Council on Foreign Relations: Daily newsbrief Nov. 15, 2022

November 15, 2022
Editor’s note: For the duration of the twenty-seventh Conference of the Parties (COP27), the Daily News Brief will include a special section dedicated to developments at the climate conference.
Top of the Agenda

G20 Summit Focuses on Ukraine War

A draft communiqué from today’s Group of Twenty (G20) summit in Bali, Indonesia, said “most members strongly condemned the war in Ukraine” and its consequences for the world economy, the Financial Times reported. The draft also denounced using or threatening to use nuclear weapons. Russian President Vladimir Putin did not attend the summit, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appeared in a video address.  Deals on climate policy and funding were also announced, with the U.S. and Indonesian presidents unveiling a $20 billion plan (Bloomberg) to move Indonesia away from coal power. Ahead of the summit, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Indonesia said they will cooperate on forest preservation (Reuters). The countries collectively contain more than half the world’s tropical rain forests.
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COP27: What’s at Stake for the World?

Council on Foreign Relations

The COP27 climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, closes out another year of disasters: record-breaking floods, deadly heat waves, and devastating droughts. The urgency for the world’s leaders to make progress at this conference has never been higher, but many obstacles remain. The Council on Foreign Relations explains the issues and lays out what’s at stake in the world’s fight against climate change. 
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Council on Foreign Relations – Daily news brief Nov. 14, 2022

Editor’s note: For the duration of the twenty-seventh Conference of the Parties (COP27), the Daily News Brief will include a special section dedicated to developments at the climate conference.
Top of the Agenda

Biden, Xi Hold First In-Person Meeting

U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping signaled an interest in improving cooperation (Nikkei) on global issues during their first in-person meeting of Biden’s presidency. The meeting lasted three hours, and they also discussed policy toward Taiwan (NYT), China’s human rights record, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to a White House readout. The readout said Biden told Xi that U.S. policy toward Taiwan has not changed, and that Washington objects to Beijing’s “coercive and increasingly aggressive reactions” toward the island. The leaders spoke in Bali, Indonesia, where they will attend the Group of Twenty (G20) summit this week. Their meeting comes amid tensions related to U.S. restrictions on China’s chip sector and Chinese military drills that followed U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August.
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The spectacular collapse of a $30 billion crypto exchange should come as no surprise

Published: November 11, 2022 5.05am GMT The Conversation

Author

  1. John Hawkins John Hawkins is a Friend of The Conversation.Senior Lecturer, Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society, University of Canberra

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Not long ago, FTX was one of the world’s largest trading platforms for cryptocurrencies. Founded in 2019, the Bahamas-based crypto exchange had a meteoric rise to prominence, and was valued at more than US$30 billion earlier this year.

All that has changed in the past two weeks. First, concerns emerged about links between FTX and an asset-trading firm called Alameda Research, including suggestions that customers’ funds have been transferred from FTX to Alameda.

A few days later, rival firm Binance (the biggest crypto exchange) announced it would sell its holdings of FTT tokens, a crypto that reportedly comprises much of Alameda’s assets.

Panicked customers rushed to withdraw funds from FTX, and the company is now on the brink of collapse, with a banner message on its website announcing it is “currently unable to process withdrawals”.

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ASEAN and China announce ACFTA upgrade

ASEAN

PHNOM PENH, 13 November 2022 – The Leaders of ASEAN and China welcomed the official launch of negotiations for the upgrade of the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area (ACFTA). The upgrade negotiations are meant to ensure that ACFTA contributes to the further deepening and broadening of ASEAN-China economic relations and to both region’s post-pandemic economic recovery. The announcement on the upgrade of the ACFTA was made at the 25th ASEAN-China Summit.

The ACFTA is ASEAN’s oldest FTA among its Dialogue Partners. Upgrading the ACFTA sends a signal to the private sector and all stakeholders that both ASEAN and China are committed to make the ACFTA more relevant to businesses, future-ready, and responsive to global challenges.

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US Dept. of Treasury Report to Congress (Nov. 2022): Macroeconomic and Foreign Exchange Policies of Major Trading Partner of the United States

Read full report >>

Excerpt on Vietnam

Treasury Conclusions Related to the 2015 Act

Vietnam has been removed from the Monitoring List, having only met one of the three criteria over the four quarters through June 2022 as it had in the June 2022 Report for the four quarters through December 2021. Vietnam had previously exceeded the thresholds for all three criteria as noted in the December 2021, April 2021, and December 2020 Reports, in each of which Treasury conducted enhanced analysis of Vietnam. In early 2021, Treasury commenced enhanced bilateral engagement with Vietnam in accordance with the 2015 Act. As a result of discussions through the enhanced engagement process, Treasury and the State Bank of Vietnam- (SBV) reached agreement in July 2021 to address Treasury’s concerns about Vietnam’s currency practices.5 Treasury continues to engage closely with the SBV to monitor Vietnam’s progress in addressing Treasury’s concerns and remains satisfied with the progress made by Vietnam.

