1 Draft Doha pact to freeze oil output till October
(Gulf News) A draft agreement among oil producers meeting on Sunday in Doha
says average daily crude oil production in each month would not exceed the
level recorded in January this year, according to a copy of the draft seen by
Reuters.
The freeze would last until Oct. 1 this year, and
producers would meet again in October in Russia to review their progress in
engineering "a progressive recovery of the oil market", the draft
reads. Final agreement has not been reached on the draft, but several senior
sources in countries' oil ministries said they were optimistic that a deal
would be reached.
Producers would continue to develop the process of
consultation between them on the best ways to bolster the oil market, and the
deal would be open for other states to join, the draft says. OPEC member Iran
has said it will not participate in Sunday's meeting as it could not accept
proposals to freeze its production.
2 Citigroup quarterly profit plunges 27% (BBC) US
bank Citigroup has reported a 27% fall in first quarter profits compared with a
year earlier. It came as Citi said it had set aside more cash to cover losses
on energy loans, and as the cost of shrinking some of its businesses increased.
Citi, which is restructuring to focus on more
profitable businesses, saw net income fall to $3.5bn from $4.8bn the time a
year earlier. However, the results were better than analysts had been
expecting. Chief executive Michael Corbat said Citi was making progress
"in becoming a simpler, smaller, safer and stronger institution".
The bank's profit decline, in the three months to
the end of March, is the largest among big US banks that have reported first
quarter results so far. Citi recently slipped from third to fourth biggest US
bank by assets, after being overtaken by Wells Fargo.
The global banking industry has struggled since the
start of year due to uncertainty surrounding the world's economic outlook, with
a slowdown in China and the continued fall of oil prices. Earlier in the week
JP Morgan reported a 6.7% drop in profit. On Thursday, Bank of America reported
that profits fell 13% in the first quarter and Wells Fargo reported a 7% drop.
Citigroup has had a larger drop in profit is in part
because it has greater exposure to emerging markets, where the economies have
been slowing. The bank has been selling assets and leaving less profitable
markets. Mr Corbat said the first quarter earnings included "a significant
repositioning charge" of $491m.
3 Neoliberalism as the root of our problems (George
Monbiot in The Guardian) Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never
heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us,
no name. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?
Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its
power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the
financial meltdown of 2007‑8,
the offshoring of wealth and power, the slow collapse of public health and
education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of
ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump.
But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in
isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or
exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a
name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?
So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom
even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this
utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law,
like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious
attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.
Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining
characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose
democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that
rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market”
delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.
The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in
Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the
ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they
saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the
gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a
collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.
After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took
power, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich,
the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and
competition in public services. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht
treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were imposed on
much of the world.
Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining
means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom
to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and
design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the
distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.
Like communism, neoliberalism is the God that
failed. But the zombie doctrine staggers on, and one of the reasons is its
anonymity. Neoliberalism’s triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When
laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive
economic theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers
in the 70s, there was an alternative ready. But when neoliberalism fell apart
in 2008 there was ... nothing. This is why the zombie walks.
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