (paper application)
30 April 2016 (online application)

Offered annually? Yes

How to Apply Visit the Scholarship Webpage for details

Sponsors: The New Zealand Development Scholarships are funded by the New Zealand Aid Programme, the New Zealand Government’s overseas aid and development programme and managed by the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT).

Terror Hub or Empire Of Fear

Mara Ahmed

A wonderful housewarming party the day after New Year’s, in a Rochester suburb covered with bright, powdery snow. A diverse group of guests – musicians, poets and academics, but also physicians and lawyers, neighbors, grandmothers, Indian, Iranian, Russian, Belgian, and of course, everyone soundly American. The hors d'oeuvres are splendid, I assume that the wine is good, the conversation flows.

In the midst of preliminary introductions and stories about work, the subject of terrorism comes up. It’s to be expected. Rochester has just experienced the latest terror plot in which a socially marginalized Muslim man with a history of mental illness was bulldozed by the FBI into planning an attack, and then quickly arrested. New Year’s fireworks were cancelled and Rochester joined the ranks of global metropolises like Paris and New York City. The excitement didn’t last long though, as the sad details of a local panhandler’s entrapment became known.

“Why has Belgium become a terror hub?” someone asks. There is some discomfort, some evasion, but the question is repeated several times. The Belgian guest explains how things have changed over time. We talk about Molenbeek, a municipality of some 95,000 people in the Belgian capital, an area inhabited by Muslims and North Africans, the alleged suburb “at the heart” of the Paris attacks. I express my displeasure at stereotyping entire neighborhoods for the actions of a few. I remember some of my Moroccan and Algerian friends at the Lycée Emile Jacqmain in Brussels. They might have been from Molenbeek. It wasn’t on the radar in those days, not newsworthy enough.

We discuss the social inequities that exist in many European cities, the impossibility for second and third generation, non-white immigrants to be absorbed by the mainstream, the high rates of unemployment and crime, the clustering of poverty, and the geography of racist segregation whereby central Paris becomes a foreign country to those relegated to the banlieues. Disaffection does not need to be imported from abroad, it’s borne of systemic, multigenerational discrimination.

Someone marvels at Europe’s difficulties with immigrants in light of the relative success we’ve had here in the United States. I mention Black Lives Matter and the ongoing war on American black men. But they’re not immigrants, I’m told. Indeed, they’ve been here forever and they’ve built this country, yet the projects look incredibly similar to the banlieues. Could racism be a point of intersection?

In an interview with Bill Moyers, in November 1988, Derek Walcott spoke about the appalling ghettoes of America, about the “colony” which exists within the empire. He said it might have something to do with denying the responsibility of being an empire, not just a global empire but also a domestic one.

This denial of empire creates endless confusion in American political discourse and lends itself to dangerous manipulation. It’s astonishing that the American public, protected by the mightiest military juggernaut in human history, is constantly afraid.

Al Qaeda, and now ISIS, can strike fear into the American heart in a way that is completely out of whack with reality. After all, it’s our military power that continues to flatten countries and kill innumerable people in the Global South, in invisible, largely privatized, open-ended wars, not the other way around.

The discussion at this lively party, organized by a dear friend, leaves me unsettled. I come home to find an article about Molenbeek in the Socialist Worker. It sounds all too familiar. In the piece, dated November 2015, Belgian activist Farida Aarrass describes heavy police presence in the area. There are frequent house raids, blatant profiling and use of racist language. These problematic dynamics with law enforcement remind me of inner city Rochester.

Aarrass explains how every terrorist incident or so-called plot is used to escalate repression. The media join in cheerfully by beating the drum of “jihad” and in the world outside of Molenbeek, there’s steady harassment and Islamophobia. People are frightened. Their fears are legitimate, grounded in a threatening reality, in which their homes and physical sense of security are routinely violated.

Americans, on the other hand, are 353 times more likely to die from a fall, while cleaning their gutters or putting up Christmas lights, than from a terror intrigue. But even those odds are not satisfactory. The policing of thought, preemptive arrests, the profiling of minorities, even the targeting of the mentally ill, are all permissible in the quest for perfect security. The rest of the world knows that such a quest is bound to fail and that fear is a miserable way to live. Let’s hope we catch on soon.

The Sauds' Impunity

Eric Zuesse

No matter how bad the fundamentalist Sunni-Islamic Saud royal family are, America's government still supports them and condemns the countries that the Sauds hate: those are the Shia-led nations of Iran and of Syria.

All jihadist terrorism is Sunni, none of it is Shia; but the U.S. government is anti-Shia, not anti-Sunni. There were no Shia involved in the 9/11 attacks, nor in the Mumbai attacks, nor in the Charlie Hebdo or other Paris attacks, nor in the London bombing, nor in any of the others. All of the terrorism that wracks Afghanistan and Pakistan is Sunni. ISIS is Sunni; Al Qaeda is Sunni. As Sunni fundamentalists, they all hate especially Shia  as “infidels,” because Shia claim  to be Muslims, and Sunni fundamentalists take that very claim to be not only a lie but a personal insult to themselves as ‘real' Muslims, because they ‘know' what a ‘real' Muslim is — they've been taught  it, and it's distinctively Sunni. 

