ERATO BRYN

The Australian government is planning to spend AUD 190 billion (USD 132 billion) to support the economy in response to COVID-19, according to the latest Parliamentary Budget Office estimate. The total impact of COVID-19 on the government’s net debt, including both revenue impacts (down, because of less activity) and spending impacts (up because of spending to support the economy) amounts to between 11% and 18% of gross domestic product, or AUD 500 billion to AUD 620 billion. The estimates are based on the three possible scenarios developed by the Reserve Bank: “downside”, “baseline” and “upside”. Each differ in their assumed timing of the relaxation of social distancing and other restrictions, and for how long uncertainty and diminished confidence weigh on households and business activity. With similar blow-outs around the world, a view gaining ascendancy, including amongst commentators such as Alan Kohler, is that government debt doesn’t matter – provided the government owes the money...

Image:itsnewsafrica After reading that Excerpt in a local Newspaper of a warning from the Kenyan Government to those carrying out operations with Crowd1, I delved into the matter and dug deeper to understand what really Crowd1 is.? Here are some of the countries that Crowd1 have been red flagged with reasons. My experience with them too. JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA : the regulator of Financial Services Providers (FSPs) has issued a public warning about Crowd1 being a suspected pyramid scheme that has been banned in Namibia and the Philippines. ‘Crowd1 is neither an authorised FSP nor a representative of one, and there is also no record of it having applied for a licence with the FSCA’, the regulator said. The FSCA has referred Crowd1 to the SA Reserve Bank, where it is being investigated. This is after reports surfaced of Eben Etzebeth and Duane Vermeulen- Springbok Rugby Players, being investors in Crowd1. The       FSCA is advising the public to only con...

From monetary policy mishandling to decentralisation of a wealth store, Bitcoin has proven to act as a solution to many financial problems. Bitcoin could also be a lead solution to Venezuela’s sanctioned oil now floating at the sea. There is more than 18 million barrels of Sanctioned oil belonging to Venezuela currently not in good use but just floating on the sea.   Venezuela is one of many countries under strict sanctions from the United States. The US has been applying pressure to the country recently, seeking to cut off revenue flow to the regime. President Nicolas Maduro launched a cryptocurrency backed by oil, the petrol, in an attempt to skate sanctions. Trump banned the cryptocurrency in the United States. Due to the sanctions, and conditions in the oil market, Venezuela has over 18 million barrels of oil just floating at sea. This amounts to roughly two months of production in the country, unable to be monetised due to sanctions.   Countries won’t do busines...

  Here is walk-through of the 3 favourite new features in Android 11.   Conversation Notifications. The previous versions of android would have notifications flowing through inconsistently, timely messages would be hidden under less important app notifications. In Android 11 however, notifications for conversations can be categorised into three’s where the most critical messages always slide in at the top.   These categorisation tiers also apply to specific conversations within different messaging apps. (Notably, these are referred to as Conversations in the Android 11 settings panel.) For instance, you can choose whether a beloved group text in Android Messages gets priority over the ongoing thread with your immediate family in WhatsApp. Long press on an individual conversation in the notification shade to categorise it. If it’s classified a Priority, you’ll see a tiny, unique icon indicator populate in the status bar when there’s a new message within that sp...

Binance, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, recently announced that they successfully upgraded its trading platform. Earlier, Binance announced that they were going to upgrade their trading platform, the upgrade took about 2 hours. All deposits, trading, and withdrawal were disabled on spot and margin trading, P2P trading, OTC Portal trading, savings & redemption, as well as asset transfers from sub-accounts at the time of the upgrade.   The company has had major upgrades since 2017. Some were noticeable and some were not. Many Binance upgrades were aimed towards improving the performance of the trading platform, as well as giving the best user experience to their users.   A year ago, Binance introduced staking, lending cryptocurrency, and margin trading. Not only that, but Binance has also introduced other projects since the start of 2020, which includes Binance P2P and Binance B2B. Binance P2P operates similarly to LocalBitcoins and Paxf...

via nbcnews A Geiger counter measures a radiation level at a site of fire burning in the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant outside the village of Rahivka, Ukraine . Radiation levels in the Chernobyl exclusion zone spiked 17 times over the normal background reading Sunday, the head of Ukraine's ecological watchdog said Sunday, as forest fires blazed about 12 miles into the Chernobyl disaster area.   Ecological inspection Chief Yegor Firsov wrote in a Facebook post from the closed Chernobyl region. "At the center of the fire, radiation levels are high ... readings are 2.3, when the normal level is 0.14." Firsov's post included a video of a Geiger counter, a device used to measure radiation levels. According to Firsov, the alarming jump in radioactivity was found only in the centre of the fire. In a later post Sunday, he wrote that nuclear specialists had charted no increase in radiation levels in the capital, Kyiv, only about 60 miles fro...

                                         image: cryptoworldnews For those that need a refresher, here’s one: over the course of approximately a year, scammers largely focused in Asia managed to garner billions of dollars of Bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS, and XRP, and other cryptocurrencies. The scammers operated a “wallet” called PlusToken, which promised users high returns on their deposits. The wallet naturally featured a system of incentives that created a pyramid of users. A transaction from a wallet of a ringleader with the message “we have run” cemented the collapse of the scheme in the middle of 2019. Fortunately, the law caught up with PlusToken, with it being revealed shortly after they “ran” that the authorities had caught up with six of the ringleaders. Reports said at the time that the PlusToken operators were arrested in Vanuatu. Yet Dovey Wan, a partner at Primitive ...