Hello and welcome to the CMC Markets non-farm payrolls Friday webinar on Friday the 6th of April 2018 Give me the time. It's just gone quarter past 1 p.m. BST British summer time 115 p.m. UK time and this is the non-farm payrolls Webinar special as always with all our webinars I'm gonna do is I leave the risk warning screen slides on screen here for you to ever eat through It's all fairly straightforward and essentially states that anything that is covered in this webinar It's only my own personal views and opinions and thoughts and comments And they should not be construed as explicit trading or investment advice While you're having a read through those those slides, it's all fairly straightforward Others that a quick chat about what's been going on in the markets and in terms of volatility in the last few hours It's actually very very quiet as always. It's not from payrolls. It's not from Friday. It's very common to see Little no activity or volatility In the run up to the actual all important jobs report, which are out in about 14 minutes In terms of the recent news obviously overnight They make a topic of the entire week has been the kind of the pending or a possibility of a fall-on trade war between the United States and China Yesterday China turned around and stated they're looking at They're like a retaliating in relation to the into the relation to the US US's Imposition on them and then overnight we've heard that Donald Trump stated That the that the United States are looking potentially considering another hundred a hundred billion dollars worth of Imports on Chinese products and this is sort of it. This is exactly how Fortunately trade wars work. It's sort of very much going to tit for tat back and forth And all in all and it's and it usually sends traders into into a bit of a panic And I'm often puts a bit of pressure on equity markets So granted when that was announced it probably would be the early hours in other time It would be kind of I think it's half 12 or half one happened in In the early hours of Friday morning in the UK What that happened? We did see a quite a substantial sell-off in the dark futures. I mean also Index futures of other markets are around the world, but things have recovered somewhat. They're not things aren't any means About any means Rosie, but they are certainly a bit more positive than what they were It would appear that the fear factor has evaporated somewhat and we haven't seen this as quite a common theme recently We're by the initial reaction is quite bad and it wasn't actually saying saying it's a different story because Yeah, it's worth noting that base for the time being it's all just talk The the move by China yesterday on the last 48 hours those tariffs Won't actually commit to play for about 60 days So that leaves a window for negotiation Whereby the United States and China can sit down and a chat about to look at readdressing the trading of balance between the two countries Speaking of trade yesterday the United States and trade figures out yesterday and the trade deficit Increased for a sixth month in a row and it widened to its largest level in nine and a half years. So Mr. Trump whether you like him or not has a point in that There's a very much an in balance of trading between the United States and the rest of the world And when you delve down into those figures, you can see that number one in terms of, you know countries or continents or Trading areas number one that is area that the United States has a trade deficit with is with China and number two The European Union and there you go. China is in the firing line and the European Union has been exempt for now But we all know what Mr. Trump is like He likes to start off quite brash and then he can actually Back down or make me have a have a somewhat meet in the middle and I suspect that's what he's doing I think that's what traders are kind of counting on to as well that the initial reaction sounds quite quite severe And then what you have as a job afterwards is a bit of a cooling of tempers and All this the two sides will come and be together like if you look at If mr. Trump appears to be a bit softer and after than what he once was now That would obviously the alteration to the to the NAFTA agreement would obviously have a bigger position about Mexico and Canada You sell a lot to the United States But once again if mr. Trump talks top initially that could get a reaction from the various heads of government It's a government in both in both Mexico and Canada And that's how mr. Trump will actually probably would rather do business rather than actually going down have the rude Have a full-blown trade war you probably talk like he's having it willing to go Like a full-blown trade war and the way he got carries on on Twitter He might get intentionally be giving off the impression that he is a bit of a loose cannon and and That and ultimately It's often met in the middle these things often these things can take quite a bit of time But the situation appears to be the common theme seems to be that move happens Any political announcement is made it is quite a large a reaction from the financial markets and the flip side of that Why you end up seeing is some spot of a cooling of tensions In relation to the to the non-famperals. Let's take a look here. I think our economic counter for those of you Don't know our economic counter can be found on the market polls tab, and it is the fourth option down Taking a look here we can see here at the headline figure. We're expecting you can see here It's it's it here you unemployment not from payrolls half one We could see here that we're expecting 193,000 jobs to be added in the month of March that compares with 313,000 that were added in February So a big step down but to be fair anything in around the kind of 200,000 mark is fairly good is seen as quite positive Economists have stated the United States needs to be adding at least 200,000 jobs per month Actually, you can keep the economy taking long So if even if the number comes in bangin line somewhere in around the two remark will be deeply quite positive Now I've said it before and other non-farm payroll webinars And I always put it in my market commentary and analysis on the day of non-farm payrolls The devil is in the detail It's quite common for the market to react solely to the headline number This which is the main number I just read out here everyone's focused on the 193 number But what we but there are several bits of information released at the same time this first of all this previous number of 330,000 for all we know that maybe we provide higher or maybe revise lower So that's something to keep an eye out for revisions to the previous month's number second second on the list Is the unemployment rate unemployment rate is tipped to fall from four point one percent to four point two to four percent And in terms of earnings, which is it which I think is a real real key On a multi-basis average earnings in the US is expected to take up by increased by zero point two percent And that compares the previous month's rating of zero point one percent increase and in terms of the year-on-year basis All the average earnings is tipped to increase by two point seven percent And that compares to a previous month's rating of two point six percent at my view the devil is in the detail and All the information the headline figure the revisions If there are any the unemployment and also the average earning figures they all need to be taken into consideration my view is that Traded the market often has an each old reaction to the headline numbers and then the other information sinks in and it's not unusual For the headline number to be say either really good or really bad the market moves in certain direction and there's a realization Oh, hold on things actually aren't as rosy as it actually seem, you know looking back at last month You know looking at over 300,000 jobs paid that a very rosy picture last month But then you take a look at the average earnings for example, and they were solid They were fine, but there were there were there were They were declined from the January figure And that was just that that kind of tempered the mood So don't necessarily get too sweet to swayed by the headline number because more often than not headline numbers get revised so the My view is that the report should be taken as a as a whole and then she fully digested numbers and then try conclusions from there What also is is worth is worth noting yesterday We had the US jobless claim since the people who were you were claiming unemployment benefit in the United States That came out yesterday as it does every week Thursday at half one that ticked off from 215,000 to 242,000 And that was a larger than expected increase. They're spending increased by 10,000 to 225,000 in the grand scheme of things It's fair enough. It's not good to say that not good to see that the Jobless claims rate ticked higher by you know nearly thirty-odd thousand But in the grand scheme of things, it's actually still respectable seeing as that the jobless rate in the United States is That multi-decade is near enough multi-decade loads a few a few thousand here or there isn't really gonna rock the boat a whole lot Turning our attention now To Wednesday's ADP private sector employment numbers We can see here that there are two or 41,000 jobs created In the month of March and the ADP private private sector employment role That was well above expectation. There's like two or five thousand jobs to be created It sinks in nicely with an economist view that the United States need to be adding at least 200,000 jobs per month in payroll and if you look at The the previous month of 235 so it's an improvement on the previous most readings well ever saw size things are looking quite positive In that respect so traders View the better expected of the ADP numbers took a look at the fire wasn't expected ADP figures. I realize that this is overall fairly good And this we can set the mood for today's non-firm payroll But if you take a look at the kind of the wider context of what's been going on in US economic indicators we saw the core PCE Indicator last week take up if you look at various different say Surveys in terms of customer in terms of consumer confidence They're quite high some of them are actually a multi-month highs or multi-year highs all their economic indicators such as Manufacturing and such as housing in particular are quite strong. They've come off the boat ever so slightly They're maybe not as high as they were Two three four months ago, but they're still broadly in quite good shape Bearing in mind the Federal Reserve raise interest rates last month the language of the Federal Reserve seems to be I think we could be heading that we could be looking at another potentially to possibly three more rate hikes from the Federal Reserve in 2018 but obviously today's numbers are called to be of major importance Johnny Allen the ex head of the Federal Reserve only said in the last 48 hours that she expects that we could see three or four rate hikes in 2018 that's all well and good when the When you're actually out of the hot seat, it's easy to give your views and your opinions as straightforward as that But it's I said that which is actually the case But also I say that because it's often seen Jerome Powell the head of the Federal Reserve currently is Taken over miss. Yeah, that is seen as sort of a giant yet You've seen as a as a person that not too dissimilar to Jan Yeah, and so if miss yeah, that's looking as commenting saying three or four rate hikes this year That could suggest that Mr. Powell is thinking along the same lines Obviously, he's not going to just fit in exactly with what the predecessor did But the the market is views him as summer someone along the same lines He's only a job a few months. He took over in February. I thought he's gonna be in any rush to actually kind of Roughly effect feathers. It's likely that mr. Powell is gonna want to actually just get his feet on a bit under the Under the desk and actually suss off the line the land for people before actually kind of going Before having any any kind of major terms Changes in