But the U.S. government keeps harping instead against the Shia group Hezbollah, which is at war against Israel because of the barbaric way that Israel treats its Palestinians. But that's not terrorism in anything like the same sense — it's not jihadist, it's not out for global conquest; and it certainly doesn't threaten us. And it's really none of America's business to get involved with, anyway — it is Israel's problem, entirely: and Israel flagrantly violates even the Camp David accords that the U.S. government itself brokered; and, so, for America to be involved on either side there is plain wrong — but the U.S. government donates, from its own taxpayers, over $3 billion every year to Israel, so that it'll buy weapons from U.S. arms-makers. This give-away to the U.S. weapons-industry  is supposed to be ‘humanitarian,' and ‘foreign aid.' It actually aids more in killing than it does in protecting; the sheer hypocrisy of that subsidy to U.S. weapons-makers is obscene. But anyway: Hezbollah is a sideshow in a discussion of terrorism, and it's not at all  jihadist. By contrast, the Saud family fund jihad. And yet the U.S. government considers them allies, if not its top allies. Something's very wrong here.

The Sauds have impunity, at least from the U.S. government. Instead of the U.S. government being against the tyrants who rule Saudi Arabia, the U.S. government overthrows the leaders (tyrants or otherwise) who are allied with Russia — which just happens to be another country that the Sauds are at war against. Thus, the U.S. overthrew Russia-friendly Saddam Hussein in 2003, and Russia-friendly Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and Russia-friendly Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, and our government is allied with the Sauds and other top funders of terrorism, global jihadist Islam — all of whom are Sunnis — to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, because he not only is Shiite but allies with Russia, and because the Sauds hate Russia almost as much as the leadership of America do (so the U.S. is allied in this with the Sunni dictatorships: not only the Saud royals but the Qatar royals, and the Kuwait royals, and the UAE royals, and all of the Arabic-oil royal families are led by the Saudi King, the world's wealthiest person, and the organizer of a new Saudi-run Sunni version of America's NATO alliance against Russia).

The people who control America are lots more anti-Russian than they are anti-terrorist — and any old excuse will serve America's leaders to ‘justify' that priority, to the public whom they treat as their suckers, not as the people in a democracy, who are supposed to own  this government (“We, the People …”), and from whom it has been stolen.

So, something's fishy here. It's the U.S. government, obviously, and it emits the stench of rotten fish. The U.S. government's ulterior motives are constantly reeking. It's the stench of our government's constant lying-to-the-public.

Here's the reality about our Saudi ‘friends':

Ever since 1744, when the gang-leader Muhammad Ibn Saud and the fanatically anti-Shiite Sunni preacher Muhammad Ibn Wahhab swore their mutual oath to one-another, the Sauds have hated Shia and been set upon defeating them. That oath started what we today know as Saudi Arabia: a union of church-and-state (Saudi government with Wahhabist clerics validating that family's authority to rule) that seeks first to exterminate all Shia Muslims, and then to organize all Muslims together into global conquest, to bring every nation under strict Sunni rule. (And anyone who resists will be beheaded and then crucified.) Wahhab hated Shia for their trying to soften the original Islam. (Wahhabism is called “Salafism” when it's being practiced outside the Muslim Holy Land of Saudi Arabia, but its principles are the same under either name. ISIS is also the same as Saudi, except that it demands the global Islamic leader to be a descendant of the Prophet, which the Sauds are not. In this regard, ISIS poses a real threat to the Sauds. ISIS then is an enemy of the Sauds inside Saudi Arabia, but a useful fighting-oprganization for the Sauds' objectives outside  Saudi Arabia.)

The aggressor in the world isn't Shia; it's Sunni. And the custodians of the two holiest places in Islam — Mecca and Medina — are the extremist-Sunni Saud family, which America's government call ‘friends.' The Saud family won what they have by conquest: to allege they got it by either ‘capitalism' or ‘democracy' would be to insult both. Worse yet: it would be to lie. And they're no ‘friends' of America. But maybe they are our masters. Here's how they managed to grab what they've got:

"Muhammad ibn Saud began by leading armies into Najdi [today's Saudi] towns and villages to eradicate various popular and Shia practices. The movement helped to rally the towns and tribes of Najd to the Al Saud-Wahhabi standard. By 1765 Muhammad ibn Saud's forces had established Wahhabism--and with it the Al Saud political authority.”

Furthermore:

“By marrying his son into Al-Wahhab's tribe, Muhammad Ibn Saud broke with custom but initiated a process that led to the unification of disparate tribes under one leader. … In return for their allegiance, Muhammad Ibn Saud offered his followers the prospect of conquest. … In 1746, Imam Al-Wahhab issued a formal proclamation of jihad against all those who refused to share his vision of Unity.”

That jihad continues today, but the U.S. government joins it, instead of repudiates and condemns it. The U.S. government is instead obsessed with conquering Russia. This obsession started just while the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its communism was ending. It has dominated U.S. foreign policy ever since.

Inside Saudi Arabia, the Saud family, who financed Al Qaeda, behead some of their own jihadists in order to achieve two objectives: first, to get rid of some of the Sunni extremists who say that the Sauds aren't sufficiently  extreme or “pure”; and, second, to please American and other suckers to believe that, in America's allying with the very same people who provide the funding to jihadists, the U.S. isn't acting against the interests of the American people. Even a beheading can be a PR stunt, in one way or another.

And our government has been doing this since at least 1945, and especially since 1971 when the U.S. went off the gold standard and went onto the oil standard instead: oil would now be priced only in dollars.

The hypocrisy of America's leaders is what stinks enough to make rotting fish smell like fragrance by comparison.

