Very interesting to interview the German finance minister Christian Lindner for BBC News again at #WEF23… @c_lindner -
* inflation peaked & faster European recovery than expected
* Germany “completely diversified” energy & is today “not dependent on Russia”
* “new German model”
FULL STORY:
German finance minister @c_lindner
“Germany still dependent on energy imports, but today, not from Russian imports but from global markets…” as Germany completed LNG terminal in record 8 months.. claiming it as basis for “new economic model”
Thread: 1. Lindner claims with a series of supply side reform “we are about to change the German business model” and is no longer dependent on Russian energy: #Wef23
2.
Bit of a dig at the “Merkel era” of low competitiveness, epitomised by the fact it took 20 years to build Berlin airport… now says “the new German speed is 8 months” a reference to the 2 new LNG terminals commissioned from scratch on the Baltic coast
3. NEW
German finance minister tells BBC says “negative side effects of [US] Inflation Reduction Act for European economies” is an “opportunity for new negotiations” via US-EU trade diplomacy, waivers or even a US-EU trade deal but “have to avoid competition on more subsidies”
4. Is Germany on board with US push to reduce dependence on China?
Lindner: “I’m not in favour of any kind of decoupling from the Chinese market… we have to have a different approach.. we have to maintain China’s dependency on our technologies… diversification not decoupling”
5. Is Germany doing enough to help Ukraine defeat the Russians?
“We make our decisions in close cooperation with our allies, especially the US..and we jointly decide about the support of Ukraine with further military goods, then Germany will participate”
Ref to Leopard 2 tank?
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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 👀