Virgin Orbit shares crashed in premarket trading as the satellite-launch firm associated with British billionaire Richard Branson suspended operations indefinitely due to cash-crunch pressures, which has left the startup financially paralyzed. 

CEO Dan Hart held a company-wide meeting on Thursday evening. He told employees that funding was not secured and most employees would be laid off. 

“Unfortunately, we’ve not been able to secure the funding to provide a clear path for this company,” Hart said, according to audio of the 1700 ET meeting obtained by CNBC. 

“We have no choice but to implement immediate, dramatic and extremely painful changes,” Hart said, adding this is “probably the hardest all-hands that we’ve ever done in my life.”

The CEO explained 90% of the workforce would be laid off, leaving about 100 employees to oversee the process of winding down operations. In a securities filing, the company said 85% of its workforce would be laid off “in order to reduce expenses in light of the company’s inability to secure meaningful funding.”

“This company, this team — all of you — mean a hell of a lot to me. And I have not, and will not, stop supporting you, whether you’re here on the journey or if you’re elsewhere,” Hart said.

Hart added that Virgin Orbit would “provide a severance package for every departing” employee. 

As a result of the news, shares of the company plunged as much as 53% in premarket trading in New York. The stock was worth more than $7 a year ago, and after this morning’s drop, it’s only now worth pennies. 

Earlier this month, Virgin Orbit announced an “operational pause” due to its inability to raise capital. Funding woes likely stem from the demise of Silicon Valley Bank as the VC funding market froze. 

Besides a funding crunch, the company was hit with a major setback after a rocket launch failure in January. 

Virgin Orbit is still looking to sell all or part of its business, according to Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the matter. 

Update (2040ET): According to Trump’s attorneys he is expected to be arraigned as early as Tuesday, the NY Times gleefully reports.

*  *  *

Update (1827ET):

Trump has responded to the lawsuit, saying in a statement: “This is Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history.”

Full statement:

‘This is Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history. From the time I came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower, and even before I was sworn in as your President of the United States, the Radical Left Democrats – the enemy of the hardworking men and women of this Country – have been engaged in a Witch-Hunt to destroy the Make America Great Again movement. You remember it just like I do: Russia, Russia, Russia; the Mueller Hoax; Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine; Impeachment Hoax 1; Impeachment Hoax 2; the illegal and unconstitutional Mar-a-Lago raid; and now this.

‘The Democrats have lied, cheated and stolen in their obsession with trying to ‘Get Trump,’ but now they’ve done the unthinkable – indicting a completely innocent person in an act of blatant Election Interference.

“Never before in our Nation’s history has this been done. The Democrats have cheated countless times over the decades, including spying on my campaign, but weaponizing our justice system to punish a political opponent, who just so happens to be a President of the United States and by far the leading Republican candidate for President, has never happened before. Ever.

“Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who was hand-picked and funded by George Soros, is a disgrace. Rather than stopping the unprecedented crime wave taking over New York City, he’s doing Joe Biden’s dirty work, ignoring the murders and burglaries and assaults he should be focused on. This is how Bragg spends his time!

“I believe this Witch-Hunt will backfire massively on Joe Biden. The American people realize exactly what the Radical Left Democrats are doing here. Everyone can see it. So our Movement, and our Party – united and strong – will first defeat Alvin Bragg, and then we will defeat Joe Biden, and we are going to throw every last one of these Crooked Democrats out of office so we can MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley opined on the indictment in a Thursday interview with Fox News.

“Bragg reportedly has secured his indictment. He has made history, but it is an inglorious moment where even some on the left have criticized the effort.  This is a patently political prosecution. Bragg and NY AG James ran on bagging Trump. This has fulfilled that pledge but, if the indictment follows the course described in coverage, it is deeply flawed theory. We will have to wait to see the indictment. …The objection is not to the prosecuting of a misdemeanor but the reported effort to extend the statute of limitations under an unprecedented bootstrapping theory. We have not heard of an alternative criminal theory.

Jonathan Turley on the indictment of President Trump:

“It’s rather outrageous. It’s legally pathetic.”pic.twitter.com/fDn1D0f0fx

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) March 30, 2023

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, meanwhile, has issued a statement condemning the “weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda,” adding that Florida “will not assist in an extradition request given the questionable circumstances at issue with this Soros-backed Manhattan prosecutor and his political agenda.”

The weaponization of the legal system to advance a political agenda turns the rule of law on its head.

It is un-American.

