Syz the moment

This means that more people in their country approve of them than disapprove. The exceptions are Prime Ministers Narendra Modi, Anthony Albanese and Giorgia Meloni of India, Australia and Italy, respectively, as well as the presidents of Mexico, Switzerland and Brazil, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Alain Berset and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. As the COVID-19 crisis dragged on in 2020 and 2021, world leaders' approval ratings mostly decreased or stagnated at low levels. As global crises deepened with Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, they have not yet recovered for most countries. French President Emmanuel Macron's score was among the worst in the ranking as protest in France about the raising of the retirement age quelled even more discontent. Other politicians faring very poorly were Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and South Korean President Yoon Seok-youl. Source: Statista

Visa has wrapped up testing a way for users to pay on-chain gas fees directly in fiat with a credit or debit card, the payments giant said on Thursday. The experiment, which was conducted on the Ethereum Goerli testnet, uses a paymaster contract to sponsor gas fees on behalf of users, according to a statement. It means users can send blockchain transactions without having to worry about maintaining a balance of ether. Visa believes the contract could make transactions more accessible to a wider range of users. “Our experiment aims to offer a promising approach to substantially addressing the challenges of blockchain-based transactions,” Visa’s technical team wrote. “By leveraging the innovative concept of a paymaster, in conjunction with account abstraction and the ERC-4337 standard, we explored the potential for a process that could redefine blockchain-based transactions.”

Source: Blockworks

Microsoft (MSFT US) continues it's consolidation since mid July. It's now approaching important support level at 316. That level was March 2022 high and May 2023 breakout level. Keep an eye at that level. Source : Bloomberg

Companies rated highly on widely accepted environmental, social and governance metrics pollute just as much as lowly rated companies, research has found. This perverse lack of correlation holds even if companies’ carbon intensity — their carbon emissions per unit of revenue or market capitalisation — is compared purely to their environmental rating, according to Scientific Beta, an index provider and consultancy. “ESG ratings have little to no relation to carbon intensity, even when considering only the environmental pillar of these ratings,” said Felix Goltz, research director at Scientific Beta. “It doesn’t seem that people have actually looked at [the correlations]. They are surprisingly low.” “The carbon intensity reduction of green [ie low carbon intensity] portfolios can be effectively cancelled out by adding ESG objectives.” The findings come amid strong demand for ESG investment, with “sustainable” funds globally attracting net inflows of $49bn in the first half of this year, according to Morningstar, while the rest of the fund industry saw outflows of $9bn. Goltz and his colleagues looked at 25 different ESG scores from three major providers: Moody’s, MSCI and Refinitiv. They found that 92 per cent of the reduction in carbon intensity that investors gain by solely weighting stocks for their carbon intensity is lost when ESG scores are added as a partial weight determinant. Even just using environmental scores, rather than the whole panoply of ESG, “leads to a substantial deterioration in green performance”, they found. Worse still, mixing social or governance ratings with carbon intensity typically creates portfolios than are less green than the comparable market capitalisation-weighted index, the researchers noted. “On average, social and governance scores more than completely reversed the carbon reduction objective,” Goltz said. He offered a simple explanation for this, namely that “the correlation between ESG scores and carbon intensity is close to zero [at 4 per cent]. The two objectives are unrelated and are therefore hard for investors to simultaneously achieve.” “It can very well be that a high-emitting firm is very good at governance or employee satisfaction. There is no strong relationship between employee satisfaction or any of these things and carbon intensity,” Goltz argued. Source: FT

Tavi Costa: "From the late-1960s to the mid-1970s, equity markets declined whenever CPI rates re-accelerated to the upside. The primary driver behind this negative correlation stems from the market's growing concern about the potential for a tighter monetary policy to address the persistent increase in consumer prices". Source: Crescat Capital, Bloomberg

UBS on Friday said that it has ended a 9 billion Swiss franc ($10.27 billion) loss protection agreement and a 100 billion Swiss franc publicly liquidity backstop that were put in place by the Swiss government when it took over rival Credit Suisse in March. UBS said the decision followed a “comprehensive assessment” of Credit Suisse’s non-core assets that were covered by the liquidity support measures. Credit Suisse also fully repaid the emergency liquidity assistance loan of 50 billion Swiss francs to the Swiss National Bank in March, as Credit Suisse teetered after a collapse in shareholder and investor confidence. “These measures, which were created under emergency law to preserve financial stability, will thus cease to exist, and the Confederation and taxpayers will no longer bear any risks arising from these guarantees,” the Swiss government said in a statement Friday. “Furthermore, the Confederation earned receipts of around CHF 200 million on the guarantees.”

"I understand there is a lot of curiosity on these numbers. What I can tell you is that we will always sell one car less than the market demand." Source: Quartr

Source: www.zerohedge.com, Bloomberg