Responsible entrepreneurship by Central and Eastern European companies protected the countries of this part of Europe during the pandemic. Eurozone countries did much worse and are recovering more slowly. What or who is responsible for this?

Polish economy recovered from the misery of the previous year in such a way that 97.2% of the state of the economy before the pandemic was reached again. President of the Polish Stock Exchange Marek Dietl said it was thanks to the unique adaptability of Polish entrepreneurs. According to Dietl, the entrepreneurs knew how to make clever use of state aid, among other things. Industrial production in Poland in December 2020 actually rose by 11.2% compared to the previous year.The fact is: Poland’s export surplus is increasing. Fact is: the Czech Republic has the lowest unemployment in the EU at the moment. Fact is: the country’s own currency limits potential trade deficits. During the same period, the Eurozone economy, which is 10 times larger than Poland’s, only recovered to 93.2% of its pre-Covid state (after all, judging by the figures, you would never guess how much larger the Eurozone is than Poland).
Continue reading →

After the storming of the Capitol, there is now a big commotion on Wall Street. This time it is not the supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement who are trying to storm the fortress of the financial world. It is small investors who are hurling a stone at the big funds.

Hedge funds – that’s what we’re talking about – are actively managed funds whose goal is to achieve the highest possible return regardless of market developments. This is achieved by hedging (hence their name) their shares, bonds, their investments in commodities, foreign exchange and other assets. Most of the time, funds hedge by buying what are called shorts on their investments. It works like this: they buy, for example, shares of a company within a longer period for a total of 1 billion dollars, usually when they are undervalued, which raises the price of those shares, which in turn attracts small investors. At this point the funds get rid of their shares and take a short position by borrowing the shares from an institutional investor like a pension fund and selling them on the market pushing the price down. To return the shares to the pension fund, they repurchase them at a lower price.

Because the price falls, the small investors lose their money and the funds in turn collect money because it sold the shares at a high price and recollect them at a lower price. Sometimes, however, they act the other way around, when they have “missed” an interesting “asset” that is largely owned by small investors. In such cases they start to sell borrowed stocks so that these small fish panic and get rid of their shares and the big sharks can take them over at lower prices. Not only pension funds but also other assets kept at broker accounts are borrowed to hedge funds without the knowledge of the owner, the pensioner or the retail investor. The whole mechanism is against the interest of the stock owner or pensioner, but generates some extra profit, in the form of a lending fee, for the custodian of the stocks.

The hedge funds have huge sums of money and so they can actually manipulate the price at will. What makes hedge funds risky is that they have little equity, and function largely through leverage (mostly from large investors or banks) on credit. In addition, hedge funds are often operated as offshore funds and are located in the Cayman Islands or Bermuda i.e. places where the financial sector is less regulated by law than elsewhere.
Continue reading →

In 2020, Chinese parliament passed a new civil code that went into force on January 1, 2021. The new regulations contain a social credit system which is designed as a set of incentives and disincentives in the field of social behaviour. At the start each citizen is granted 1.000 points. Then a prescribed number of points is either subtracted from or added to this sum for a negative or positive act on the part of an individual. People with social ratings exceeding the initial 1.000 are awarded with all sorts of preferential treatment in banks and offices, whereas those whose initial sum of points dwindles encounter all manner of punitive measures like having difficulties taking out a loan or having worse employment opportunities. What kind of behaviour is rewarded?

Duty towards the state, which is mainly the timely payment of liabilities (taxes, credits, bills); duty towards society, which is the compliance with the law, participation in social events, care of one’s parents, having the allowable number of children, criminal record; and the individual’s activity in the net (behaviour towards other users, reliability of the information posted, purchases made and the like. The three categories are subjected to an algorithm which determines the social rating of a citizen. This in turn facilitates or impedes an individual’s efforts in terms of the availability of social services, price of credit, access to good education, travel abroad, employment or career in state-run institutions. The social rating system is made possible by heavy monitoring, by the hundreds of thousands of cameras, by the internet, and by overall data gathering.

The Western media have raised alarm and struck fear into the hearts of Europeans and Americans. It surpasses George Orwell’s predictions! It is Aldous Huxley’s brave new world in the making! China’s inhabitants are held on a tight leash while the uppity communist rulers wielding unbridled power step in with might and main to crush the vestiges of individual freedom by naming and shaming, by placing citizens under a round-the-clock surveillance and making their well-being conditional on complying with the state (party) requirements. A big kindergarten for adults to say the least, an ominous digital concentration camp to say it openly.
Continue reading →

Gefira 50 directs the reader’s attention to the movers of the world. Presidents, prime ministers and chancellors (even those referred to as Empress of Europe) are not the real leaders of their countries. Rather, they are chief executive officers of particular enterprises that go by the name of the United States, the United Kingdom, the Federal Republic or any other. Monarchs that used to rule over their countries my be gone, yet they have not been replaced by democratically elected officials. To be precise, they have, but only superfluously. Real power remains in the hands of the few very rich individuals who hold their term – like the monarchs of yesteryear – till their dying days.

