European MarketsAnalysis: Erdogan delights Turkish depositors with lira let-up in possible election gambit
By Ebru Tuncay and Nevzat Devranoglu
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan addresses the media after a cabinet meeting in Ankara, Turkey, December 20, 2021.
ISTANBUL, Dec 21 (Reuters) - Tayyip Erdogan's plan to defend lira deposits has given Turkish savers some respite as well as possibly laying the ground for an early election by the President, but it risks piling up debt and stoking already rife inflation.
Erdogan, Turkey's leader of nearly two decades, has been pushing ahead with a "new economic model" he says will boost jobs, growth, exports and deliver cheap credit but has been hit in the ratings by a damaging drop in the lira.
Central to Erdogan's promise on Monday was an effective tax-free guarantee, backed by the Treasury, that Turks would be made good on the difference between what they earn on their deposits through interest rates and any adverse exchange rate move, encouraging savers to sell dollars and buy lira.
For some, his latest policy move, with short-term gains and potential longer-term pain, is a signal that Erdogan may intend to hold an election within months, well ahead of presidential and parliamentary elections which are scheduled for mid-2023.
"I expect a snap election. What has been done in the economy so far is an election strategy," said Ozer Sencar, president of Turkish polling group MetroPoll.
Analysts have interpreted recent moves as a last-ditch attempt by the president and his AK Party to shore up their socially conservative, working and lower middle class voter base, and to return to his past record of economic growth.
But Erdogan's government could be left on the hook to cover future losses based on the exchange rate, analysts and bankers said after the lira's rapid rally on Tuesday, which they said could yet fizzle out and reverse.
The latest pledge amounts to a turnaround for the 67-year-old, who has staked his new economic programme on slashing rates and rejecting the concept of interest. But Turkey's public finances are strong compared to other emerging market countries, leaving it room to provide support. read more
Erdogan made his announcement just hours after the lira breached 18 to the dollar for the first time ever on Monday, with a series of steps he said would reverse a tidal wave of depositors shifting lira deposits into dollars.
Official data shows term lira deposits held by ordinary Turks were about 1.2 trillion lira ($92.5 billion) on Dec. 10.
Were the new measures to cover it all and if the exchange rate rises 20% faster than Turkey's central bank deposit rate, this would amount to a 240 billion lira hit to Ankara's budget, Hursit Gunes, an economist at Marmara University, estimated.
While questions such as how and when the Treasury will pay and how to account for the tax relief remain, for depositors the new policy delivered much needed protection from erosion.
Bankers told Reuters they had therefore converted up to $1.5 billion in savings on Monday night alone, driving the lira's biggest rally on record in volatile trading. [USN LINK]
"If you expect the exchange rate to double, which happened (in the last two months), then the return on lira deposits is 100% for you," Refet Gurkaynak, head of Bilkent University's economics department in Ankara, said.
"But it can have dangerous consequences," he added.
Turkish banks already pay 16-18% rates on deposits and are unlikely to offer much more given the policy interest rate is 14% after an aggressive and unorthodox monetary easing cycle.
Under pressure from Erdogan, Turkey's central bank has cut rates by 500 basis points since September, setting off the worst lira crisis in two decades on fears of an inflationary spiral.
'NO FREE LUNCH'
Annual inflation breached 21% last month and is expected to soar beyond 30% next year due largely to the currency crash, which stokes import prices. Food and other basic goods are higher still, rattling already stretched households.
Any further currency depreciation could theoretically mean limitless new debt being issued by the Treasury. The government could then turn to the central bank to monetize this, creating another inflationary wave, bankers and analysts said.
"There is no free lunch for the lira. The cost of the support measures will come through to corporates ultimately in the form of higher borrowing costs or higher taxes," Dubai-based Hasnain Malik, head of equity research at Tellimer, said.
"There is no escape from re-establishing a credible interest rate policy environment," he added.
While a government source with knowledge of the matter acknowledged the budget burden and inflation could rise, they said "these can be managed", adding: "All of the decisions announced include protections against risks".
Cemil Ertem, a presidential adviser and member of the government's Economic Policies Committee, told Reuters the deposit guarantee was a "historic change" that removes individuals' need for dollars to protect against inflation.
But a senior banker said the new policy will only work well if the economy maintains a current account surplus, and the government still needs to explain some details despite a rough outline from the Treasury on Tuesday. read more
Turkey's budget deficit is projected to be about 3.5% of GDP for this year, up from 1.5% earlier in the year. read more
"How and when is the Treasury going to pay the difference. Is it going to pay once every three months or once every six months?" said the banker, requesting anonymity.
