Iran, Saudi Arabia "Clash" Over Syria At "Secret", Closed-Door Meeting In Davos

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/23/2016 09:26 -0500

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-23/iran-saudi-arabia-clash-over-syria-secret-closed-door-meeting-davos

In case you might have missed it, Saudi Arabia and Iran are teetering on the edge of open war.

For years, the two regional powers have been engaged in at least three proxy wars across the Mid-East.

In Syria, the Quds and the IRGC have been fighting to bolster Bashar al-Assad’s depleted forces since at least 2012, while the Saudis and the other Gulf monarchies have lent assistance to the various Sunni rebel groups fighting to destabilize the government in Damascus.

In Yemen, Iran-backed Houthi militiamen drove President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi from the country last year, prompting Riyadh to intervene in order to prevent Tehran from establishing what would amount to an Iranian colony on the kingdom’s southern border.

And in Iraq, the sectarian strife is as divisive as ever, with Iran dominating politics in Baghdad and the Ayatollah’s Shiite militias stoking fear in the hearts of the country’s Sunni minority even as the fighters function as the most effective force battling ISIS.

Through it all, Riyadh and Tehran haven’t yet squared off directly. That is, where Saudi Arabia has troops and planes Iran fights by proxy and where Iran has ground troops, the Saudis are fighting through their own proxies.

Saudi Arabia’s move to execute prominent Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr has the potential to change all of that.

The Sheikh was a leading voice among Saudi Arabia’s dissident Shiite minority and his death sparked outrage and street protests across the Shiite community. Riyadh cut diplomatic ties with Tehran after the Saudi embassy was torched in Iran and the Sunni monarchies quickly followed suit.

Now, the stage is set for a potentially disastrous sectarian conflict that could reverberate for decades to come. Underscoring just how contentious the situation has become, Iran foreign minister Javad Zarif and Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal were reportedly involved in a “clash” at a closed-door meeting at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday.

“The barbed exchange between Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif at an invitation-only meeting on Wednesday underlined the hostility between the two Gulf rivals, who are waging proxy wars in Syria, Yemen and Iraq,” Reuters reports before recounting the spat. "It was a dialogue of the deaf," on witness recalls. Here’s more:

U.N. special envoy on Syria Staffan de Mistura, former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa of Egypt, the foreign ministers of Italy and Austria and officials from Turkey and several other Western nations were also around the table.

De Mistura opened the meeting by saying the time was ripe for the Geneva peace talks because outside powers all wanted a political solution to the five-year-old civil war in Syria, the participants said.

However, several speakers questioned Russia's motives for intervening in the conflict since September with air strikes in support of President Bashar al-Assad. They cast doubt on whether Moscow and Tehran wanted any deal that would involve Assad's eventual departure.

Zarif said Iran supported a political solution and had set out a four-point peace plan when it was finally invited to join international diplomacy on Syria last year. It had been excluded for years at U.S. and Saudi insistence.

Without naming any country, he took a veiled swipe at Riyadh by condemning those, he said, who fanned and exploited sectarian differences between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims across the region.

At his news conference, Zarif accused Saudi Arabia of having spent millions of dollars to lobby the U.S. Congress against an international deal on Iran's nuclear program. An agreement with Iran led to the lifting of U.N. sanctions on the country this week.

He said Riyadh had panicked after the embassy attack and the Saudis needed to "come to their senses".

Prince Turki hit back in the closed session, blasting Iran's role in the Syria conflict, the participants said. Quoting an Arabic saying, he told Zarif:

"I really like what you say but when I look at what you do, I wonder."

Prince Turki, the 70-year-old youngest son of the late King Faisal, accused Iran of having 10,000 fighters on the ground in Syria supporting Assad, participants said. He described the Syrian leader as a "terrorist killing his own people" who was directly kept in power by Tehran, the participants said.

One participant said the prince's remarks were sharper than expected and shocked some of those attending the meeting.

There were already doubts as to whether John Kerry and Sergei Lavrov would succeed in bringing the "moderate" Syrian opposition to the bargaining table in Geneva next week and the verbal jousting match between Zarif and Prince Turki suggests that diplomacy may be impossible given the current hostilities between Riyadh and Tehran. 

