China’s Cultural Revolution could happen again, warns ex-Shenzhen mayor and former rising political star

Once a reform-minded political rising star, Yu Youjun surprised many with his miraculous comeback after a corruption probe.

Months after his retirement this year, Yu returned to the limelight as a scholar addressing the thorny issues of the Cultural Revolution.

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“The soil for the Cultural Revolution is still fertile, especially when the people have no reasonable and profound knowledge of it. It may partially recur, under certain historical conditions,” he told students, mainland news outlet Caijing reported.

Italy could back Britain over two-speed Europe

Sound familliar? We likely found the cheap labor source with the refugee crisis but will still have to wait and see how a United States of Europe takes shape.

 

Anglo-Italian initiative on status of euro “outs” could help Cameron pull off Brexit renegotiation coup

David Cameron’s hopes of winning a successful renegotiation in Europe are poised to receive an important boost from Italy following talks between both countries’ foreign ministers, the Daily Telegraph has learned.

Although Mr Cameron will not set out his formal demands to EU leaders until next month, a behind-the-scenes collaboration with Italy is already exploring ways to help Britain win a key battle over redefining the concept of ‘ever closer union’.

On the table is a plan to formalise the “out” status of the nine countries that currently do not use the euro in order to allow Mr Cameron to claim that he had won a major victory in halting the inexorable advance towards a European super-state.

China to Rearrange World Financial System – German Media

With the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), China has started to reorganize the world’s financial system. Asian countries are no longer solely dependent on the IMF and the World Bank and able to have a major influence on world’s financial markets, DWN reported.

The establishment of the bank is one of the biggest geopolitical successes of China in recent years, the newspaper wrote. It would help the country to counterbalance the IMF and the World Bank, which are dominated by the US.

PLA discusses major military structure reform

From playing defense to going offense.

 

Beijing is considering launching major military command structure reform after a conference was held recently in Beijing to discuss the future role of the PLA, according to Kanwa Defense Review, a Chinese-language magazine based in Canada.

The article stated that Chinese generals attending the conference talked about redefining the national interests of China. In the past, the goal of the PLA was to defend the sovereignty and territorial inegrity of the People’s Republic of China. In the future, they believe that the PLA must carry out missions to protect China’s interest around the Asia-Pacific region. With this new policy in mind, the command structure of the PLA must then be changed to fit it.

The Full Explanation Of How The ECB Broke Europe’s Bond Market

It was almost three years ago to the day when Zero Hedge first explained the biggest problem facing Europe when it comes to unconventional monetary policy: the lack, not scarcity, but outright shortage of collateral.

Initially, our focus was on private-sector collateral, and if one had to summarize the key difference between the US and Europe in one chart, it would be this one, showing that while in the US the split between secured and unsecured funding was roughly even, in Europe, some 90% of corporate funding was on bank loan books, with only 10% in the form of (unsecured) corporate bonds (which also explains why in Europe NPLs, aka bad bank debt is by far the biggest problem facing the financial industry).

Security confab focuses on ‘collapse of global order’

BERLIN — The Ukraine conflict, Islamic State group jihadists and the wider “collapse of the global order” will occupy the world’s security community at an annual meeting in Germany from Friday.

Also on the agenda of the three-day Munich Security Conference (MSC) will be Iran’s nuclear talks, the Syrian war and mass refugee crisis, West Africa’s Ebola outbreak and cyber-terrorism.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is among 20 heads of government and state on the guest list, along with 60-odd foreign and defense ministers including US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russia’s top diplomat Sergei Lavrov.