($1 = 12.9741 liras)
INDIA IPPON DESU
Tuesday, December 28, 2021
Sunday, December 26, 2021
Saturday, December 25, 2021
Sunday, December 19, 2021
Wednesday, December 15, 2021
Impact of Vaccination study
Highlights
In the absence of a vaccination program, there would have been approximately 1.1 million additional COVID-19 deaths and more than 10.3 million additional COVID-19 hospitalizations in the U.S. by November 2021.
Without the U.S. vaccination program, COVID-19 deaths would have been approximately 3.2 times higher and COVID-19 hospitalizations approximately 4.9 times higher than the actual toll during 2021.
If no one had been vaccinated, daily deaths from COVID-19 could have jumped to as high as 21,000 per day — nearly 5.2 times the level of the record peak of more than 4,000 deaths per day recorded in January 2021.
Background
Nearly 800,000 Americans have died so far during the U.S. COVID-19 pandemic, with more than half those deaths occurring during 2021.1 One year into the U.S. vaccination effort, much attention has focused on the stubborn persistence of the pandemic, which has been fueled by new, more- transmissible variants and the millions of Americans who have not gotten their shots. However, the positive impact of the rapid development and deployment of highly effective vaccines — the reduction in deaths and hospitalizations — has been less obvious.
In July, we reported that the U.S. vaccination program had averted 279,000 deaths and 1.25 million hospitalizations, primarily by blunting a surge in the Alpha variant during spring 2021.2 Since that report, nearly all of the U.S. has experienced a wave of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths caused by the highly transmissible Delta variant. More than 1,000 Americans are dying each day.
In this report, we update our estimates, through the end of November 2021, of COVID-related deaths and hospitalizations avoided because of the U.S. vaccination program. Briefly, the agent-based computer model analyzes features of the coronavirus, its transmission, and its effects to compare the observed pandemic trajectory (infections, hospitalizations, and deaths) to a counterfactual scenario in which no vaccination program exists. The model incorporates the transmission dynamics of previous variants other than Omicron, which is only now beginning to appear in the U.S. The model accounts for waning immunity and changes in population behavior over time as schools and businesses have reopened and travel has increased. We have refined the model to reflect emerging scientific evidence. See “How We Conducted This Study” at the end of this brief for further details on our methods.
Findings
Through November 2021, we estimate that the COVID-19 vaccination program in the United States prevented 1,087,191 additional deaths and 10,319,961 additional hospitalizations (Table 1). There would have been an estimated 35,903,646 additional infections.
The majority of these averted deaths and hospitalizations would have occurred during the late summer and early autumn, as the highly contagious Delta variant began to surge in southern states and spread to other parts of the U.S. As Exhibit 1 illustrates, the daily peak would have exceeded 21,000 deaths per day (6.3 per 100,000 population), far eclipsing the actual peak of 4,000 per day (1.6 per 100,000 population) reached during January 2021.
Exhibit 2 shows a similar pattern for hospitalizations. A peak of more than 55 hospitalizations per 100,000 population far exceeds the rate of hospitalization attributable to influenza during a severe flu season (typically fewer than 10 per 100,000).
Discussion
The U.S. vaccination program campaign has profoundly altered the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic, preventing nearly 1.1 million deaths. Even with only about 60 percent of Americans vaccinated to date, the nation has dodged a massive wave of COVID-19 deaths that would have started as the Delta variant took hold in August 2021. Because of Delta’s rapid and nationwide spread, deaths due to COVID-19 would have far exceeded all previous peaks.
Our estimates suggest that in 2021 alone, the vaccination program prevented a potentially catastrophic flood of patients requiring hospitalization. It is difficult to imagine how hospitals would have coped had they been faced with 10 million people sick enough to require admission. The U.S. has 919,000 licensed hospital beds and typically accommodates about 36 million hospitalizations each year.3 Even the 2.6 million COVID-related hospitalizations that occurred during 2021 placed an enormous strain on hospitals, with many staff lost not only to the virus but also to exhaustion and burnout. Faced with such unprecedented demand, U.S. hospitals operating under crisis standards of care would likely have had no choice but to turn away tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of individuals.
In addition to reducing hospitalization and death, vaccination prevented many millions of COVID infections, reducing the prospect that millions of Americans could develop long COVID and its debilitating symptoms.
These estimates of vaccination impact may seem startlingly high. But they are consistent with the extraordinary effectiveness of vaccines. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show how dramatically COVID-19 vaccination reduces the risk of hospitalization and death. By the end of October 2021, rates of hospitalization among unvaccinated adults (47.3 per 100,000) were nearly 12 times the rate of fully vaccinated adults (3.9 per 100,000).4
How Would Differing Assumptions Affect These Results?