The Soros-backed Manhattan District Attorney has consistently bent the law to downgrade felonies and to excuse criminal misconduct. Yet, now he is…

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) March 30, 2023

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has weighed in as well, tweeting; “Alvin Bragg has irreparably damaged our country in an attempt to interfere in our Presidential election.

“As he routinely frees violent criminals to terrorize the public, he weaponized our sacred system of justice against President Donald Trump.”

Alvin Bragg has irreparably damaged our country in an attempt to interfere in our Presidential election.

As he routinely frees violent criminals to terrorize the public, he weaponized our sacred system of justice against President Donald Trump.

The American people will not…

— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) March 30, 2023

The President of El Salvador chimes in;

Imagine if this happened to a leading opposition presidential candidate here in El Salvador 🙃 https://t.co/T8TSfr3Nq4

— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) March 30, 2023

Tucker Carlson opines;

Donald Trump is now the first former President of the United States ever to be indicted. There is no coming back from this moment. pic.twitter.com/pHuXdDRAka

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) March 31, 2023

*  *  *

A Manhattan Grand Jury has voted to indict former President Donald Trump over hush money paid to former porn star Stormy Daniels, according to the NY Times, citing four people familiar with the matter.

The still-sealed felony indictment, which comes as 2024 campaign season comes into focus, makes Trump the first former president in US history to face criminal charges.

The exact charges are not yet known, however the Times expects them to be announced in the coming days by the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Prosecutors working for DA Alvin L. Bragg will ask Trump to surrender and face arraignment on said unknown charges.

[U]nlike the investigations that arose from his time in the White House, this case is built around a tawdry episode that predates Mr. Trump’s presidency. The reality star turned presidential candidate who shocked the political establishment by winning the White House now faces a reckoning for a hush money payment that buried a sex scandal in the final days of the 2016 campaign.

Mr. Trump has consistently denied all wrongdoing and attacked Mr. Bragg, a Democrat, accusing him of leading a politically motivated prosecution. He has also denied any affair with the porn star, Stormy Daniels, who had been looking to sell her story of a tryst with Mr. Trump during the campaign. –NY Times

The move also comes just before the grand jury takes a one-month break until late April.

Interestingly, as The Epoch Times’ Jack Phillips reported, this month-long delay came after an attorney in former President Donald Trump’s orbit who testified in front of a Manhattan grand jury earlier this month believes that there has been a shift in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against the 45th president.

“Well, I think I got through to them, because [Monday] I understand they called back another witness by the name of David Pecker, who used to run the National Enquirer,” Costello, a former Michael Cohen attorney, told Newsmax on Tuesday.

“Basically, what they’re doing is really gerrymandering this,” he said of Bragg’s probe into Trump.

Costello said he had represented Cohen, himself a former Trump lawyer, and told reporters last week that he does not believe Cohen is a credible witness against Trump.

Sounds like that wasn’t the case.

The prosecution’s star witness in the case is former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about sleeping with Trump. Cohen said that Trump directed him to buy her silence (contrary to a 2018 letter from his lawyer claiming the opposite), and says that the Trump organization helped cover it up.

The case brought by Mr. Bragg, a Democrat, is far from a sure bet. Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., and federal prosecutors each passed on charging Mr. Trump in a stand-alone case related to the hush money. If the case goes to trial, a conviction would almost certainly require a jury to credit the testimony of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who has faced his own legal troubles and pleaded guilty to an array of federal felonies in 2018. Among them was a campaign-finance offense for the porn-star payment, as well as charges of lying to a bank and to Congress. -WSJ

Meanwhile, this didn’t age well…

Did Alvin Bragg just make Trump into even more of a martyr?

If this happens, Trump will be re-elected in a landslide victory

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 18, 2023

As Techno Fog writes via The Reactionary…

The indictment is an absolute scandal, the banana republic on parade, the prosecutor using the weapons of his office to attack his political opponent.

Bragg and his predecessor’s slow-walking of the investigation, with its inception by Manhattan DA goes back to 2019, evidences both the dubious nature of the case against Trump and the political motivations for prosecuting Trump. Theoretically, this should be a simple case. Yet the investigation went on for nearly five years, despite what they’ve possessed: overzealous prosecutors who wanted to charge Trump with racketeering, the cooperating witnesses, the likely millions of pages of materials from the Trump Organization.

Now suddenly, the insanely pro-criminal Manhattan DA, who demanded his prosecutors reduce charges for violent criminals, is prioritizing law and order. It’s hard to believe there are legitimate reasons – for prosecutors, that means seeking justice – for that transformation. Why bring the case now? It’s the start of the 2024 presidential campaign season.

