13/Jan/2018(Sat)

[yoon.]

Here's How Late-Night Is Preparing for Trump's 'Dishonest and Corrupt Media Awards'

After President Donald Trump tweeted that he would be announcing the “Most Dishonest and Corrupt Media Awards” on Monday, a few top late-night hosts decided to submit themselves for consideration for the year.

“I will be announcing THE MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR on Monday at 5:00 o’clock,” Trump wrote. “Subjects will cover Dishonesty & Bad Reporting in various categories from the Fake News Media. Stay tuned!”

Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel and Trevor Noah all took time out their shows on Wednesday to mull over their chances of receiving one of the awards — or as Colbert referred to them, “the Fakies.”

Here’s how the hosts are preparing for the ceremony.

After sharing his excitement at the prospect of winning an award, the host of The Late Show revealed that he had purchased a “billboard in New York’s City Times Square in hopes of increasing his chances of being honored in categories such as “Least Bretibarty,” “The Eric Trump Memorial Award for Disappointment” and “Smallest Button.”

“Personally, I’m excited for the most Dishonest and Corrupt Media Awards of the year,” he said. “Because nothing gives you more credibility than Donald Trump calling you a liar. And I, of course, don’t want to get snubbed.”

Apparently late-night minds think alike. Not to be outdone by Colbert, Noah not only purchased a billboard in Times Square but took out a full-page ad in the New York Times promoting The Daily Show as “political propaganda disguised as entertainment” and “monotonous…liberal dogma.”

“After provoking North Korea and then insulting Palestine, the President turned to America’s greatest foe: the fake-news media,” Noah said of Trump’s announcement. “So that was Donald Trump’s day on Twitter. The bad news is he’s itching to start a nuclear war. The good news is, despite his threats to Korea, at least he thinks we’re going to make it until Monday.”

Meanwhile, Kimmel was feeling a bit less confident than his peers and apparently trying to keep everyone’s hopes at bay. The Live! host expressed doubt that anyone in the media would actually receive an award.

“The President of the United States is starting his own awards show — the Stupid People’s Choice Awards are what they’re calling it,” Kimmel said. “This is a real dilemma for the President because, on one hand, he loves awards and trophies. But will he be physically able to give a trophy to someone other than himself? I don’t think so.”

WHY IS SOUTH KOREA SUDDENLY TERRIFIED OF BITCOIN?

Usually on the cutting edge of technology, the country unleashes a swift crackdown on cryptocurrencies that threatens to trigger a domino effect in Asia

Bitcoin has been hailed as the greatest technological innovation of our time, yet it seems South Korea, one of the most technologically innovative societies, is now not only giving up its role as a leader in the field but aggressively fighting the trend.

Some observers suggest the government has many reasons to be afraid of bitcoin, not the least of which is the cryptocurrency’s potential to be used by Kim Jong-un ’s North Korea as a covert economic weapon. But leaders point to other concerns as well.

South Korea’s Ministry of Justice said on Thursday the country is considering shutting down all local cryptocurrency exchanges, an announcement that sent shockwaves through the industry worldwide. Earlier this week, stock in the internet service provider Pareteum more than doubled after it said it would provide blockchain support services, Bloomberg reported, but fell 25 per cent after Seoul’s comments.

Hong Nam-ki, the minister for government policy coordination, called Korea’s interest in cryptocurrencies “abnormal”, echoing the disdain of Prime Minister Lee Nak-yeon, who last month warned that cryptocurrencies could corrupt Korean youth and lead to “social pathological phenomena”.

After Hong’s announcement, bitcoin prices at the Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bithub fell 13.8 per cent from US$20,181 to US$17,400.

Others are also pulling back. Two of Korea’s largest banks, Shinhan and KB Kookmin, announced this week that in mid-January they will no longer redeem credit card points for bitcoin, according to a report by Korea Biz Wire. This comes after South Korean officials reportedly banned the trade of bitcoin futures in December and drafted emergency measures prohibiting minors, foreigners and banks from bitcoin trading.

One cause for concern is that bitcoin has grown in value more than 12 times since January and remains prone to extreme volatility. In early December, it almost doubled in value from US$10,240 to an all-time high of almost US$20,000, before falling 30 per cent to below US$11,000 then rallying to almost US$16,000.

Despite the fluctuations, retail investors and several major Korean companies are getting in on the action. Samsung announced in May a project using blockchain – the platform for all cryptocurrencies – to track shipping orders in real time. Kakao, maker of the country’s leading messaging app, acquired the fintech start-up Dunamu to launch its own cryptocurrency exchange in October, named Upbit. And video game giant Nexon is now the biggest shareholder in Korbit, Korea’s third-largest cryptocurrency exchange.

