tardigrada

A new report by the Dutch Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations says that the US shopping platform Amazon has been so dominant that independent retailers who wish to sell online cannot avoid it. This allows Amazon to get away with extracting monopoly rent from them, pushing them into acquiring extra services, and continuously increasing the fees it charges them.

A brief summary of the study (pdf): https://web.archive.org/web/20230614112703/https://www.somo.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Rapport-Amazon.pdf

• In 2022, Amazon raked in € 23.5 billion in service fees from independent sellers in Europe. This was more than triple the € 7.6 billion it obtained in 2017. These fees include charges for listing, delivering, and getting support from Amazon. This increase can't be fully explained by Amazon's claim of higher sellers' revenue, the report shows.

• In the past years, Amazon’ has increasingly monetised its display results and reccmmendation features. This saw a move away from organic results, which would be ranked according to quality, relevance, and price, towards paid-for sponsored content. Advertising on Amazon doesn’t have a fixed price: it is set by an auction for keywords. The more sellers and other business clients bid for a specific keyword, the more expensive it gets. This way Amazon added an estimated € 2.75 billion in advertising revenue from independent sellers in 2021. Since 2017, Amazon’s overall European advertising revenue has grown nearly 17-fold.

• Amazon’s cut of sellers’ income is increasing. Services like delivery and advertising are theoretically optional, yet Amazon has used its power to make them nearly indispensable by linking them with achieving visibility and sales. Amazon is either keeping fees high (for example, for listing) or increased them (such as for delivery and storage).

• An analysis if delivery and storage prices from 2017 to 2023 in Germany, the UK, France, Italy, and Spain show that Amazon has been steadily increasing the prices of these services. Amazon sellers seem to be increasingly shouldering Amazon’s costs, including the costs of the expansion of its network of fulfilment centres and also the digital services taxes in France and the UK, taxes meant to respond to the extremely low tax contributions of high-revenue digital multinationals like Amazon.

To whom it may concern.

"With a contraction in bank liquidity and lending and an increased radar for bank stress testing from regulators due to the recent turmoil, banks with the highest [Commercial Real Estate] concentrations could see a pull-back on their lending books to allow their debt to roll off," writes Trepp, an analyst specialising in securitized mortgages. As a result, there could be lower origination volumes in the coming months and years.

The news that evolution would be cut from the curriculum for students aged 15–16 was widely reported last month, when thousands of people signed a petition in protest. But official guidance has revealed that a chapter on the periodic table will be cut, too, along with other foundational topics such as sources of energy and environmental sustainability. Younger learners will no longer be taught certain pollution- and climate-related topics, and there are cuts to biology, chemistry, geography, mathematics and physics subjects for older school students.

A total of 485 children are known to have died across Ukraine and a further 1,005 have been injured since Russia launched its full-scale invasion. The youngest known victim, Serhii, was two days old when he died after Russia shelled a maternity ward in Vilniansk, in Zaporizhzia region, in November last year.

Apple’s savings account, a partnership with Goldman Sachs, launched in April to great fanfare. Some customers say it has been hard to get their money out. Customer service representatives at Goldman, which holds the deposits, sometimes gave differing responses about what to do, they said. Sometimes, custumers' money appeared to have simply vanished, not showing up in their Apple account or in the account they were trying to move it to.

In a debt-for-nature swap, Ecuador effectively bought its own debt back at a knock-down price via a fresh loan, and in return, the country pledges to spend about USD 18 million annually for two decades on the conservation of the Galapagos Islands and to capitalize an endowment for the Galapagos Life Fund (GLF).

The BRICS nations, consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, are actively seeking to expand their alliance by inviting additional countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE to join, forming what is referred to as BRICS+. Furthermore, there have been discussions within the group about the possibility of creating a shared currency called BRICS.

New regulations include that crypto exchanges and wallet providers looking to operate across the 27-nation bloc will be able to do so with a license issued under MiCA, which will likely be truly enforced in June after being published in the official EU journal. However, critics argue that excessive regulations could stifle innovation and drive crypto businesses away from the EU.

"[The] SEC’s function now is not to protect the American people, but it’s to protect the banks – particularly the central banks and those interests," Kennedy said. The presidential candidate also spoke about the impact of inflation [...], saying that digital assets presented an "exit ramp" for those worried about traditional money being misused in the name of foreign wars or bailing out big banks.

This has been happening quite often over the recent few months. Why?

In the current case, which has been observed and reported by Lookonchain, a participant in Ethereum's ICO has moved holdings to another wallet address, also with a very short transaction history.

Here is the data from the Ethereum explorer: https://web.archive.org/web/20230527172457mp_/https://etherscan.io/address/0x6ccb03acf7f53ce87aadcc21a9932de915f89804

The firm asserted that regulators in the U.S. are “actively trying to stop companies (banks and fintechs) from supporting crypto assets – even when the companies are trying to do it correctly and by the book”. Unbanked said it recently signed a term sheet for a $5 million investment with a $20 million valuation. Though it did not state which regulations prevented it from receiving the loan, it said it ultimately had not received the funds as of yet and will resume operations.