Treasury Analysis under the 1988 and 2015 Legislation

This Report assesses developments in international economic and exchange rate policies over the four quarters through June 2022. The analysis in this Report is guided by Sections 3001-3006 of the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988 (1988 Act) (codified at 22 U.S.C. §§ 5301-5306) and Sections 701 and 702 of the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act of 2015 (2015 Act) (codified at 19 U.S.C. §§ 4421-4422), as discussed in Section 2 of this Report.
Under the 2015 Act, Treasury is required to assess the macroeconomic and exchange rate policies of major trading partners of the United States for three specific criteria. Treasury sets the benchmark and threshold for determining which countries are major trading partners, as well as the thresholds for the three specific criteria in the 2015 Act. In this Report, Treasury has reviewed the 20 largest U.S. trading partners3 against the thresholds Treasury has established for the three criteria in the 2015 Act:

(1) A significant bilateral trade surplus with the United States is a goods and services trade surplus that is at least $15 billion.
(2) A material current account surplus is one that is at least 3% of GDP, or a surplus for which Treasury estimates there is a material current account “gap” using Treasury’s Global Exchange Rate Assessment Framework (GERAF).
(3) Persistent, one-sided intervention occurs when net purchases of foreign currency are conducted repeatedly, in at least 8 out of 12 months, and these net purchases total at least 2% of an economy’s GDP over a 12-month period.4

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Belching lakes, mystery craters, ‘zombie fires’: How the climate crisis is transforming the Arctic permafrost

Newly formed lakes in the permafrost landscape of Russia's Siberia.

Newly formed lakes in the permafrost landscape of Russia’s Siberia.Evgeny Chuvilin/Skoltech

By Katie Hunt, CNN

Published 7:06 AM EST, Sat November 12, 2022

CNN — Four years ago, Morris J. Alexie had to move out of the house his father built in Alaska in 1969 because it was sinking into the ground and water was beginning to seep into his home.

“The bogs are showing up in between houses, all over our community. There are currently seven houses that are occupied but very slanted and sinking into the ground as we speak,” Alexie said by phone from Nunapitchuk, a village of around 600 people. “Everywhere is bogging up.”

What was once grassy tundra is now riddled with water, he said. Their land is crisscrossed by 8-foot-wide boardwalks the community uses to get from place to place. And even some of the boardwalks have begun to sink.

“It’s like little polka dots of tundra land. We used to have regular grass all over our community. Now it’s changed into constant water marsh.”

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Crypto’s Boy King Got Dethroned Overnight

Sam Bankman-Fried sold himself as a savior—but was sitting on a hollow company.

By David Gerard, the author of the book Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain and the cryptocurrency and blockchain news blog of the same name.

Foreign Policy

Sam Bankman-Fried speaks onstage at a charity event on June 23 in New York City.
Sam Bankman-Fried speaks onstage at a charity event on June 23 in New York City.

NOVEMBER 11, 2022, 1:22 PM

Cryptocurrency has a serious problem: The party’s over. Fresh dollars from naive retail buyers aren’t coming in anymore after the crashes in May and June, despite a round of advertising during the Super Bowl in February reaching every consumer in the United States. Without those fresh dollars, the holders can’t cash out.

Crypto trading firms hold large piles of assets whose “market cap”—their alleged mark-to-market value—supposedly adds up to a trillion dollars. But this number is unrealizable nonsense because the actual dollars just aren’t there. Everyone in the system knows it. What to do?

The regulated U.S.-based exchanges are just the cashier’s desk for the wider crypto casino. The real trading action, as well as price discovery, is on the unregulated offshore exchanges. These include Binance, OKX, and Huobi. Until Tuesday, Nov. 8, they also included Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, which cut off customer withdrawals around 11:37 a.m. UTC on Nov. 8 and then revealed around 4 p.m. UTC that it was suffering a “liquidity crisis.” FTX is just the latest casualty in a series of collapses that began with Terraform Labs’s UST stablecoin; that took out Celsius Network, Voyager Digital, and many other crypto trading firms; and that is now gradually driving the price and trading volume of cryptocurrencies to what they should be: zero.

