In a scene reminiscent of the origins of the banking system itself (benches, goldsmiths, promissory notes, counterfeiting) it’s beginning to look as though gold has been oversold. Leveraged appears to be the term for counterfeiting in these modern times. Just as in the old days, the origins of banking, goldsmiths gave out promissory notes for the same volumes of gold over and over again, it appears bullion banks are routinely doing the same thing. Cue more bailouts! Audit ahoy!
Floods, Pestilence, Plagues Of Locusts, Suicidal Economists… Oh, Wait…
Scratch that last, they weren’t supposed to be there. All this “End of the world” scenario is simply a distraction away from the economic problems that are in reality engulfing us. Brown’s hoping we won’t notice the theft from our wallets if we’re all scanning the skies watching for bad guys. It’s like living in a badly-written airport paperback.
How dumb are we supposed to be? Some politicians have got the excuse “I know they’re dumb because they voted for me” but Brown doesn’t even have that. Where do his PR people get the idea we’ll be impressed by anyof this?
BB
Quantitative Easing Does Not Mean Inflation
Printing money into the economy would normally precipitate inflation. This isn’t happening and won’t happen because the money isn’t going into the economy. It’s going into the banks. The banks are their own world now, they only interface with the wider economy. If they choose not to use this money as a base to create more money into the broader economy then there will be no inflation as the broader economy has no more money in it. They choose instead to address their own internal problems, applying the printed money to their own self-inflicted wounds. The banks played with fire, and burned the world. Handed the first aid kits to multiply and pass around, they prefer to keep them for themselves.
This will continue for as long as the government chooses to hand over newly-printed money to the banks. In their vaults, they don’t have red ink, they have black holes. The securitisation of debt means it was sliced and diced, reackaged, redistributed so many times it will be impossible to either determine who owns what or how much is actually owed. The only realistic way to deal with this, then, is to treat it as infinite. That’s impossible. It couldn’t end. We’d be feeding it printed money foever, and it wouldn’t make a dent. This appears to be the Bank of England’s policy though. Hmmm. I suspect this is because they’re utterly clueless about what to actually do and this disguises that fact by making it look like they’re doing something. Everybody fusses about the potential significance of what they’re doing (inviting inflation) but miss the real significance (they have no solution to the ongoing crisis so they’re stalling). They can keep this up forever, and it looks as though they will, but it won’t solve the problems of the economy (which is that it isn’t designed to work for us in the first place) and it won’t precipitate inflation either.
BB
In The Forest – Economics
The Keynes School of economic thinking, Adam Smith, the Austrian School… all these are what I call “In the forest” economics. We’re here in this forest, so we have to reorder things in our best interest.
I say, no we don’t. We shouldn’t even be considering that at all.
We don’t because this would be like hens in a battery farm trying to reorder things so that the battery farm worked in favour of them, not the farmers. It’s like trying to accept something wholly artificial, contrived, designed specifically to serve the needs of those who built it, as somehow being the natural environment for those imprisoned within it. Just tweak it this or that way, they say, and it’ll be ok. More taxes, less taxes. Different taxes. Occasional taxes. Part-time taxes. Tax reliefs. That’ll fix it, say these economics schools, from deep in the forest. Then it’ll work.
I say that’s nonsense. The system wasn’t designed to work in favour of the people in it, but in favour of the people who run it. We suffer an imposed culture and an imposed econom model. They aren’t ours. They didn’t naturally develop here. They were imposed.
The basic societal model is Roman. We first saw it here when – surprise! – the Romans conquered us. We first saw the national currency then too. This was introduced so we could be taxed. It facilitates trade, true, but over and above, handled right it enriches any party having control over the money supply. That used to be the Romans, now it’s the banks.
Effectively, then, we’re now conquered by the banks, who have lately (in historical terms) resurrected the old Roman economic model. Internationally, too, not just here. It doesn’t matter how you tweak and twiddle this arrangement, adding or subtracting this or that tax. The ultimate beneficiaries are still the banks. No matter what we do, we cannot amend the existing system so it works in our favour. We need “out of the forest” economics, then. This isn’t our forest, this isn’t our system. If we’re going to develop something that works in our favour, in favour of we who live in it, we’re going to need to get out of this one completely.
BB
Selling England By The Pound
The government propose paying down the National Debt by selling off assets such as the Tote, The Dartford Crossing, the Student Loan Book, etc.
This is wrong in so many ways.
You don’t sell your assets off cheap when you have no money because then you’re left with no assets and no money. It’s financial mismanagment on a colossal scale.
Then there’s the National Debt itself. It shouldn’t exist. It should never have existed. The government ‘borrows’ money from banks that the banks don’t have in the first place. They make it up out of thin air. They do this under license from the government. They then demand to be paid interest on top of the original money. Where is that supposed to come from? It’s clearly impossible. This is what we live in. Ridiculous.
If the government can grant a license to a third party to create money electronically, it can do the same thing itself. It could do it at no interest, and grant it to deserving parties like businessmen, or it could create money at low interest, and similarly grant it to businessmen. Under the first scheme everyone would still have to pay taxes, under the second scheme, arguably we could do away with taxation and simply fund everything needed from the interest repayments.