Changing selected assumptions in our analysis could reduce or increase the estimates we report here. For example, our model assumes that the reopening of businesses and schools, along with the increase in social gatherings that occurred during summer 2021, continued despite the Delta wave. If people had restricted social activities and travel, or businesses or schools had closed in response to the Delta surge, many deaths and hospitalizations could have been averted even in the absence of vaccination. However, it seems unlikely that the entire nation would have returned to the restrictions imposed during the first year of the pandemic.
Conversely, the number of deaths estimated by the model may be too low if hospital capacity were exceeded (as it surely would have been). Moreover, the model estimates only death attributable to COVID-19. Preventable deaths due to other causes would have increased too, as occurred early in the pandemic in cities like New York City and Los Angeles.5
The Continuing Urgency of Vaccination Efforts
Our findings highlight the ongoing tragedy of preventable death and hospitalization occurring among unvaccinated Americans. Daily vaccination rates have ticked up recently but only recently to 60 percent of the U.S. population — a lower rate than that achieved by dozens of other countries. As immunity wanes and breakthrough infections continue to emerge, it is clear we must vaccinate (and give booster shots) to many more people — building on the tremendous, though mostly invisible, successes the U.S. vaccination program has accomplished thus far.
As the Omicron variant begins to spread and the Delta variant surge continues, our results point to the tremendous power of vaccination to reduce disease and death from COVID-19. Sadly, they also highlight the ongoing tragic consequences of failing to vaccinate every eligible American.
How We Conducted This Study
To evaluate the impact of the vaccination program in the United States, the researchers expanded their age-stratified, agent-based model of COVID-19 to include waning of naturally acquired or vaccine- elicited immunity, as well as booster vaccination.6,7 For the timelines of this study, the characteristics of three variants were included in the model, each with cumulative prevalence of at least 3 percent in the U.S., including B.1.526 (Iota), B.1.1.7 (Alpha), and B.1.617.2 (Delta) in addition to the original Wuhan-I SARS-CoV-2 strain.
The model parameters included the population demographics of the U.S., an empirically determined contact network accounting for pandemic mobility patterns, and age-specific risks of severe health outcomes due to COVID-19. The model incorporated data on daily vaccine doses administered in the U.S.8 The minimum age eligibility for vaccination was 16 years before May 13, 2021, after which children 12 to 15 became eligible for vaccination. Vaccination of children ages 5 to 11 with Pfizer-BioNTech started on November 2, 2021.
Vaccine efficacies against infection and symptomatic and severe disease for different vaccine types — for each variant and by time since vaccination — were drawn from published estimates. The model was calibrated to reported national incidence data between October 1, 2020, and November 30, 2021, and validated with infection, hospitalization, and death trends during the same period.
The researchers evaluated the impact of vaccine rollout by simulating the pandemic trajectory under the counterfactual scenario of no vaccination program. The simulated outcomes of total infections, hospitalizations, and deaths were compared to the fitted model, reflecting the actual pandemic in the U.S. and vaccinations that occurred between December 12, 2020, and November 30, 2021.
In the absence of a vaccination program, there would have been approximately 1.1 million additional COVID-19 deaths and more than 10.3 million additional COVID-19 hospitalizations in the U.S. by November 2021.
Without the U.S. vaccination program, COVID-19 deaths would have been approximately 3.2 times higher and COVID-19 hospitalizations approximately 4.9 times higher than the actual toll during 2021.
If no one had been vaccinated, daily deaths from COVID-19 could have jumped to as high as 21,000 per day — nearly 5.2 times the level of the record peak of more than 4,000 deaths per day recorded in January 2021.
Background
Nearly 800,000 Americans have died so far during the U.S. COVID-19 pandemic, with more than half those deaths occurring during 2021.1 One year into the U.S. vaccination effort, much attention has focused on the stubborn persistence of the pandemic, which has been fueled by new, more- transmissible variants and the millions of Americans who have not gotten their shots. However, the positive impact of the rapid development and deployment of highly effective vaccines — the reduction in deaths and hospitalizations — has been less obvious.
In July, we reported that the U.S. vaccination program had averted 279,000 deaths and 1.25 million hospitalizations, primarily by blunting a surge in the Alpha variant during spring 2021.2 Since that report, nearly all of the U.S. has experienced a wave of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths caused by the highly transmissible Delta variant. More than 1,000 Americans are dying each day.