FTX desperately sought more funding, but to no avail; at press time, FTX had been shut down by its Bahamian regulator and put into liquidation, as well as was filing for bankruptcy in the United States and Bankman-Fried has resigned as CEO. But the fall of FTX has been particularly remarkable in part because its founder was unusually feted.

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As major powers meet in Asia, the rest of the world is pressed to pick a side

Simone McCarthy

By Simone McCarthy

Updated 2:54 AM EST, Fri November 11, 2022

Leaders of Southeast Asian nations make courtesy call to Cambodia's king before a summit in Phnom Penh on November 10, 2022.

Leaders of Southeast Asian nations make courtesy call to Cambodia’s king before a summit in Phnom Penh on November 10, 2022.Khem Sovannara/AFP/Getty Images

Editor’s Note: A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here.

Hong Kong CNN — 

World leaders are converging in Phnom Penh this weekend for the first in a series of international summits in Southeast Asia over the coming week, where divisions between major powers and conflict threaten to overshadow talks.

The first stop is the Cambodian capital where leaders from across the Indo-Pacific will meet alongside a summit of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) leaders, followed next week by a meeting of the Group of 20 (G20) leaders in Bali and of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Bangkok.

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A technologically advanced society is choosing to destroy itself. It’s both fascinating and horrifying to watch

Published: November 6, 2022 7.04pm GMT The Conversation

Authors

  1. Christopher WrightProfessor of Organisational Studies, University of Sydney
  2. Daniel NybergProfessor of Management, Newcastle Business School, University of Newcastle
  3. Vanessa BowdenLecturer, University of Newcastle

Disclosure statement

Christopher Wright receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Daniel Nyberg receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Vanessa Bowden receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

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University of Sydney and University of Newcastle provide funding as members of The Conversation AU.

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As world leaders assemble for the United Nations climate change conference (COP27) in Egypt, it’s hard to be optimistic the talks will generate any radical departure from the inexorable rise in global carbon emissions over the past two centuries.

After all, before last year’s Glasgow talks, experts warned the summit was the world’s last chance to limit global warming to 1.5℃ this century. And yet, a UN report last week found even if all nations meet their climate goals this decade, the planet would still heat by a catastrophic 2.5℃.

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Loss and damage: Who is responsible when climate change harms the world’s poorest countries?

The Conversation

Author

  1. Bethany TietjenResearch fellow in climate policy, The Fletcher School, Tufts University

Disclosure statement

Bethany Tietjen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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You may be hearing the phrase “loss and damage” in the coming weeks as government leaders meet in Egypt for the 2022 U.N. Climate Change Conference.

It refers to the costs, both economic and physical, that developing countries are facing from climate change impacts. Many of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries have done little to cause climate change, yet they are experiencing extreme heat waves, floods and other climate-related disasters. They want wealthier nations – historically the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions – to pay for the harm.

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Singaporean wanted by US for violating North Korea sanctions is in Singapore: police

US State Department on Thursday offered US$5 million for information on Kwek Kee Seng, blaming him for numerous fuel deliveries to North KoreaReward comes as the US urges strict enforcement of UN sanctions on North Korea after it launched a volley of missiles

Agence France-Presse

Agence France-Presse, SCMP

Published: 9:15am, 6 Nov, 2022

FBI wanted poster for Kwek Kee Seng. Photo: FBI via AP

FBI wanted poster for Kwek Kee Seng. Photo: FBI via AP

A Singaporean businessman wanted by the United States for violating sanctions on North Korea is currently in the city state where he is under investigation, the Singapore police said.

In a statement issued late on Saturday, the Singapore Police Force (SPF) said they have sought clarification from their US counterparts over the reward as they have kept them informed about the ongoing probe by local authorities.

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Egypt faces criticism over crackdown on activists ahead of COP27 climate summit

Ivana Kottasová

By Ivana Kottasová, CNN

Updated 12:44 PM EDT, Sat November 5, 2022

View of a COP27 sign on the road leading to the conference area in Egypt's Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, taken on October 22, as it prepares to host the COP27 summit.

View of a COP27 sign on the road leading to the conference area in Egypt’s Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, taken on October 22, as it prepares to host the COP27 summit.Sayed Sheasha/ReutersCNN — 

Egypt is facing a barrage of criticism over what rights groups say is a crackdown on protests and activists, as it prepares to host the COP27 climate summit starting Sunday.

Rights groups have accused the Egyptian government of arbitrarily detaining activists after Egyptian dissidents abroad called for protests to be held against President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi on November 11, during the United Nations climate talks.

According to rights groups, security forces have been setting up checkpoints on Cairo streets, stopping people and searching their phones to find any content related to the planned protests.

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