terms of terminology in terms of terminology our language or tone We've got about two minutes left before we actually have the figures come out The Fed have stated that they are focused on the economic indicators I like I just said the economic indicators are broadly fairly positive You know this arguments to be said Four four right four four four rate hikes this year But there's also arguments to be said that four is too many as I keep going with keep going with the give The last couple of years only three rate hikes one minute left Wait for the numbers to come out for those of you either training platform by looking at the market pulse type here What you can do is if you Wanted an indicator to always pop up on your screen What you can do is this this alert here if you click that alert that means it'll be kind of permanently set that every every Every you every time that that economic indicator comes out every month Every week whichever it is will always automatically pop up in the streets You don't necessarily have to wait every to be tuned in because it is pop up on your screen So I love the the alerts all set up for the non-farm payrolls the unemployment and also the actual And the and the earliest figure so we're waiting now to see what the kind of market reaction is going to be what the figures are going to be Coming out now So take a look at the headline number. That was a colossal miss I just want to double-check on my rotors screen on it I roll instrument on a different screen to ensure that that was the accurate figure 103,000 is the as the it was a figure When they were expecting 190 193,000 that seems quite low to me the on the flip side of the last month last month number of 313,000 was revised higher to buy 10,000 also looking at the average earnings average earnings On a monthly basis increased by 0.3 percent an improvement on the 0.2 percent I was expected and looking at on an average earnings on a year-on-year basis Kind of more important what to look at came in a 2.7 percent bang in line with market expectations. I'm so like very quickly Look at it my rotors terminal on a different screen I just want to really be sure that those headline numbers were actually that the numbers that we're looking at In terms of that the reaction from the markets Yes, 103,000 is what was fed through in terms of the non-farm payrolls report. It's a quite a considerable Quite a considerably below expectation that this is an enormous truck appears with the previous two months period with the previous month but No, I know there's not a chaos and you can see the price of gold is a shooting up And I could see here that the US dollar index is lower But as I said at the top of the webinar the United States is be adding around 2,000 jobs every month to be taking along nicely a bearing in mind last month's number was 326,000 because it is revised higher and now we're getting just over 100,000 which is poor on the top of the head and the at face value, but It's still an average 200,000 jobs per month when you amalgamate to it's probably it's probably it's still a fair It's still reasonably good. It's not amazing, but it used to be good and this is a classic example Whether I think the markets are going to be too focused on the headline figure, but also unemployment did take up as well That's something that is something to be to take note of so also this is clearly isn't a particularly good report headline number Was very weak the other plumber ticked up The only thing only got positive I can say is that on a month-on-month basis the average earnings ticked up But the yearly one which is the one people really focus on came in banging on with expectation It's good to see more Americans are Are Getting better are getting paid slightly better, but ultimately it isn't it isn't an overall good report I think what we're going to do now is I'm going to take a look at some of the market reactions I'll say quick look now at the dark futures. I'll observe it It's not skeptical but hesitant to kind of pay attention to what's going on with the markets immediately after the number has come up because There's a lot of all those two good problems. I look at it on a better basis We can see here That the numbers came out at this candle and it's one that I can't hear the reaction was down and then I pushed higher It does appear that we're actually we've taken off the lows of the Of the the candle but when the numbers just just about came out if you look at this we can see here that the market did Was going to quite a bit of volatility, but there we go You know the numbers are not 40 minutes We can clearly see on a miniature that the market is heading south take a look now at the S&P 500 I suspect it's going to be a similar situation on the S&P 500 So for those people you're thinking about what's the kind of state of American equities We've had a series of lower highs For that in recent weeks. So I showed you the kind of big snapchat We can see here that the market has been in a fairly obvious downward trend here of the S&P 500 similar looking chart on the Dow Jones the market day edging lower here fairly It has popped higher on this occasion. So it's recouped some of the ground that was lost here But we take a look now at a minute minute chart and now you can see here once again This is when the figures come out here at exactly half one I know we're already below the lows at the half one. The numbers only came out four minutes ago The markets made made digest this I think to themselves. Well, you know what when you combine the two months report together It's still okay. Not amazing, but okay, but The initial reaction into the downside is that one second there, please So I think in the very near term. It's likely to see pressure on US indices Trading or in our non-found payrolls is obviously quite high is obviously very is obviously is also quite high risk Given that the volatility And what's going on in the markets ice as I said, this isn't a good report on its own But I think the market might try and convince itself that the report combined with last month's report isn't too bad And for that reason what we couldn't end up seeing is We could have seen a scenario by the the market isn't as worried About as initially let on if that makes sense. So I'll take a look at what's going on with the US dollar So the big picture on the four-hourly chart here The US dollar yesterday with this morning hit its highest level in over a month And as you can see now the markets coming off on the back of that This is the US dollar index take a look now what we can see here ban major sell-off Nothing was going to see if you positive in terms of the US dollar outlook So bearing in mind particularly on the one-hour chart the US dollar has been doing fairly well recently So a bit of a pullback isn't an entire surprise I suspect Things aren't as bad as they initially seem So I think we could see a bit of a turnaround in the US dollar in the next few hours Just so we could see a turnaround or we could see a push higher in US equity in the next few hours I don't think I don't think that's really gonna be anything enormous, but I think the We may have seen the kind of worst of the reaction in that The people might look at this number and go, you know what when you take a consideration last month's number It is an overall that bad One market which has been very correlated or inversely correlated with the price of The US dollar has been the gold market and they can a big picture over the last few months Safety and safety December onwards has been broadly to the upside. We have taken up the low You have to create a lower low here But the in recent weeks on assing five or six weeks price of gold has been for all the kind of pushing higher and if you look at the if you look at the moves it on the back of the Imperial number it's also pushing higher on account of it. This was kind of put it with numbers like this unemployment rising Poor headline number that would really kind of put traders thinking, you know, we're probably not going to have The Fed probably are rushing out raising rates in June ever that reason. We're seeing a push higher here in the price of gold that they mentioned the gold on Certain days when the economy market is on a severe pressure because of the uncertainty around Pension trade war gold has matter to do quite well I take a look now at a couple of current popular currency pairs like the euro dollar the power versus your US dollar so Over the last few weeks, we can see here that the even though the euro has been doing fairly well against you I guess the US dollar In the grand scheme of things we can see in recent weeks for 2018 It has been edging a bit lower and it's kind of always gonna run out of steam on the kind of 125 level I'm looking at any kind of a shorter term basis What we can see here is that it has been edging lower here But now that the euro is actually probably did well on the back of the that the latest figures We could see a bit of a continuation of the of the reason of the reason gonna sell off. So taking a look at it Take it thinking like this this level here. We were pretty much on One of the areas keep a mile forward is this this area here It's in around the 122 40 level or just north of that the moment 122 40 Which is with exact low from late March is 122 39 We're training ever so slightly higher that the moment if you can relate north of that It's likely we could see the euro push on higher from here given the idea Sell off in the US dollar and also it would be a resumption of the wider trend and the big picture trend Like that is more likely to continue, but that being said If the euro has found it difficult once again, I get the euro I guess they guess north of the Hits and moving average at 123 35 We could look into what's 124 and then the late March high of 124 76 But notice how the euro is further difficult to get to get up towards the 125 level I take a look now at pound dollar What's going on that? So the pound versus the US dollar has been a solid upper trend over the last 12 months You can see here that recently enough we have a this this move here recently is appears to be a bit of a pullback in Compared with the kind of wider The move here that happened largely in the month of March push higher from here See a bit of a pullback appears to be resting on the 50-day moving average, which comes to play in 139 87 if we can hold above that level We could be looking heading back up towards 141 that we can see here that the market ran out steam in around the 141 area And if you go north of 141 the next level to keep an eye for the upside we want to 42 44 the late March high, but even if the Market does better to drift a bit lower from here We could be looking at getting support in around the 139 area. We saw a lot of consolidation in around 139 And if he if you even if you do manage to go south of 139 In around the kind of 137 50 ish if you did look at the this trend line here We can see that 137 50 ish would be in around that trend line So while we remain north of that trend line And for those of you who want to know that is the trend line from the loads of March last year to the loads of August last year Grounded in November it traded south of it a couple of times But then they should make it a slice and move through it If you draw a timeline from there, and if you remain north of that trend line I suspect the outlook for pollen versus US dollar is going to remain positive It's only if that trend line is broken it could actually look to get a bit worried on the back of this What I'll do now is it's a look to take a look at the at the at the footsie with 100 Is there any markets that you want me to have a look at or comment on that? I haven't already commented on feel free to just stick that in the chat box But bearing in mind there's only a few minutes left On this webinar, so we'll be looking to wrap things up fairly soon Taking a look now what's going on on the On the footsie 100 we can see the big picture of the footsie has had a quite a decent sizeable sell-off in 2018 The market is pushing higher here yet again It appears to be running into resistance at the fifthly moving average Which