“The request is simple, please include... supply chain finance” Bank of England release FOI correspondence with former PM Cameron, lobbying for inclusion of supply chain finance, offered by Greensill Capital, within post COVID support scheme to buy forms of commercial debt:
Greensill contacted Bank/HMT on ‘a number of occasions’.
Cameron contacted Bank on 5th and 7th March 2020.
DC/ Greensill/ Bank call on 17 March.
On 18 March Bank announced CCFF scheme, excluding supply chain finance.
This is a rather interesting sentence from Cameron to then Governor Carney’s private secretary introducing Greensill...
“GC is now the world’s largest provider of Supply Chain Finance and has the mandate for the UK government”.. which is a reference to...
... the point elaborated on in Greensill’s specific proposal to Deputy Gov Cunliffe for why the Bank’s emergency debt purchases should (as in 2010) include supply chain finance...
“We are the sole provider of HMGs supply chain finance programmes across all areas...”
DC’s email pleads with Deputy Governor over objections relating to Greensills use of foreign currency, support for foreign supply chains, and in particular that this corporate facility was not for a financial institution...
Greensill caught between that and not being a bank...
New set of emails to the Treasury released...
Of note: an amount of between £4-10bn mentioned for the refused application for the Commercial Paper facility.
Treasury seem pretty sceptical at this point, and Cameron and Greensill basically argue its to help NHS/ pharmacies...
... so what changed by June? At that point Greensill is entrusted with actually itself handing out taxpayer backed COVID support loans under separate CLBILs scheme, after having badgered Treasury over its support for NHS and pharmacies, and lends money to Gupta’s steel companies.
Again back in March - pretty sceptical note - Treasury Perm Sec reports “incoming from my old boss” - Cameron.... and “well done for holding off ⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️”...
And then the mention of the former Cabinet Secretary Sedwill is new - he introduces Greensill to second perm sec of Treasury - which rather suggests there were more emails/texts/ lobbying elsewhere (ie other than HMT & Bank of England that we have seen)...
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Staggering to see emails suggest Mandelson advised JP Morgan’s Dimon via Epstein to “mildly threaten” Cabinet colleague Alastair Darling over banker bonus tax.
The Dimon call DID happen, Darling told me about it, including apparent threat to shun gilts & re HQ…
Threats to Darling, Dimon, the gilt market, HQs, apparently orchestrated by Epstein upon advice from financial crisis Cabinet member Mandelson … and a conversation with the late Alastair Darling that has troubled me for a decade and a half, that I would never have imagined unlocked by Epstein files… bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…
And here late Chancellor describing in his book Beyond the Brink how a “v angry” Dimon rang him up in December 2009, days after Mandelsons “mild threat” email
“[Dimon] said that his bank bought a lot of UK debt and he wondered if that was now such a good idea”.
just had confirmed live on BBC Breakfast, from here in Davos, that yes, President Trump sent THAT note to the Norwegian PM saying that because they hadn’t given the Nobel Peace Prize, he could now justify owning Greenland.
At one of the seats of Western power, No 10 Downing Street, the UK Prime Minister is asked TWICE about whether President Trump is thinking rationally…😳
after news emerged that Trump had messaged Norways PM linking Greenland justification to his lack of Nobel Prize
it comes down to compute power, who has it, who can fund it…
When I met Sundar Pichai, his particular pride was not at that point Gemini 3, nor YouTube nor latest smartphone…
but its AI Chip, the Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, Ironwood
2/ this is hugely economic significant.
raw material of the AI boom is compute power offered by those TPU chips, & more commonly now, by Nvidia’s AI chips, when assembled into pods and racks, and supercomputers capable of training AI models and rapid inference… which I saw at the TPU lab:
🚨 Mind blowing interview with Turing award-winning Yoshua Bengio for @BBCNewsnight one of the three founding fathers of AI, is now warning:
“The worst-case scenario is human extinction.”
AI isn’t just risky — it could end us.
1/10 🧵
📺
2. 🤖 He warns that today’s most powerful AIs are already learning to lie, cheat, even blackmail —
because we’ve trained them to win.
Bengio reveals AI's "scary behavior" & self-preservation tendencies. #AI #AISafety #Blackmail
📺
👁️ In chilling experiments, AI lied to a human to get its task done, says Bengio
🤖 blackmailing an engineer after reading in an email it was going to be replaced.
♟️ choosing to hack a computer to win a chess game
US customs messaging note quietly slipped out last night shows that smartphones, the number 1 Chinese export to the US by value last year, exempted from the 125% tariff… alongside chips, processors, wafers, lcd panels, LEDs etc…
8517.13.00.00
Smartphones
US has excluded the single biggest Chinese export, and certainly the most high profile finished good from the tariffs, without publicly announcing it…
Avoiding the very public repricing of IPhones etc across Apple stores, but only in the US….
While obviously smartphones/ iPhones being exempted is big news for now…
Here’s full list of exemptions according to Harmonised US tariff codes that I plugged into its database… lots of semiconductor parts, circuits, processors, solid state storage, flat panel touchscreens 👀