Ambassador of Mongolia to Tajikistan delivers credentials www.akipress.com

AKIPRESS.COM - Ambassador of Mongolia to Tajikistan L.Battulga delivered his credentials to President of Tajikistan Emomali Rahmon on November 21.

China expands Mongolian vocabulary www.news.xinhuanet.com

HOHHOT -- "Shared bike" and "facial recognition" are among more than 18,000 new terms and words that have been added to the Mongolian vocabulary in China.

European investors to fund $53-million bio-coal plant www.mining.com

Baltania OÜ, a 100% owned subsidiary of Dutch private equity investment firm Momentum Capital, announced that it has made a conditional investment decision to commission an industrial-scale torrefaction bio-coal plant in Vägari, Estonia.

Sonos is running a rare Black Friday sale that includes its new Alexa-enabled smart speaker www.businessinsider.com

While Black Friday is full of deals — you can see our favorite tech ones here — some stand out more than others. Sonos rarely discounts its speakers, but it's kicking off a holiday season sale today. Right now, you can save $50 on a Sonos PLAY: 1 or PLAY: 3, $100 on a PLAYBASE or PLAYBAR, and $25 on the Sonos One.

November 23, 2017 trading report www.mse.mn

On November 23, 2017, 969,358 shares of 32 firms listed as Tier I, II, and III were traded. 18 firms’ shares increased in price, 8 decreased and 6 remained unchanged. Juulchin Gobi JSC /JGV/ was the top performer, increasing 15.00 percent, whereas Material Implex JSC /MIE/ was the worst performer, decreasing 15.00 percent.

Facebook will let some of its users see if they interacted with Russian propaganda www.businessinsider.com

Facebook said on Wednesday that it would let some of its users see whether they liked or followed pages belonging to Russia-linked operatives that sought to sow political divisiveness around the 2016 US presidential election.

Tesla Leads Surge in U.S. Asset-Backed Securities www.bloombergtv.mn

Led by Tesla Inc., the U.S. solar asset-backed securities market has had a banner year, more than quadrupling from 2016.

Britain sets aside $4 billion for Brexit www3.nhk.or.jp

The British finance minister says the UK is setting aside 3 billion pounds, or about 4 billion dollars, over the next 2 years in preparation for its exit from the European Union.

Oil Sets Itself Up for Fall If OPEC Can't Deliver Cuts Extension www.bloomberg.com

Oil traders and analysts almost unanimously expect OPEC and Russia to prolong their production cuts next week. However, behind the scenes Saudi Arabia and Russia are still debating what course to follow.

These high expectations, coupled with a recent surge in bullish bets on crude, amplify the risk to prices if the group can’t convince a hesitant Russia that it’s necessary to agree an extension right away.

“Anything but an extension supported by Russia would have a significant impact on the price,” said Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank A/S. “Not least due to the near record-long oil bet, which has left little room for error in terms of the communication from the OPEC ministers.”

Oil climbed to a two-year high in New York on Wednesday in anticipation that the reduction in oil shipments from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies would further diminish the glut that’s weighed on prices for three years. The cuts are a success, but the job isn’t done. To prevent the stockpile surplus expanding again, International Energy Agency forecasts indicate OPEC needs to maintain the cuts beyond their March expiry.

That’s what almost everyone expects to happen. All of the 36 analysts and traders surveyed by Bloomberg expected an extension, with another nine months of cuts the most popular prediction.

It’s also what OPEC’s largest and most powerful member wants. Last week, Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih told Bloomberg television the group should announce an extension of the curbs in Vienna because surplus inventories won’t be eliminated by March.

Russian Reservations

Yet the dominant non-OPEC participant in the deal has reservations. Russia believes it’s too early to announce anything this month, two people with knowledge of matter said last week. Another issue was the duration of the extension, with options including an additional three months of cuts being considered, they said.

Kuwait, the fifth largest OPEC producer and a member of the committee that oversees the accord, also believes the decision to extend should be taken closer to expiry, said people familiar with the matter. Ministers from both nations set out that position publicly at their last meeting in Vienna in September.

Saudi Arabia has had “extensive” consultations with Russia and feels “fully convinced” that country will be “fully on board,” Al-Falih said last week. Most seasoned OPEC observers tend to agree that the group’s most powerful member will prevail.

“Despite the signs that the Russians may be having second thoughts, I think in the end they are going to agree on an extension,” but it’s not a slam dunk, said Mike Wittner, head of oil market research at Societe Generale SA in New York. The Saudis may not get the extra nine months of cuts they’re pushing for and “if they don’t do anything it will be a severe disappointment to the market.”

These doomsday preppers are starting to switch from gold to bitcoin www.mining.com

(Bloomberg) — Wendy McElroy is ready for most doomsday scenarios: a one-year supply of nonperishable food is stacked in a cellar at her farm in rural Ontario. Her blueprint for survival also depends upon working internet: part of her money, assuming she needs some after civilization collapses, is in bitcoin.

Across the North American countryside, preppers like McElroy are storing more and more of their wealth in invisible wallets in cyberspace instead of stockpiling gold bars and coins in their bunkers and basement safes.

They won’t be able to access their virtual cash the moment a catastrophe knocks out the power grid or the web, but that hasn’t dissuaded them. Even staunch survivalists are convinced bitcoin will endure economic collapse, global pandemic, climate change catastrophes and nuclear war.

