With a lineup of prayer meetings, humanitarian forums and religious panels, the National Prayer Breakfast has long brought together people from all over the world for an agenda built around the teachings of Jesus.
But there on the guest list in recent years was Maria Butina, looking to meet high-level American officials and advance the interests of the Russian state, and Yulia Tymoshenko, a Ukranian opposition leader, seeking a few minutes with President Trump to burnish her credentials as a presidential prospect back home.
Their presence at the breakfast illuminates the way the annual event has become an international influence-peddling bazaar, where foreign dignitaries, religious leaders, diplomats and lobbyists jockey for access to the highest reaches of American power.
The subculture around the breakfast was thrust into the spotlight last week with the indictment of Ms. Butina, who was charged with conspiring to act as a Russian agent. Her goals, prosecutors said, included gaining access to the breakfast “to establish a back channel of communication” between influential Russians and Americans “to promote the political interests of the Russian Federation.”
.. Ms. Butina’s spy-thriller-like tactics hint at the more widespread, if less sensational, international maneuvering that pervades the prayer breakfast, and the lucrative opportunities it creates for Washington’s corps of lobbyists and fixers, according to more than half a dozen people who have been involved in peddling access around the event.
.. Ahead of Mr. Trump’s first appearance at the breakfast last year, some of the people said, foreign politicians clamored for tickets, with some offering to pay steep fees to get into the event and the myriad gatherings on its sidelines.
One lobbyist, Herman J. Cohen, offered what he billed as an exclusive invitation to last year’s breakfast, and three days of meetings around it, to an African leader for $220,000.
.. “It’s an opportunity,” Mr. Cohen said of the event. “If I go to the prayer breakfast, I have a good chance of maybe shaking the president’s hand or talking to him for two minutes.”
“In a way, it bypasses protocols,” he added, “but in a way, it is taking advantage of people being present in the same venue.” Such invitations to foreign leaders, he said, are “very useful to them back home.”
.. Some describe the gathering as similar to the World Economic Forum, except that Jesus is the organizing principle. The eclectic guest list has included the Dalai Lama, the Rev. Billy Graham, Mother Teresa, the singer Bono and the former Redskins coach Joe Gibbs, as well as the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and President Paul Kagame of Rwanda.
.. With its relative lack of diplomatic protocols and press coverage, the prayer breakfast setting is ideal for foreign figures who might not otherwise be able to easily get face time with top American officials, because of unsavory reputations or a lack of an official government perch, according to lobbyists who help arrange such trips. They also contend that it is easier to secure visas when the breakfast is listed as a destination.
.. “You can’t just invite wonderful, exciting, great people,” said Mr. Hall. “Jesus, when he went to dinner, he went to dinner with everybody.”
WhatsApp suggests a cure for virality
Other tech firms should watch and learn
Services such as Facebook and Twitter are built to maximise “virality”, making it irresistible to share, like and retweet things. They are getting better at it: fully half of the 40 most-retweeted tweets date from January last year.
.. Virality can cost lives. At least two dozen innocent people have been lynched in India this year after bogus rumours warning of child abductors went viral on WhatsApp, a messaging service owned by Facebook. WhatsApp has also been used by political operatives in India, its largest market, to stoke religious and nationalist fury.
.. Starting this month, however, users of WhatsApp will find it harder to spread content. They will no longer be able to forward messages to more than 20 others in one go, down from more than 100. In India the upper limit is just five and WhatsApp has removed the “quick forward” button from audio, video and images, adding an extra step to the process of sending content.
.. The goal is not to prevent people from sharing information—only to get users to think about what they are passing on. It is an idea other platforms should consider copying.
.. Sceptics point out that WhatsApp can afford to hinder the spread of information on its platform because it does not rely on the sale of advertisements to make money.
Slowing down sharing would be more damaging to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, which make money by keeping users on their sites and showing them ads. Their shareholders would surely balk at anything that lessens engagement.
.. Facebook’s shares fell by 23% in after-hours trading this week, partly because Mark Zuckerberg, its boss, said that its priority would be to get users to interact more with each other, not to promote viral content. Yet the short-term pain caused by a decline in virality may be in the long-term interests of the social networks. Fake news and concerns about digital addiction, among other things, have already damaged the reputations of tech platforms. Moves to slow sharing could help see off draconian action by regulators and lawmakers.
.. Instagram, a photo-sharing social network also owned by Facebook, shows that you can be successful without resorting to virality. It offers no sharing options and does not allow links but boasts more than a billion monthly users. It has remained relatively free of political content and misinformation.
.. Move slow, don’t fake things
The need to curb virality is becoming ever more urgent. About half the world uses the internet today. The next 3.8bn users to go online will be poorer and less familiar with media. The examples of hoaxes, misinformation and violence in India suggest that the capacity to manipulate people online is even greater when they first gain access to digital communications.
Small changes can have big effects: social networks have become expert at making their services compulsive by tweaking shades of blue and the size of buttons. They have the knowledge and the tools to maximise the sharing of information. That gives them the power to limit its virality, too.
In Dissing Angela Merkel and NATO, What Was Trump Telling Putin?
Even more than with most subjects, when Trump brings up Russia he seems to be speaking of something that is defined less by reality than by what he needs it to be.
.. “We’re the schmucks paying for the whole thing.”) On Thursday, Trump proclaimed,
“I believe in nato,” then immediately undermined the sentiment by complaining that Europe was unfair to American farmers.
.. Another likely explanation for this performance is that the nato members were simply being subjected to the phenomenon of one bully showing off to another. “He’s a competitor,” Trump said of Putin. “Somebody was saying, Is he an enemy? Mmm, no, he’s not my enemy. Is he a friend? No, I don’t know him well enough.” Trump, by that measure, isn’t interested in anyone’s relationship with Putin except his—not Europe’s, not America’s. The policy contents of his demands were hardly relevant; his message to Putin was that he had yelled at nato.
.. Trump’s European tantrum was also, no doubt, intended for the home audience.
.. Russia, in this sense, becomes shorthand for all “those things”—the fakery and dodgy promises and money—that are just a part of the daily life of an American political candidate.
.. he said that May had “wrecked” Brexit, because “she didn’t listen to me.” He then proceeded to endorse, as a future Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, May’s freshly departed, self-indulgently destructive Foreign Secretary, largely on the ground that “he obviously likes me.” With that, and a swipe at immigration in Europe (“You are losing your culture”)
What to Do With Excess Cash
Most investors have way too much cash. Wealthy investors really have too much.
This is a phenomenon Citi Private Bank’s David Bailin has observed whether the markets are soaring, stumbling, or stagnant.
According to Federal Reserve figures, retail investors had about 18% of their assets in money market funds and in U.S. bank deposits, considered cash alternatives, at the height of the financial crisis in 2009. But today, they still have a high percentage in cash—around 14%.
.. “If a client has US$100 million, why would they need US$15 million or US$20 million in cash?” Bailin asks. “They should have it fully invested—they may need US$5 million [in cash]”.Where to Put Cash InsteadCiti is recommending clients consider fixed-income managed accounts that can include a range of options, from a variable rate demand note—which is a municipal security with a weekly maturity, meaning it reprices each week—to a variable rate bank fund, backed by floating-rate bank loans that reset when interest rates rise or fall.“We want things that won’t lose value in a rising rate market,” Bailin says.
For Citi’s clients with large cash positions, the cost of putting together a fixed-income managed account with varying maturities would be 0.20%.