Why isn't even one  U.S. Presidential candidate promising to end the selling of weapons to those jihadist tyrants (the Sauds and the other Arabic oil-potentates — all of the Sunni national leaders), and to organize global economic sanctions against the Sauds and their friends the other funders of jihadism? Let those clans sell their oil and gas, but there should be an internationally coordinated arms embargo against them. Instead, the Sauds are by far the largest foreign purchasers of U.S. weapons (and, unlike Israel, they pay for all of it with their own inherited money, not with money that was donated to them by America's taxpayers).

How else can jihadism be brought to an end in our time? Why isn't the reality behind jihadism even being publicly discussed? Why?

Islam: The War Within

Sazzad Hussain

The severing of diplomatic ties between Saudi Arab and Iran and its following by some other Arab states once again widens the gap between Sunni and Shiite factions within Islam, which has been on since the tragedy of Karbala. However in modern times, it has been a political manoeuvring favouring certain strategic interests which have put Islam to be in war with itself. In a time when the world has been experiencing the dichotomy between Islam and the rest of other faiths because of Islamist terrorism, the Saudi-Iran spat reveals the paradoxes within the so-called Islamic world of the Middle-East and a reality check to the idea of an utopian Islamic world that many Islamists propagate by projecting the faith as an homogeneous entity.

Ever since its formation in 1932 with armed help from British India, the Saudi Kingdom has been officially representing Sunni Islam with its ultra-orthodox interpretation preached by Ibn Wahhab. The possession of the two holiest sites of Islam—Mecca and Medina from the Ottoman rule after World War I enabled the Saudis to propagate Wahhabism to all Muslims of the world because of the annual Hajj. The discovery of oil in the Kingdom in 1939 fastened the then US President Roosevelt to sign a treaty with the Saudis as a partner and this led to the formation of oil company ARAMCO. Since then Saudi Arabia started producing oil with US armed protection in a system that suits the western demands of uninterrupted energy supplies. An absolute monarchy with the Holy Quran as its constitution and the king as the upholder of the faith, Saudi Arabia evolved as a state without any nationhood. Its official Mufti asks the citizens for loyalty towards the king but allowed rebellion (Jihad) abroad through fatwas. The western establishments in the post-World War II scenario was nervous towards the spread of Arab nationalism spearheaded by Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt with the prime objective of liberating Palestine from Israel and turning all the oil-rich Arab monarchies and dependencies into socialist republics. At this backdrop, this Saudi stand with Sunni Islam in the forefront suited the west very much which they are still cashing in.

Iran, earlier called Persia, has been a Shiite bastion for the last thirteen centuries. Many Arab lands like the present day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Bahrain has Shiite population. Despite the linguistic differences of Arabic and Persian, Shiite Arabs always looked towards the Shiite seminaries of Qom in Iran as their authority. The pro-western Pahlavi dynasty of Iran paused no threat to the Saudi or any other US allies in the Middle-East. But the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which brought Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran, changed the entire course. The Islamic Republic of Iran, under the spiritual guidance of Khomeini set up to diktat terms on Islam which were political moves to counter the growing Sunni power exercised by Saudi Arabia ever since the oil boom of 1974. It was the Shiite Arabs of Iraq, Syria, Bahrain and Lebanon who became the first followers of Iran despite the linguistic differences. The eight years Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) was the culmination of that Sunni-Shiite divide which the Saudis and its other Gulf allies backed Iraq’s Saddam Hussain to be a war mongering ruler with tacit approval from the west. The Shiite Iranian outreach in this region was successful in the Lebanese civil war (1976-93) when the Shiite group Hezbollah, succeeded in unifying that sectarian country ending western intervention and pulling out of Israeli troops. Meanwhile among the Palestinians, a Shiite group named Islamic Jihad also gained momentum to fight Israeli occupation during the pre-Intifada era. Iran’s strong stand against Israeli occupation of Palestine, American intervention in the region and overall anti-west campaign has long been made the country an unflavoured one in most of the western capitals. Its nuclear programme has also been a concern for the west. The most striking stand by Iran on Islam so far is the death fatwa issued against British author Sir Salman Rushdie by Khomeini in 1989 for his novel Satanic Verses.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 gave the Saudis the ample opportunity to export its Wahhabi-Sunni Islam as America started the Mujahedeen war from Pakistan. The creation of Al-Qaeda, bin Laden, Taliban etc are all the product of this Saudi-US collaboration. Later when George W. Bush invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003, the hitherto secular state became fragmental on sectarian divide between Sunnis, Shiites and non-Arab Kurds (also Sunnis). It was Iran which was immensely benefited from the US occupation of Iraq as its majority Shiites always had an allegiance to them. On the other hand the Saudi-Qatar backed Sunni militias and al-Qaeda mobilized themselves in post-Saddam Iraq which are now metamorphosed to IS. The Saudi sponsored Sunni political outreach provides duel citizenships to all Sunni head of states and provides them asylum whenever necessary. Remember when Nawaz Sharief was deposed by Gen. Musharaf in 1999, he went to Riyadh. The deposed Tunisian president Zain-al-Abedine Ben Ali, former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri all enjoyed Saudi hospitality because of the dual citizenship.

Saudi Arabia has been confronting Iran for supremacy in Lebanon and Syria which has a large Shiite base and political strength. For this simple reason the Saudis are not fighting the IS in Syria and Iraq but bombing the Shiite Hauthi rebels in Yemen. It also sent troops to Sunni ruled Shiite majority Bahrain during the Arab Spring of 2011 to crush the pro-democracy movements. There have also been reports that the Saudi plans of allowing its airspace to Israeli jets to bomb the nuclear plants in Iran.