comes into play just in around the kind of 7,200 mark where we're basically where we are now The market's moving higher We can see positive momentum on the rise of so the the upward move is being confirmed By the positive by the increase in positive momentum But why do we remain south of the of the march high of of a 70 to 56? I suspect the mark is going to is um is Could turn over on itself potentially, but if you do break north of 50 to 70 52 56 We could be looking getting back up towards the elated marks February high of 73 40 And if you go beyond that big the big psychological number of 7,400 would then be in play at 7,400 Is also important because it actually coincides with the charity moving average But if we do see the market look to actually run on a steam here And if it turns out that this this upward move is only a bounce back in the wider Series of bounce backs that we've had the next day to keep them out for the downside We're 47,100 and then of course the big psychological important 7,000 level I think i'll sell the 7,000 we could be looking getting back down towards 6,839 I'll take a look now at the DAX and then I look to wrap things up Right as you can see here the DAX has also had a fairly fairly rough 2018 after losing serious ground that like late late late January early February It hasn't really managed to actually kind of snap out of the downward trend that it's been in It's firmly below the two-day moving average which comes into play here So the outlook is quite it remains negative that being said It does manage to hold hold north of this support area here This price actually you know if in around 11,700 there thereabouts 11,692 or 11,700 as an area As you can see a classic example of lower highs So I suspect we could be looking at heading south again On the DAX and should it should that be the case the next day when the watch out forward to the downside Will be the kind of psychological important 12,000 and if you go south of that down towards 11,800 and if you go south of that Look towards the 11,700 region and if you go if you go below 7,000 because at this area here 7,800 that will create a new low for 2018 and that in itself would actually be quite a worry And it could point could point to head back down towards levels and that seems to be everybody of last year in around the Just south of 11,500 What we need to be doing is you need on the DAX to kind of shake off or negate the negative trend that we've been in recently We need to kind of first of all probably Capital head north of the fifth of the moving average which comes into play at 12,390 But then also you would want to be taken out the march highs which come into play just shy Well, they're thereabouts at 12,500 12,475 Wouldn't be taken up before we can actually even begin to consider Should we be looking head and higher if it do you might as you go north of there We'd be looking heading back towards 12,600 And I thought was the case you can then get to get a sense of fear that we might actually target the journey moving average Which comes to play at 12,671 Well, that's all for me this week. I hope you enjoyed this week's non-farm payrolls A webinar it's going to be on the market insight section for the next hour or so And market insights can be found under the trading trading pulse section and the second tab down I want to point out that we also have a webinar the Monday market webinar You feel free to sign up for that. That's on the Monday coming. I'll be giving that webinar and that'll be on at 12,15 BST British summertime. I do want to thank you for your time and your patience. Have a good trading week and good luck


let me begin to get a temperature of the room by which I mean not the physical temperature. In terms of content, how many of you have are already in the blockchain space? How many of you have heard about it? And then how many of you have read about it? Excellent. Okay, good. And last set of questions, just a demographic question. How many technology providers in the room? And the rest of you end users? How many end users? Consumers? And the rest is what? Media? Paparazzi. Okay, so I think, I don't know the protocol. I think the doors are welcome to stay open, but let's get on to a sort of a warm start over here. Is this streaming live or is it being recorded for replay? Okay, good, good. There are going to be two of us that are going to be speaking. I'm going to set the stage, actually more than set the stage because I'll be talking for about the first 20 minutes. We have 30 minutes altogether. And that is getting some of the foundational aspects around blockchain placed. And then Chris is going to join me in taking us through not just a demo, a couple of demos, but also in the spirit of the forum that we are in over here. Take us through the Hyperledger project, which is another very vibrant up and coming open source project similar to how, let's say, Cloud Foundry was just a few years ago. My name is Garvinder Alawalia. I'm based in Dallas. I'm part of the IBM team. Officially, my paycheck comes from the cloud side of the business, but it touches the blockchain side of our business. It touches IoT and beginning to touch a lot of cognitive as well. My role is out in the field with customers, many of you or some of you who I do know are in the room in helping kind of solution all the changes in technology that we are experiencing, both from the cloud side and increasingly from the blockchain side more to this talk. And I'll just do a brief intro and then Chris will talk a little bit more. Chris Ferris over to the front seat on the left side for me is a Distinguished Engineer, and he is the CTO of our open technologies, open architecture, open cloud architecture, and also the chairperson, the elected chairperson of the Hyperledger project, which operates under the governance of the Linux Foundation. He'll touch a little bit more about that. So as must be clear from the title, of course this is a conversation I want to start about blockchain, and then also in the context of Bluemix which runs, which is the IBM pass running on Cloud Foundry as most of you know. There are three parts that I'm going to touch on in about 15, 20 minutes. Actually, I'll touch on the first two parts and then hand it over to Chris for the last part. One is give you the basics, the essentials around blockchain, and that is definitely let's understand what it is, let's understand what its constructs are, give you certain architecture views, help you relate to certain well-known patterns like model view controller I'll touch upon, and also I'll specifically touch on something called consensus protocols, and there's a reason I'm going to touch on that specifically. And then I'll talk about a new genre of apps, if you may, called Dapps. How many of you have heard that term before? Just one person, one or two or three. Okay, so very few of you. So I'm glad that we are able to, Chris and I are able to from IBM bring to you, introduce to you the concept of Dapps, which is very similar to a few years ago when the concept of 12-factor apps started and cloud native application development started. So there's already a new paradigm of application development that has come upon us and calling developers on how to approach blockchain-based apps. And in the Dapp section, I'll talk specifically, you'll see the continuity from the previous section and that is about smart contracts, certain practices and characteristics related to Dapps. And then the developer resources actually I'll leave it to Chris to point to the developer resources. It'll really combine with the third section.  One is marbles and the other is commercial paper. Just the names of those should be intriguing enough to you that I feel safe leaving the description for later and the intrigue for you right now, and Chris will detail it a little bit more. Okay, that's the plan. Everyone's good? All right, so blockchain essentials. The key distinction, you might have heard of this as a distributed ledger, but the key distinction and a characteristic of the blockchain is that it is decentralized and it has replicated state and replicated content across all nodes. So there is consistency and how we arrive at that consistency to give you the teaser, it happens through consensus, which has to proceed the replication. Every node on a blockchain network basically has the identical database. So that makes it not just a database which is decentralized and consistent and identical, but it is also a transaction analysis platform. So it is both a database as well as a new kind of transaction analysis system, right? So transaction analysis is not new to any of you, and I'll make some of the historical connections a little bit later. Now, this being a generic picture, if we look at the constructs, actually let me just back up to give you historically the contrast. The contrast on the as is scenario is where every node in a relationship or every node that needs to transact or entity, let's not call it a node, maintains their own ledger. Ledger is a fancy name in the blockchain lexicon for let's just call it databases, decentralized databases. Every node in the current state maintains their own ledger, maintains their own database, even if there is a transactional relationship between two entities. And then you can think about all the reconciliation, all the alignment, and of course all the audit that has to follow as a result of the databases being separate, even though the transactions are tied. So the databases become same identical decentralized replicated, a lot of audit and a lot of reconciliation and a lot of friction is removed from the ecosystem and from the economy. Now I'm going to take you through five constructs and think of this more in terms of business before you begin to translate this into technology and later in the slides I'll make the translation into technology. One is assets. Assets are broadly of two kinds. One are tangible assets which are physical and you'll see chairs and tables and all and when Chris does the mobiles demonstration, mobiles are an example of physical assets. The other category of assets are intangible assets, right? So paper stuff that is digital, intellectual property, so on and so forth of course including software code, those are intangible soft assets. And Chris's second demo which is the one called commercial paper is an example of an intangible asset, an application that uses intangible assets on a blockchain. So that's a construct of an asset. The second, there are five constructs I'll take you through. The second one is one of a ledger. I've already described that a little bit to you but think of the ledger, what your historical know a ledger to be. Here's the transaction. It goes down on one side for a one party. Here's how it goes down where another party on the other end of the same transaction. And then you can look at the transaction from a life cycle perspective and I come to an example of buying a car, a new car or a used car and then you use it for a few years and then you sell it and somebody else buys it and exchanges hands through four owners. You get the idea. Eventually it goes to a junkyard, right? So there's a complete life cycle and every step of the way there is a transaction that is happening and those transactions are getting recorded. The transactions are not just exchange of money but also represent exchange of transactions of course associated to that could be exchange of value, exchange of currency, could be associated, all right? And then I clubbed the last three constructs over here and that is participants, transactions which I already a little bit described and then contracts. Everybody understands participants in the ecosystem and in a relationship when a transaction is happening and the contracts are what govern the rules of relationship and operation of the participants in order to conduct the transactions. I talk about contracts a little bit more formally in just a few slides. So if you relook at this picture and I build upon it with that's a generic picture and I build upon it with a more specific picture, you see the life cycle in a car as an example of an asset that a car goes