You can’t help but think of the political calculations that went on in Bragg’s head. Not only does he benefit personally, now elevated to a liberal folk hero after being the prosecutor to finally get Trump (a campaign promise he keeps), but this throws a grenade into the Republican race. Will the GOP base rally to Trump? How will the other candidates respond?

And what will this do for the undecideds and the independents and the swing voters – those who are essential to victory in 2024? 

Some of those questions will be answered in the short term. Some of them won’t be answered until election day, assuming Trump gets the GOP nod.

That’s because the case won’t go away. It’s illegitimate and political, but it’s here to stay for the time being. Don’t be surprised if the trial date is set for the first half of 2024. And don’t understate the danger to Trump, who will face a jury of Biden voters. Biden won Manhattan 86.7% to 12.3% according to the New York Times. The jury of Trump’s peers will be friendly to the prosecution. That’s all the Manhattan DA might need to secure a conviction. Trump could very well win on appeal but the damage – which carries national repercussions – might already have been done.

And that’s the whole point of this dirty scheme.

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By Alexandra Muller and Michael Msika, Bloomberg Markets live reporters and analysts

Luxury stocks have never been this pricey relative to the broader market, but that shouldn’t deter acquisitive predators keen to snap up trophy assets in the sector.

Hugo Boss and British luxury apparel-maker Burberry are among luxury companies being marked out as potential European takeover targets this year, according to an informal Bloomberg survey of 17 M&A desks, fund managers and analysts.

The luxury sector has been on fire this year, with the MSCI Europe Textiles Apparel & Luxury Goods Index rising 19%. That has stretched its premium over the broader market to a record 120%.

Investors have bought these shares to gain from China’s post-Covid reopening and because the industry is studded with companies that have healthy balance sheets and earnings growth, and the pricing power to overcome economic strife. That means targets come with hefty price tags.

Dealmaking in the luxury industry “normally happens at punchy share price levels, as attractive acquisition targets are few and far apart,” says Luca Solca, senior research analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein.

Many expect France’s €415-billion luxury behemoth LVMH to be the one that ends up consolidating rivals. Its track record and de-leveraged balance sheet make it most likely to participate in a deal, Bank of America predicted in January.

In this tough competitive environment for smaller companies, “owners of rare assets may be tempted to fold and sell their brands to larger players, who would be more and more in a position to cherry pick,” Solca adds.

While buyers may need to pay top dollar after months of booming market performance, not all stocks in the sector trade at a heavy premium. In fact, Richemont and Burberry are now heavily discounted to peers, having given up the superior valuation it used to boast.

The survey coincides with a worsening M&A outlook, as higher interest rates and the threat of a recession give buyers pause. European deals in January-March totaled around $137 billion, about 60% below year-earlier levels, and among the slowest starts to the year in two decades, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Other names that cropped up in the survey include TMT firms Temenos, Vivendi and Atos, after featuring in December’s poll. Commerzbank and Banco BPM were the only lenders identified as M&A candidates. Representatives for the five companies with the most mentions in the survey either declined to comment or didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Over the last few weeks we have reported about billions being pulled from ESG funds, hedge funds losing ESG ratings, and companies and banks scrambling to cover up their ESG appeal in pitch decks, all after “woke” ESG name Silicon Valley Bank went under, forcing the market to focus a bit more on things that matter (i.e. solvency, cash generation) instead of the unicorn and rainbow ESG fairy tale it has been obsessed with over the last 5 years.

But, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Bloomberg reported this week that with ESG out of favor for all of about five minutes, there’s already a new “buzzword” on the street that we’re certain will drum up the same interest in “green” names: biodiversity.

The term has helped some fund managers expand their asset base by 15% in two months, the report says. This comes after a “150% surge in the number of funds offering such strategies last year”, it continues. While the $2.9 billion in combined assets for the buzzword pales in comparison to ESG, it feels like it could just be the beginning of more herd mentality virtue signaling FOMO like we saw in ESG. 

Ingrid Kukuljan, head of impact and sustainable investing and international lead portfolio manager at Federated Hermes, cemented those thoughts, telling Bloomberg: “The move in biodiversity that we have seen is 10 times the speed of what we have seen with carbon. And rightly so, because this is the biggest systemic threat that we face.”