In this report, we update our estimates, through the end of November 2021, of COVID-related deaths and hospitalizations avoided because of the U.S. vaccination program. Briefly, the agent-based computer model analyzes features of the coronavirus, its transmission, and its effects to compare the observed pandemic trajectory (infections, hospitalizations, and deaths) to a counterfactual scenario in which no vaccination program exists. The model incorporates the transmission dynamics of previous variants other than Omicron, which is only now beginning to appear in the U.S. The model accounts for waning immunity and changes in population behavior over time as schools and businesses have reopened and travel has increased. We have refined the model to reflect emerging scientific evidence. See “How We Conducted This Study” at the end of this brief for further details on our methods.
Findings
Through November 2021, we estimate that the COVID-19 vaccination program in the United States prevented 1,087,191 additional deaths and 10,319,961 additional hospitalizations (Table 1). There would have been an estimated 35,903,646 additional infections.
The majority of these averted deaths and hospitalizations would have occurred during the late summer and early autumn, as the highly contagious Delta variant began to surge in southern states and spread to other parts of the U.S. As Exhibit 1 illustrates, the daily peak would have exceeded 21,000 deaths per day (6.3 per 100,000 population), far eclipsing the actual peak of 4,000 per day (1.6 per 100,000 population) reached during January 2021.
Exhibit 2 shows a similar pattern for hospitalizations. A peak of more than 55 hospitalizations per 100,000 population far exceeds the rate of hospitalization attributable to influenza during a severe flu season (typically fewer than 10 per 100,000).
Discussion
The U.S. vaccination program campaign has profoundly altered the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic, preventing nearly 1.1 million deaths. Even with only about 60 percent of Americans vaccinated to date, the nation has dodged a massive wave of COVID-19 deaths that would have started as the Delta variant took hold in August 2021. Because of Delta’s rapid and nationwide spread, deaths due to COVID-19 would have far exceeded all previous peaks.
Our estimates suggest that in 2021 alone, the vaccination program prevented a potentially catastrophic flood of patients requiring hospitalization. It is difficult to imagine how hospitals would have coped had they been faced with 10 million people sick enough to require admission. The U.S. has 919,000 licensed hospital beds and typically accommodates about 36 million hospitalizations each year.3 Even the 2.6 million COVID-related hospitalizations that occurred during 2021 placed an enormous strain on hospitals, with many staff lost not only to the virus but also to exhaustion and burnout. Faced with such unprecedented demand, U.S. hospitals operating under crisis standards of care would likely have had no choice but to turn away tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of individuals.
In addition to reducing hospitalization and death, vaccination prevented many millions of COVID infections, reducing the prospect that millions of Americans could develop long COVID and its debilitating symptoms.
These estimates of vaccination impact may seem startlingly high. But they are consistent with the extraordinary effectiveness of vaccines. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show how dramatically COVID-19 vaccination reduces the risk of hospitalization and death. By the end of October 2021, rates of hospitalization among unvaccinated adults (47.3 per 100,000) were nearly 12 times the rate of fully vaccinated adults (3.9 per 100,000).4
How Would Differing Assumptions Affect These Results?
Changing selected assumptions in our analysis could reduce or increase the estimates we report here. For example, our model assumes that the reopening of businesses and schools, along with the increase in social gatherings that occurred during summer 2021, continued despite the Delta wave. If people had restricted social activities and travel, or businesses or schools had closed in response to the Delta surge, many deaths and hospitalizations could have been averted even in the absence of vaccination. However, it seems unlikely that the entire nation would have returned to the restrictions imposed during the first year of the pandemic.
Conversely, the number of deaths estimated by the model may be too low if hospital capacity were exceeded (as it surely would have been). Moreover, the model estimates only death attributable to COVID-19. Preventable deaths due to other causes would have increased too, as occurred early in the pandemic in cities like New York City and Los Angeles.5
The Continuing Urgency of Vaccination Efforts
Our findings highlight the ongoing tragedy of preventable death and hospitalization occurring among unvaccinated Americans. Daily vaccination rates have ticked up recently but only recently to 60 percent of the U.S. population — a lower rate than that achieved by dozens of other countries. As immunity wanes and breakthrough infections continue to emerge, it is clear we must vaccinate (and give booster shots) to many more people — building on the tremendous, though mostly invisible, successes the U.S. vaccination program has accomplished thus far.
As the Omicron variant begins to spread and the Delta variant surge continues, our results point to the tremendous power of vaccination to reduce disease and death from COVID-19. Sadly, they also highlight the ongoing tragic consequences of failing to vaccinate every eligible American.
How We Conducted This Study
To evaluate the impact of the vaccination program in the United States, the researchers expanded their age-stratified, agent-based model of COVID-19 to include waning of naturally acquired or vaccine- elicited immunity, as well as booster vaccination.6,7 For the timelines of this study, the characteristics of three variants were included in the model, each with cumulative prevalence of at least 3 percent in the U.S., including B.1.526 (Iota), B.1.1.7 (Alpha), and B.1.617.2 (Delta) in addition to the original Wuhan-I SARS-CoV-2 strain.