through, right? And think about all the paperwork that is involved in the transactions of the life cycle of a car as a property or as an asset. Who owns the asset? What is its licensing certification? State licensing, DMV kind of papers, ownership, insurance, so on and so forth, right? Who is driving it? Who is borrowing it? There are a lot of aspects to it. There could be telematic aspects also to it. I am not touching on necessarily the telematic aspects over here but you could also look at that as another digital chain that happens in automotive. So this is something that you can relate to. This is an example of a tangible asset and these kind of transactions can go on a blockchain and each of the entities in that each of the nodes represents an entity and the entity records the transaction depending on the movement and the stage of the life cycle of the vehicle. So that was a car use case. This is an IOT use case, probably closer to a consumer connected home kind of an IOT but you can think of it similarly in other IOT situations where the devices, so these don't just have to be financial transactions. Financial finance could be an element of it, right? So the devices that are talking to each other could be nodes on a blockchain which now become homogenous, meaning the blockchain and the user is agnostic to the individual devices. The reason I point out the word homogenous is because that's one of the barriers to large scale adoption of connected home. Heterogeneous devices, they don't talk to each other and so on and so forth but how do you take that problem away by lifting it into a layer which we call the blockchain and then having the rules and the transactions and the trust between devices through the blockchain. And now you can begin to look at a car talking to the vision that it really has seen, painted in the industry, can come closer to reality where you now get not a device centric experience but you get a user centric experience with trust between devices and governance that you can apply through the blockchain. There are several other examples, several other use cases but the most important point in providing only a very short sample of the use case list over here is to compel you to understand that it's going to touch all of you regardless of what your industry is because the nature of transactions that we are talking about which can come into the scope of a distributed ledger is basically anything and everything for the large part. Now of course there's more mechanics and design aspects to it meaning public versus permission and scale and certain design points that I'll talk about in just a moment but there are use cases and actual execution happening in the market, this is not just visionary around land rights in countries where land rights aren't very well developed and property ownership of land is put on a blockchain and it stays there and there is no dispute about it and it's very clear when hand off an exchange of land or property transaction happens. Providence is when somebody wants to know exactly, a company wants to know exactly where its individual component parts of a product are coming or service is coming. Think about pharmacy, think about aviation, think about luxury goods, think about healthcare. Those ecosystems are very sensitive to where the supply is coming from, where the supply chain is coming from, how do you get the right governance and the right provenance around that? All those are examples and use cases for the blockchain. So I'm stepping into kind of my second section which is to begin to give you, now that we painted a picture around the blockchain and by the way I forgot to mention one of the key words, once you get a little bit deeper into this, there is a whole language and terminology that is developing. The transaction and what is saved in the blockchain database is immutable. So it is different from typical databases where you can go and do a delete and distributed ledgers, decentralized ledgers you cannot delete. So once you save something in it, it is saved in there for life. So now you can begin to see not just does everybody have an identical copy but what is in it is immutable. So I'm going to move into the architecture view and this is the model view controller pattern that I alluded to earlier and if you begin to think of your stack, a typical stack on the left side, begin to think of that and I'm going to basically build it up and try to relate it to a blockchain based stack and you have transaction systems in your environments today, the middle portion of the platform stack. So think of this, think of blockchain based stack, very similar to the stacks that you have but of course very different in its own unique and differentiating ways where you look at it as another transaction system that is part of your environment. Just like cloud became part of your environment and beginning to expand and legacy begins to shrink similarly think of your transaction systems and opportunities for new transaction systems, either existing ones moving or new ones being built, being built with applications built on the blockchain. So I'll step you through real quickly through these layers and starting from, well let's just start from the bottom. The point being that security is of course not just hardware but also security at the hardware layer and there are hardware companies that are doing a lot of work, both at the chip, right at the chip level in terms of security and then you come into consensus which is a really important point and the reason I flagged that out is because it sets me up to talk about on the next slide which is devoted only to a certain sample of consensus protocols for you to kind of keep, take under your belt for further consumption. So blockchain the core fabric, right, is abstracted out from the consensus capability. So from the IBM point of view and increasingly from the community in the Hyperledger project, Chris will talk a little bit more about that, you begin to see consensus as a service. So it is not loaded and wired into the Hyperledger core and now you get to pick and choose which consensus protocol you use. Park that thought in your mind for a moment because I'm going to come back to it, why the choice of a protocol and having flexibility in which choice for your use case and for your market conditions is important. I'll talk a little bit more about that in the next slide. Then of course your crypto capabilities, messaging capabilities across blockchain nodes and then smart contracts is the other layer that I will highlight a few slides down and built on top of smart contracts or applications which in this world are called the apps and I'll elaborate a little bit more about that in just a moment. So here are some terms that you probably never heard of. Quite frankly even I had not heard of until you know started having into under the hood of this engine. On the top left is something called BFT or Byzantine fault tolerance or PBFT for practical Byzantine fault tolerance. Praxis is another, let me just throw the words at you and then I'll elaborate rafters is another one and sieve is another one. Now to make the connection for you these are the protocols which stand in the layer over here that you see called consensus or consensus protocols. There are lots of choices. This by itself is becoming a very vibrant subspecialty in computer science schools today. A lot of research happening in new kinds of consensus protocols are evolving. Now some of these are new and some of these actually have existed for 20 years. Byzantine BFT has been sitting on the shelves from MIT or somewhere for the last 20 years really hasn't gone into wide-scale application but the Hyperledger project which is the open source blockchain project IBM is significantly invested in that is going to use at least for the first release the BFT protocol. If you're familiar with Bitcoin which I'm sure all of you are and underneath of Bitcoin is also the blockchain which is where all this innovation and disruption started but the distinction to note is that the Bitcoin blockchain is vertically integrated for Bitcoin so think of Bitcoin as the application think of Bitcoin as the application and the blockchain underneath of Bitcoin as a vertically integrated specific to Bitcoin that's the blockchain for it and the consensus protocol that it uses is proof of work which is not shown over here. So the choice of the protocol affects significantly the use cases the market behavior and also the fairness of a blockchain market so that nobody corners power and of the transactions matters significantly. I won't elaborate too much just in the interest of time. RAFT is another very popular protocol and actually you may not even know this is something that is used in the Zookeeper Hadoop HBase world so see some heads that are nodding. PAXOS has been around for some time I believe but it's also very complex SEVE has some more refinements on top of BFT for eliminating or minimizing non-deterministic behavior. I'll skip this but the main idea is here is there are certain design points that are important when you're designing a blockchain node meaning which node should take what entities and what roles there are different roles as you can see that nodes have. A node first by default boots up as a validator node and then issues a request a broadcast saying are there other validators over there and then it finds out whether there are other validators or not and then takes on there's an exchange and a protocol communication that happens and then nodes take on different roles based on the protocol on certain security and privacy services. How many transactions can be run on a node? So there are a lot of design aspects that come into play when you're designing a blockchain network besides just picking which protocol it is. I'm going to skip the letter of credit use case but it's the idea is you begin to see the movement of documentation and goods across a set of parties. I spent a few minutes on smart contracts and DApps and leave sufficient time for Chris in a few minutes.  So it is an offer as a meeting of mine it has to be accepted by both parties it is a promise to perform and because it's a promise to perform there has to be consideration meaning value has to be exchanged there's usually a timeline and an exploration associated with it there has to be proof of performance so the consideration can be exchanged within the timeline and there has to be remedies if somebody does something bad then how do you do mediation and recovery and those kind of things somebody breaches. That's a contract. In many sense the smart contract is not different but you should not expect it to be just a codification of traditional contracts into software code because there is more optimization you can get more granularity and features and control on the contract you can release payments on much shorter intervals depending on movement of a cargo from country A to country B depending on the progress of exchange of tangible assets you can have more finesse, more control a richer contract if you have it in terms of a smart contract. Smart contracts run on nodes certain privileges nodes will have which ones can run what kind of smart contracts and if you think about the stack diagram we looked at smart contracts are what invoke the submission on to the blockchain they invoke a request on to the blockchain and therefore also invoke the consensus protocol underneath of it. Back to our car ownership problem real quick the current state where the databases are different and each has an in-house database and the idea being now everybody has a yellow identical shared distributed ledger the reason I put up that slide is to begin to introduce you to the concept of dApps and there are three things in the dApps if you look at it holistically one is of course the application per se and in the middle you will see something called chain code think of this as the layer in the stack diagram of the smart contracts in the hyper ledger project in the IBM term chain code is basically the implementation paradigm for smart contracts in go Chris can elaborate a little bit more on that that's chain code and then chain