Zero Hedge
“For The First Time Ever Russia Beats Saudi Arabia As China’s Top Oil Supplier”
While OPEC members were infighting over crude production and export quotas, posturing with temporary production cuts (just so the Saudis could get a six month reprieve during which it clears out a massive internal crude glut), Russia was busy capturing market share, and according to overnight Chinese data, Russia overtook Saudi Arabia as China’s top oil supplier last year for the first time ever boosted by robust demand from independent Chinese «teapot» refineries.
Russia boosted oil exports to China by 24% from 2015 to 52.5 million metric tons, or 1.05 million barrels per day, according to data released Monday by the General Administration of Customs, cited by Bloomberg. In a blow to Ridyah’s ambitions, the Middle Eastern kingdom slipped to second place, shipping 51 million tons, or 1.02 million barrels per day, little changed from a year earlier.
For December, Russia also held the top spot with supplies up 4.8 percent from the same month a year earlier at 1.19 million bpd. Meanwhile Saudi sales dropped nearly 20 percent from a year earlier to 841,820 bpd, data from the Chinese General Administration of Customs showed.
Project Syndicate
“A New Deal to Save Europe”
The European idea is being driven into retreat by the combined force of a denial, an insurgency, and a fallacy. The EU establishment’s denial that the Union’s economic architecture was never designed to sustain the banking crisis of 2008 has resulted in deflationary forces that delegitimize the European project. The predictable reaction to deflation has been the insurgency of anti-European parties across the continent. And, most worrying of all, the establishment has responded with the fallacy that “federation-lite” can stem the nationalist tide.
The Economist
“Vast crowds gather to protest Donald Trump”
THE first full day of Donald Trump’s presidency was marked by some vast protest marches in America and some pretty big ones elsewhere in the world. Demonstrating after an election is a strange thing to do: generally the most effective time to protest is when casting a ballot. The Americans who voted for Mr. Trump will have seen the thronged streets and concluded that there are a lot of sore losers. But the “Women’s March on Washington”, organized by activists, did not feel like a protest against the result. It was more like an amble for civility.
In that respect, the march was partly about making the side that lost in November feel better. That’s understandable, but there is also a danger for those who oppose the president from the left here. Politics has become so much about signaling what sort of person you are that the hard work of persuading people who disagree gets forgotten. On Inauguration Day the city was filled with ardent Trump supporters. Yet rather than try to win converts, the two sides mostly ignored each other, politely. Waving a Planned Parenthood banner in a crowd of people who are pro-choice is a political act, but it is a minor one compared with talking to someone who voted for a candidate you despise and trying to find some common ground. Those who oppose the president need to spend more time thinking about how to win over people who voted for Mr. Trump and less time talking to each other.