Michael Hudson gives me the horn pt.328

Curiously for a conspiraloon economician, Michael Hudson does not promote precious metals with every waking breath, he clearly believes that the megarich vs poor paradigm isn't a false one and he does not appear to be focused on engendering a sense of collapsafarian despair in his listeners...

Hudson isn't going to sell very many Krugerands or water filters with talk like that

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Listening to this latest dose of Hudson I was reminded, as I usually am when listening to Georgists, of the land ownership systems adopted during the Gold Rushes of the 19th Century.

Because the mining camps were set up in wilderness areas, beyond the reach of established governing systems or landlords, the miners got together and made up the rules for themselves.

The rules were simple enough; one person, or small group, could stake only one claim and the claim was no bigger than that person or group could work. If claimants did not work the claim they lost it

Whilst not a perfect system, it did restrict the scope for rent, speculation and generally poncing off people who actually worked for a living

Anyone who tried accumulating claims so that they could rent out or speculate with them, whilst sitting on their arse, ran a real risk of being hit repeatedly on the head with pick axe handles

Of course, this kind of thinking was suppressed as soon as the camps got properly civilised

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It always baffles me when people 'of the right' dismiss the very notion of social welfare as being an unworkable utopian fantasy because they believe it results in a system where people are paid to do nothing

As if spongers being paid to do nothing is somehow a pitfall unique to left wing systems

Whenever anyone plays that card I find myself thinking of people like this twunt...

The Duke of Twuntminster

He left school with only one O Level, in spite of the best education money could buy, has done nothing especially productive or clever in his adult life and yet is one of the richest land-owners in the country. He lives entirely off the labour of others and has done absolutely nothing to deserve that privilege. Thanks largely to the fact that he'll pay fuck all tax, in life and death, he and his progeny will continue to accumulate capital and increase the amount they leach off everyone else in a way that simply isn't possible for us paeons

Whatever your political persuasion, I believe it's pretty difficult to make a case for parasitism of this nature. Those who have 'left wing' sensibilities will see it as unfair. Those with a 'right wing' point of view should see it as a pretty shit way of allocating scarce resources or stimulating productivity. The fact that many ordinary people with right wing views don't get what's going on is one of the triumphs of the plutocratic class

Though, for the life of me, it's sometimes hard to put my finger on which of the members of that class are the ones who are actually smart enough to keep this charade going

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Michael Flatley is really from Chicago

Economics 101 - Lesson #11 QE Explained

Time to go away now pt2

Cheers to Anon for the link to this series of presentations by Damon Vrabel entitled 'Debunking Money'

So far, I've watched the first in the series...

...and whilst it doesn't offer much in the way of new material for veteran Loons, Vrabel's delivery is 'concise and easy to understand'

Which might be handy, as we're now getting to the stage where those of us who have been grazing the Net for some time have a pretty good idea of what's going on with the Money thing and, rather than preaching to the choir and discussing this material amongst ourselves, we probably should be thinking about reaching out to the majority of people who are waking up to the fact that they are being rogered senseless but don't quite understand how*

Naturally, I reserve the right to pull the link to Vrabel's videos if and when I discover that he starts talking about Space Newts, dons white robes or instructs viewers to send otherwise worthless money to some bearded Loon and his followers in a compound in the Mojave Desert. That is, after all, a vaguely suspicious haircut he's sporting there



* = Something must be in the air/ water. Otherwise, how else could you account for a once unthinkable headline such as this...

Bank of England Head Mervyn King Proposes Eliminating Fractional Reserve Banking

NB Don't be holding your breath now

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Still Bill

Great news for people who enjoy watching videos that explain Fiat Currency and Fractional Reserve Banking for the umpteenth time

Not one, but two new video presentations of monetary truthiness are now available on-line

The Secret Oz

(Keepvid is your friend)

Not so much a sequel as a reworking of Bill Still’s Conspiraloon classic, The Money Masters.

