By Rohini Ralby and Dr. Ian Ralby The phrase “In God we Trust” has long graced US currency.  Our trust, however, has shifted from God to banks, and to the people who work to generate wealth on increasingly creative, risky and fantastical grounds. As recent headlines demonstrate, however, those banks and the people who run them are far from omniscient, infallible or immortal. C. Hoare & Co. is a private bank in the United Kingdom that has operated under the leadership of the same family since 1672.  It has evolved with the times, but it has maintained certain principles that have kept it alive through countless wars, pandemics, economic crashes and major shifts in both global power and world trade.  By contrast, Silicon Valley Bank was founded in 1982, First Republic Bank was founded in 1985 and Signature Bank was founded in 2001.  They seem to be on the front end of a growing list of banks that  may not survive to even the midway point of 2023.  The latest addition to that list, Credit Suisse – around since 1856 – has shown that even older institutions are not immune to the danger of abandoning values, eroding fiduciary responsibilities and relying excessively on risky instruments. Theoretically, that was the lesson that should already have been learned from the 2008 collapses of such institutions as Lehman Brothers (founded 1850) and Bear Stearns (founded 1923). So why is the banking sector still banking on the same principles that brought down the economy fifteen years ago? On the 27th of February 2023, less than two weeks before Silicon Valley Bank – the first of the recent failures – collapsed, Victoria Saporta, Executive Director of Prudential Policy at the Bank of England, gave a speech that is posted on the Bank’s website. In it, she effectively argued that a critical role of the Bank’s regulatory function – the Prudential Regulatory Authority – is to facilitate growth and that the…

By Dr. David Soud Over the past several years, I.R. Consilium has earned a strong global reputation for analyzing, mapping, and targeting what we have called “invisible supply chains” – the routes by which bad actors move normally legitimate goods that have been turned to criminal ends. As we have revealed in multiple reports, such supply chains are often hidden in plain sight. Careful sifting and correlating of trade data, open source information, and interviews with well-placed sources can at least begin to reveal what is being moved where, in what form, for what purpose, by whom. This is painstaking work. It involves drilling down into reams of data at different levels of aggregation. You have to account for potential errors and blank spots in those data. You have to make sure that what you find in one information stream matches up with, or at least doesn’t contradict, what turns up in another. You have to remember that a signal that “pops” amid all that information can signify many things, most of them benign. You have to know precisely where insight ends and apophenia begins, and how the worst move you can make is to buy into an appealing narrative and try to make the data confirm it. And when you do make a mistake, even a seemingly insignificant one, you have to be willing to own it and correct it as quickly and clearly as possible. But you also need something else, which is too often ignored by analysts and journalists who have an unexamined faith in data and a desire to make something happen. That something else is subject matter expertise. Without it, you can’t even know the right questions to ask. If you’re going to analyze the behavior of a cargo vessel, you had better know something about the complexities of the maritime space, and the many reasons why a ship might appear to loiter, or even to turn off its Automatic…

By Dr. Ian Ralby, Rohini Ralby, Dr. David Soud As tensions between anxious families and rescue workers grew in Gaziantep, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed: “It impossible to prepare for disasters this big.” That, however, depends on how one defines preparation. The magnitude 7.8 earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria on Monday, the 6th of February 2023, was ferocious but not unforeseeable.  Indeed, seismologists had predicted this earthquake – extremely accurately as to both magnitude and location – days before it occurred. Those alerts, if heeded, would have allowed for preparatory warnings and mobilization of response.  In addition to this prediction, people throughout the Turkish areas that have been hardest hit have been paying taxes to fund earthquake preparedness for years.  Economists estimate that the value of the government account devoted to earthquake preparation and response should be somewhere around $36 billion, so using a lack of resources as an excuse for a lack of preparation does not hold up.  Given President Erdogan’s own efforts to peddle a narrative of Turkish exceptionalism, the failures of both preparation and response in Gaziantep may therefore have to be attributed to a lack of interest and care for the people who reside there.  Perhaps not coincidentally, many of those people are Syrian. While this was the strongest in over a century, Turkey is no stranger to earthquakes.  Scientists constantly monitor the fault lines in the region, and Dutch seismologist Frank Hoogerbeets tweeted a prediction on the 3rd of February that there would be a roughly 7.5 magnitude earthquake in south central Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, identifying the epicenter as just southwest of Gaziantep. Despite this warning, and despite an earthquake preparedness tax on residents of the area, Turkish authorities showed a surprising lack of urgency in the critical first 48 hours after the quake.  Amid freezing temperatures and massive devastation, the window for finding survivors was limited from the outset. In neighboring Syria, as Yousra ElBagir…

