Which indicates something truly weird. Often, a data issue, at least in part. No clue what it has to do with Venzeula, other than some sort of gotcha comparison. I don’t even see an attempt to explain the factors involved.
Well I think the audience (emerging markets finance people, basically) was supposed to understand it intuitively. As far as I can tell from my post hoc googling, the main commonalities are rampant inflation and a currency crisis, which would explain the huge drop given that it’s a dollar denominated index.
Yeah its not looking good there.
I’m pretty finance-skeptical here, but basically when a small country “economically collapses” read, “loses access to international finance”.
I’m pretty sure there are meetings by the managers of trillion dollar investment houses sipping mint juleps (or the appropriate equivalent) somewhere in a Swiss resort club smiling wordlessly to each other when they see one or another financial disaster or boom happen, the long tail trickle down effect of where capital comes and goes, decisions which they had a hand in years ago but which the ordinary person not only isn’t aware of but doesn’t and will never have the information with which to become aware.
I really do feel like there’s some kind of new socio-economic revolution possible. But right now nobody understands international capital well enough to even be congniscent of how the whole system works and so can’t even imagine an alternative, except to nibble the edges. To be honest there are probably only a few hundred or thousand people in the world who actually have the information and can also grasp all the supply chains, relationship with finance, derivatives, sovereign currencies, capital flows, and off book / private investment simultaneously. We’re painfully leaning in to a globalized world which requires globalized institutions and globalized governance and globalized solutions… and if anything capital lives on the arbitrages between regulatory agencies, between strict capital controls here and loose controls there, between finding greenfield investments here and in-fill investments there, and capital will kind of scream in a quiet, throwing money at the system sort of way to ever prevent that from happening.
But all that doesn’t really help Lebanon right now… I think sadly what you see there is what’s going to increasingly happen all over the climate-change, post COVID world of have and have nots. What the left-behinds and the left-outs must now endure.
That article is pretty stingy with the Mrad’s actual photography. If you scroll to the bottom of this page, you can see more of his pictures:
For instance:
-Tom
nice, thanks
Amazing that those trees outside that window look like they came through the ordeal just fine. Nature is resilient.
Edit: Or wait. Maybe the blast came from the opposite direction, and those trees were sheltered by the building?
Trees bend. If they didn’t, they would snap.
Well sure, but those look pristine. I was just expressing amazement, not trying to start a conspiracy theory. I’ve seen the videos of that blast, and it was massive.
I guess I don’t know when those photos were taken though. Or how far away from the blast those scenes are.
That particular location is in the Sursock Palace (an art museum), and looks to be the north face of it due to seeing the water on the horizon.
So yeah; nature can be pretty resilient.
Cool. Thanks, man.
Just glad when my deep dives into Google Maps bear fruit, lol
I saw a video about a month ago from that location. It was a goddamn mess. Basically untouched since the explosion. It smelled awful, due to a mixture of sewage and mountains of rotting grain. Yes, they still hadn’t cleaned that up.
Can’t say I blame them. Desperate people resort to desperate measures.