Attentive individuals have long seen through the political systems and when they began voicing their opinion about them, they were mercilessly dismissed as followers or creators of conspiracy theories. These days, billions around the globe have seen it plainly: it is Mark Zuckerberg rather than Donald Trump, who has the final say. It is the former who could silence the latter in the twinkling of an eye, not the other way round. It is George Soros, a naturalized American citizen, who can publicly call the American president a danger to the world and get off Scot-free. He has not and will not face impeachment or anything of the same caliber; rather, it is the American president who is about to face his second impeachment.

Which is the reason why Gefira 50 delves into societies, institutions and organisations which operate behind the scenes. The few most important that were caught in our cross hairs certainly are merely the tip of the iceberg. The secrecy that envelops them and the fact that their activities are barely known to the public only implies that there must also be deep structures of whose operations we have no idea but whose existence we should – we must – reasonably infer or else we will never understand why politicians change their mind from one day to another, why certain individuals are suddenly in the spotlight of the media and become presidents or prime ministers while others disappear from public attention overnight.

The recent events in the United States along with the racial tensions that have been mounting there for decades bode ill for the country located between the oceans. The fault lines – political, social and economic – run deeper and deeper while the rapidly changing ethnic composition of the people collectively known as Americans only accelerates the process of inevitable disintegration. The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are vivid even if dramatic recent illustrations of a dissolution of a state, while South Africa shows what future has in store for white Americans.

 

The Washington Capital has been stormed. People got maced and shot at. Among the casualties there was a white woman who died as a result of a shot to the neck. To the neck. When a black man died as a consequence of a policeman kneeling on his neck, the whole of the United States seems to have gone up in flames. When protesters in Kiev in 2014 staged riots in the Maidan, the Western media were expressing their support for them and railing against the Ukrainian authorities.

Whence this difference? Whence this unjustness?

George Floyd was a violent male criminal, Ashli Babbitt – a respectable citizen, patriot, a servicewoman. The former was canonised upon his death, the latter may only expect universal condemnation.

Viktor Yanukovych was toppled down – rightly so, as the Western media maintained – by displeased people. No suspicion about the lawfulness of George Biden’s election are allowed to be harboured. Why?

The presidential election in Belarus was rigged, that’s what we are all supposed to believe in. The American presidential election was carried out impeccably, that’s also what we are all told to believe in. Continue reading →

As is the case with any and all calamities that afflict humankind – be it war or for that matter a plague – people sooner or later grow accustomed to the new normal and shed off the initial fear even if the fear is being fuelled. Human psyche has this mechanism of adaptation. We can observe it also nowadays having in mind the covid pandemic. The polls conducted at the beginning of it showed that the vast majority of individuals expressed their oftentimes unconditional readiness to be vaccinated once the vaccine was available. Gradually this readiness has shrunk – at times and places significantly – which was only to be expected.

A more interesting observation concerns the political persuasion of those who want or do not want to be vaccinated. Across the world it transpires that individuals who are right-leaning are much less enthusiastic about vaccination than their left-leaning colleagues. In Poland it is 5% (five!) against 82% (eighty-two), when two extreme political wings are compared. Much the same is observable in Germany, Austria or the United States. How do we explain it?

What other features distinguish the two political camps? The right-leaning citizens are mostly religious and patriotic, they uphold tradition and are opposed to big government. Which of these features makes them remain sceptical about vaccination?

Religiosity may play a role. Religious people put trust in Providence and generally do not attach utmost importance to the mundane matters. Left-leaning individuals have no choice: the only life that they have on earth must be protected cost it what it may.

Patriotism may play a role. Since the pandemic and vaccination are global in their reach and are globally handled, it is only natural to expect patriots to be on their guard against any international or – better put – supranational measures which are being pushed by moderate or extreme globalists.

Right-leaning people tend to accept struggle rather than rely on security, social or otherwise. The political right does not hold the reins of power anywhere nowadays (the parties that are referred to as right-wing are in fact left-wing parties with a right-wing veneer that manifests itself in more patriotic or traditional jargon) and so are naturally opposed to the protective measures – such as lockdown and vaccination – taken by their political rivals. They also tend to suspect that the measures are enforced with a purpose other than the avowed one.

Be it as it may, it is a thought-provoking fact to know that there is a relationship between an individual’s political persuasion and his stance on vaccination.

Gefira 49 looks forward to the coming year. What will it be like? Will there be no end to the pandemic? Are we going to have a third wave or will we be saved by the vaccine? The effects of the measures taken by various authorities worldwide and occasioned by the virus are comparable to the aftermath of a war: flagging economy, large-scale structural unemployment, lingering uncertainty, and a sense of growing insecurity. As usual, we hear that the world will not be the same, that we will wake up in a reality much different to what we have been used to. Governments are not trying to calm us down; rather, they have been whipping up anxiety and frenzy. Why?

There are big, supranational players that have seized the opportunity and are quite open about creating a new world for us. They are intent on introducing a new type of capitalism, they are boasting about “building back better”, they are painting a rosy future with the aid of all the technological devices and scientific solutions that have been advanced and accumulated recently. Will this world be still human or already transhuman? We are promised to be participating in a grand vision of making everyone happy. Have we not heard it before? We are told we need to save the planet and make our economy sustainable. Everything must be sustainable and all goods universally accessible. And pretty soon! It is a breath-taking vision of serenity and satiety outlined for us by our benefactors. Is it not too good to be true? One almost feels tempted to say: May God defend us from our friends: we can defend ourselves from our enemies.