From: elmatador | 11/28/2022 10:31:14 AM | | | | The datacenters' industry prevailing model has been to concentrate the datacenters (DCs) in the northen hemisphere and invest heavily in submarine cables to suck the data from faraway to store and process in Europe and the US.
But the data volumes are growing too fast and the Easy Money years are ending. The industry is likely not have the CAPEX -as Easy money comes to a halt- to keep bulding submarine cables to keep up with the data demand
Expect the industry to spread the geography of their DCs.
See the example of Latin America
Spotlight: Latin America’s next submarine cables BnamericasPublished: Wednesday, July 20, 2022 5g Fiber Capacity Demand Networks Show 5 more
 Latin America will see major submarine cable projects come into operation in the next few years, helping to boost the small number currently connecting to the region.
The world has nearly 510 fiber submarine cables for data transportation in operation or under development, according to the TeleGeography database. Roughly 70 connect to Latin America, or 13.7%, which is deemed far from sufficient by experts.
Speaking at a webinar in May, Latin American development bank CAF’s digital infrastructure chief Eduardo Chomali said that over 30 submarine cables would have to be built in Latin America in the next decade to meet increasing connectivity demands.
According to Chomali, Latin America is connected by 68 submarine cables, which has increased the region's capacity five-fold in the last 20 years. However, 23 of these are more than 15 years old and 18 are over 20 and approaching the end of their 25-year useful life, he said.
While 30 new systems in 10 years may seem difficult to achieve, several new projects reaching and leaving Latin American shores are on track for the next years.
BNamericas provides an update on some of the submarine cable projects expected to see daylight soon.
GIGNET-1
Estimated ready-for-service date: 4Q22
US-headquartered telecom and digital infrastructure firm GigNet, largely focused on connectivity projects in Mexico’s Riviera Maya, is advancing the launch of GigNet-1, a 1,100km submarine cable to connect Cancún with Boca Raton in the US.
The project has seen the completion of the desktop route survey, regulatory and permitting feasibility studies for both Florida and Mexico, market demand and analysis studies, selection and contracting of key suppliers for the system design, equipment, and installation, as well as the marine survey.
The installation of the cable was commissioned to IT International Telecom and US submarine systems developer Xtera, which is also supplying fiber and amplifiers (repeaters) and the submarine line terminals in Florida and Mexico.
The system is known as the first new subsea cable from Florida to the Yucatan Peninsula in over 20 years.
In Mexico, GigNet already operates a 250km cable that goes from Cancún to Tulum and it will be the major tenant on the GigNet-1 system, providing IP transit and connectivity throughout the region.
AURORA
Estimated ready-for-service date: 1Q23
First announced in 2017 and owned by FP Telecommunications, the Aurora cable system is expected to go live in the first quarter of next year, running 5,500km from West Florida to Manta in Ecuador, with landing points in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, the Cayman Islands and Colombia.
Aurora is being supplied by Nokia's subsidiary Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) and it will require an investment of US$310mn, according to the latest available information.
Its development status has not been updated since at least 2020 and, as of press time, BNamericas had not been able to confirm the latest status of the project.
According to some reports, FPT would be the developer of the cable, but not its operator, with maintenance costs being shouldered by customers purchasing fiber pairs.

Source: FPT
GALAPAGOS CABLE SYSTEMS (GCS)
Estimated ready-for-service date: 2Q23
Galapagos Cable Systems (GCS), the Singaporean company in charge of the namesake project, and Xtera, signed an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract in October last year for the build-out of a 1,280km cable from the mainland to the Galapagos islands.
The contract triggered the project’s execution through the permitting and design phase, and the marine survey in early 2022.
State-run telco CNT in Ecuador will become one of the system’s main anchor-tenants once it is operational. The main purpose of the system is to enable the development of scientific research, commerce, tourism and education in Galapagos.
“A key benefit of the system is to provide the Galapagos archipelago with high capacity and high quality national and international telecommunications services, both fixed and mobile, fiber optic broadband internet, and 4G mobile services with 5G in the future,” according to a release from Xtera.
With a design capacity of 20 terabytes per second, the project is expected to come into service in the second quarter of 2023, with an investment of US$50mn.
GCS said that the cable has the capacity to increase Galapagos' GDP by some 25%.
In addition to Xtera, which will provide optical solutions, NSW/Prysmian will manufacture the cable and IT International Telecom will be in charge of marine installation.