The Saudi-Iran spate reflects the century old sectarian rift within Islam which otherwise provide an egalitarian vision for mankind. It is the typical Middle-Eastern paradox to be sectarian which hardly to be found among Muslims elsewhere. But the important fact is that this divide in Islam has put the Sunnis in side with the western hegemonic designs as it has been for the last eight decades and Shiites with the global forces that oppose it—Russia and China.

190 Muslim workers fired from Colorado meatpacking plant

Tom Hall

Around 190 Muslim workers at a meatpacking plant in Fort Morgan, Colorado were fired last month after walking off the job in protest of management’s discriminatory decision to revoke prayer breaks during their shift.

The Colorado plant, operated by multinational food giant Cargill, employs around 2,100 hourly workers. Six hundred of these, or more than one-quarter, are Muslim refugees from Somalia, one of the world’s poorest countries, which has been decimated by decades of conflict stoked by American imperialism.

The salah, or praying five times a day, is one of the main pillars of the Islamic faith. The prayers, which generally take no more than five minutes, take place at regular intervals throughout the day, which are determined by the movement of the sun across the sky. The workers involved in the walkout all worked on the plant’s second shift, which falls during sundown prayers.

Management at the plant opened up a small prayer area on the premises to accommodate the workers in 2009. However, workers who have sought to utilize the space during their working hours have reported that they have been subjected to routine threats from management. “This has been going on for a long time,” Jaylani Hussein of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which is representing the fired workers in the dispute, told the press. “There have been instances last year and this year where supervisors would literally say, ‘You’re fired, you’re going home,’ if you go to pray.”

Matters reportedly came to a head in December when the new manager for the second shift prohibited prayer breaks during work hours. Ten Muslim workers resigned the following day, followed shortly by a walkout by around 200 more. Cargill responded by firing all of the roughly 190 workers who had not returned to work on December 29, citing a clause in their union contract that provides for summary dismissal after three consecutive unexcused absences.

Mike Martin, a spokesman for Cargill, denied that the company had banned prayer breaks and blamed the walkout on a “misunderstanding.” He told the media the initial resignations came after the company refused a request by 11 workers to leave the production line in order to pray at the same time. Company policy, according to Martin, allows only two or three workers to leave at a time in order to keep the line moving. “While reasonable efforts are made to accommodate employees, accommodation is not guaranteed every day and is dependent on a number of factors that can, and do, change from day to day."

However, the workers say this request was never made. “They told us, ‘If you try [to pray] tomorrow, you’re going to get a write-up or get fired,’” plant worker Mahmoud Hassan told the local ABC affiliate.

However, even by Martin’s own favorable characterization, Cargill’s policy would likely be a violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of religion. Under the law, employees’ requests for a “reasonable accommodation” for their religious beliefs must be met as long as it does not place an “undue hardship” on business operations. For example, a worker can request not to be scheduled to work during the Sabbath if it goes against his religious practices.

Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, American Muslims have reported a sharp rise in workplace discrimination. One 2013 study by Carnegie Mellon University found that Muslim job applicants received callbacks for interviews at far lower rates than Christians, especially in conservative states. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has also reported a sharp rise in religious-based discrimination cases reported by Muslims after 2001, doubling in 2002 and peaking at 884 in 2011. American Muslims, who comprise two percent of the population, account for nearly a quarter of all such discrimination cases.

Negotiations with the company by CAIR to have the workers re-instated have thus far led nowhere. According to company policy, workers who were terminated are not allowed to re-apply for six months; the CAIR negotiating team is reportedly attempting to have this freeze waived.

Significantly, the union that claims to represent the workers, Teamsters Local 455, has done nothing to defend the victimized workers. The local has not even acknowledged the firings on their web site or Facebook page, and has reportedly refused to talk to CAIR, to whom the workers’ turned after the union’s inaction. Many workers at the plant earn as little as $14 per hour, barely above the official poverty level for a family of four.

David Macaray, a former union bureaucrat who denounced the World Socialist Web Site on the Counterpunch web site for mobilizing opposition against the betrayal by the United Auto Workers in the recent contract struggle, accused the meatpacking workers of demanding “preferential treatment” in a recent column. Evincing filthy “America-first” chauvinism, which is the stock-in-trade of the unions, Macaray asked, “Why have ICE agents chased out undocumented Latinos in these meat-packing plants and opened the door to Somalis? Why aren’t more American-born men and women working these $30,000 a year jobs?”

The mass firings in Colorado are similar to an earlier incident in Nebraska in 2008 when roughly 90 mostly Somali Muslims at a meatpacking plant operating by JBS Swift & Co. were fired after walking off the job in protest after being refused prayer breaks during Ramadan, the Islamic holy month. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which represented the workforce at the plant, refused to support the workers, and the local union president falsely claimed to the press that the workers had “quit.”

Far from opposing xenophobic and anti-Muslim agitation, the unions function as accomplices in the efforts by the corporate and political establishment to use the “war on terror” to divide the working class, carry out sweeping attacks on the democratic rights of all workers and justify ever-expanding wars.

Global financial turmoil continues on fears of slower growth

Nick Beams

China’s stock market was closed early Thursday for the second time in four days as stocks plunged as soon as it opened. A key index dropped by 5 percent, forcing an automatic 15-minute freeze. When the markets re-opened the losses continued and the market was shut for the day when they hit 7 percent.