code writes to the distributed ledger the blockchain at the bottom so those are the three essential constructs of dApps on how new kind of apps are built and here are some more properties I'll leave these mainly for you this is just a narrative around the previous graphic around the characteristics actually just real quick this last point over here and you look at the characteristics of dApps and you think of them to be abstraction this is a new form of programming of abstraction you are now looking at so you think of contracts not in terms of objects you think of contract oriented programming as opposed to object oriented programming there is no entity that controls the majority of the tokens protocols as I described is as the consensus is as a service dApp adaptive based on use case of the market and you avoid any you know central points of failure and if you think about it on the right side the 12 factor the 12 factors the 12 factor app everybody's familiar with this builds upon that this is not in conflict everything underneath of this is intrinsically in the 12 factor application constructs as well alright so let me give it to Chris to take you through a couple of demos thank you let's see alright so the first one I'm going to show here is marbles so we've written a couple of sample apps on the hyperledger hyperledger fabric platform I should say to demonstrate essentially what's going on in the internals and each of these samples sort of gives you a sense of you know how to actually create an application that leverages the blockchain in this particular case we have a very simple demo we have Bob and Leroy and they have and can trade marbles right so I can move a marble from Leroy to Bob and as you can see down below that's getting recorded in the blockchain as a specific transaction I can create a new marble I can give it a color I can say I like this one I'm going to have a green one I'm going to make it blue alright and I'm going to make that large and give it to Leroy and boom we see another block get added to the blockchain where did it go hello alright that's not good it's not getting validated as everything was going on here it hasn't been validated why isn't it showing up create another one give this to Bob there we go now the show up and then I can trade them but you notice that this is immutable so you know once a trade is recorded it's recorded for both I have two nodes in this particular demonstration and it gets recorded on each and I can go through and I can inspect the blockchain there the second demo that I want to show is sort of the commercial paper so this is an application where you know one company may put out an offer to give a loan to a customer so that they can buy their product right so this is something we call commercial paper and so I have myself and then I have Gurri all logged in here and we're going to trade some commercial paper so I'm going to create XXX $100,000 note so I've just created a $100,000 note put it in there and that's now available for Gurri to pick up so he can actually purchase that note right there so that he can buy something from me and so we've just executed a trade and if we come down here we can see that all of those are then recorded in the blockchain so again these examples essentially give you all the tools that you need to be able to write a note application that interacts with the blockchain shows you how to write the smart contract and go and deploy it to the ledger and so forth let's get back to the demo since I think we have very little time hello, Moes okay so when we started exploring all of this one of the things that we recognized was this is the perfect type of thing that's suitable to open source at its essence you know blockchain is going to be something that's going to be I think as fundamental as the web if everybody runs off and implements their own blockchain technology that doesn't interoperate we're never going to be able to create these various use cases that you saw if we're going to have supply chain transparency you're not going to have a single vendor solution across an entire supply chain so it's very important to us that we actually created an open source project and so this brings us to the hyper ledger so I worked with Jim Zemlin some of the other guys at the Linux foundation and we recruited a bunch of friends and I have 48 friends in the hyper ledger project we started out with a total of 30 and we've had two in just the past three months we've had two additions one of 10 and one of 8 just last week new additions, new members of the hyper ledger project we have sort of monthly hackathons where we get the community together community developers together to either to start hacking on and creating hyper ledger hyper ledger based projects solutions and or to hack on the platform itself to bring new members into the fold sort of it's not quite exactly the same thing as the cloud foundry dojo model but again there's an awful lot of pairing and stuff that goes on as we start bringing people into that community of development we've got a number of activities ongoing we're building requirements in use cases this is sort of exploring you know the landscape of use cases that Guri was sort of hinting at we've got an architecture working group that's sort of exploring how we want to compose this from a pluggable perspective identity working group that's focusing on the various schemes that we have to manage identities in the blockchain and we've got a group working on creating a white paper that's giving us a point of view across all the different types of things we're essentially you know if I were to net it out I would say that the project is intending to be the analog for blockchain that the Linux kernel is for Linux we expect there to be one kernel and then many distros and many various solutions building off of that kernel so again that sort of reflected in the white paper we have two incubators we have the fabric incubator which is based on the IBM contribution in collaboration with digital assets and then we also have the sawtooth lake incubator which is a project that was contributed by Intel it implements a blockchain and it introduces a new and very novel form of consensus something they call proof of elapsed time it's a little bit more complicated to get into but basically it sort of replaces the notion of proof of work and we're looking at just in fact just this week we've been working on getting the whole release integration process up and running so that we can potentially be able to cut a couple of releases in the June timeframe I've left a couple of links here so we have obviously Bluemix all the demos that I was showing you were actually running on Cloud Foundry Node.js applications that interact with the blockchain peer network that was running in a Docker swarm cluster with two validating peers so we've got that you can check those demos out they're also available on GitHub you can go to github.com slash IBM dash blockchain we've got a number of other additional demos and samples there you can toy around with and some additional links here to various resources including the Hyperledger project hyperledger.org again it's open source it's free for anybody to come and contribute and we'd love to have come and hang out and that's basically it any questions any questions yes right so the question is can I give an example of how the choice of consensus protocol would affect the nature of the application that I wanted to build an important point that I think again this is a half an hour is very too short to cover a lot of this stuff but if you think about Bitcoin, Bitcoin is a permissionless network anybody can join and the choice of consensus is important because it this proof of work notion is what assures that that everybody is paying the same picture right it's fairly complex but basically because anybody can join you have to sort of pay to get in and the way that you pay is to do this is to solve a puzzle solving the puzzle requires that you chew up an awful lot of CPU and the thinking is well if you're chewing up CPU you're actually spending a good deal of money paying to the electric utility to actually to do that when we think about some of the use cases there those are going to be in what we call permissions networks those are going to be where maybe a collection of banks or participants in a particular supply chain we get together in a closed network if you will and because you know who the members are of that you're less likely to fear that one of your one of the members of your supply chain or one of the members of your banking consortium is a bad guy that's going to try and do some bad things with the shared ledger and so as a result of that we can choose one of those other consensus algorithms like PBFT or SIV or something or RAFT and because we know the set of members in that network we know how large the network is then we can figure out whether or not we've achieved consensus just by counting and so as a result you would choose some of these different algorithms to essentially achieve greater throughput in those kinds of networks and again there's additional exploration ongoing to figure out we can have some where we have a collection of validating and non-validating peers that participate in that way you can even constrain further the number of validating peers helps to increase the throughput because it takes less time to achieve consensus and there's additional research that's ongoing about various other forms of consensus that we might choose to use R3 came out with something called CORDA very recently and their notion of consensus is just the two members participating in a given transaction are the only two that have to achieve consensus so if they do then we're good so there's an awful lot of different approaches depending on again the nature of the kind of network that you're creating okay yep I collect money over the web for anything so I can't store for example credit card or something and I need to be PCI compliant and all those things so how do you see hyper ledger or blockchains easing that pain for let's say commerce over the web so so as I mentioned so the hyper ledger project is focused on sort of the core implementation technologies that you can use to construct a blockchain it's not a specific solution I would expect that the people the building is sort of on the solution layer on top of that technological capabilities are the ones that are going to answer that particular question I mean obviously those use cases and requirements feed down into how we build this technology but it's going to be the solution itself that determines that okay why would how would you convince me to go with hyper ledger and not Ethereum okay so that's a good question so the question is you know choosing between one of the other implementations of blockchain like Ethereum or even Bitcoin itself there's a number of others ripple and the answer to that question is we're actually in the process of collaborating with members of the Ethereum community and one of the things that we're looking specifically at is being able to take the Ethereum VM approach doing smart contracts and porting that and writing that in into the context of the chain code example that we just showed and the Ethereum community is very excited about collaborating with us so I don't think it's necessarily going to be a choice I think it's more likely that these things start coming much more together under the umbrella of the hyper ledger project alright I think there's another yeah thanks Chip thanks for saving me so thank you


Thank you for your stay. Thank you for fighting for freedom. Thank you for being friends. Thank you for being fellowships over all the years. You have to be ready for whatever task we give you. You got to train. You got to train hard. You got to be physically fit and know your job extremely well. NATO's come together as a strong team because of people like you. I want to thank the soldiers that have deployed here. I'm very very proud of what they're doing. They're making a difference. They've helped us reassure our allies and partners and they've helped deter any type of further aggression.