Both ideas are mathematically feasible, in fact, many alternatives to the present oppressive system are.
Why do we keep the present one?
It favours the wealthy. They have the reigns of power, and they ain’t giving them up.
Except that they are, because they’ve lost them from their hands. It’s got away from them, they’ve lost control of it all.
They’ve killed the golden goose.
They’ve over-milked the cow.
The fleas have killed the dog.
The parasites – are you getting this? – have killed the host.
So, it’s over anyway. All this nonsense about this scheme or that scheme the politicians are blathering on about… it’s all just to make it seem like it’s somehow business as usual.
It isn’t.
We face a future we aren’t prepared for and our glorious leaders are trying to pretend isn’t happening.
Be afraid.
Be very afraid.
BB
Cash For Scrap Continues
Among Mandy’s many amusing statements at the Labour Party conference was that the cash for scrappage scheme would continue with money being provided for another 100,000 cars and vans. Cue applause. Excuse me? Did any of those attending have any grasp of the economic consequences of this policy? I doubt it… all it does is bring forward purchases from the future. People who buy now using government money will not be buying in the future using their own. Subsidised sales now mean there won’t be any then. This effectively bankrupts the future to bankroll the present – how is economic growth supposed to arise from this? Keeping the car industry alive now by robbing it of any future serves one purpose, not economic but political. When the future rolls inexorably around and lack of cash means stimulus has to stop, Labour is well aware that chances are it’ll be after the election and they won’t be in power by then anyway. It’ll be someone else’s problem. This is an appalling and cynical management of our finances which if better understood would make their losing at the next election a certainty. Instead they can rely on there being a general lack of understanding as it’s they who determine what level of economic education we receive. No wonder Balls fears homeschooling so much, any independently and properly educated kid is going to see straight through political chicanery like this.
BB
Immature Debate
This is Chancellor Darling quoted, I imagine from their own PR, at the Labour Party conference (speaking on economic stabilisation and improvement), “I welcome the chance of a mature debate on how we achieve this goal – even if it is hard to see the Shadow Chancellor taking much part,” he said. “There has, after all, been little that is grown up about his performance so far.”
This is what those who wish to run the country have to offer us by way of mature debate? In any genuinely mature debate I can’t see much chance of either Chancellor taking part on that showing. The silly idiot opens his mouth only to disqualify himself from further comment. I say this again and again; while I accept if we remain a nation we need someone to run this country but it can’t be the bankers and it can’t be the politicians either. Should we wish for a military coup now? That doesn’t seem feasible with our overstretched resources almost permanently abroad. Perhaps that’s why, in the face of mounting evidence that their mission there is futile, they’re there in the first place. As Britain descends ever faster into chaos perhaps this is a rare tangible example of genuine prudence from the PM, keeping the army so spread out they couldn’t manage a local coup even if they wanted to.
BB
Mandelson for Prime Minister?
Peter Mandelson is now being quoted at 4 to 1 to be the next Labour leader, meaning if they win the next election he might be the new Prime Minister! You never know, he might make a good fist of it!
BB
Brownout – Judgement Fail
Why is Brown being greeted with smiles, applause etc. at the Labour Party conference? This is the man who was UK Chancellor during the run-up to the greatest near-breakdown that world finance has ever had, and was Prime Minister when everything he was in charge of almost collapsed! The UK economy, his brief, was at one point just a few hours away from going to the great till in the sky yet the bloke in charge while this was all happening is warmly greeted and congratulated. Why aren’t they putting a teacloth over his head and hiding him in a corner somewhere?
More to the point, how can we ever trust this lot?
BB
Give Over, Darling
Chancellor Alastair Darling is this morning reported as stoutly declaring his intention to limit bankers’ bonuses. Does he stoutly declare how he’s going to do that, I wonder? If the bankers want to pay themselves more money, they will. They won’t call it a bonus, it’ll simply be called a renumeration instrument, or some-such. Business as usual, then, for the banks, something else Darling is said to be declaring he’ll end. What nonsense! When the banks wanted to get round financial insurance legislation they took the insurance concept, added a bell and whistle or two and called it swaps. Same deal, just no regulation. Darling isn’t going to regulate these people; they’re cleverer than him!
More indication he’s superfluous, then. Anything really important and politicians can’t affect it or effect it. Who runs the place, then, elected politicians or unelected bankers? When it’s all going well you might kid yourself it’s the elected politicians and that you actually have any say in how things are run thorugh your vote. When push comes to shove, it gets pretty obvious you simply don’t, doesn’t it? And along with these stout declarations are other declarations, equally stout, about regulating the banking system so that the financial meltdown (supposedly averted but in reality merely postponed) can never happen again. These might have more weight were they not issuing from the smug motley crew of politicians and bankers who allowed this situation to ferment in the first place. Given they were the people who led us into this, it’s doubtful they’ll either wish or be able to lead us out. To whom can we turn now for leadership?
BB