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According to Bloomberg News , 12/20/17 ,Bitcoin and other crypto currencies will now be paying tax {on capital gains?} according to the new tax bill .Tax cannot be retro active ,but now they will have to pay their fair share . This alludes to the notion that we will be paying tax as well ,which I will be delighted to pay !

BRICS Fight Waning Clout With $150 Billion Deal at Summit By Raymond Colitt and Arnaldo Galvao Jul 14, 2014 6:48 PM CT 18 Comments Email Print Facebook Twitter Google+ LinkedIn Save Photographer: Alexander Vilf/Host Photo Agency via Getty Images BRICS delegation heads at a meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Sept. 5, 2013. The leaders of five of the world’s largest emerging markets will showcase a new currency reserve fund and development bankthis week. Critics say neither is enough to revive the group’s waning clout. Brazil, Russia, India, China andSouth Africa, known as the BRICS, will approve the creation of the $100 billion reserve fund and $50 billion bank at a July 15-16 summit in Brazil’s coastal city of Fortaleza and the capital Brasilia, President Dilma Rousseff and other officials said last week. Negotiators are still trying to agree on shareholding in the bank, according to three Indian officials who requested not to be named because the talks were not public. India wants member stakes to be based on contributions not on economic weight. The initiatives are born out of frustration with a lack of participation in global governance, particularly in the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, said Arvind Subramanian, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The measures aren’t big enough to boost growth or cohesion in the group as foreign investor sentiment sours and member states focus on issues close to home, such as Brazil’s elections, the conflict inUkraine and new economic policy plans in India. “It’s hard to see a lot of impetus at this stage for the BRICS in general and for these initiatives in particular,” Subramanian said by telephone from Washington. “There’s going to be a lot of attention on domestic issues.” Economic GrowthEconomic growth in the five countries is projected to average 5.37 percent this year, half the pace seen seven years ago, according to the median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg. Brazil and Russia will grow 1.3 percent and 0.5 percent, respectively. Yuri Ushakov, Russian presidential aide on foreign policy, said in an interview that the group’s growth rate is still above that of the global average and that its economic and political weight is increasing. The BRICS have evolved from the original term coined in 2001 by then-Goldman Sachs Group Inc. economist Jim O’Neill to describe the growing weight of the largest emerging markets in the global economy. In 2011, South Africa joined to give the BRICS a broader geographic representation. The group’s track record in pursuing a common agenda on the world stage has been mixed. “It’s easier to say what the BRICS aren’t than what they are,” said Jose Alfredo Graca Lima, under-secretary for political affairs at the Brazilian Foreign Ministry. Two PostsThe five countries failed to agree on a candidate to head the World Bank in 2012 and the International Monetary Fund in 2011, two posts at the heart of their demands for more say in global economic matters. The summit is unlikely to provide a common front to push ahead global trade talks either, even though the World Trade Organization is headed by Brazilian Roberto Azevedo. Brazil itself has increased protectionist measures under Rousseff. India and South Africa have signaled they may backtrack on a trade facilitation agreement reached at the WTO talks in Bali, Indonesia in December 2013, wrote Carlos Braga and Jean-Pierre Lehmann, professors at Lausanne, Switzerland-based IMD business school. The joint communique by BRICS trade ministers today said member countries stood by the Bali agreement. Brazilian Trade Minister Mauro Borges said he understood India had certain concerns about its implementation. ‘Common Position’“The meeting of the BRICS trade ministers did not intend to forge a common position on the ratification of the Bali agreement,” Borges told reporters today in Fortaleza. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is unlikely to rock the boat at the Brazil summit, said N.R. Bhanumurthy, an economist at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, a government-backed research institute in New Delhi. “Domestic issues are dominating his agenda, especially growth and inflation,” Bhanumurthy said. Russia expects BRICS leaders to discuss international issues, including the situation in Ukraine, and speak out against “sanction pressure,” Ushakov told reporters July 10. All BRICS members except for Russia abstained from a United Nations vote that called on states not to recognize Crimea’s autonomy from Ukraine. Rousseff met with Russia’s Vladimir Putin earlier today in Brasilia. Financing NeedsThe new development bank, which won’t impose policy requirements on borrowers, will help fill fast-growing infrastructure financing needs, said Kevin Gallagher, professor of international relations at Boston University. The BRICS can also use it to pressure developed countries, particularly the U.S., to advance stalled measures to make global financial institutions more equitable, he said. “They can say, ‘look, we have an alternative,’” Gallagher said in a phone interview. “It gives you a lot of political leverage.” With an expected startup capital of $50 billion financed equally by the five members, the bank could lend $3.4 billion per year in a decade, according to a March study by the UN Conference on Trade and Development. That compares with the $61 billion the World Bank expects to lend this year. The bank will require legislative approval from member countries and at least one year to be implemented. It will eventually open membership to non-BRICS countries and coincides with plans for an Asian infrastructure development bank spearheaded by Beijing, according to an official at the Brazilian Finance Ministry, who requested not to be named because he’s not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. Higher ReturnsThe BRICS bank, along with the separate $50 billion Asian infrastructure bank, is another way for China to get higher returns on its $3.9 trillion reserves than it does from buying U.S. Treasuries, said Oliver Rui, professor of finance and accounting at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai, the favorite city to headquarter the bank. Multilateral lending agencies are also a way for Beijing to legitimize investments abroad, after nationalistic backlashes in Africa against Chinese investment, said Subramanian. China’s Finance Ministry didn’t respond to faxed questions for comment about the BRICS bank. China will also fund $41 billion of the currency reserve agreement, which