But if Korea moves ahead with a full shut down, it would not only end these projects but also make bitcoin less attractive in neighbouring Asian nations, possibly triggering a domino effect.

Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, has an underlying technology that makes it an unhackable commodity that doesn’t need a central bank or a government to guarantee its value. This allows users to make transactions without an intermediary, saving time and money, potentially upending the costly financial services and exchange markets as we know it.

Korea is the third-largest market for bitcoin trading after Japan and the United States, making up roughly 20 per cent of all bitcoin trading, and the country’s recent change of heart comes amid other nations also placing restrictions on the cryptocurrency.

On December 25, the Israeli Securities Agency announced companies will no longer be able to trade in bitcoin on the Tel Aviv stock exchange, and in Morocco, Bolivia and Ecuador, bitcoin is completely illegal.

Eugene Mutai, a bitcoin 'miner' and software developer, in Nairobi. Photo: Bloomberg

Concerns seem most profound across Asia, however, where bitcoin is also illegal in Kyrgyzstan, Bangladesh and Nepal. China, which once constituted 90 per cent of all bitcoin trading, banned initial coin offerings (ICOs) in September and began to crack down on exchanges.

In addition, Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda called the surge in bitcoin prices “abnormal” last week, CNBC reported, specifically citing the dangers of speculative investing; the Reserve Bank of India has expressed concern about tax evasion and other misuses; Indonesia seems poised to ban cryptocurrency transactions next year; Vietnam may ban cryptocurrency payments; Singapore warned speculative investors last week about the risk of losing “all their capital”. These cracks in confidence will only widen if South Korea moves against bitcoin.

There are, of course, legitimate concerns about fraud. In December, police busted a US$200 million cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme named MiningMax and the bitcoin exchange BitKRX, which claimed to be a legitimate venture created by the Korea Exchange but was revealed to be fraudulent. The incident gave authorities a reason for more regulations, but some worry they would really be a form of protectionism.

In a November 2016 Korean Law Blog post, Sean Hayes wrote: “Korea has struggled with the acceptance of new technologies that infringe on some of the major vested interests and we suspect that bitcoin will be no different.”

What makes South Korea’s situation different, however, is the existential threat posed by North Korea. Youbit went out of business in December after being hacked, losing one-fifth of its clients’ holdings. It was also attacked in April, when it lost US$35 million. The company did not say how much was taken, or how it happened, but Pyongyang is a leading suspect. North Korean hackers are also believed to be behind the attacks on four South Korean bitcoin exchanges this past summer. The regime also began mining bitcoin in mid-May, and can use what it mines or steals to circumvent sanctions.

Nevertheless, bitcoin enthusiasts feel these challenges can be surmounted with the right combination of regulation and support. “There’s a delicate balance involved,” said Yoo Byung-joon, business administration professor at Seoul National University and co-author of the 2015 research paper “Is Bitcoin a Viable E-Business?: Empirical Analysis of the Digital Currency’s Speculative Nature”.

“But a lot of governments are looking at this very carefully,” he said. “Some are even considering putting their currencies on the blockchain system. The biggest challenge facing bitcoin now is the potential for misuse, but that’s true of any new technology.”

Regarding the government’s announcement that it may shut down bitcoin exchanges, Yoo said: “I think the decision seems too quick. We don’t need to do that, but they worry about fraud or such. But there’s no guarantee that this shutdown will pass Congress, so we have time. Governments, you know, are risk-averse. But economically, I think it’s not a good decision. There’s no need to hurry.”

AFTER ALL THOSE ‘HARD LANDING’ WARNINGS, DO YOU STILL WANT TO BET AGAINST CHINA?

In the 1980s China accounted for just 3 per cent of total global output and later naysayers lined up to criticise attempts at reform, but Beijing has prevailed and seems prepared to weather any storm

In December, the China Economic Quarterly shut up shop after 20 years. To mark the print journal’s passing, the editors looked back at the lessons learnt since 1997, and what they teach about the likely course of China’s development over the next generation.

The first lesson is just how wrong many 20-year-old forecasts about China’s economy turned out to be. From the vantage point of 2017-2018, its economic ascendance appears to have had an air of inevitability about it. But that’s not how things looked in late 1997.

At the time, China was an economic also-ran. Yes, it was home to more than a fifth of the world’s population. But it accounted for just 3 per cent of global economic output, and a similar share of world trade. The average income was on a par with the Congo. Most of the state-controlled industrial base was antiquated and unprofitable.