Bloomberg points out the genesis of making biodiversity a key issue:

Since a landmark agreement was struck at the COP15 summit in December, the finance industry has been forced to pay attention to biodiversity. The Global Biodiversity Framework, signed by almost 200 nations, envisages a central role for banks, insurers and asset managers in reaching the stated goal of mobilizing at least $200 billion each year to protect the natural world.

But the report also notes that there’s a lack of reliable biodiversity data, calling some of the calculations a “black box”. Kind of like Silicon Valley Bank’s balance sheet. 

Wijnand Broer, program manager at the Partnership for Biodiversity Accounting Financials and partner at CREM, a Netherlands-based consultancy, concluded: “You see more and more data providers entering the market providing biodiversity data, but it’s not always clear what the underlying assumptions are.”

“Biodiversity” is the next big ESG investing buzzword. Likely gonna see bunch of new ETFs with that word in the name.. “The move in bidioversity that we have seen is 10 times the speed of what we’ve seen in carbon” https://t.co/vxBS9N9opZ via @business

— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) March 28, 2023

By Charles Kennedy of Oilprice.com

Kurdistan’s oil exports could be suspended for several more days as officials from Kurdistan are set to return to Baghdad next week for a new round of talks on the resumption of crude exports from Kurdistan via a pipeline to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan.

The Kurdistan Regional Government hopes that talks next week could result in the resumption of Kurdistan’s oil exports, commodity analyst Giovanni Staunovo says, quoting the head of foreign media affairs for the Kurdish government.  

Kurdistan’s crude oil exports – around 400,000 bpd shipped through an Iraqi-Turkey pipeline to Ceyhan and then on tankers to the international markets – were halted late last week by the federal government of Iraq.

Last week, the International Chamber of Commerce ruled in favor of Iraq against Turkey in a dispute over crude flows from Kurdistan. Iraq had argued that Turkey shouldn’t allow Kurdish oil exports via the Iraq-Turkey pipeline and Ceyhan without approval from the federal government of Iraq.

Talks between officials from Kurdistan and from the Iraq federal government have failed in recent days.

Next week could see a breakthrough in talks, but oil companies operating in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan have already started to shut down oil fields as storage capacity is limited while they had been instructed to temporarily cease deliveries to the Iraq-Turkey Pipeline destined for the port of Ceyhan.

The company pumping a quarter of Kurdistan’s crude oil exports, Norway-based DNO ASA, said on Wednesday that it had started an orderly shutdown of its oil fields following the suspension of oil exports.

“It is unfortunate it has come to this given the likely impact of a continuing supply disruption on oil prices and at a fragile time in global financial markets,” DNO’s Executive Chairman Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani said.

Another operator in Kurdistan, London-listed Gulf Keystone Petroleum, said on Monday that its facilities “have storage capacity that allow continued production at a curtailed rate over the coming days after which the Company will suspend production.”

In the latest evidence of major shifts in global power dynamics, the Saudi government has approved the kingdom’s partial membership in a Chinese-led economic, political and security bloc.    

Saudi Arabia will join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization with the initial status of a “dialogue partner.” Formed in 2001, the SCO’s full members are China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Iran is expected to become a full member later this year, while other dialogue partners include two more countries that have traditionally been in the U.S. sphere of influence: Qatar and Egypt. Underscoring the group’s security component, SCO members will conduct a joint “counter-terrorism exercise” in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region — north of Kazakhstan — in August.   

Wow! Another Saudi-China-Russia integration. Saudi Arabia decides to join the SCO — Shanghai Cooperation Organization — as a dialogue partner.

Iran also recently joined SCO as a full member.

Asia is uniting as one big but diverse family, while Europe is destroying itself. pic.twitter.com/wDiL2THt63

— S.L. Kanthan (@Kanthan2030) March 29, 2023

“By engaging with these U.S. rivals, it really does seem like this multipolarity is in full-bore here now,” Atlantic Council fellow Jonathan Fulton tells The Wall Street Journal. 

Saudi Arabia’s decision comes three months after China President Xi Jinping visited Saudi Arabia, and just days after state-owned Saudi Aramco made two world-surprising announcements signaling a huge push into China: The Saudi petrochemical giant will build a $10 billion refinery in China and acquire a 10% stake in a leading Chinese oil refinery.

China recently brokered a rapprochement between longtime Middle East rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran. The two countries announced they will restore full diplomatic ties, and the kingdom credited China for serving as a “bridge” that made it possible. Xi said the dialogue will “play a major role in strengthening regional unity and cooperation.”