The China plunge came after a day of turbulence in European and US markets on Wednesday, prompted by a further drop in oil prices, rising concerns over Chinese growth and financial stability, and worries over emerging market debt. Reports of a North Korean hydrogen bomb test added to the uncertainty.

In the US, the major indexes fell by more than 1 percent, with the Dow and the S&P 500 ending the day below 17,000 and 2,000, respectively. The US share sell-off followed sharp declines in Japan and other parts of Asia, as well across Europe.

The main factor at work is the deepening trend toward recession in the global economy, which is starting to undermine the financial bubble that has been created by the pumping of trillions of dollars into global financial markets by the US Fed and other major central banks.

Market analysts speaking to the American business channel CNBC cited China and signs of a worsening situation globally and in the US. “It’s pretty much the same story. You’ve got China growth problems,” and “the US manufacturing sector seems to be in recession territory,” one commentator said.

Another commented that the “biggest thing affecting markets” is that “we’re coming in with an assumption that the global economy is slowing more” in 2015 than 2016. “We’re worried about China.”

Another analyst told the Los Angeles Times that markets were “trading on fear that Chinese growth is going to collapse and that… lower oil prices are going to lead to a growing number of defaults in the high-yield bond market.”

Those fears have been compounded by the fall in the price of Brent crude to below $35 per barrel for the first time since 2004, while the price of American crude hit its lowest point in seven years. The falling oil price feeds directly into energy markets via energy-based companies and into the high-yield or “junk” bond market, which saw an infusion of cheap money when oil was trading at more than $100 a barrel barely 18 months ago.

The worsening situation in China is evidenced both in the economy and the financial system. Chinese growth is already down to its lowest levels in a quarter of a century, with manufacturing activity experiencing lower growth for five months in a row and exports down for each of the last 15 months. But a new cause for concern appeared on Wednesday with the news that the services sector had experienced its lowest growth for 17 months. The official policy of the Chinese government is that it is making a transition to a more service-based economy.

Chinese stock market and financial turbulence, which rattled world markets in August last year, has also returned. On the first day of trading, markets were automatically shut down following a drop of almost 7 percent, as the date for the lifting of government restrictions on share trading imposed in August approached.

As in the crisis five months ago, there are concerns about the stability of the Chinese currency, the renminbi. It has now reached its lowest point in five years, as the gap between its value in the more tightly controlled domestic market and the offshore market widens to record levels. The offshore value of the renminbi has dropped by more than 2 percent this week, recalling the events of August, when its surprise devaluation sent shock waves through world markets.

In a research note published on Wednesday, Timothy Moe, Goldman Sachs’ chief Asia-Pacific strategist, wrote: “During our investor meetings in December, the most significant risk that investors were worried about was a substantial devaluation of the renminbi.”

The concerns are two-fold: first, that a significant fall in the Chinese currency will lead to devaluations in Asian and other currencies, sending a new wave of deflationary pressures through the world economy, and second, that it will spark an increase in capital outflows from China that could cause major financial problems.

The People’s Bank of China (PBoC) has been intervening in financial markets in an effort to limit the fall in the renminbi, running down its global currency reserves. At the same time, the PBoC wants the currency to fall gradually in order to improve China’s trade position.

There are concerns that the situation is getting out of the control of financial authorities. Last August, they changed the method of determining the value of the renminbi by deciding to tie it to the previous day’s close. But on Wednesday, this new rule was broken when the PBoC fixed the rate significantly above the close for Tuesday, prompting concerns that the movement in the daily fix would only increase market volatility.

Financial Times commentator Gavyn Davies noted that the risk of large scale devaluation of the renminbi was “again spooking financial markets, which are firmly convinced that this is a very bad contingency for global risk assets in 2016.” Since the start of the new year, “investors have become much more concerned that a larger devaluation may be in the in works, either through the choice of the Chinese authorities, or because the outflow of private capital is getting out of hand.”

Some were even worried that China could be suffering from “a genuine exchange rate crisis, in which its enormous foreign currency reserves could be quickly drained.”

There are also growing concerns about financial stability in other emerging markets, which the International Monetary Fund has estimated are “over-borrowed” to the tune of $3 trillion. The prevailing conventional wisdom is that such over-indebtedness is not the concern it was in the past because most of it has been concentrated in the corporate rather than the government sector, and therefore the risk of a sovereign debt crisis is reduced.

But doubt has been cast on this reassuring assessment by an article published Wednesday in the Financial Times. It noted that more than $800 billion of sovereign debt was being camouflaged by the use of bonds that offer implicit state backing without always appearing on government balance sheets. The article noted that the stock of these “quasi-sovereign bonds” had risen in the past 12 months “to overtake that of all emerging market sovereign debt by the end of 2015.”

In other words, while the official debt to gross domestic product ratio may appear quite low by global standards for countries such as India, Russia and China, the amount of debt they have to cover in the event of a crisis could be much higher than official figures indicate.

The worsening global economic situation was underscored by a World Bank report issued Wednesday that cut the bank’s growth forecast for the third year in a row. It said larger-than-anticipated contractions in Brazil and Russia, combined with lower growth in the world’s major economies, had caused it to downgrade its growth forecast by 0.4 percentage points to 2.9 percent. While this was up slightly from the downwardly revised estimate of 2.6 percent for 2015, the report presented a gloomy outlook.