Bill has stopped fiddling endlessly with his biro whilst explaining how we’re all being shafted by the Hidden Overlords of Finance Capital but the shonky camera work and Stillted delivery style we’ve all grown to know and love remain

Bill does a nice job of explaining why reverting to a Gold Standard would be playing into the hands of the Shadowy Overlords (They control its supply) but doesn’t half talk some bollocks when romanticising periods of history when people weren’t subjects of the bankers

I also particularly enjoyed the part where Bill makes reference to the eradication of mutual, non-profit savings institutions across the Western World in the 80s and 90s (which helped pave the way for the current upsurge in global financial larceny) as if it were something that ‘just happened’, like rain


The Money Fix

(I haven’t found out how to view this off-line, short of forking out some hard-earned Fiat to buy a copy, which is a pain)

Featuring the usual run through of the principles of Fractional Reserve Banking and the increasingly mandatory praise for the creation of local currencies.

This film does include a nice touch of drawing parallels between the exchange of goods and services between people and natural ecosystems of mutually supporting organisms. As such, the result is just a teensy wee bit Marxist in its analysis of why our current financial system is fucked

Marx, as I keep reading on the Internet, was a paid tool of the Zionist Bankers. I am also frequently being informed by the same sources that the current financial crisis and associated bail-outs (thefts) are nothing less than part of a Communist plot to finally secure world domination once and for all

I have one or two problems with this particular world view

There are many competing definitions of what constitutes ‘true’ Communism, or Free Market Capitalism, and the ones that seem to have been adopted by right wing loons go something like...

• Free Market Capitalism = A system under which I personally make money

• Communism = A system under which I personally lose money

Personally speaking, I think this is misguided, ever so self-centred, and plain wrong.

Just because the same kleptocratic system which bought the acquiescence of the Middle Classes with a little bit of illusory wealth creation and 3rd world rape is now evaporating that ‘wealth’ that does not mean that this kleptocracy was somehow magically and seamlessly transformed into a Communist system

If it’s Communism today then it was Communism back when Reagan and Thatcher were doing their thing and beyond. The fact that the previously unreamed are now being reamed does not mean that the system has changed, just its victims.

As for the Marx thing, all I can say is that the more I learn about Marx the more I find myself agreeing with his analyses. The people who make connections between Marx and the Banksters generally leave their criticisms at the fact that, yes, there were connections but they don’t actually tackle the meat of what Marx had to say

That’s not good enough

This may come as news to people who push the ‘Marx was a tool of the Banksters’ meme but every idea that looks like it is going somewhere is, with varying degrees of success, co-opted and turned into a tool of the plutocrats

and that most certainly includes Free Market Capitalism

as well as Communism

and Environmentalism

and Secularism

and Theism

and pretty much any kind of ism that looks like it’s going to make its mark on the world

The give-away moment normally comes when non-compliance with a particular ‘ism’ results in state-sanctioned theft and violence against the individual. It's about then that you can be pretty sure a bunch of fuckers has hijacked a decent or interesting idea with a view to robbing you at gunpoint

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Announcing FF15MP's new Property and Investment supplement

One thing this blog has always lacked is its own Property feature.

I'm going to rectify that right now and inaugurate my new UK Property supplement with a high quality investment opportunity that's only just come to the market...

BUY NOW!!!

Ordinarily, I wouldn't publicise the existence of such a screaming bargain and would hope to quietly snap it up for myself but a) I do not have 250 Large to spend on a cell, and b) I am not insane

In its favour, as well as being in a desirable (sic.) part of North London and close to a railway station, when the time comes, anyone shrewd enough to invest in this compact and bijou residence can have their executor shovel a few spadefuls of earth on it and have it double as their grave

Only the chances are that whoever buys this place will die still owing money on it. So, their corpse would have to turfed out and dumped on a tip and the property put back on the market for the next smart cookie to buy it

Assuming a 10% deposit, a loan of £225,000 at a 5% mortgage rate, this slave hutch can be yours for £1,350 (repayment) or £950 (interest only) per month. When the banking industry decides it wants to take some more money out of your pocket and mortgage interest rates go up to 8% that will be £1,750 and £1,500 respectively. At 10% that will be £2,050 and £1,850