FIRMINA
Estimated ready-for-service date: 2023
Google’s Firmina, the company’s second proprietary continental submarine cable in Latin America – that is, for its exclusive use – will connect the US east coast to Las Toninas in Argentina, with landing points in Praia Grande in Brazil and Punta del Este in Uruguay.
Google is also the full owner and operator of Curie, a cable launched in 2019 that is running from Chile to the US.
The company also operates three submarine systems connected to Brazil: the cables Monet, which runs from Santos/Praia Grande to Boca Raton, Florida; Junior, from Santos to Rio de Janeiro; and Tannat, from Santos to Maldonado in Uruguay.
The cables went live in 2017, 2018 and 2021, respectively.
Of these, Monet and Tannat are owned in a consortium with other companies and Junior is fully owned by Google.
Construction of the Firmina submarine cable, which is scheduled to become operational next year, is part of a five-year US$1.2bn investment plan for Latin America.
In May last year, it was reported that Google had bought a 30ha property for a datacenter project at Uruguay’s Pando science and technology park in capital Montevideo.
The Uruguayan government confirmed at the time that it had been engaged in talks with Google for such a project. On its part, Google do not comment on such developments.

Source: Google
CARRIBEAN EXPRESS
Estimated ready-for-service date: 3Q25
Caribbean Express (CX) is being developed by Atlanta-based Ocean Networks, an expert in installation and maintenance of submarine cables with a focus on repurposing out-of-service cables for scientific research.
The 4,500km system will connect Points of Presence (PoP) between Boca Raton (Florida) and Maria Chiquita/Corozal (Panama), with branch connections to Mexico (Cancún), Grand Cayman (Health City), Honduras (Puerto Cortés), Costa Rica (Limón) and Colombia (Cartagena).
The company has not disclosed who its suppliers are but says CX will use the latest Space Division Multiplexing (SDM) technology, and have 18 fiber pairs at a minimum of 18 terabytes per pair.
Ocean Networks also says that CX will be the only cable in the Caribbean region to offer full fiber pairs to the market.
The company provided the following estimated station-to-station roundtrip latency for the system:
Boca Raton - Corozal: 29.38ms
Boca Raton - Cartagena: 29.76ms
Boca Raton - Cancún: 11.60ms

Source: Ocean Networks
CARNIVAL SUBMARINE NETWORK-1 (CSN-1)
Estimated launch: 2025
Ecuadoran telecom firm Telconet and ASN signed a supply contract in March and announced the beginning of the construction of Carnival Submarine Network-1 (CSN-1).
When ready, CSN-1 will run 4,500km from Ecuador to Florida’s west coast, with landing points in Panama and Colombia. The system will rely on ASN’s SDM Open-Cable technology solutions.
According to ASN, Telconet has also relied on the services of DRG Undersea Consulting to support the implementation of CSN-1.
In addition to the two stretches planned, the project could also see landing points in Guatemala, Costa Rica and Mexico, according to Telconet.
In addition to CSN-1, Telconet is one of the owners of the PAN-AM cable, the first submarine cable of Ecuador, and the Pacific Caribbean Cable System (PCCS).
The Guayaquil-based firm’s Cable Andino is the owner of PCCS together with Telxius, C&W and SETAR. Telconet and DRG also worked together during the construction of PCCS.

Source: Telconet
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From: elmatador | 11/29/2022 12:22:35 AM | | | | Recruiters at Amazon could throw more than $700,000 at a qualified engineer or project manager.
At gaming company Roblox, a top-level engineer could make $1.2 million, according to Levels.fyi.
Productivity software firm Asana, which held its stock market debut in 2020, has never turned a profit but offered engineers starting salaries of up to $198,000, according to H1-B visa data.
Fast forward to the last quarter of 2022, and those halcyon days are a distant memory.
Layoffs at Cisco, Meta, Amazon and Twitter have totaled nearly 29,000 workers, according to data collected by the website Layoffs.fyi.
Across the tech industry, the cuts add up to over 130,000 workers. HP
announced this week it’s eliminating 4,000 to 6,000 jobs over the next three years.
For many investors, it was just a matter of time.
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To: DinoNavarre who wrote (9960) | 11/29/2022 12:54:30 AM | From: elmatador | | | SPACs allowed companies that didn’t quite have the profile to satisfy traditional IPO investors to backdoor their way onto the public market. In the U.S. last year, 619 SPACs went public, compared with 496 traditional IPOs.