The World Bank cut its forecasts for developing countries as a whole by more than 0.5 percentage points and warned that this estimate was made on the basis of a smooth Chinese slowdown, a stabilisation of commodity prices, and only a gradual increase in borrowing costs. “All of these assumptions, however, are subject to substantial downside risks,” it stated.

The bank pointed out that it has now downwardly revised growth in the major developing countries for three years in a row, the first time this has happened since the 1980s, and noted that recoveries in the US and Europe were weaker than expected, while slowing world trade was having an impact.

Summing up the situation, the bank’s chief economist Kaushik Basu said: “There are severe fault lines beneath the surface.”

Stock markets continue to plunge amidst growing signs of economic crisis

Andre Damon

World stock markets continued to plunge on Thursday. The sell-off began in China, where trading was suspended for the second time in four days when stocks fell by more than seven percent in 30 minutes, resulting in the shortest trading day of the Chinese stock market.

Losses extended to Europe, where major indices fell between one and two percent. In the United States, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) fell by 392 points, or 2.3 percent. The S&P 500 fell by 2.37 percent, while the NASDAQ Composite Index fell by 3.03 percent.

Both the S&P 500 and the DJIA are off to their worst annual starts in history, with the DJIA down by 5.2 percent in the first four trading days of the year, and the S&P 500 down by 4.9 percent.

The NASDAQ has now officially entered a “correction,” defined as a decline of 10 percent or more from the recent peak, while the DJIA and S&P 500 are down by 9.8 percent and 8.8 percent, respectively.

The continued sell-off points to growing fears of a divergence between global stock market values, which have been rising for nearly six years, and the ongoing slowdown of the world economy.

Economic growth in 2015 is expected to have been the lowest of any year since 2009, and International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde has hinted that 2016 could be even worse.

The fall in economic output has contributed to a steep drop in demand and prices for commodities. The price of Brent crude oil fell by another 2.1 percent Thursday, hitting $33.27 a barrel, down from nearly $65 in May and its lowest level since February 2004.

The global sell-off centered on fears of a further deterioration of China’s economy, amid concerns that the country’s slowing growth could lead to a significant destabilization of its exchange rate regime. The country’s annualized growth rate in the fourth quarter of last year is expected to have been less than 7 percent, down from 14.2 percent in 2007.

China’s central bank reported Thursday morning that it would set the target value for the renminbi at 6.56 to the dollar, the lowest valuation in nearly six years. While Chinese monetary officials have allowed the country’s currency to depreciate in an attempt to boost exports, they have been forced to burn through foreign exchange reserves in an effort to defend the currency’s value and prevent it from falling even faster.

The country’s foreign exchange reserves fell by $108 billion last month, hitting $3.33 trillion, after a fall of $87 billion in November.

The New York Times reported that a “quarterly survey of 2,000 Chinese manufacturers and other industrial companies shows that almost none are currently investing in new equipment and factories.” The newspaper quotes Gan Jie, the director of the Center on Finance and Economic Growth at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing, who said, “In the past four quarters, it’s only 2 to 3 percent that are making expansionary investments.”

The latest stock market falls follow the panicked sell-off in the Chinese market over last summer, which led the country’s benchmark index to fall by up to 45 percent from earlier highs. The Chinese government was able to halt the sell-off with massive injections of cash into the financial markets totaling some $234 billion, according to an analysis by Goldman Sachs.

Fears that the current sell-off in China could be the start of a much broader correction were intensified when billionaire investor George Soros drew a parallel between the current economic conjuncture and the 2008 financial crisis. Speaking at an economic forum in Sri Lanka, Soros pointed to the uncertainty related to China’s slowing economy and unstable currency regime.

“China has a major adjustment problem,” Soros said. “I would say it amounts to a crisis. When I look at the financial markets there is a serious challenge which reminds me of the crisis we had in 2008.”

Whether or not the current market moves are the beginning of a significant unraveling remains to be seen. Most of the markets are still significantly higher than lows from last year. Regardless, there is a growing nervousness in the ruling class about the state of the world economy seven years after the 2008 crash, and the markets function as something of a barometer for this sentiment.

Among the concerns are not only the slowdown in China and the general stagnation of the world economy, but also the signs of a significant growth of opposition in the working class. The entire financial system is a house of cards, built on a foundation of free money from the central banks, and premised on the assumption that there will be an unending transfer of wealth from the international working class into corporate coffers and the speculators on Wall Street.

Survey finds a majority of Americans unable to pay for major unexpected expenses

Nick Barrickman

A new survey put out by the personal finance management site Bankrate.com on Wednesday found that more than half of Americans could not weather a sudden financial crisis without having to borrow money from friends and family or being forced to reduce the amount spent on other items such as dining out, paying cable or cell phone bills, or other basic features of a “middle class” lifestyle.

The survey, conducted last month among a pool of 1,000 Americans in conjunction with Princeton Survey Research Associates International, found that only 37 percent of those surveyed would be able to pay an emergency expense of $1,000, such as an emergency room visit or the cost of repairing a broken down vehicle, out of pocket.

Sixty-three percent of those surveyed would not be able to cover such a sudden expense without either cutting down on expenses elsewhere, borrowing or resorting to credit. The survey found that nearly four in 10 Americans had suffered such a financial setback in 2015.

“Without an adequate rainy-day fund, we are all living on a very slippery financial slope,” Gail Cunningham of the National Foundation for Credit Counseling told Bankrate.com. “The unexpected, unplanned expense is going to rear its ugly head and usually at the most inopportune time…Things as small as a flat tire or one trip to the emergency room can wreck the budgets of those who do not have an adequate amount in their savings account,” she said.