Across the country, state-owned enterprises were kept in business only by open-ended loans from state banks, operating as a form of welfare. As a result, some 50 per cent of the banking system’s outstanding loans were reckoned to be non-performing, with the entire financial system often said to be in danger of imminent collapse.

Worse, it seemed political appetites for economic reform had diminished since the opening up of the 1980s – an opening that led to runaway inflation and the political uprising of 1989. In the 1990s, things seemed to go backwards, with a tightening of central government control and an entrenchment of interests that saw the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) established as one of the country’s primary forces in business.

And just to cement the pessimistic view, in the summer of 1997 the tiger economies of Southeast Asia were struck by a round of deval‎uations, defaults and debt deleveraging that threatened, domino-fashion, to topple China, too. In early 1998, one diplomat in the economic section of the US embassy in Beijing was so sure that China’s economy was going the same way as Thailand’s and Indonesia’s that he was prepared to bet all-comers US$1,000 that Beijing would deval‎ue the yuan by at least 20 per cent during the

He lost his bet. What he had failed to take into account was the remarkable political will and executive ability of premier Zhu Rongji. As China Economic Quarterly (CEQ) editor Arthur Kroeber wrote last month: “The achievements of Zhu’s five-year tenure were little short of astonishing. Were it possible to measure such things precisely, he would certainly hold the world record for the most economic reforms achieved in the least amount of time.”

Zhu’s administration broke up China’s monolithic ministries, restructured big state concerns into something resembling commercial businesses, closed down the most inefficient rust-belt operations (ruthlessly laying off tens of millions of industrial workers in the process), sold off thousands of smaller enterprises, forced the PLA to surrender its commercial interests, cleaned up the banking system and privatised China’s housing stock to ignite a multi-year property and construction boom.

And along with his boss Jiang Zemin, Zhu secured China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation, a move that helped pave the way for the explosion of trade and investment which followed.

The economic upheavals were so deep-seated and far-reaching that many of the outside observers who had been worried that a failure to reform would lead to economic and political collapse promptly started to predict instead that an overenthusiastic approach to reform would now produce the same result.AFP

They were wrong. And so were the legions of economists who predicted China’s financial and economic collapse as a result of Beijing’s massive credit-fuelled investment binge during the 2008-09 global crisis, or from the rapid build up of debt in the years that followed.

For 20 years, China has defied every forecast of collapse to become the world’s second-biggest economy, and by far the most important driver of global growth. What is more, the Communist Party now appears more solidly entrenched in power than at any time in the last few decades.

So what lessons can all this teach us about the next 20 years? Most obviously, it doesn’t pay to bet against either China’s economic development or the primacy of the Communist Party.

For decades, observers have argued that China’s model of state-directed development was deeply inefficient. Repeatedly they warned that it would misallocate capital on a colossal scale, leading to declining returns on investment, a debt crisis, and stalled growth, if not an outright economic contraction.

Yet, while China’s development model was far from perfectly efficient, it has proved effective enough. And while capital misallocation may have seen the value of liabilities exceed that of assets across much of the state sector, that matters little. It is not insolvency that triggers financial and economic crises, but illiquidity. And as long as the state controls the domestic financial system and constrains flows of cross-border capital, the chances of a crippling liquidity crunch remain minimal.

So, yes, China’s growth will slow over the coming 20 years. That’s inevitable given the sheer size its economy has reached. But the slowdown won’t trouble most Chinese people. As the economy continues gradually to rebalance from investment to consumption, from manufacturing to services, incomes will continue to increase, with the number of households reckoned to be affluent middle-class set to triple even as growth slows.

That doesn’t mean the next 20 years will unfold entirely according to the Communist Party’s script. Demographic headwinds will become increasingly strong as China ages. And exporting influence around the world will prove tough given China’s unappetising political model and the continued reliance of its economic model on capital controls. But will China’s political and economic system collapse in the next 20 years? Looking at the history of the past 20 documented by CEQ, it would be foolish to bet on it.

[Erika♡]

처음 참가합니다 공지사항에 댓글로 정보 달았는데 그럼 여기다 참석 신청하면 되나요~?

[yoon.]

넵! 토요일에 뵐게요 ㅎ

[Erika♡]

죄송한데 급한 일이 생겨서ㅠ 담주 토요일부터 참석할게요ㅠ 죄송합니다ㅠㅠ

[Chan E]

참석합니다!!

[Elizabeth Choi]

저 처음으로 참석해요~^^ 잘부탁드려요!

[yoon.]

낼뵙겠습니다!

[DDave]

Jeossi 처음 참석합니다