Category: Aggregated

On Feb. 1, French cable TV “Canal+” broadcast a trenchant, 50-minute exposé of the fascists behind the Maiden coup, by respected journalist Paul Moreira, “Ukraine, the Masks of the Revolution,” on a program called “Spécial Investigation.”

It is a well-done investigation on the neo-fascist movements which made the Maidan revolution possible, and which are still operating in security functions, separate from the police or military forces of the country, and are “tolerated” by the Ukrainian government and by its foreign protectors. Moreira exposes, one-by-one, the Right Sector, the Azov Battalion, and Svoboda, as extreme-right violent movements. He shows how, just months after Maidan, the Right Sector took over the role of border patrol between Ukraine and Crimea, explicitly to provoke a famine in Crimea, by blockading all trade from coming in. One can see long lines of trucks waiting to come in, but nobody dares to do anything, because the militias are armed. He focuses very much on the Odessa massacre, featuring shocking footage showing in detail how more than 40 pro-Russian Ukrainians were eliminated at the Trade Union House of Odessa.

President Piotr Poroshenko is not mentioned at all. At the end, Moreira shows a meeting which took place in Kiev in September 2015, which brought together the Americans and Europeans who supported the revolution. Moreira asks himself whether they voluntarily ignored the militias, and says, “Here, the money-people play world war games.”

Lawrence Summers is targeted in the program; Summers says, “We are not performing charity; Ukraine is an essential front-line of our military interests.” David Petraeus is shown pleading for anti-tank weapons for the Kiev army. Stanley McChrystal is interviewed on the sidelines of the Kiev meeting as an experienced military figure who dealt with out-of-control army corps in Afghanistan. Asked what has to be done to cope with the militias, he responds that they have to be made professional and connected to the government. After a second question, he flees. Victoria Nuland is shown at the same meeting saying that the U.S. military aid had a significant impact on the battlefield. She is also shown being questioned by Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), and acknowledging the presence of “ugly” forces in Maidan.

The documentary concludes that the Maidan revolution wouldn’t have been possible without these neo-fascist groups. Horrifying, new, filmed material of the bestiality of the fascists is shown, and the American and European aid that was given to these Nazis. There were several major press-outlets featured in the documentary, and Le Monde exposed itself as a collaborationist publication by attacking the documentary. The Ukrainian Embassy in Paris, in a hysterical gesture, put pressure on the TV network to cancel it, but failed.

Sputnik News reports that Canal+ will rebroadcast the documentary on Feb. 8.       

The talk in Frankfurt, London, and as far away as Australia, is that Deutsche Bank is headed to be the next “big one” to fail — and that may come a lot sooner than people think. Germany’s leading financial daily Handelsblatt runs the headline, “Deutsche Bank in Free Fall,” writing that the bank’s shares have lost one-third of their value since the beginning of the year; that this is only the beginning of February; and that the bank took a loss of EU6.8 billion for 2015. Everyone seems to know that the bank is buried under of a mountain of fines, including $2.5 billion levied by U.S. and British authorities for its part in rigging benchmark interest rates. This figure could rise to $12 billion because of other pending cases on illegal activities.

The bank’s shares, trading at EU177 prior to the crisis, collapsed to EU30 by the end of 2015, and on Feb. 2, they hit an all-time low of EU15.54 euros. An article in Australia’s Financial Review points out that the shares are “trading on a price-to-book valuation of 0.34 times, which implies the market thinks that almost 70% of its loans are impaired and some nasty news is just around the corner.”

All this has eaten into Deutsche Bank’s notoriously low capital holdings. It seems the only way it can raise capital is through issuing CoCos, or contingent convertible, bonds. The CoCos are the bail-in bonds whose payout is made only when the stock price exceeds a certain amount. More important, if the bank gets into trouble, the bonds are converted into stock; i.e., bailed in. Deutsche Bank’s CoCos are being “kicked around in the gutter” and are trading at about 85 cents, and falling. Still, the bank hopes to sell EU4 billion worth, although no one is holding his breath.

Financial Review cites Paul Schulte, the Chief Executive of SGI Research, who warned that the bank is not only sitting on a mountain of bad assets dating from the previous crisis, but is holding “a large book of commodity-related derivatives that are under stress from the collapses in most commodity prices.” (Oh, really! Everyone knows that Deutsche Bank has the world’s largest portfolio of derivatives.)

Deutsche Bank is not alone, opines Schulte:  “This has been brewing under everyone’s nose, because while people thought that the problem was periphery banks in Ireland or Spain, the actual problem is that Deutsche Bank, and the French banks with lots of toxic debt in commodities, are over-stretched; badly run; have no sense of risk management, and are organs of state capitalism.”

While Deutsche Bank shares have fallen by 30%, those of Citi have sunk by 22%; Goldman Sachs -16%; JP Morgan -14%; Morgan Stanley -23%; Bank of America Merrill Lynch -22%; and Credit Suisse -22%.