Meanwhile, Pentagon chief Ash Carter just can't seem to understand why the Sunni powers aren't more helpful in fighting ISIS. “It’s strange that a Sunni extremist group running rampant in Iraq and Syria should attract as little Sunni Arab counterweight as it has so far,” Carter told Bloomberg TVon Friday.

No, Mr. Carter, it is not "strange", nor is it a coincidence.

There is no "Sunni Arab counterweight" because Saudi Arabia promotes a similar brand of ultra puritanical Islam as that espoused by ISIS. Once again, if the US wants help in defeating Islamic State, Ash Carter may want to look to the nations that actually have a vested interest in bringing about the group's demise, namely Iran and Russia. As long as Washington insists on keeping up this charade wherein everyone pretends to be mystified as to why the Gulf monarchies and Turkey don't seem all that interested in seeing ISIS destroyed, this ridiculous dog and pony show will continue, and Javad Zarif's contention that it is in fact the Saudis that are fomenting sectarian discord will continue to fall on deaf ears.

For those who missed it, this is now the most important map in geopolitics:

The Secret Behind The Next Global Crash (??)

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/22/2016 18:05 -0500
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-22/secret-behind-next-global-crash

Submitted by Pepe Escobar, Op-ed via SputnikNews.com,

The World Economic Forum in Davos is submerged by a tsunami of denials, and even non-denial denials, stating there won’t be a follow-up to the Crash of 2008.

Yet there will be. And the stage is already set for it.

Selected Persian Gulf traders, and that includes Westerners working in the Gulf confirm thatSaudi Arabia is unloading at least $1 trillion in securities and crashing global markets under orders from the Masters of the Universe – those above the lame presidency of Barack Obama.

Those were the days when the House of Saud would as much as flirt with such an idea to have all their assets frozen. Yet now they are acting under orders. And more is to come; according to crack Persian Gulf traders Saudi Western security investments may amount to as much as $8 trillion, and Abu Dhabi’s as $4 trillion.

In Abu Dhabi everything was broken into compartments, so no one could figure it out, except brokers and traders who would know each supervisor of a compartment of investments. And for the House of Saud, predictably, denial is an iron rule. 

This massive securities dump has been occasionally corporate media, but the figures are grossly underestimated. The full information simply won’t filter because the Masters of the Universe have vetoed it. 

There has been a huge increase in the Saudi and Abu Dhabi dump since the start of 2016. A Persian Gulf source says the Saudi strategy “will demolish the markets.” Another referred to a case of “maggots eating the carcass in the dark”; one just had to look at the rout in Wall Street, across Europe and in Hong Kong and Tokyo on Wednesday.

So it’s already happening. And a crucial subplot may be, in the short to medium term, no less than the collapse of the eurozone.

The Crash of 2016?

So a case could be made of a panicked House of Saud being instrumentalized to crash a great deal of the global economy. Cui bono? 

 

 

Moscow and Tehran are very much on it. The logic behind crashing markets, creating a recession and a depression – from the point of view of the Masters of the Universe above the lame duck President of the United States — is to engineer a major slow down, cripple buying patterns, decrease oil and natural gas consumption, and point Russia on a road to ruin. Besides, the ultra low oil price also translates into a sort of ersatz sanction on Iran.

Still, Iranian oil about to reach the market will be around an extra 500,000 barrels a day by mid-year, plus a surplus stored in tankers in the Persian Gulf. This oil can and will be absorbed, as demand is rising (in the US, for instance, by 1.9 million barrels a day in 2015) while supply is falling.

Surging demand and falling production will reverse the oil crash by July. Moreover, China’s oil imports recently surged 9.3% at 7.85 million barrels a day, discrediting the hegemonic narrative of a collapse of China's economy – or of China being responsible for the current market blues.

So, as I outlined here, oil should turn around soon. Goldman Sachs concurs. That gives the Masters of the Universe a short window of opportunity enabling the Saudis to dump massive amounts of securities in the markets.

The House of Saud may need the money badly, considering their budget on red alert. But dumping their securities is also clearly self-destructive. They simply cannot sell $8 trillion. The House of Saud is actually destroying the balance of their wealth. As much as Western hagiography tries to paint Riyadh as a responsible player, the fact is scores of Saudi princes are horrified at the destruction of the wealth of the kingdom through this slow motion harakiri.