What is going on guys welcome back to the channel and I appreciate you being here today I am back with another destiny to highlights video today We have epic plays funny moments and much much more if you guys do enjoy the video and would like to show you Support you can by smashing that like button if you are new around here and enjoy daily destiny to videos be sure to subscribe And if you have any click you want featured in a highlights video or a top 5 send it into the email I just linked at the top of the video description guys I hope you enjoyed the video and hopefully I will see you on that next one Which chest did you say you got from did you open it well someone already opened it so okay? I'm just gonna open this one. No way aim. Don't open anything yet. Oh, dang it Oh a chattering bone I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it. I got it Do we get to one party? To the boys in one party. Oh my Oh my gosh, just a job This one right here the one I got it from I got this one. I'm sorry thing. Oh my gosh I'm sorry for anybody who doesn't have it. Oh my gosh. Oh my god Control means no victory take them and crush your enemy Is and protect them you clean success belongs to you alone fed all that ammo in one place At least I got an enhancement core. Let me do my prayer real quick Please Lord let me get this thousand voices because I'm not about to play with this game no more bro Let's go get it I Got the entire armor set I jumped up so high. I don't have no idea bro.  Oh My god And to be honest, this is my first week learning a full rate Like I did the full rate like on Monday for the first time And oh my god And it's not as hard as I thought it would be not really not I Got to learn how to do scourge of the past deal, but I'll learn to do that this weekend and well I have time to do it. Oh my god Whoa Got it away You make so first myself. I'm a third purse. I'm in first person. Oh First person Cushioners come to town may captured. This is the only reason I wanted to do the raid


Good evening aspirants, welcome to the Hindu News Analysis by Shankar A.S academy for the date 4th of July 2023. Displayed here are the list of news articles we will be going through today. Now without wasting time, let's get into today's discussion. Take a look at this news article. This article is speaking about greed flation. We have heard about various economic terms like inflation, deflation, reflation and so on right? But what is this greed flation? It seems to me a new term right? Now I will explain it to you. Greed flation refers to price inflation caused due to corporations greed for higher profit. To put it in simple words, the term greed flation refers to a price raise introduced by corporates to take advantage of the prevailing inflation. By doing this, the corporates will boost their profit margin. Now why is this greed flation concept suddenly in use? As we all know, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected almost all the economies of the world. Many countries have witnessed raising inflation, increased unemployment, decreased business growth and so on. The United States, which is the world's largest economy, has also witnessed high inflation. Some economic experts are arguing that the cause of high inflation in the US is due to greed flation. The experts are saying that corporate profit margins have risen significantly in the United States since the pandemic and this has contributed to high inflation. But some other economists argued that the price rise in the US during the COVID pandemic is not due to greed flation. So this is why the concept of greed flation appeared in the news today. In this discussion, we will understand the points provided in this article in detail. As we just saw now, some economists are arguing that the price rise in the United States during the COVID pandemic is not due to greed flation. Now you may have a doubt. If the prices were risen not due to greed flation, then how the prices were risen and who determines the prices of the particular goods? The economists argue that the prices of the products are not arbitrarily set up by the business entities, whereas they are set based on consumers' willingness to pay for their products. In simpler words, the businesses cannot force consumers to pay a certain price for their goods, whereas they can only try to fix the maximum price the consumer would be willing to pay. Now what is the reason behind this? See, if businesses charge high prices for their product without knowing the consumer's willingness to pay, then the particular good will go unsold. So the businesses have to lower the price of their products to clear its unsold stock. From this inference, we can say that businesses have the freedom to raise or lower the price of their products, but it is ultimately the consumer who determines the price of any product in a market economy. Having understood how prices are determined for the particular good, now we will see why prices were increased in the United States. Some economists primarily argue that price raise was not due to greed flation. As we all know, inflation refers to a general raise in price level. This means the inflation refers to a widespread increase in the prices of goods and services across the broader economy, and it does not account for the prices of individual goods and services. So the experts say that the price raise by a particular company does not cause widespread inflation, and so there is no scope for greed flation in the US. Then what is the reason behind the price raise? See, the current high inflation in the United States is due to the US Federal Reserve's expansionary monetary policy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, as a part of the expansionary monetary policy, the US Federal Reserve put more money in the hands of the US consumers. Now what happens when more money is given to the consumers? See, if more money is given to the consumers, the purchasing power of the consumer will increase. So they are able to buy more goods and there would be more demand than earlier. This in turn increases the price of the goods and services in the economy, and this ultimately results in inflation. If we take the United States in the wake of the pandemic, the money supply has risen to about 40% due to the US Federal Reserve's expansionary monetary policy. So the abundance supply of money in the hands of the consumers and the supply chain bottlenecks caused by the stringent lockdowns led to high inflation in the United States, and it is not greed flation that happened in the United States. And this is the reason behind the increase in the price of goods in the United States. If this is the fact, then how did the US companies get huge profits during COVID pandemic? The economists point out that large US corporations benefited from the demise of smaller businesses during the pandemic. See, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many small businesses were not able to thrive because of the lockdowns and the financial constraints. The large US corporation used this as a chance, and they captured the market share of the small businesses. This led to an increase in profits of large US corporations. The economists also argue that some US corporates have raised their price because of an increase in cost of input that is needed to produce the goods. The cost of inputs have increased due to supply chain bottlenecks due to COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war. So the experts say that the large US corporation did not get huge profits by increasing their price exorbitantly. They gained profit by capturing the market of the demised small businesses. So that's all regarding this discussion. In this discussion, we saw what is greed inflation. We saw why the present price rise in US is not due to greed inflation. We saw the reason behind the present price rise in the United States. And finally, we saw why US corporations are making huge profits right now. So that's all regarding this discussion. Now let us conclude this and take up the next news article. Take a look at this editorial article. This editorial article talks about India's refusal to join NATO Plus Grouping. See in May 2023, while the US House Select Committee recommended strengthening the NATO Plus framework by including India in the grouping, India's external affairs minister, Mr. Jay Shankar had rejected this idea by saying that the NATO template does not apply for India. This happened a couple of months ago. But again, the topic has resurfaced due to the recent state visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to US in June. During his visit, there were plans to table a bill to bring India into the NATO Plus fold. The author through this editorial has argued that India must stay out of the NATO's fold for long-term gains. This is the crux of the article given here. In this context, let us quickly go through some of the important points given in this editorial. Before that, I have highlighted the syllabus here. You can go through it. Firstly, let us understand about NATO and NATO Plus Grouping. NATO or not Atlantic Treaty Organization is a transatlantic alliance of 31 like-minded North American and European countries. It was created in 1949 in the aftermath of the Second World War. The alliance was created mainly to serve three purposes. First is to hinder Soviet expansionism. Second is to forbid the revival of nationalist militarism in Europe through a strong North American presence on the continent. And thirdly, to encourage European political integration. In short, the aim of NATO is to provide collective security against Soviet Union and to prevent the revival of nationalist militarism in Europe. One special fact about NATO is that it constitutes a system of collective defence in order to respond to and counter any attack by a non-NATO member. But remember, NATO is committed to peaceful resolution of disputes, meaning if diplomatic efforts fail, it has the military power to undertake crisis management operations. Now moving on, let us see the membership. NATO's membership is open to any European state. Only criteria is that such a country should be ready to contribute to the security of North Atlantic region. Currently, NATO has 31 members. Very recently only, that is in April 2023, Finland became the 31st member of NATO. And Sweden, which has stayed out of military alliance for 200 years, is also ready to join NATO currently. See, after the dissolution of Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, many thought that NATO would lose its relevance. But NATO has not only survived, but it is also expanding. Thanks to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Now coming to NATO Plus Grouping. NATO Plus Five is a security arrangement that brings together NATO and five aligned nations to boost defence and intelligence ties. The five allies of the US include Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Israel and South Korea. Actually, the term NATO Plus is not officially recognized or re-established to concept. Since the inclusion of these countries as members would require a complex process of negotiation and assessment, the NATO Plus Group remained an unofficial grouping that has been used in debates regarding potential expansion of the alliance. While NATO's target is to counter Russia, NATO Plus is clearly aimed at containing China. Experts feel that with the ongoing disputes between India and China, India will naturally align with the NATO framework. This is why the United States offered an invitation to India to join NATO Plus. See, India has a lot of advantages by joining the group. Some of the advantages include gaining access to advanced military technologies, intelligence sharing platforms, interoperability with other member states. This could potentially strengthen India's defence capabilities and modernisation efforts. Most importantly, the framework will provide India with a security umbrella and deterrence against any potential threats, mainly in the light of increasing regional security challenges. Despite all such advantages, India rejected the offer due to certain reasons. Now we will see the reasons one by one. Firstly, getting into any NATO framework will annoy both Russia and China. Apart from being a strategic partner, Russia has