Saudi Arabia has joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a #China-led security bloc, as a ‘dialogue partner’ amid deepening ties between #Riyadh and #Beijing @CNBCMiddleEast @_HadleyGamble @CNBCi pic.twitter.com/CpnUAbK2Iq

— Sam Vadas (@sam_vadas) March 30, 2023

Speaking of regional cooperation, Saudi Arabia is also close to restoring diplomacy with the Syrian government, which was targeted for regime change by the United States with heavy assistance from Saudi Arabia, and which is still enduring the ongoing presence of US soldiers. 

These developments all point to the waning influence of the United States, and the waxing clout of China. Ominously, the SCO’s growing membership rolls pave the way for the next phase of de-dollarization, a trend that threatens to obliterate a principal cornerstone of American power.  

Uneasy American officials have cautioned its Middle East affiliates that some forms of cooperation with China could undermine their standing with the US…

…but these admonitions from the fading US empire ring increasingly hollow.  

Via Remix News,

Sweden’s supposedly conservative prime minister has called for Hungary’s conservative government to be removed from power in the past…

State Secretary for International Communications Zoltán Kovács.

After the Hungarian Parliament approved Finland’s NATO application with an overwhelming majority, on Monday, State Secretary for International Communications Zoltán Kovács gave three reasons why the same did not happen for Sweden.

Kovács wrote that “Sweden is constantly undermining (international) relations,” its “throne of moral superiority is crumbling,” and the country has shown a lack of “care and respect” towards Hungary.

The state minister for international communications stressed that:

“As the war in Ukraine ravages, the ongoing strife is punching holes in Europe’s former security fabric.”

Kovács said it is therefore commendable and understandable that Finland and Sweden are sitting at the negotiating table to secure their positions in the new geopolitical environment. However, in the case of Sweden, Kovács said there is a “copious amount of grievances” to be dealt with before its accession to NATO is ratified.

Borrowing the ideas of Balázs Orbán, who is Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s political director, Kovács wrote that Swedish MPs have repeatedly used diplomatic means to attack Hungary and used their political influence to “damage Hungarian interests.” In Sweden’s case, it is not “the usual interference of Brussels bureaucrats,” and the problem is not limited to the “Swedish left.” In his view, this is a case of declared and open hostility that has been going on for years.

Among other things, he cited the statement made by the current right-wing prime minister, Ulf Kristensen, in 2021. At the time, he said that the EU “must break Hungary.” Kristensen was putting pressure on the EU to support the left-wing opposition to oust Hungary’s conservative government.

The examples Kovács cites suggest a “perceived moral superiority that is ridiculous at best,” if only because it was not the “xenophobic” Hungarian state or its “repressive regime” that allowed a right-wing activist to openly burn the Quran in the middle of Sweden’s NATO accession talks, which included a Muslim power, Turkey.

Kovács also wrote that it was not Hungary that excused this “provocation against all human reason” by claiming it was an “expression of freedom.”

“The relations between our countries have deteriorated over the years, which makes bridging the gap even more challenging in these difficult times,” Kovács wrote. He said this was why the Hungarian government felt it necessary to send a parliamentary delegation to Sweden.

However, the Swedish government is simply not interested, according to Kovács, which is why their officials have described the Hungarian government’s intention to negotiate as “blackmail tactics.” The state minister said that, given Turkey’s concerns, there was now little room to maneuver for Sweden, at least until “they start to change their tune and help heal the wounds.”

Via The Cradle,

The US Senate voted 66-30 on 29 March to repeal the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that allowed former president George W. Bush to launch a military invasion of Iraq under false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The bill is now headed to the Republican-led House of Representatives, where it remains unclear if lawmakers will put it on the floor for a vote.

“Congress has abdicated its powers to the executive for too long,” said Senator Tim Kaine, who over the past several years has authored the Senate’s efforts to repeal the Iraq AUMF. “Presidents can do mischief if there are outdated authorizations on the books,” he added.

If the bill passes a vote on the House of floor — and is signed by President Joe Biden — it will be the first repeal of a war authorization since 1974.

Nonetheless, just last week, the US Senate overwhelmingly voted against repealing the original AUMF, which was signed into law on 18 September, 2001 by George W. Bush in response to the 11 September attacks.

As opposed to the Iraq AUMF, the 2001 AUMF is seen as a more sweeping, blank-check legislation that was passed to target the alleged perpetrators of the 11 September attacks.

According to the Congressional Research Service, the 2001 AUMF has been used to justify more than 40 military interventions in at least 22 countries without the approval of Congress.