Would there be a Plan B? Yes. Warrior prince Mohammed bin Sultan – who’s actually running the show in Riyadh – should be on the first flight to Moscow to engineer a common strategy. Yet that won’t happen.

 

 

And as far as China – Saudi Arabia’s top oil importer — is concerned, Xi Jinping has just been to Riyadh; Aramco and Sinopec signed a strategic partnership; but the strategic partnership that really matters, considering the future of One Belt, One Road, is actually Beijing-Tehran.

The massive Saudi dumping of securities ties in with the Saudi oil price war. In the current, extremely volatile situation oil is down, stocks are down and oil stocks are down. Still the House of Saud has not understood that the Masters of the Universe are getting them to destroy themselves many times over, including flooding the oil market with their shut-in capacity. And all that to fatally wound Russia, Iran and… Saudi Arabia itself.

Only a Pawn in Their Game

Meanwhile, Riyadh is rife with rumors there will be a coup against King Salman – virtually demented and confined to a room in his palace in Riyadh. There are two possible scenarios in play:

1) King Salman, 80, abdicates in favor of his son, notorious arrogant/ignorant troublemaker Warrior Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 30, currently deputy crown prince and defense minister and the second in the line of succession but de facto running the show in Riyadh. This could happen anytime soon. As an extra bonus, current Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi, not a royal, would be replaced by Abdulaziz bin Salman, another son of the king.

2) A palace coup. Salman – and his troublemaker son – are out of the picture, replaced by Ahmed bin Abdulaziz (who was a previous Minister of the Interior), or Prince Mohammed bin Nayef (the current Minister of the Interior and Crown Prince.)

Whatever scenario prevails, the British MI6 is intimately aware of the whole pantomime. And the German BND might be. Everyone remembers the BND memo at the end of 2015 that depicted Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as a “political gambler” who is destabilizing the Arab world through proxy wars in Yemen and Syria.

Saudi sources — for obvious reasons insisting on anonymity — stress that as much as 80% of the House of Saud favors a coup.

Yet the question is whether a House reshuffle would change their slow motion hara-kiri. The categorical imperative remains; the Masters of the Universe are ready to bring the whole world down in a major recession basically to strangle Russia. The House of Saud is just a pawn in this vicious game.

Another Oligarch Preaches To The Peasants: Charlie Munger Says "Prepare For Harder World"

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/26/2015 
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-26/another-oligarch-preaches-peasants-charlie-munger-says-prepare-harder-world 

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
While several exceptionally wealthy and successful people have admirably come out and spoken passionately of the broken nature of financial markets and the political system, as well as the threat this poses to society in general (think Paul Tudor Jones and Nick Hanauer), there have been several examples of oligarchs coming out and conversely demonstrating their complete disconnect from reality, as well as a disdain for the masses within a framework of incredible arrogance.
I’ve commented on such figures in the past, with the two most popular posts on the subject being:
A Billionaire Lectures Serfs in Davos – Claims “America’s Lifestyle Expectations are Far Too High”
An Open Letter to Sam Zell: Why Your Statements are Delusional and Dangerous
The latest example comes from Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right hand man, who tends to demonstrate an incredible capacity for verbal diarrhea. Recall his commentary on gold: “gold is a great thing to sew onto your garments if you’re a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939.”  

Moving along, Mr. Munger provided some typically insensitive commentary at an event yesterday in Los Angeles. Bloomberg reports that:

(Bloomberg) — Charles Munger, who became a billionaire while helping Warren Buffett build Berkshire Hathaway Inc., predicted it’s going to get tougher for consumers to maintain their standard of living in coming decades.

“We should all be prepared for adjusting to a world that is harder,” Munger, 91, said Wednesday at an event in Los Angeles, in response to a question about the increase in the size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet since the 2008 financial crisis. “You can count on the purchasing power of money to go down over time. And you can almost count that you’ll have more trouble in the next 50 years than the last.”

“Somebody my age has lived through the best and easiest period that ever happened in the history of the world — the lowest death rates, the highest investment production, biggest increases in most people’s standards of living,” Munger said. “If you’re unhappy with what you’ve had over the last 50 years, you have an unfortunate misappraisal of life.”