By Duncan Copeland Executive Director, TMT and Dr Ian M Ralby CEO, I.R. Consilium A new Spotlight report by TMT, in cooperation with I.R. Consilium, examines both how foreign fishing operators are accessing and exploiting African flag registries for their fishing vessels in pursuit of legal impunity, and how weaknesses in African flagging regimes attract this exploitation. The global fishing market is projected to be worth $194 billion by 2027, so there is ample financial reward to be gained by fishing illegally. High-risk fishing vessel owners – those operations that are most likely to engage in illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, unsustainable and/or destructive fishing practices, and/or those involving broader forms of associated crimes – are looking to create a situation where they can harness the resources of a State without any meaningful restrictions or management oversight. Challenges with maritime governance and limited fisheries enforcement capacity across the continent of Africa, combined with the relative health of African fisheries, makes the continent an ideal venue for high-risk fishing operators to test a variety of tactics for evading accountability. Recognizing this phenomenon is a critical first step in discerning what can be done about it. While concerns have been raised and discussed for many years about the ‘genuine link’ between the flag state and the beneficial owners and/or operators of vessels, broader flag-related concerns continue to emerge around fishing vessels that indicate a growing relationship between the flag of the vessel and high-risk fishing practices. These practises are particularly acute in Africa, where some fishing vessel owners and operators exploit African flags to escape effective oversight and to fish unsustainably and illegally both in sovereign African waters and in areas beyond national jurisdiction. The Spotlight report examines two distinct high-risk flagging processes: 1) ‘flags of convenience’, the use of African open registries to fish in waters beyond the national jurisdiction of African nations, and 2) ‘flagging-in’, the use and abuse of various local rules to…

An Economic Ecosystem of Sanctioned and “Less Popular” States Could Expand a Parallel Global Economy Dr. David Soud, Dr. Ian Ralby and Rohini Ralby Turkish President Recip Tayyep Erdogan’s phone call with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Sunday 6 March 2022 indicated that Turkey is continuing to walk a fine line, encouraging Russia to end the war but refusing to join NATO allies pressuring Russia to do so with sanctions. The stakes of this high-wire act are even more precipitous than they may at first seem. By seeking to maintain good relations both with its Western allies and with Russia, Turkey may find itself catalyzing the expansion and entrenchment of a parallel global economy of sanctioned states and their enablers. As the country that can effectively control access to the Black Sea, Turkey is a critical player in both the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the potential responses to it. Understanding Turkey’s equities in the situation, therefore, can shed light on what choices it may make that could, in turn, affect the world.  Turkey’s roles as a NATO ally, the key party to the Montreux Convention, and a major trading partner with both Ukraine and Russia have all garnered international attention since the 24th of February. Turkey’s roles as the world’s leading exporter of wheat flour and second largest exporter of pasta, however, have not.  Nor has the reality that by the end of June, Turkey will run out of the grain it has stored to maintain that output, and without any clear return to market from the Russian and Ukrainian supply chains, Turkey may not be able to fulfill the orders of its own trading partners.  Those partners – many of which rely on Turkey for staple food supplies – are largely fragile and less popular states outside the direct supply chains of Ukrainian and Russian grain routes.  They include Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and Somalia. Given their central role in global…

Rohini Ralby, Dr. David Soud, Dr. Ian Ralby Consider three events that have commanded global headlines over the past several years: the Russian influence campaign around the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the April 2019 bombings in Sri Lanka, and the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia. If we go by surface indicators, the three episodes look completely different. The first involved the strategic rivalry of two world powers, the second took the form of a horrifically violent series of physical attacks by a small group of conspirators, and the third is a land war launched to invade and conquer a sovereign state. What links the three events, along with many others, lies deeper: in all three cases, minds were weaponized. What might be called the mental battlespace has always been with us. Well over two thousand years ago in The Art of War, Sun Tzu placed special emphasis on the state of mind and condition of heart in leaders, soldiers, and noncombatants alike. He also insisted that any strategist must above all know three things: himself, his adversary, and the terrain. In the past twenty years, the terrain of human conflict has shifted in unprecedented ways, as have the adversaries traversing it, and the ideal of genuine self-knowledge has largely been swept aside by a torrent of outward stimuli and popular forms of self-affirmation. Information technology, especially the internet, has made the abstract terrain of thought, belief, and narrative the defining battlespace of our time. We are already globally at war—a kind of ambient, ceaseless war within collective and individual minds, and it is this conflict, or web of conflicts, that will decide humanity’s future. Any strategist who fails to grasp this reality will always lag behind those who do. By now, we ought to be thoroughly disabused of the notion that the internet and related technologies would necessarily be forces for good, means of overcoming barriers, catalysts for freedom. Whatever else they have made…