For Americans making less than $30,000 per year, only 23 percent would be able to cover such a sudden expense on their own. This was contrasted by nearly 60 percent of those making over $75,000 annually who could say the same. Nine percent making $30,000 or below stated that they did not know how they would cover such expenses, meaning that they were one expensive setback away from personal financial ruin.

The poll comes amid a slew of other reports detailing an immense drop in the living standards of a significant section of the US population, a component of the growth of social inequality more broadly.

Since the 2008 financial collapse and the subsequent economic “recovery” in 2009, 95 percent of all wealth gains have gone to the top 1 percent in society. A report released in November by the St. Louis Federal Reserve showed that Americans’ personal savings in 2015 were half of what the average was in the early 1980s.

A US Federal Reserve report released in 2014 found that nearly six in 10 Americans had lost all or part of their savings due to the financial impact of the 2008 economic crisis, while a 2015 study by GOBankingrates.com revealed that the majority of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings to their name. A report released the Pew Research firm last month revealed that the number of middle-income homes as a portion of the population had largely vanished in the span of a few decades.

The figures come as the US Federal Reserve has begun raising interest rates for banks and other financial institutions, which will likely lead to further difficulty for individuals who rely upon credit in order to finance their costs of living.

The expenses eating away at the typical individual’s savings read like essential items for living in modern society. According to Bankrate.com, the largest expense for one-third of all Americans outside of food and shelter consisted of utilities such as water, electricity or phone service. For those over the age of 50, one in five cited medical bills as their largest concerns outside of food and shelter.

US jobs report: Employment numbers obscure deeper social crisis

Tom Hall

Friday’s job figures for December from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) was an occasion for praise by business commentators and self-congratulatory statements by Obama administration officials. The economy unexpectedly added 292,000 jobs last month, considerably above analysts’ projections of 211,000 according to a poll of economists by CNNMoney. The official unemployment rate remained at 5.0 percent.

Jason Furman, chairman of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, bragged that the report “[marked] the strongest two years of job creation since 1998-2000.” Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez declared in a written statement that “the longest streak of private-sector job growth on record continues… the worst economic crisis in generations is behind us. Despite unprecedented obstruction from Republicans in Congress, the nation is enjoying an historic recovery.”

Notwithstanding its decent headline payroll figure, the report, upon closer examination, reveals a continuation of economic stagnation and low wage growth that are wreaking havoc with tens of millions of American workers, for whom there has been no “recovery” from the 2008 financial crisis. Even on the jobs front, overall payroll growth for 2015 declined roughly 13 percent relative to 2014, from 3.1 million added jobs to 2.7 million.

This stagnation is borne out by the breakdown of employment figures in the report. The service industry, a traditionally low-wage sector, was the biggest driver of last month’s growth, with 231,000 additional jobs. In the professional and business services subcategory, which showed the biggest growth in the service sector, nearly half of the new jobs, 34,000 out of 73,000, were part-time.

Mining and manufacturing jobs continue to stagnate or decline, driven by a deepening slump in demand and fall in commodity prices. While manufacturing showed a modest increase of 8,000 jobs, employment in the durable goods subcategory, which includes heavy machinery and computer products, declined by 6,000 over the month. The mining and logging sector continued its long decline, shedding 8,000 jobs for a total of 129,000 over the entire year.

“Involuntary part-time workers,” or people working part-time because they are unable to find full-time work, remained unchanged at 6 million people. While this represents a decline of 764,000 over the course of 2015, it is still nearly 50 percent higher than 10 years ago.

The low-wage, casualized labor market, the result of a systematic restructuring of the American economy to place the burden of the financial crisis on working people, continues unabated.

Erik Holm, the deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal’ s MoneyBeat blog, noted in a post that for non-management employees, overall year-on-year wage growth was a meager 2 percent, before factoring in inflation. “So for the vast majority of Americans,” Holm wrote, “there’s virtually no appreciable or noticeable wage growth.” He continued: “That shows two things clearly: employers still by and large do not have to pay up to find workers--even with an ostensibly ‘full employment’ landscape--and the big picture for employees still by and large has not changed.”

“That is not the picture of a robust, healthy, growing economy,” Holm concluded. “The headline numbers may look like ‘jobs market full speed ahead,’ but the reality of the wage numbers shows where things actually stand.”

Average hourly earnings actually fell one cent in December.

The 5 percent official unemployment rate, while formally considered close to full unemployment, is widely acknowledged to significantly undercount the real state of joblessness, with the head of the Gallup polling agency going so far as to call it a “Big Lie.” The fall in unemployment numbers is largely driven by a collapsing labor force participation rate, as millions of people, discouraged by the weak job market, have given up looking for work altogether. While this figure rose in December 0.1 percentage points to 62.6 percent, it remains near the lowest levels in almost 40 years.

Because they are not counted as part of the labor force, people discouraged from looking for work are not considered in the official unemployment figures. The Economic Policy Institute, which analyzes the government’s monthly employment figures, estimates that there were 2.9 million such “missing workers” in December 2015. The official unemployment rate would rise to 6.7 percent if these workers were counted as part of the labor force, the think tank noted.

An alternative measure of unemployment tabulated by the BLS, which includes marginally attached workers and involuntary part-time workers, and which is informally dubbed the “real unemployment rate” in the press, stayed constant last month at 9.9 percent, nearly twice the official level.