The model parameters included the population demographics of the U.S., an empirically determined contact network accounting for pandemic mobility patterns, and age-specific risks of severe health outcomes due to COVID-19. The model incorporated data on daily vaccine doses administered in the U.S.8 The minimum age eligibility for vaccination was 16 years before May 13, 2021, after which children 12 to 15 became eligible for vaccination. Vaccination of children ages 5 to 11 with Pfizer-BioNTech started on November 2, 2021.
Vaccine efficacies against infection and symptomatic and severe disease for different vaccine types — for each variant and by time since vaccination — were drawn from published estimates. The model was calibrated to reported national incidence data between October 1, 2020, and November 30, 2021, and validated with infection, hospitalization, and death trends during the same period.
The researchers evaluated the impact of vaccine rollout by simulating the pandemic trajectory under the counterfactual scenario of no vaccination program. The simulated outcomes of total infections, hospitalizations, and deaths were compared to the fitted model, reflecting the actual pandemic in the U.S. and vaccinations that occurred between December 12, 2020, and November 30, 2021.
Thursday, December 09, 2021
US has inadvertently helped China in Ethiopia
China provides winning weaponry to Ethiopian national forces while US de facto sides with the fading Tigray rebels
by Stephen Bryen December 6, 2021December 9, 2021
Just as Ethiopian government forces appear to have turned the tide in the country’s so-called civil war, the Biden administration is pushing for US citizens in Ethiopia to leave and is providing relocation assistance to those who can’t afford to buy a plane ticket.
Meanwhile, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has visited Addis Ababa and has made it clear that China backs Ethiopia’s government fully. This, in contrast to the United States which has imposed sanctions on Ethiopia, but not on the rebellious Tigray.
As Bloomberg reports: The US last month suspended duty-free access to its exports “because of gross human rights violations,” which remain undocumented for the most part.
The US has shown no interest in atrocities by Tigray forces, nor the theft of UN-sponsored relief supplies taken by the retreating Tigray army.
China is also supplying weapons to the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF), including armed, medium-altitude, long-endurance Wing Loong drones.
Sensing the significant vacuum left in Ethiopia, Iran is also supplying its Muhajer-6 armed drones, the same weapons used by Iran’s proxy Hezbollah in Syria.
The UAE had previously supplied drones and some Israeli weapons to Ethiopia, including Chinese-made Wing Loong’s.
China is clearly exploiting the opening created by the UAE and jumping in, along with Iran, to push out the UAE (seen incorrectly as a US proxy) and other Western suppliers and backers.
Ethiopia’s war has recently turned in favor of the government, which looked nearly defeated a few weeks ago when the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) was about 209 kilometers from the capital Addis Ababa.
But in a short time, Ethiopia has rallied its army, received important political and weaponry support from China and Iran, and apparently changed the course of the war.
Meanwhile, thousands of Ethiopians in the United States, some protesting in front of the White House, are angry that the US has sided with the TPLF forces against the country’s legitimate government.
The US administration claims it has supported peace negotiations between the two sides in the conflict, working through African intermediaries.
But brokering a peace deal in the middle of an undecided conflict is unlikely to gain traction, not least because Addis Ababa sees talks as a way to force it to give up territory, even legitimacy, in exchange for ending the war.
The US says it is neutral in the actual dispute, but American behavior, including Biden’s imposition of sanctions first on Ethiopia on September 17 and then on Eritrea on November 12 for assisting Ethiopia has made it clear whose side the US is on.
In actual fact, the Biden administration opened the door to China and Iran by convincing Addis Ababa that there was no future with the US or its allies and partners.
The US has been speaking out of both sides of its mouth, a fact noted by Today News Africa journalist and commentator Simon Ateba.
Ateba points out that Samantha Power, administrator of USAID, has been condemning Ethiopia in tweets while others, especially the US envoy for the Horn of Africa Jeffrey Feltman, have been trying to talk to both sides – although unsuccessfully.
America’s incapacity to leverage the conflict and its disingenuousness in supporting the Tigray rebels who started the war has clearly put Ethiopia’s future much more clearly in China’s hands, marking a major diplomatic defeat for Biden and Blinken.
While it is still not clear that the ENDF will continue its march north toward Tigray and actually defeat the TPLF, the US won’t be the one to help settle the conflict.
If Ethiopia wins or at least fully contains Tigray, it will emerge as the major power in the Horn of Africa.
Before the Tigray war, Ethiopia had notched one of the world’s fastest GDP growth rates, with significant investment in infrastructure and education. Ethiopia’s economy has been shifting from agriculture to services and industry.