There’s a staggering amount of offensiveness in such few words. First off, he says that: “We should all be prepared for adjusting to a world that is harder.” Who is included in the word “all” here. Certainly not his fellow oligarchs, who already bailed themselves out in incredible fashion and have been spending the years since protecting themselves from the horrible future they’ve created. No, he is speaking to the masses, the plebs, the serfs, the peasants, the ruled. He is telling them tough luck, just try to avoid cannibalism in the future. Meanwhile, if you get close to my castle I’ll have you shot down like a dog.
He then shows his cards once again with the statement: “If you’re unhappy with what you’ve had over the last 50 years, you have an unfortunate misappraisal of life.”
50 years of life? What about those us who haven’t had the pleasure of being alive so long. What about the millennials, the teenagers, and the babies being born right now? He couldn’t give a shit, which is exactly why he and his buddies went out of their way to protect the wealthy, older generations with their bailouts in 2008/09. Conveniently, this is the exact demographic he belongs to.
His comments are particularity striking when you take them in context of yesterday’s article from the Wall Street Journal: Executive Pensions Are Swelling at Top Companies. If you think these guys are going to be dealing with the “hard times” ahead like everyone else, think again.
From the WSJ:

Top U.S. executives get paid a lot to do their jobs. Now many are also getting a big boost in what they will be paid after they stop working.

Executive pensions are swelling at such companies as General Electric Co., United Technologies Corp. and Coca-Cola Co. While a significant chunk of the increase is the result of arcane pension accounting around issues like low interest rates and longer lifespans, the rest reflects very real improvements in the executives’ retirement prospects.

New mortality tables released last fall by the American Society of Actuaries extended life expectancies by about two years. That, as well as low year-end interest rates, helped push pension gains higher than many companies had expected. The result is much higher current values for plans with terms like guaranteed annual payouts, which are no longer offered to most rank-and-file workers.

Note that these guaranteed annual payouts are no longer offered to most rank-and-file workers. There are peasants and there are oligarchs. The peasants are the ones Munger speaks to.

 GE Chief Executive Jeff Immelt’s compensation rose 88% last year to $37.3 million. Meanwhile, excluding $18.4 million in pension gains, his pay actually fell slightly to $18.9 million.

In all, Mr. Immelt’s pension is valued at about $4.8 million a year for life. The company puts its current value at about $70 million, up from around $52 million a year ago.

At Lockheed Martin Corp., CEO Marillyn Hewson’s total pay rose 34% to $33.7 million last year, with $15.8 million of that stemming from pension gains. An extra column in the proxy statement’s compensation table strips out those gains, showing her pay up about 13% to $17.9 million.

Executive pensions generally don’t consume the attention that pensions for the rank and file do. For years, as costs of traditional pension plans have risen amid low interest rates and longer lifespans, big companies have been closing them to new employees or even freezing benefits in place, often continuing with only a 401(k) plan for all but the oldest workers.

Last June, Lockheed Martin told its nonunion employees that it would stop reflecting salary increases in their pension benefits starting next year, and that the benefits would stop growing with additional years of work starting in 2020.

Just in case you needed further evidence of how all “public” policy, especially the actions of the Federal Reserve, are specifically designed to enrich the 0.01% at the expense of everyone else, let’s take a look at some excerpts from a CNBC article published today: Fed Policies Have Cost Savers $470 Billion:

The Federal Reserve’s efforts to stimulate the U.S. economy after the financial crisis ended up costing savers nearly half a trillion dollars in interest income, according to report released Thursday.

Since the central bank dropped interest rates to near zero at the end of 2008, savers have labored under plain-vanilla bank accounts and money market funds that have yielded close to nothing. Critics have long said the Fed’s quantitative easing efforts have boosted asset prices, particularly in the stock market, but exacted severe costs across other parts of the economy.

If QE really helps everyone, then why has income inequality exploded? The answer, of course, is that QE picked winners and losers. Naturally, the winners have been the oligarchs, and the losers have been everyone else.

Thanks for playing.
*  *  *
For related articles, see:
As the Middle Class Evaporates, Global Oligarchs Plan Their Escape from the Impoverished Pleb Masses
Just Another Tale from the Oligarch Recovery – $100 Million Homes Being Built on Spec
The Pitchforks are Coming…– A Dire Warning from a Member of the 0.01%
A Billionaire Lectures Serfs in Davos – Claims “America’s Lifestyle Expectations are Far Too High”
An Open Letter to Sam Zell: Why Your Statements are Delusional and Dangerous