“I consider bitcoin to be a currency on the same level as gold,” McElroy, who lives on the farm with her husband, said by email. “It allows individuals to become self-bankers. When I fully understood the concepts and their significance, bitcoin became a fascination.”

At first glance, it seems counter-intuitive that some of bitcoin’s most ardent proponents are people motivated by the belief that public infrastructure will collapse in times of social and political distress. Bitcoin isn’t yet widely accepted as a method of payment and steep transaction costs make it inconvenient to use at vendors that do take it.

Preppers, as it happens, have a different perspective on what they see as the money of the future, which has surged 10-fold in the past 12 months as supporters lauded it as a digital alternative to rival the dollar, euro or yen.

Used to send and receive payments online, bitcoin is similar to payment networks like PayPal or Mastercard, the difference being that it runs on a decentralized network—blockchain—that’s beyond the control of central banks and regulators. It was born out of an anti-establishment vision of a government-free society, a key attraction for those seeking unhindered access to their capital in case a massive shock shuts down the banking system.

“Not too long ago, people in the prepper community were actively warning against crypto, and now they’re all investing in it,” said Tom Martin, a truck driver from Washington who runs a social-media website for people interested in learning skills to survive disaster. “As long as the grid stays up, people will keep using bitcoin.”

In addition to gold, silver and stocks, Martin invests in bitcoin and peers litecoin and steem because they’re easier to travel with, harder to steal and offer better protection in the event of the kind of societal breakdown that would unfold if a fiat currency like the dollar collapsed.

He’s among those confident that bitcoin can withstand even a complete blackout through the strength of the underlying blockchain, the anonymous public bookkeeping technology that records every single bitcoin transaction.

Discussions on the pros and cons of investing in crypto have popped up on survivalist forums like mysurvivalforum.com and survivalistboards.com this year as bitcoin rallied above $7,000. “Buy bitcoin” is now a more popular search phrase than “buy gold” on Google.

The buzz is starting to impinge on gold’s role as a store of value especially since, like the precious metal, there’s a finite supply of bitcoin, which proponents say gives it anti-inflationary qualities. Sales of gold coins from the U.S. Mint slid to a decade low in the first three quarters months of 2017.

“It’s definitely had some impact on the market,” Philip Newman, who does research on precious-metal coin sales and is one of the founders of research firm Metals Focus, said by phone from Washington. “People see bitcoin prices going to the moon. No one thinks gold is going to the moon.”

To attract investors who traditionally buy gold, several digital assets, like Royal Mint Gold and Anthem Gold, have been developed that are backed by physical gold stored in vaults.

Still, it’s hard to envision people walking around spending digital coins to buy Spam, canned beans or bottled water at a local supermarket when they don’t have electricity at home to charge their smart phones, let alone a working internet connection to access their digital wallets.

“I doubt bitcoin is a safe haven from an extreme-risk environment. In that sense, bitcoin isn’t gold,” said Charlie Morris, the London-based chief investment officer at Newscape Capital Advisors Ltd., which invests in cryptocurrencies and is building a price-discovery platform for them.

Bitcoin has also not reached the critical mass to be considered a viable currency to invest in, UBS Group AG’s Mark Haefele said in an interview. The total sum of all cryptocurrencies is “not even the size of some of the smaller currencies’’ that UBS would allocate to, he said.

Preppers, though, stock enough food and supplies to sustain them for months, if not years, and they expect whatever governing structure emerges post-calamity will prioritize getting the web back up and running.

“It may be difficult, if not impossible to access for a while, but once things start returning to some level of normality, then the blockchain will return as it was before the disaster,” said Rob Harvey, a bitcoin investor who prepares for natural and nuclear catastrophes by learning and teaching survival skills, like making a fire. “The blockchain does not need a specific place or a specific person to survive—that’s a strong survival tactic.”

“It is a people’s currency”
Interest in cryptocurrencies has started permeating the mainstream. When Morris surveyed hundreds of executives attending the London Bullion Market Association’s annual conference last month, one in 10 said they’d rather own bitcoin than gold following a nuclear war.

Along the fringe, the 20,000 libertarians expected to converge on New Hampshire as part of the Free State Project are also switching from precious metals. They like bitcoin because it isn’t created by a government, unlike conventional currency.

“You can use bitcoin for economic transactions in a way that gold was never designed to do because it’s a physical thing—it’s heavy,” Matt Philips, the project’s president, said by phone. “A lot of people don’t know what the heck to do with gold if you give it to them in exchange for a cup of coffee.”

Whatever doom-and-gloom scenario unfolds, McElroy, from Canada, has faith in bitcoin. She’s writing a book called Satoshi Revolution, inspired by the pseudonym of the person or people who created bitcoin in 2009 as an answer to the financial turmoil wrought by the global financial crisis.

She says the digital currency breaks society’s dependence on a state that uses its monopoly over the issuance of money to dominate the economy, making it a natural hedge against disaster.

“It is a people’s currency,” she writes in the book’s introduction. “Bitcoins move seamlessly through a world without states or borders, obeying only the command of individuals who choose to deal with each other. Immune to currency manipulation and inflation, they do not serve the powerful elites at the expense of average people.”