If Ethiopia can escape Egypt’s downstream ire over its Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam project, it will become Africa’s largest hydroelectric power source. Since 2000, China has invested $12 billion in Ethiopian projects.
As of 2016, there were 305,800 Ethiopians in the United States, a number that may have grown closer to 450,000 by 2021. While emigrating to many US cities including Seattle, Atlanta and Minneapolis, the number in the Washington DC area grew from 10,000 in 1980 to 30,000 in 2010.
The numbers continue to rise in the US capital as does the economic and political clout of the small but industrious and active community.
Whether this will impact future US policy is unclear, but what is apparent is that the Biden administration has paid little to no attention to the overseas Ethiopian community just as it has lost almost all influence in one-time ally Ethiopia.
by Stephen Bryen December 6, 2021December 9, 2021
Just as Ethiopian government forces appear to have turned the tide in the country’s so-called civil war, the Biden administration is pushing for US citizens in Ethiopia to leave and is providing relocation assistance to those who can’t afford to buy a plane ticket.
Meanwhile, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has visited Addis Ababa and has made it clear that China backs Ethiopia’s government fully. This, in contrast to the United States which has imposed sanctions on Ethiopia, but not on the rebellious Tigray.
As Bloomberg reports: The US last month suspended duty-free access to its exports “because of gross human rights violations,” which remain undocumented for the most part.
The US has shown no interest in atrocities by Tigray forces, nor the theft of UN-sponsored relief supplies taken by the retreating Tigray army.
China is also supplying weapons to the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF), including armed, medium-altitude, long-endurance Wing Loong drones.
Sensing the significant vacuum left in Ethiopia, Iran is also supplying its Muhajer-6 armed drones, the same weapons used by Iran’s proxy Hezbollah in Syria.
The UAE had previously supplied drones and some Israeli weapons to Ethiopia, including Chinese-made Wing Loong’s.
China is clearly exploiting the opening created by the UAE and jumping in, along with Iran, to push out the UAE (seen incorrectly as a US proxy) and other Western suppliers and backers.
Ethiopia’s war has recently turned in favor of the government, which looked nearly defeated a few weeks ago when the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) was about 209 kilometers from the capital Addis Ababa.
But in a short time, Ethiopia has rallied its army, received important political and weaponry support from China and Iran, and apparently changed the course of the war.
Meanwhile, thousands of Ethiopians in the United States, some protesting in front of the White House, are angry that the US has sided with the TPLF forces against the country’s legitimate government.
The US administration claims it has supported peace negotiations between the two sides in the conflict, working through African intermediaries.
But brokering a peace deal in the middle of an undecided conflict is unlikely to gain traction, not least because Addis Ababa sees talks as a way to force it to give up territory, even legitimacy, in exchange for ending the war.
The US says it is neutral in the actual dispute, but American behavior, including Biden’s imposition of sanctions first on Ethiopia on September 17 and then on Eritrea on November 12 for assisting Ethiopia has made it clear whose side the US is on.
In actual fact, the Biden administration opened the door to China and Iran by convincing Addis Ababa that there was no future with the US or its allies and partners.
The US has been speaking out of both sides of its mouth, a fact noted by Today News Africa journalist and commentator Simon Ateba.
Ateba points out that Samantha Power, administrator of USAID, has been condemning Ethiopia in tweets while others, especially the US envoy for the Horn of Africa Jeffrey Feltman, have been trying to talk to both sides – although unsuccessfully.
America’s incapacity to leverage the conflict and its disingenuousness in supporting the Tigray rebels who started the war has clearly put Ethiopia’s future much more clearly in China’s hands, marking a major diplomatic defeat for Biden and Blinken.
While it is still not clear that the ENDF will continue its march north toward Tigray and actually defeat the TPLF, the US won’t be the one to help settle the conflict.
If Ethiopia wins or at least fully contains Tigray, it will emerge as the major power in the Horn of Africa.
Before the Tigray war, Ethiopia had notched one of the world’s fastest GDP growth rates, with significant investment in infrastructure and education. Ethiopia’s economy has been shifting from agriculture to services and industry.
If Ethiopia can escape Egypt’s downstream ire over its Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam project, it will become Africa’s largest hydroelectric power source. Since 2000, China has invested $12 billion in Ethiopian projects.
As of 2016, there were 305,800 Ethiopians in the United States, a number that may have grown closer to 450,000 by 2021. While emigrating to many US cities including Seattle, Atlanta and Minneapolis, the number in the Washington DC area grew from 10,000 in 1980 to 30,000 in 2010.
The numbers continue to rise in the US capital as does the economic and political clout of the small but industrious and active community.