In the years after 2001, the US Congress also approved so-called ‘security cooperation authorities‘ (SCA) that have allowed the Pentagon to covertly deploy troops and wage secret wars in dozens of countries across the globe.

According to a report by the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice, the SCA allows the Pentagon to “train and equip foreign forces anywhere in the world” and to “provide support to foreign forces, paramilitaries, and private individuals who are in turn supporting US counterterrorism operations,” with a spending limit of $100,000,000 per fiscal year.

As a result of this, in dozens of countries, these programs have been used as a springboard for hostilities, with the Pentagon declining to inform Congress or the US public about their secret operations.

“Researchers and reporters uncovered [SCA] programs not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in Cameroon, Egypt, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen,” the report highlights.

Christopher C. Miller, a former acting head of the Pentagon, said in his memoir released last month that the US should be held accountable for the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “The US military-industrial complex has grown into a hydra-headed monster with almost no controls on the American war machine,” Miller writes.

In an interview with The Hill, Miller went on to say that, “We invaded a sovereign nation, killed and maimed a lot of Iraqis, and lost some of the greatest American patriots to ever live — all for a goddamned lie.”

The pass rate for the first level of the chartered financial analyst (CFA) exam ticked up with zero pandemic related cancellations for the first time since 2021, Bloomberg reported this week. 

38% of those who took the Level I test passed it, which was up from 36% in November 2022 and 37% in August of last year. Despite the tick higher, the numbers still come in under the 41% average pass rate over the last decade, the report notes. 

The report says the pass rates are among “signs of improvement and waning impact from the pandemic”, which helped drive pass rates significantly lower coinciding with the onset of the pandemic. 

Record low pass rates were recorded last year across all levels of the CFA, the report says. In February, about 17,000 candidates sat for the exam, which was administered at 459 testing centers worldwide. 

And the CFA Institute did a bit of what public schools have been doing when pass rates drop: they reworked some of the exam earlier this month to “emphasize practical skills and reduce the amount of time candidates study, in the biggest reworking since the test was introduced in 1963”, Bloomberg wrote. 

The record low pass rates also (conspicuously?) coincide with the CFA Institute choosing to offer the exam via computer, instead of on paper, as a result of Covid protocols. There are currently 190,000 charterholders worldwide, who took an average of 4 years to complete all three levels of the exam. 

By Ye Xie, Bloomberg Markets Live reporter and strategist

In a quick succession this week, Beijing unveiled ground-breaking deals to further its efforts to promote the yuan and ditch the US dollar. It’s the kind of thing money-market guru Zoltan Pozsar had in mind when he warned that the dollar’s centrality in the world financial system is slowly being whittled away.  

What occurred in Beijing this week was easy to overlook, but it could just as easily have a place in future history books. On Wednesday, Banco BOCOM BBM became the first Latin American bank to sign up as a direct participant in CIPS, a Chinese alternative to the US-dominated global payment system. The two countries also agreed to settle trade in their own currencies.

Earlier this week, Saudi Aramco agreed to buy a stake in Rongsheng Petrochemical, one of China’s refining giants, in its biggest-ever foreign acquisition to expand its presence in the world’s biggest energy importer. A day later, China National Offshore Oil Corporation and France’s TotalEnergies completed China’s first yuan-settled liquefied-natural-gas trade through the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange.

These developments followed an earlier warning by Pozsar, a former Fed and US Treasury Department official, that we could be witnessing the dusk for the petro-dollar and the dawn of the “petro-yuan.” He flagged the so-called BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — in particular in an essay in December:

“China is proactively writing a new set of rules as it replays the “Great Game,” creating a new type of globalization with new institutions like the Belt and Road Initiative, BRICS+, and the SCO  (Shanghai Cooperation Organization)

…the one thing that the BRICS are most aligned on is the de-dollarization of their fast-growing, bilateral trade flows…the drive to de-dollarize intra-BRICS trade and soon intra -BRICS+ trade will speed up.  Don’t tell me that doesn’t threaten the dollar’s supremacy, or that it won’t hurt the “exorbitant privilege”

…the U.S. dollar and Treasury securities will likely be dealing with issues they never had to deal with before: less demand, not more; more competition, not less.  

To be sure, the yuan’s market share in the global system remains minuscule. But the direction is clear. As Victor Xing at Kekselias Inc. put it: “The key characteristic of the present geopolitical development is ideological, rather than based on economic calculus. Therefore, it is harder to de-escalate, and it means the disruptions and decoupling has momentum to go on for a longer period of time.”