ELMAT: The Subprime this time around are the SPAC companies. Like people who could not afford a house found the backdoor through Subrime, SPAC found a backdoor too...
The CNBC Post SPAC Index, which tracks the performance of SPAC stocks after debut, is down over 70% since inception and by about two-thirds in the past year. Many SPACs never found a target and gave the money back to investors. Chamath Palihapitiya, once dubbed the SPAC king, shut down two deals last month after failing to find suitable merger targets and returned $1.6 billion to investors.
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From: elmatador | 11/30/2022 9:12:03 AM | | | | The Era of Easy Money Is Over. What Does That Change?
Analysis by Jill R. Shah | Bloomberg
November 28, 2022 at 12:04 a.m. EST
An unparalleled era of easy money came to a screeching halt in 2022, as central banks shifted gears to fight inflation.
The US Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate from near zero to 4% in a mere six months. Companies, countries and consumers that had borrowed heavily when doing so was cheap now faced new strains, just as banks rediscovered caution in lending.
This sudden tightening of credit conditions not only increased the risks of recession and defaults but raised worries about financial vulnerabilities emerging that had previously been covered up by borrowing.
1. Why was money so cheap for so long? Central banks opened spigots wide to keep the global financial crisis from triggering a depression, using low interest rates and other measures to try to stimulate business activity.
They kept rates low for years in the face of a notably anemic recovery, then opened the faucets again when the pandemic struck: The Fed cut interest rates back to near zero and didn’t raise them until March 2022.
2. What did that lead to? It helped fuel a period of extraordinary growth in US financial markets, save for the short, sharp pandemic drop in 2020. The US stock market rose more than 580% after the financial crisis, accounting for price gains and dividend payments.
It also led to a massive increase in debt taken on by companies and countries. From 2007 to 2020, government debt as a share of gross domestic product globally jumped to 98% from 58%, and non-financial corporate debt as a share of GDP surged to 97% from 77%, according to data compiled by Ed Altman, professor emeritus of finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
And in a hunt for better returns than safe debt assets like Treasuries offered, investors flooded companies with cash, buying bonds from risky ventures that paid higher yields while overlooking their lower credit quality. Yet despite the ballooning debt, inflation remained subdued in most developed economies -- in the US, it rarely reached the Fed’s target of 2%.
3. What changed? Inflation arrived with a roar in 2021 as pandemic restrictions waned while supply chains remained disrupted. In 2022, exacerbated by energy shortages and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, inflation reached over 9% in the US and 10% in the European region. Led by the Fed, central banks began raising interest rates at the fastest pace in over four decades. They’re aiming to slow growth by reducing consumer demand, hoping in turn that prices will cool, too. Between March and November, the Fed increased the ceiling of the rate it uses to manage the economy, known as the federal funds rate, to 4% from 0.25%. Economists expect the central bank will hike the rate to 5% by March 2023 and hold it there for most of the year.
4. What does this mean for investors and markets? After the rate hikes began, the US equity market plunged as much as 25% from its peak, as investors braced for the slowdown the interest rate hikes would likely bring.
Bond prices fell by the most in decades, as the prospect of new issu-ances paying higher rates made existing low-yield bonds worth less.
Both investment-grade and high-yield companies cut back on borrowing. One of the most rate-sensitive areas of the US economy, the housing market, saw sales slow significantly. And newly cautious investors eschewed the riskiest assets such as leveraged loans.
5. What does it mean for consumers and companies? For US businesses, average yields for newly issued investment-grade debt jumped to around 6% and high-yield debt jumped to nearly 10% by November.
That comes on top of higher labor costs, especially in sectors like health care. Home buyers are facing sharply steeper monthly payments, as the 30-year fixed mortgage rate topped 7%, the highest level in two decades.
And despite significant wage gains for US workers over the last two years, record inflation has begun to eat into incomes. Outside the US, the Fed’s rate increases also strengthened the dollar relative to other currencies, which meant that dollar-denominated sovereign and corporate debt in emerging markets became a lot more expensive to repay.
6. What risks come along with the shift? Easy access to money in the US has led to higher and higher levels of debt among the riskiest corporate borrowers, especially those owned by private equity firms. A commonly cited measure of debt to earnings has ticked up in the leveraged loan market over the last 10 years.
That means portfolios of collateralized loan obligations, which are loans bundled into bonds, grew more exposed to risks as well.