Whether this will impact future US policy is unclear, but what is apparent is that the Biden administration has paid little to no attention to the overseas Ethiopian community just as it has lost almost all influence in one-time ally Ethiopia.
Interesting article
What are the best analyses of small, innovative, productive groups?
by Tyler Cowen June 25, 2018 at 12:32 am in
Shane emails me:
Hello!
What have you found to be the best books on small, innovative, productive groups?
These could be in-depth looks at specific groups – such as The Idea Factory, about Bell Labs – or they could be larger studies of institutions, guilds, etc.
I suggest reading about musical groups and sports teams and revolutions in the visual arts, as I have mentioned before, taking care you are familiar with and indeed care passionately about the underlying area in question. Navy Seals are another possible option for a topic area. In sociology there is network theory, but…I don’t know. In any case, the key is to pick an area you care about, and read in clusters, rather than hoping to find “the very best book.” The very theory of small groups predicts this is how you should read about small groups!
But if you must start somewhere, Randall Collins’s The Sociology of Philosophies is probably the most intensive and detailed place to start, too much for some in fact and arguably the book strains too hard at its target.
I have a few observations on what I call “small group theory”:
1. If you are seeking to understand a person you meet, or might be hiring, ask what was the dominant small group that shaped the thinking and ideas of that person, typically (but not always) at a young age. Step #1 is often “what kind of regional thinker is he/she?” and step #2 is this.
2. If you are seeking to foment change, take care to bring together people who have a relatively good chance of forming a small group together. Perhaps small groups of this kind are the fundamental units of social change, noting that often the small groups will be found within larger organizations. The returns to “person A meeting person B” arguably are underrated, and perhaps more philanthropy should be aimed toward this end.
3. Small groups (potentially) have the speed and power to learn from members and to iterate quickly and improve their ideas and base all of those processes upon trust. These groups also have low overhead and low communications overhead. Small groups also insulate their members sufficiently from a possibly stifling mainstream consensus, while the multiplicity of group members simultaneously boosts the chances of drawing in potential ideas and corrections from the broader social milieu.
4. The bizarre and the offensive have a chance to flourish in small groups. In a sense, the logic behind an “in joke” resembles the logic behind social change through small groups. The “in joke” creates something new, and the small group can create something additionally new and in a broader and socially more significant context, but based on the same logic as what is standing behind the in joke.
5. How large is a small group anyway? (How many people can “get” an inside joke?) Has the internet made “small groups” larger? Or possibly smaller? (If there are more common memes shared by a few thousand people, perhaps the small group needs to be organized around something truly exclusive and thus somewhat narrower than in times past?)
6. Can a spousal or spouse-like couple be such a small group? A family (Bach, Euler)?
7. What are the negative social externalities of such small groups, compared to alternative ways of generating and evaluating ideas? And how often in life should you attempt to switch your small groups?
8. What else should we be asking about small groups and the small groups theory of social change?
9. What does your small group have to say about this?
I thank an anonymous correspondent — who adheres to the small group theory — for contributions to this post.
by Tyler Cowen June 25, 2018 at 12:32 am in
Shane emails me:
Hello!
What have you found to be the best books on small, innovative, productive groups?
These could be in-depth looks at specific groups – such as The Idea Factory, about Bell Labs – or they could be larger studies of institutions, guilds, etc.
I suggest reading about musical groups and sports teams and revolutions in the visual arts, as I have mentioned before, taking care you are familiar with and indeed care passionately about the underlying area in question. Navy Seals are another possible option for a topic area. In sociology there is network theory, but…I don’t know. In any case, the key is to pick an area you care about, and read in clusters, rather than hoping to find “the very best book.” The very theory of small groups predicts this is how you should read about small groups!
But if you must start somewhere, Randall Collins’s The Sociology of Philosophies is probably the most intensive and detailed place to start, too much for some in fact and arguably the book strains too hard at its target.
I have a few observations on what I call “small group theory”:
1. If you are seeking to understand a person you meet, or might be hiring, ask what was the dominant small group that shaped the thinking and ideas of that person, typically (but not always) at a young age. Step #1 is often “what kind of regional thinker is he/she?” and step #2 is this.
2. If you are seeking to foment change, take care to bring together people who have a relatively good chance of forming a small group together. Perhaps small groups of this kind are the fundamental units of social change, noting that often the small groups will be found within larger organizations. The returns to “person A meeting person B” arguably are underrated, and perhaps more philanthropy should be aimed toward this end.