The end of 2015 and the first week of 2016 saw several high-profile announcements of layoffs by American corporations. Only days after the Christmas holiday, chemical giant DuPont announced it would lay off 1,700 of its 6,100 workers in the state of Delaware, where the company is based. The layoffs are part of a plan to trim the company’s global workforce by 10 percent in advance of an announced $130 billion merger with Dow Chemicals.

The Macy’s department store chain announced plans on Wednesday to slash 4,800 jobs and close 40 US stores in the aftermath of a dismal holiday season for the retail giant. A story by Business Insider, also released on Wednesday, reported that Yahoo plans to lay off 1,000 workers, or 10 percent of its workforce, beginning as early as this month.

Overall figures on the American economy continue to sour amid growing signs of a new global financial downturn. On Monday, JP Morgan Chase halved its forecast for GDP growth in the fourth quarter of 2015 from 2 percent to 1 percent, citing weak manufacturing and construction figures.

Global markets continue to fall

Nick Beams

Global stock markets have experienced their worst opening week in a new year in two decades as concerns over the Chinese economy, the value of the renminbi and the policies of Chinese financial authorities sent out a series of shock waves. More than $2.3 trillion was wiped off the value of global stocks for the week.

Markets in the US had their worst opening week ever. Shares closed down about 1 percent on Friday, after falls in Japan and Europe, with the German Dax index posting its biggest loss since 2011.

The Dow lost 6.19 percent in value for the week, and the S&P 500 was down by almost 6 percent, with falls across all ten sectors of the index. The high-tech-based Nasdaq composite index fell by more than 7 percent.

The continued decline came despite a stronger-than-expected jobs report in the US, which indicated that an additional 292,000 jobs were created last month. There was also an upturn in the Chinese market, after trading was suspended for two days last week when falls in share prices exceeded 7 percent, triggering circuit-breaker mechanisms.

Following criticisms that these mechanisms were contributing to, rather than alleviating, market instability, financial authorities lifted them on Friday, leading to the uptick in share prices. In another move aimed at stabilising the value of the Chinese currency, the renminbi, the foreign exchange regulator issued guidelines to banks limiting the purchase of US dollars by corporations and individuals.

The renminbi was down 0.8 percent for the week, its biggest decline since the People’s Bank of China made a surprise move last August to reduce its value. In a sign of the extent of capital outflow, China’s foreign currency reserves fell by $108 billion in December.

Summing up the events of the week, the Financial Times commented that if any lesson was to be learned from the past six months it was that any bump in the Chinese economy could not be ignored by the rest of the world. “The question is whether the rest of the world feels a gentle ripple or a tidal wave.”

The article noted that the fall in China’s growth rate from more than 10 percent in 2010 to the estimate of just 6.3 percent for this year could be expected, on the basis of China’s weight in global gross domestic product, to reduce world growth by about 0.75 percentage points.

According to International Monetary Fund chief economist Maurice Obstfeld, however, the effects are much greater than is indicated by a direct consideration the 18 percent of the global economy that China comprises. “The global spillovers from China’s reduced rate of growth … have been much larger than we would have anticipated,” he said.

This is because China is at the head of a series of integrated supply chains that involve the countries of South East Asia, Japan and Korea.

An indication of the impact of falling growth is seen in the decline in Chinese imports. They fell by 15 percent in the first 11 months of last year, with purchases from all its major trading partners, except Vietnam and Canada, in decline.

Furthermore, there are increasing concerns that the real level of Chinese growth is considerably less than official figures, with some estimates putting it closer to 4 percent.

An article in the Wall Street Journal on Friday pointed to the gloom that has descended in one of China’s most important industrial areas.

“Executives at businesses in the manufacturing heartland of south-eastern and eastern China, which churn out everything from electronic gadgets from textiles to furniture, talk of slack orders and late payments,” it reported. “China’s traditional heavy industrial engines of steel, cement and glass remain saddled with excess capacity built up in the boom years.” According to one executive cited in the article “no numbers point to a rosy picture.”

While there is no question that slowing Chinese growth rates, fears of a fall in the renminbi, doubts over reliability of government statistics and the destabilising effects of the seemingly ad hoc decisions of Chinese authorities are having their impact, more is involved than simply the state of the Chinese economy.

Financial Times columnist John Authers noted that “Chinese markets are shaking the world,” but, as in the past, “this says more about the frayed nerves in the rest of the world than it does about China.”

Authers pointed to the “greatest fear prevailing in the west: deflation” which impacts on the ability of companies to maintain, let alone increase, their profits. With central banks desperately trying to escape this situation “anything that threatens to intensify the problem is very serious.”

According to Authers, the “stark reaction to this week’s Chinese events reveals a deep lack of confidence in the health of the western corporate sector.”

He drew a parallel with events in February 2007, when a 9 percent fall in the Shanghai index triggered a major fall on Wall Street which, amid growing concerns about the state of the subprime mortgage market, signified the end of the “Great Moderation” when market volatility had remained relatively low.

Multi-billionaire investor George Soros also drew comparisons between the present situation and the events that led to the global financial crisis. In a speech delivered in Sri Lanka this week, he said there was a “serious challenge which reminds me of the crisis we had in 2008.”

It is not clear where the present course of events will lead. However, the rise in corporate debt in the US, where the trillions of dollar pumped into the financial system by the Federal Reserve have been used to finance a speculative bubble in stocks, as well as in emerging markets, where corporate debt has increased rapidly over the past four years, have created the conditions for another major financial crisis.