Currency devaluations touted by IIF to aid troubled economies

TROUBLED governments that devalue their currencies tend to benefit from the decision, underscoring the tool’s usefulness in the face of crisis, according to the Institute of International Finance (IIF). There’s been a pivot toward economic growth in countries just three years after authorities opt for major currency devaluations, economists Robin Brooks and Jonathan Fortun found in an analysis of the 51 largest and most-persistent episodes

UNITED STATES Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director William Burns said Thursday that he remains optimistic Ukraine will be able to make advances its counteroffensive against Russia, based on the intelligence he has reviewed.

Russia suffers from some significant “structural weaknesses” behind the considerable defenses it has built up, Burns said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. Those weaknesses include poor morale, poor generalship and “disarray” among its political and military leadership.

“It is going to be a tough slog, but we’re going to do everything we can as an intelligence agency to provide the kind of intelligence support and sharing that’s going to help the Ukrainians to make progress,” Burns said.

Burns said that mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mu - since 1990. Export volumes rise, according to the Washingtonbased banking trade group, and current-account deficits reliably narrow—with some even turning to surpluses.

“As asymmetric shocks—from climate change to heightened geopolitical risk multiply—we think the policy consensus needs to shift back to seeing exchange rate devaluations as part of the solution and not a problem to be avoided,” Brooks and Fortun wrote in a Thursday report.

Some of the world’s most-indebt- tiny in June had “exposed some of the significant weaknesses in the system that Putin has built.”

“For a lot of Russians watching this used to this image of Putin as the arbiter of order, the question was does the emperor have no clothes or at least why does it take so long for him to get dressed,” Burns said.

Burns’ comments echoed remarks earlier this week by Sir Richard Moore, the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, known at MI6. Moore said that Putin’s government was beset by “venality, infighting and callous incompetence” and that the aftermath of Prigozhin’s mutiny had been “humiliating” to Putin.

Putin will likely try to avoid giving the impression that he is overreacting to the mutiny, while trying to extract what he can of value from Prigozhin’s Wagner network, Burns said. Still, Burns said Prigozhin is likely to see ret - ed nations have found themselves embroiled in debates surrounding currency devaluations this year as they weigh the drop in their exchange-rates needed to secure bailouts from the International Monetary Fund. Egypt, Pakistan and Lebanon are among those that have opted for devaluations in a bid to address dollar shortages and other fiscal challenges.

Argentina, too, has faced pressure to drop its peso exchange rate as discussions heat up with the IMF. A delegation from Ar - ribution from Putin at some point.

“Putin is the ultimate apostle of payback,” Burns said. “If I were Prigozhin, I wouldn’t fire my food taster.”

Burns said the mutiny presented a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” for CIA recruitment in Russia. The agency recently made its first video post on Telegram, the social media and messaging site developed and widely used in Russia, to let Russians know how to contact it on the “dark web.” Burns said the video was viewed 2.5 million times in the week after it was posted.

Burns, a diplomat before becoming the CIA chief, has emerged as a key backchannel for the Biden administration’s thorny relationships with Russia and China. He went to Moscow before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in an attempt to talk Putin’s government out of attacking and, more recently, traveled to Beijing in a bid to gentina’s Economy Ministry is in Washington this week to discuss the fifth review of a $44 billion loan with the multilateral lender. Meantime, the gap between the official and black market rate widens past 100 percent.

Governments are often hesitant to devalue their own currencies — a process that typically reduces the purchasing power of people in the nation.

“None of this is to say that devaluations aren’t painful,” the IIF economists wrote. “They imply keep intelligence channels with China open.

Burns said that CIA has “made progress” in rebuilding its intelligence network in China after setbacks in the country. “We’ve made progress and we’re working very hard over recent years to ensure that we have a strong human intelligence capability to complement what we can do through other methods,” Burns said.

CIA launched a China Mission Center in 2021 to hone the agency’s focus on “an increasingly adversarial Chinese government.”