member countries will be able to tap in case of balance of payment deficits. South Africa will earmark $5 billion of its reserves and the remaining countries will set aside $18 billion each. Details on the functioning of the $100 billion agreement, which amounts to 2 percent of the BRICS’s pooled reserves, have yet to be worked out. Second-best PerformerThe Brazilian real is the second-best performer this year with a 6.8 percent gain, and the rand the third-worst among 16 major currencies tracked by Bloomberg with a 1.7 percent loss. The rupee has gained 2.9 percent and the ruble has lost 4.3 percent. Each country would have a limited amount of cash it could draw on from the currency reserve, and lenders have an opt-out clause, allowing them to drop out of the agreement any time, according to the Brazilian official. “There are many unanswered questions still,” Domenico Lombardi, director of global economy at the Waterloo, Ontario-based Centre for International Governance Innovation, said in a telephone interview. “The measures are more symbolic, designed to show they have alternative instruments to the IMF and World Bank.” To contact the reporters on this story: Raymond Colitt in Brasilia Newsroom atrcolitt@bloomberg.net; Arnaldo Galvao in Brasilia Newsroom atagalvao1@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Philip Sanders atpsanders@bloomberg.net Randall Woods

4 - 8 - 2013 In a recent interview with the New York Times, the writer Toni Morrison said, “I dare you to tell me a sane reason we went to Iraq.” Her request is not unreasonable. We’ve heard similar arguments a lot over the past few weeks, as we marked the 10th anniversary of the war. There is widespread agreement that the American invasion of Iraq was provoked by a series of lies, neuroses, venalities and delusions. And so much of what has happened over the past 10 years in Iraq has been undeniably disastrous. The cost in Iraqi and American blood and treasure is appalling, and the damage done to our country’s reputation -- and to the ideas that animate liberal interventionism -- may be irreparable. (Just ask the people of Syria, who are struggling against tyranny without much help from the U.S.) One thing I’ve noticed over the past two weeks, however, is that Iraqis themselves haven’t often been asked about their opinion of the war. Iraq, after President George W. Bush failed to accomplish his mission, was a place of violence and chaos, but before the invasion, it was a charnel house. Saddam Hussein’s regime murdered as many as 1 million Iraqis in its years in absolute power. Many Americans forget this. Most Iraqis don’t. Torture Chambers The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins, who wrote the best book on Iraq (“The Forever War”), recently recalled a visit, shortly after the invasion, to one of Saddam’s torture chambers, a place called Al Hakemiya. He met a man there who identified himself as Al-Musawi. The two visited a room where Al-Musawi’s “arms had been nearly torn from their sockets.” He had been hung from the ceiling and electrocuted. “Today, in 2013 -- a decade later -- it’s not fashionable to suggest that the American invasion of Iraq served any useful purpose,” Filkins continued. “But what are we to make of Iraqis like Al-Musawi? Or of torture chambers like Al Hakemiya? Where do we place them in our memories? And, more important, how should they shape our judgment of the war we waged?” His suggestion: “Ask the Iraqis -- that is, if anyone, in this moment of American navel-gazing, can be bothered to do so.” I took Filkins’s charge to heart, and asked another graduate of Saddam’s torture chambers, a man named Barham Salih, what he thought of the invasion, 10 years on. Today, Salih is the chairman of the board of the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani, which provides a liberal education in a place not previously known for such a phenomenon. In recent years, Salih has served as both the deputy prime minister of Iraq and as prime minister of the Kurdish regional government. He was in the camp of people who argued that Saddam’s decision to commit genocide against Iraqi Kurds (sometimes with chemical weapons) in the late 1980s made his removal a moral imperative. I asked him if he thought the invasion was worth it. “From the perspective of the Kurdish people -- and I dare say the majority of the Iraqi people -- it was worth it,” he said. “War is never a good option, but given our history and the brutality of Saddam’s regime, it may have been the only other option to end the genocidal campaign waged by Saddam against the Kurds and other communities in Iraq.” Here is where his answer became a lament. “I must admit, however, that 10 years on, Iraq’s transition is, to say the least, characterized by unrealized expectations, both for Iraqis and for our American liberators. Iraq is not the friendly democracy that the U.S. had hoped for, and it is far from the secure, inclusive democracy that Iraqis deserved and aspired to.” ‘Inherent Danger’ He went on to blame Iraqis, rather than Americans, for the failures of the past decade. “Much can be said about U.S. missteps and miscalculations in this process, but there is no denying that Iraqi political leadership bears prime responsibility for squandering a unique opportunity to deliver to their people. This has been nothing short of a drastic failure of leadership on our part! The Kurdistan region offers hope that all is not lost in Iraq.” I asked Salih to answer the argument that the Kurds -- who make up almost 20 percent of Iraq’s population -- were, by 2003, mainly living in relative safety in a region protected by an American-enforced no-fly zone. In other words, the invasion wasn’t a humanitarian necessity at that moment. “All Iraqis lived under a regime that had complete disdain for human life,” he said. “Executions and killings continued at will. Thousands of Iraqis were being sent to the mass graves. The Kurds were never safe as they knew that Saddam could at any time decide to reconquer the no-fly zone.” He went on, “Saddam was a menace to the Kurds, to the other Iraqi communities, and an inherent danger to the region. He was, from our perspective in this part of the world, a grave and mortal danger that we could never be safe from while he was still around.” I take Toni Morrison’s beliefs seriously. The serial and tragic mistakes of the Bush administration, and the naivete of people like me, make questioning the value of the invasion necessary. I thought that Iraq, with competent American help, could make the transition to at least semi-democracy, even after suffering such physical and psychological damage during the bleak years of Saddam’s reign. But those who believe the invasion was an act of insanity -- especially those who fashion themselves as advocates for human rights, dignity and liberation -- should at least ask Saddam’s many victims for their opinion on the matter before rendering final judgment. http://goo.gl/bp2Hj