Globally, zombie firms -- companies that don’t earn enough to cover their interest expenses -- have become more common.
Higher costs across the board -- for capital, labor and goods -- has created expectations that the default rate will rise, especially among highly indebted companies.
7. Could there be another financial crisis? Lending rules were tightened after the collapse of credit markets in 2008. Yet the speed at which rates are being hiked is increasing fears that something in the financial system will break.
In September, a hedging strategy routinely used by UK pension funds backfired when yields on government bonds jumped faster than the models the funds used had allowed for. Intervention by the Bank of England was needed to calm market turmoil.
8. Are there reasons for optimism? Yes, on several fronts. So far, US consumers and corporate borrowers broadly have been resilient. Easy access to markets in the wake of the pandemic enabled many companies to refinance their debt at low interest rates, meaning they won’t have to go back to the market immediately.
And pandemic stimulus payments and subsequent higher wages set up households with a cushion to weather some level of economic slowdown.
Overall, the share of risk in consumer obligations such as mortgages and auto loans has fallen since 2006, according to a UBS Group AG report.
©2022 Bloomberg L.P.
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From: elmatador | 12/1/2022 3:57:09 AM | | | | Only now are the true costs of quantitative easing making themselves felt – all £200bn of them
These are real losses the taxpayer is now being forced to pay to the commercial banking sector
JEREMY WARNER30 November 2022 • 11:00am
The direct fiscal costs of quantitative easing are beginning to materialise
Tricky stuff, quantitative easing. Many of us, including yours truly, were deeply suspicious of the manoeuvre when the Bank of England first embarked on QE in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis.
To the intense irritation of the Bank of England, most journalists would routinely refer to the asset purchase facility (APF) as central bank money printing, plain and simple. No, no, no, said the Bank – it was merely another way of reducing interest rates so as to compensate for the deep recession of the time.
For a while, the official explanation just about held water; in its early years, QE didn't have the inflationary consequences many predicted, and eventually we all got used to it, so that as each successive crisis was met by another burst of money printing, we all just shrugged and said so-what? Perhaps there was such a thing as a free lunch after all.
The seed had nevertheless been sown for the later magic money tree, which duly blossomed in the madness of the pandemic; the always thin line that separates the legitimate pursuit of the inflation target from overt monetary financing of government deficits was deftly and massively breached.
As fast as governments could issue the debt needed to pay for the vast costs of closing their economies down, central banks stood by ready to buy it all up again in the markets. Since the central bank is in virtually all cases a wholly owned subsidiary of the sponsoring government, governments were effectively buying up their own debt. It was almost bound to be inflationary the moment demand came bouncing back from the deep sleep of lockdown, and so it has proved.
But it is not just the inflationary costs governments are now having to wrestle with. As it turns out, there is also a direct fiscal cost which only now is beginning to materialise.
This was partially foreseen, but not spelt out to the public at large. A conspiracy of silence operated around the likely sting in the tail.
In essence, QE is the financing of government bond purchases through the creation of short term central bank reserves. Investors swap their bonds for reserves. This works fine, and to the advantage of governments, as long as interest rates are falling, for what is basically happening is that expensive long term debt is being replaced with less costly short term debt.
The resulting profit from the interest rate differential would then be transferred from the central bank to the sponsoring government. A recent Bank of England paper estimated these transfers at £123bn since the start of QE in 2009.
Unfortunately, the tables are now reversed. With the return of inflation, the interest rate on reserves has risen above that of the average in the Bank's £847bn holding of government bonds. Having banked and spent the previous profits, governments are now being forced to finance the consequent losses. Already the costs are biting hard. Last month, the UK Government was forced to pay the Bank of England the thick end of £1bn to cover QE losses. The same Bank of England report anticipates total transfers this year of £30bn, and the same the year after.
Separate Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecasts suggest the UK Treasury will need to pay the Bank of England £133bn over the next five to six years – or nearly as much as it costs to run the NHS for a year – more than wiping out the previous profits.
It is a similar picture, though on a much larger scale, at both the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank (ECB).
Britain is an outrider in recognising these costs. Eventually, the ECB will be forced to fess up too. Expect a furious row in the German Bundestag when it emerges that the ECB is in negative equity and that it will be Germany coughing up the lion's share of the money needed for recapitalisation.
It is tempting to dismiss all this as little more than accounting mumbo jumbo of no real world significance. Regrettably, this is not the case. These are real losses, or money which owing to the follies of QE the taxpayer is now being forced to pay to the commercial banking sector.