3. Small groups (potentially) have the speed and power to learn from members and to iterate quickly and improve their ideas and base all of those processes upon trust. These groups also have low overhead and low communications overhead. Small groups also insulate their members sufficiently from a possibly stifling mainstream consensus, while the multiplicity of group members simultaneously boosts the chances of drawing in potential ideas and corrections from the broader social milieu.
4. The bizarre and the offensive have a chance to flourish in small groups. In a sense, the logic behind an “in joke” resembles the logic behind social change through small groups. The “in joke” creates something new, and the small group can create something additionally new and in a broader and socially more significant context, but based on the same logic as what is standing behind the in joke.
5. How large is a small group anyway? (How many people can “get” an inside joke?) Has the internet made “small groups” larger? Or possibly smaller? (If there are more common memes shared by a few thousand people, perhaps the small group needs to be organized around something truly exclusive and thus somewhat narrower than in times past?)
6. Can a spousal or spouse-like couple be such a small group? A family (Bach, Euler)?
7. What are the negative social externalities of such small groups, compared to alternative ways of generating and evaluating ideas? And how often in life should you attempt to switch your small groups?
8. What else should we be asking about small groups and the small groups theory of social change?
9. What does your small group have to say about this?
I thank an anonymous correspondent — who adheres to the small group theory — for contributions to this post.
Wednesday, December 01, 2021
Wow Momo funding raise
Wow! Momo is now Rs 1,225 crore company - Here's how it turned things around Launched in August 2008, the QSR chain currently is present across over 350 outlets of Wow Momo and 50 outlets of Wow China.
New Delhi Published on: September 23, 2021 12:53 IST
The company is planning to set up over 150 stores and 50 cloud kitchens in the next one year.
Wow Momo Valuation: Wow Momo Food has raised over USD 15 million (around Rs 110.49 crore) in series C funding round led by Tree Line Investment Management. The funding round has made Wow Momo Foods the most valued home-grown QSR brand, with a valuation of over Rs 1,225 crore, said Tiger Global backed firm in a statement.
Wow Momo Foods operates QSR chains - Wow Momo and Wow China.
"This is a formidable leap from its last valuation of 860 crore in September 2019, when it raised money from Tiger Global, considering the brand’s persistent efforts of pivoting, bouncing back profitably and outstanding efforts during the pandemic," the statement said.
The funding round also saw participation from IAN Fund (Indian Angel Network) and existing investor Lighthouse Funds, it added.
"The fresh funds will enable the brand to amplify efforts on its newly launched FMCG business, add more energies to the expansion of its QSR & Cloud Kitchen brands and also fuel its growth in launch of its new verticals to be announced soon," the company said.
Journey from 2008 to 2021
Launched in August 2008, the QSR chain currently is present across over 350 outlets of Wow Momo and 50 outlets of Wow China.
“In the next year, the company is planning to set up over 150 stores and 50 cloud kitchens as well as grow 2x plus on monthly run rate by next August,” it said.
“When we started with Wow! Momo and later Wow! China, we were confident about the potential that the market holds. We had a clear roadmap on first strengthening our restaurant business, followed by a foray into FMCG space,” Wow Momo Foods CEO and cofounder Sagar Daryani said.
New Delhi Published on: September 23, 2021 12:53 IST
The company is planning to set up over 150 stores and 50 cloud kitchens in the next one year.
Wow Momo Valuation: Wow Momo Food has raised over USD 15 million (around Rs 110.49 crore) in series C funding round led by Tree Line Investment Management. The funding round has made Wow Momo Foods the most valued home-grown QSR brand, with a valuation of over Rs 1,225 crore, said Tiger Global backed firm in a statement.
Wow Momo Foods operates QSR chains - Wow Momo and Wow China.
"This is a formidable leap from its last valuation of 860 crore in September 2019, when it raised money from Tiger Global, considering the brand’s persistent efforts of pivoting, bouncing back profitably and outstanding efforts during the pandemic," the statement said.
The funding round also saw participation from IAN Fund (Indian Angel Network) and existing investor Lighthouse Funds, it added.
"The fresh funds will enable the brand to amplify efforts on its newly launched FMCG business, add more energies to the expansion of its QSR & Cloud Kitchen brands and also fuel its growth in launch of its new verticals to be announced soon," the company said.
Journey from 2008 to 2021
Launched in August 2008, the QSR chain currently is present across over 350 outlets of Wow Momo and 50 outlets of Wow China.
“In the next year, the company is planning to set up over 150 stores and 50 cloud kitchens as well as grow 2x plus on monthly run rate by next August,” it said.
“When we started with Wow! Momo and later Wow! China, we were confident about the potential that the market holds. We had a clear roadmap on first strengthening our restaurant business, followed by a foray into FMCG space,” Wow Momo Foods CEO and cofounder Sagar Daryani said.
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