been useful to India in dealing with regional security challenges, mainly in moderating the stance of China. Even though Russia is getting over-dependent on China, post-war in Ukraine, Moscow, that is, Russia has remained a valuable partner for India also. So, if India joins the grouping, then it will face the challenge in balancing these relationships and managing the potential geopolitical consequences. This is the first reason. Secondly, considering the threats posed by China, joining the grouping might be counterproductive and detrimental. This is because the military framework might limit India's freedom of action and prevent it from pursuing an independent policy towards China. So, India's autonomy in this scenario is doubtful. This is the second reason why India is neglecting to join the NATO framework. Thirdly, India has traditionally maintained a policy of strategic autonomy. This allows India to engage with multiple nations and block based on India's own interest. But joining a NATO framework would require India to align its defenses and security policies with the objective and strategies of the NATO alliance. This again undermines India's strategic autonomy. Finally, due to conflict of interest, the author says that joining the grouping might divert resources and attention away from pressing issues in India like border disputes, terrorism and regional conflicts. So, the author of this editorial is of the opinion that India should stick with Quad rather than getting into the NATO-plus framework. Because India engaging with the West through the Quad looks more promising than India engaging into the NATO-plus framework. That's all regarding this discussion. In this discussion, first we saw about NATO, then about NATO-plus-5. Then we saw the advantages that India might gain by getting into the NATO-plus framework. And finally, the reasons why India has denied its entry into the NATO-plus framework. This is an important article. Just note down all the points that we discussed today and revise repeatedly. With this, let's conclude this discussion and take up the next news article. Now, look at this article from the text and context page. It talks about an ordinance that was promulgated by the President on May 19, 2023. It made amendments to the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi Act 1991. See, this ordinance has raised several legal and constitutional questions. Now, we will try to understand the key points from this article in detail. Before that, I have highlighted the syllabus regarding this discussion. You can pass the video and go through it. Now, let's start the discussion. Let's start with some background information. See, the Delhi government and the lieutenant governor have been in a legal battle since 2015. The battle is over the control of services in Delhi. Regarding this, the Supreme Court gave a split verdict in 2019. Again, in May this year, a five-judge constitutional bench has delivered its verdict on this issue. It has delivered a verdict on whether officers allocated to Delhi comes under the administrative control of the Delhi government or the Delhi Lieutenant Governor. The case also included the constitutional validity of the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi Amendment Act 2021. This act referred to the Lieutenant Governor as government in any law made by the Legislative Assembly of Delhi. The Court ruled that the services should be under the control of the Delhi government because the Court feels that it is essential for the effective governance of the state. The Supreme Court based its decision on Article 239AA clause 3 sub-clause A of the Indian Constitution. This particular article grants the power to the Delhi Legislative Assembly to make laws on various subjects except for police, public order and land. So, the Court concluded that the Delhi government should have control over the services. This happened on May 11, 2023. On May 19, the President promulgated an ordinance that effectively nullified this judgment of the Supreme Court. Now let us move on to understand about the ordinance and its implication. See, the ordinance was issued by the President to nullify the Supreme Court's judgment. So, it basically takes away the services from the jurisdiction of the Delhi government and places it under the Lieutenant Governor. This raises a fundamental question. Can an ordinance or a bill passed by the Parliament nullify the decision of the Court? See, the Supreme Court has consistently held that Parliament is a legislative body and it does not possess judicial powers, which means the Parliament cannot overturn a Court's decision without changing the basis of that decision. That is, Parliament cannot just ignore or overturn the decision without a valid legal bias. In this case, the ordinance has not provided any grounds for nullifying the Court's judgment. Apart from this, the ordinance introduces a provision that establishes a new authority called the National Capital Civil Services Authority. This authority consists of a chairman who is the Chief Minister and two members. The members are Chief Secretary and the Home Secretary. The ordinance grants this authority the power of posting, transfer and disciplinary matters related to civil servants. However, decisions made by this authority does not require the Chief Minister's approval. It can be finalized by the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi. As you can see, this provision significantly reduces the role of the Chief Minister. Also, it gives undue power to bureaucrats in the administrative matters of the state. In addition, the ordinance includes another provision. It allows the Secretary to the Council of Ministers to review cabinet decision. He or she can then bring it to the Lieutenant Governor's attention. In simple words, this provision allows the Secretary to question and evaluate the Cabinet's decision. If he or she believes that it goes against the law or established procedure, then they can take it to the Lieutenant Governor. The Lieutenant Governor can then take action based on the Secretary's opinion. So, this grants the Secretary the power to influence and potentially overturn cabinet decisions. This goes against the principle of collective decision making by the elected representatives. Finally, the ordinance introduces a new procedure for summoning and proroguing the Delhi Legislative Assembly. It requires the Chief Secretary to seek the opinion of both the Lieutenant Governor and the Chief Minister before issuing the summons. This contradicts the constitutional practice. See, the usual practice is that the decision to convene a legislative session is made by the Cabinet and the Lieutenant Governor acts on the aid and advice of the Cabinet. But the provision in this ordinance deviates from the established practice. It basically creates confusion regarding authority responsible for summoning the Assembly. So, when we analyze the key provisions of this ordinance in relation to Article 239AA of Constitution, we find that it does not comply with the Constitution. Here, you should also make a note about Article 239AA Class 7. This article empowers the Parliament to create laws that supplement the provisions mentioned in Article 239AA. Here, to supplement means to add or to enhance something. But this ordinance contradicts with the law. In this case, Parliament does not have the authority to pass a law. This grants all powers to the Lieutenant Governor for administration of Delhi. Similarly, the President also does not have the power to pass a law that gives bureaucrats the authority to review Cabinet decisions. Also, any law cannot remove the Chief Minister in matters of posting, transfer and disciplinary action in the matters of services. So, the ordinance in its current form has serious legal decisions. It goes against the Constitution as it grants the power that exceeds the scope of authority provided by Article 239AA. These provisions do not align with the intentions and framework established by the Constitution. The author concludes by saying that the ordinance suffers from legal informatics and is not in conformity with the Constitution. That's all regarding this discussion. In this discussion, we saw about the recent ordinance passed by the President and the legal deficiencies in the audience. With this, let us conclude this discussion and take up the next news article. Look at this article. This opinion article is about the Bond Conference, its outcomes, and it also focuses on the concept of just transition. In this context, let us learn about Bond Conference, what is just transition and why it is significant. Before getting into our discussion, the syllabus relevant to this article is given here for your reference. Take note of it. Now, let's start. First, we look at the Bond Conference. Bond Climate Change Conference took place at World Conference Center in Bonn in Germany from 5th June to 15th June. In this conference, many important topics related to climate change was discussed. One such important topic was the global stock take. We all know as per the Paris Agreement, the world countries had agreed to reduce the global average temperature by 1.5 degree Celsius below the pre-industrial level. This global stock take is an exercise which assess the progress of the world nations in achieving this ambitious feat. It also encourages the progress on greenhouse gas reduction, building resilience to climate impacts and mobilizing of resources to address the issue of climate change. Also know that this global stock take is mandated under Article 14, class 1 of the Paris Agreement. As per the Paris Agreement, this global stock take exercise will be conducted once in every five years. The first-ever global stock take took place in this Bond Conference. It revealed that the world needs to cut down 50% of its emission by 2030 from the 2019 levels to achieve the target of controlling climate change and limiting the global average temperature rise below 1.5 degree Celsius the pre-industrial level. The next important point of discussion in the Bond Climate Change Conference was the concept of just transition. What is just transition? As per the definition of International Labour Organization, just transition means greening the economy in a way that is as fair and inclusive as possible to everyone concerned creating a decent work opportunity and leaving no one behind. To understand this concept, let us take the case of India. India had set a target to achieve net zero emission by 2070. To fulfill this commitment, India might reduce its dependence on coal-powered electricity production. During this transition, many people might lose their job and livelihood. For example, employees who work in coal mines. So the government has to create alternative employment opportunity for the coal miners. This is just transition. On one hand, climate change is mitigated and on the other hand, people are not affected by the steps taken by the government to mitigate climate change. So basically, this just transition tries to balance climate change efforts on one hand and inclusive growth on other hand. Moving on, we will look at the significance of just transition. Firstly, it ensures no one is left behind socially or economically at the cost of climate change mitigation measures. Secondly, the government can demonstrate the socio-economic benefits of green transition which in turn might increase the public support to achieve higher climate change targets. Thirdly, government should support the green jobs revolution which will ensure that alternative jobs are created. And these jobs have to be attractive in many aspects like wage, working condition, etc. This in turn will attract the workers needed for the economic transformation. Then, if the government plans transparently and includes the broad range of stakeholders like workers, technical experts, NGOs, it can minimize the fear among the people. As a result of this effort, social groundwork for resilient net zero economy can be laid. The just transition not only helps the country in progress towards climate change, but it also ensures the progress of the country in achieving sustainable development goals as well. For example, take the guess of sustainable development goal 7. This goal aims to provide affordable and clean