Burns added that Chinese President Xi Jinping and his military leadership likely “have doubts about whether they could pull off a successful full-scale invasion of Taiwan at an acceptable cost to them,” Burns said. Putin’s experience in Ukraine has “probably r einforced some of those doubts,” he said. Bloomberg News

RUSSIAN prosecutors at the trial of opposition leader Alexey Navalny are seeking to jail him for 20 more years, according to allies of President Vladimir Putin’s most outspoken critic. A Russian court that’s hearing an “extremism” case against Navalny inside a strict-regime prison set an Aug. 4 hearing to announce the verdict in the trial, the state-run Tass news service reported Thursday, citing his lawyer Olga Mikhailova.

The prosecution in the closed court has asked for a sentence of 20 years in a special regime prison, Maria Pevchikh, head of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation said on Twitter. Another Navalny ally, Ivan Zhdanov, posted a similar message on Telegram.

T he state prosecutor has requested a sentence of 20 years in special regime prison for Navalny. The verdict will be announced on August 4th.

—Maria Pevchikh (@pevchikh) meaningful disruption, especially when hard currency debt plays a big role.”

Still, they pointed to the benefits. After devaluations, countries tend to see their current-account deficits narrow, or even swing into surplus, they wrote. There is also a lift to growth in export volumes, which rises with the scale of devaluation. A rise in exports often becomes material about two years after the devaluation begins and lasts for years, Brooks and Fortun wrote. Bloomberg News

Navalny faces almost certain conviction on charges of founding an “extremist” group and six other related criminal counts. He’s already serving a nine-year term for fraud and contempt of court that was imposed after he returned to Russia in early 2021 following treatment in Germany for a nerve-agent poisoning in Siberia that he and Western governments blamed on the Kremlin. Russian authorities denied responsibility.

Navalny, 47, had been in detention for almost half a year when authorities outlawed his organizations as “extremist” in mid-2021 and crushed his network of activists. Most of his top aides fled Russia to avoid arrest. He and his supporters have continued to face a relentless crackdown by the authorities since Putin ordered the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Bloomberg News

Google says it’s developing tools to help journalists create headlines and stories

NEW YORK—Google says it is in the early stages of developing artificial intelligence (AI) tools to help journalists write stories and headlines, and has discussed its ideas with leaders in the news industry.

The rapidly-evolving technology is already raising concerns about whether it can be trusted to provide accurate reports, and whether it would eventually lead to human journalists losing their jobs in an industry that is already suffering financially.

Leaders at The New York Times, The Washington Post and News Corp., owners of The Wall Street Journal, have been briefed on what Google is working on, the Times reported Thursday.

Google, in a prepared statement, said AI-enhanced tools could help give journalists options for headlines or different writing styles when they are working on a story—characterizing it as a way to enhance work and productivity.

“These tools are not intended to, and cannot, replace the essential role journalists have in reporting, creating and fact-checking their articles,” Google said.

The Associated Press, which would not comment Thursday on what it knows about Google’s technology, has been using a simpler form of AI in some of its work for about a decade. For example, it uses automation to help create stories on routine sports results and corporate earnings.

A debate over how to apply the latest AI writing tools overlaps with concerns from news organizations and other professions about whether technology companies are fairly compensating them to use their published works to improve AI systems known as large language models.

To build AI systems that can produce human-like works of writing, tech companies have had to ingest large troves of written works, such as news articles and digitized books. Not all companies disclose the sources of that data, some of which is pulled off the Internet.

Last week, AP and ChatGPTmaker OpenAI announced a deal for the AI company to license AP’s archive of news stories going back to 1985. The financial terms were not disclosed.

Chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google’s own Bard are part of a class of so-called generative AI tools that are increasingly effective at mimicking different writing styles, as well as visual art and other media. Many people are already using them as a time-saver to compose emails and other routine documents or helping with homework.

However, the systems are also prone to spouting falsehoods that people unfamiliar with a subject might not notice, making them risky for applications such as gathering news or dispensing medical advice. AP