The Government could of course limit the transfers by coercing the central bank into paying less on reserves than Bank Rate, as suggested by Paul Tucker, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England, but this would seriously interfere with the transmission of monetary policy as well as risk a flight of capital out of UK reserves into alternative, overseas depositories that pay more.
But let's not despair. It is more than possible that things won't turn out to be quite as bad as either the OBR or the Bank of England forecasts suggest. Two members of the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee have already expressed incredulity at the future path of interest rates implied by markets and on which these forecasts of future QE losses are based.
If inflation and rates turn out to be lower than the markets expect, then the transfers too will be correspondingly reduced. Looking out ten years into the future, the Bank of England reckons the eventual tally could be anything between £50bn and £200bn, or in other words a wide range. All the same, it only goes to show that there is no mess quite so bad that official intervention won't make even worse.
In its latest forecasts, the OBR reckons that UK Government debt interest spending more than doubles in cash terms from £56.4 billion (2.4pc of GDP) last year to peak at £120.4 billion this year (4.8pc of GDP), the highest since immediately following the Second World War both as a share of GDP and as a share of revenue (12pc).
It then averages £93 billion (3.4pc of GDP) across the five years from 2023-24 to 2027- 28.
The upshot is that the debt interest burden over the next five years is projected to be almost twice as large as UK governments have become accustomed to over the past two decades.
Again, it may be that the OBR is overstating the destruction, but when MPs throw up their hands in horror at the ever expanding size of the state – total public spending is projected to rise from 39.3pc of GDP in 2019-20 to 43.4pc of GDP in 2027-28 – they should bear in mind that two thirds of this additional spending comes not from government overreach, but high debt interest payments, a totally wasteful transfer from taxpayers to bondholders that results directly from allowing inflation to get out of control. Much of this increase in debt interest, moreover, stems from the folly of QE.
Some comfort could possibly be drawn from recent International Monetary Fund projections for UK public indebtedness, which paint a much more flattering picture than that of the OBR. Indeed, on the IMF forecasts, the UK looks to be the star G7 performer, with net debt falling to 56.5pc of GDP in five years’ time, against France at 106.9pc. Stick that in your remoaner pipe and smoke it.
But would that it were so. As IMF insiders now sheepishly admit, their forecasts for the UK are a complete dog's dinner, partially based on some wholly delusional assumptions, including the King Canute-like fantasy that because the UK Government had set a target for debt to be falling in three years’ time, the policies to make this happen would miraculously come into being. The IMF's Article IV forecasts for the UK, expected in the New Year, will be much more in keeping with those of the OBR. Hey ho.
This article is an extract from The Telegraph’s Economic Intelligence newsletter. Sign up here to get exclusive insight from two of the UK’s leading economic commentators – Ambrose Evans-Pritchard and Jeremy Warner – delivered direct to your inbox every Tuesday. |
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To: DinoNavarre who wrote (9972) | 12/1/2022 9:58:43 AM | From: Elroy Jetson | | | We can clearly see how stupid Emperor Xi has been refusing to use the best world-class vaccinations in China.
China has developed their own mRNA vaccine, but it's only being used in Indonesia. - reuters.com You just can't make this shit up.
With prevalent effective vaccinations the very limited number of Covid deaths in the US now occurs almost exclusively among unvaccinated elderly people. A Darwinian culling of stupid older Republicans.
Most vaccinated Americans never know they have Covid, due to a lack of symptoms, unless they work in a healthcare or high security facility with frequent testing.
China has instead chosen ineffective vaccines coupled with continued frequent closures of their economy. Oh well the Chinese Communist Party claims they know best. LOL
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To: elmatador who wrote (9970) | 12/1/2022 1:00:42 PM | From: Broken_Clock | | | I actually disagree with this:
"Inflation arrived with a roar in 2021"
The gubbiemint adjusts inflation stats as it sees fit to accomplish a narrative that, in the end, benefits Wall St.
Inflation has been far in excess of the mythical "2%" for a long time.
shadowstats.com
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To: DinoNavarre who wrote (9972) | 12/2/2022 8:12:17 AM | From: elmatador | | | One of the consequences of the prolonged period of very cheap money and abundant liquidity was to encourage some asset managers to offer relatively liquid products that invest in relatively illiquid assets — in both private and public markets.
These products can behave very differently in a world of more patchy liquidity.

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