energy. And sustainable development goal 8 aims to provide decent work and economic growth. So, by adopting just transition, governments all over the world can on one hand negate climate change impacts and on the other hand achieve the sustainable development goals. So, that's all regarding this discussion. In this discussion, we saw the basics about born climate change conference and also some points about the just transition. Now, with this, let us conclude this discussion and take up the next news article. Look at this news article. The news article is about a new scheme announced by the central government to support minor rape victims. The scheme will be under the woman and child development ministry. The woman and child development ministry will use the administrative infrastructure of Mission Vatsalya to implement the scheme. This is about the news article. In our discussion today, we will focus on the new scheme and we will also see few points about Mission Vatsalya. The scheme is currently called the scheme for critical care and support for accessing justice to a rape survivor. The scheme would operate under the ages of the Nirbaya fund. Right now, an amount of 74.1 crore has been allocated for the scheme. The scheme's main focus is on pregnant minor rape victims who have been abandoned, orphaned or did not want to live with their families owing to social stigma. The support under the scheme will be provided until the victim attains the age of 23. Now, what are the benefits provided under the scheme? Besides maternity care, the victims will get neonatal and infant care. Psychological counseling and legal support will also be ensured to them under the scheme. Also, the scheme aims to provide shelter, food, daily needs and safe transportation for attending court hearings for the victims. In addition to this, the victims and their new bond will be provided insurance cover and monthly assistance of Rs. 4000. To avail this help, it is not mandatory for the victims to have a copy of the FIR. They can easily get the benefits of the scheme at the child care institutions in each district. This is all about the new scheme. Moving forward, we will see some points about Mission Vatsalya. Vatsalya means affection. Mission Vatsalya aims at securing a healthy and happy childhood for every child. It is an umbrella scheme for child protection services in the country. The scheme covered under the mission is Integrated Child Protection scheme. Mission Vatsalya focuses on children as they are one of the supreme national assets. Plus, India is home to 472 million children and they comprise 39% of our country's population. So, giving prime focus for children is necessary for the development of our country. Moving on, we will see the objectives of the Mission Vatsalya. The first is to secure a healthy and happy childhood for every child in India. Then, to foster a sensitive and supportive ecosystem for the development of the child. Also, the scheme aims to assist the state and the union territories in delivering the mandates of the Juvenile Justice Act 2015. Through all this, the scheme also strives to achieve the sustainable development goals, particularly the ones focused on children. Now, we will see the components under the Mission Vatsalya. The components include statutory bodies, service delivery structures, institutional care, non-institutional community based care, emergency outreach services, training and capacity building. These are some important points about Mission Vatsalya. That is all regarding this discussion. In this discussion, we focused on the new government scheme to support minor rape victims and we also saw a few points about Mission Vatsalya. Now, let us move on to the next news article. Look at this editorial article. This article talks about the access to potable water. See, we have made significant progress in achieving piped potable water for all rural households. Despite this, meeting the target by 2024 seems unlikely. The government has reported that 64% of rural households have got piped water connectivity, but the author says that this figure may be under-level and transparency is needed. In this context, let us see some important points provided in this editorial article. First, we will learn about Jal Jivan Mission and the Hargar Jal Program. See, these are initiatives by the central government to ensure access to piped water for every household in rural area. These programs basically aim to provide safe and adequate drinking water to all households by 2024. Now, let us understand about these initiatives. The goal of Jal Jivan Mission is to provide functional tap connection to every rural household and to prioritize areas with quality affected water sources, drought prone regions and desert areas. The mission also aims to provide tap water connection to schools, Anganwadi centers, health centers, wellness centers and community buildings. It also emphasizes on monitoring the functionality of tap connections. Then it focuses on ensuring the sustainability of water supply system, including water sources and infrastructure. Now, moving on to the Hargar Jal Program. This is an integral part of the Jal Jivan Mission. Basically, it aims to provide fully functional, safe and affordable tap water connection to every rural household in India by 2024. Here, fully functional tap water connection means a household receiving at least 55 liters per capita per day of potable water throughout the year. This is about Hargar Jal Program. Now, we will see the concerns and challenges associated with these initiatives. The government had set a target of providing piped water connection to all rural households by 2024. But the progress has been slower than expected. As I mentioned earlier, the government has reported a significant increase in the number of households with tap water connection. But these numbers are not very reliable, and the overall progress of the mission is a big question. The COVID-19 pandemic at Russia-Ukraine war have slowed down the mission. It basically affected the access to necessary resources like pipes and civil construction material. The government officials claim that these factors have affected the pace of implementation of these initiatives. However, there are concerns about the transparency and accuracy of the reported figures. The figures are solely based on data provided by the states, but independent assessment suggests that the actual progress may be lower than the figures that is reported. For example, the number of villagers certified as Hargar Jal is relatively low. This indicates that many villagers have only partial access to piped water. In order to ensure transparency, it is important to have a mechanism that discloses the actual progress of the scheme on the ground. This will help in addressing the challenges and improving the implementation of these initiatives. So that's all regarding this discussion. Now let us conclude this and take up the next news article. Take a look at this article. Yesterday, the Tamil Nadu government wrote a letter to the Kaveri Water Management Authority objecting to the deficit in its share of water received from Karnataka. The letter also asked the authorities to issue directions to the neighbouring state to release Tamil Nadu's actual share of July water as per the schedule. So in this news article discussion, let us quickly go through the Mekadetu dam issue. Mekadetu issue is a continuation of a long-standing Kaveri river water dispute between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. As we know, Kaveri is an interstate river with its upper hilly catchment lying in Karnataka and Kerala states and lower part in the plains of Tamil Nadu. It rises in the Brahmagiri range in the western Ghats in the Kurg district of Karnataka, Harangi, Hemavathi, Shimsha, Arkavathi, Laxmanathirtha and Swarnavathi are some of the major tributaries joining the river Kaveri in Karnataka territory. Kabini which drains the north Malabar of Kerala state flows through Karnataka and joins Kaveri. Bhavani, Amravathi and Noyal are the tributaries of river Kaveri in Tamil Nadu. Know that there are two interstate agreements signed in 1892 and 1924 on Kaveri river. The 1892 agreement is a general agreement relating to a number of interstate rivers and the 1924 agreement relates to the irrigation development in the basin of Kaveri alone. Both the 1892 and the 1924 agreements are permanent. Later the Karnataka government constructed four new dams across the tributaries of Kaveri such as Harangi, Kabini, Hemavathi and Swarnavathi. For none of these dams the Karnataka government obtained the prior consent of Tamil Nadu. So in 1969 Tamil Nadu appealed to the Prime Minister of India to adjudicate on the unilateral action taken by the Karnataka government. The center used its power under the Interstate River Water Disputes Act 1956 to constitute the Kaveri Water Dispute Tribunal in 1990. The tribunal submitted the report in 2007 which was challenged in the Supreme Court. Based on the Supreme Court judgment in 2018 the center notified the Kaveri Water Dispute Management Scheme. It constitutes the Kaveri Water Management Authority and the Kaveri Water Regulation Committee. This is about the history of the river dispute between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Now let us take up the Megadethu issue.  A project has been planned by the Karnataka government to be constructed here. This project aims to construct a balancing reservoir across the river Kaveri. It is a multipurpose project with several objectives. Some of its objectives are to utilize additional 4.75 TMC of water from the proposed project to provide drinking water facility to Bengaluru metropolitan region. The next objective is to store the flood waters that may escape into sea and the last objective is to harness 400 MW of renewable energy. See, according to the Tamil Nadu government, this project violates the final award of the Kaveri River Water Tribunal. Also, the construction of the two reservoirs would result in impounding the water in the intermediate catchment between the Krishna Sagar and the Kabini Reservoirs. This will result in less water being supplied to Tamil Nadu. This is the reason why Tamil Nadu government is opposing this project. So that's all regarding this discussion. In this discussion, we saw the history of the river water dispute between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. We also saw some points about the Megadethu issue. With this, let us conclude the news article discussion session and take up the practice prelims questions. We have two practice prelims questions today. Let us see them one by one. Let us take our first question. This is a previous question which appeared in 2013 published paper. Let me read out the question. Which of the following can be found as pollutants in the drinking water in some parts of India? The pollutants given here are arsenic, sorbitol, fluoride, formaldehyde and uranium. See, the correct answer for this question is option A, arsenic and fluoride. Arsenic and fluoride are the only pollutants that is found in drinking water in India. Now moving on to the second question. This question is based on our Megadethu Dam discussion. Three statements are given. We have to find how many of the statements given here are correct. Let us take up the first statement. Harangi, Kabini and Amravati are tributaries of Kaveri river. This statement is correct. Moving on to the second statement. The river Kaveri rises in the state of Karnataka. This is a very easy statement. We all know this is a correct answer. Moving on to the third statement. Kaveri is the third longest river in South India after Godavari and Krishna. This is also correct. The longest river in South India is Godavari. After that we have Krishna, then we have Kaveri. Since all the statements given here are correct, the correct answer is option C, all three. Now moving on to the main questions. The main questions based on today's discussion are displayed here. Interested experts can write the answer for these questions and post them in the comment section. If you like today's discussion, like, comment and share it with your friends. For more updates regarding UPSU preparation, subscribe to Shankara IS Academy's YouTube channel. Thank you for listening.