The really insane thing is that I know people who will tell me how much sense this makes. People who have made a *lot* of money flipping properties in the same area that are even more ghastly than this one

The trick is the flipping part

Millions of people in the UK have been playing a nationwide game of financial pass the parcel and as long as they're not the ones left holding the over-priced property with the eye-watering mortgage when the music stops they've won

Only they won't have won, because the economic lives of millions of people left holding over-priced properties with eye-watering mortgages are going to go tits up and everyone is going to have to bear the cost. People who played the property game and those who stayed out of it, all of them.

(As an aside, I understand typical mortgage rates in the UK to be currently in the region of 5% to 6% whereas the savings rate on a typical bog standard deposit account is 0.25%. That's a 20 fold gross profit on the banks' cost of funds. An absolutely eye-watering level of usury by any measure. I suspect that there isn't much outcry over that as most people don't have much in the way of savings and those who do made them off the back of property inflation. However, the banks are getting a lot of that 0.25% money from the government (i.e. the citizens of the UK) and then charging people 5%+ to borrow it back. So, one way or another, people are funding their own debt slavery, whether they are conscious of it or not)

And whether you smell the whiff of conspiracy, or plain stupidity, it's worth asking yourself why virtually no-one, actually I believe no-one, in the mainstream press or government ever questioned the sustainability of house prices rising three, four, five times faster than wages indefinitely. The insane and ruinous inflation of the cost of a fundamental requirement of life, as necessary as food or water, was trumpeted to the heavens

Why are all of those fuckers claiming the Crunch was an unpredictable surprise?

How dumb would you have to be not to see it coming? At the very least this demonstrates that the entire existing system of financial regulation and education needs razing to the ground and rebuilding from scratch

That is if you assume our system of financial regulation and education was put in place to protect and nuture the ordinary muppet on the street.

I've worked in finance so I don't

So, we can't afford our own homes, mum and dad are both working to pay the bills, mum and dad are also maxed out on debt, deposit interest rates have been reduced to virtually zero, most of our shit is manufactured by 3rd world slaves, the UK's sold all its oil, most of the infrastructure has been sold off, the financial future of the next few generations has been mortgaged to the hilt, a bugger load of spend has been hidden temporarily in PFI deals and the government has written a lot of bad cheques. Like a junkie or a gambler with an incurable addiction the UK, and the rest of the West, has sold, pawned, borrowed or stolen everything it can just to get through each day, with no thought of tomorrow

Now what?

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The Death of the Middle Class Proletariat

a (slightly) oldie but a goodie...

Elizabeth Warren gets a lot less coverage in the Conspirosphere than Catherine Austin Fitts but I think she does a pretty good job of documenting the death of the American and, by extension, the British, middle class

Because her presentation is based on US demographics it does include elements, such as health insurance, that aren't directly relevant to the UK but the core of her analysis is sound and relevant to people on the other side of The Pond

Another weakness in Warren's presentation is the lack of any analysis of the reasons why the changes she's identified have come to pass. She does an excellent job of demonstrating the size of the hole a typical double-income family finds itself in in 2005, compared to a single income family in 1970, but she doesn't even start to explain where that hole comes from (edit: she does a slightly better job here)

You could, of course, simply shrug your shoulders and say 'shit just happens' but then you probably wouldn't be reading this blog...


(I'd love to claim the expression 'Middle Class Proletariat' as my own but we have the Ministry of Defence to thank for that little pearl)


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edit: of course, as a commentator pointed out underneath one of my posts a little while back, James Goldsmith nailed this subject years ago...



Goldsmith was a peculiar chap. The analysis he presents in this video is perceptive and essentially anti-elitist. Yet, this same man was a robber baron who looked more like a Bond villain (complete with a Bond villain's multi-zillion dollar tropical fortress lair) than anyone else alive and whose family has bumped uglies with the Rothschilds and who are now leading players in the ongoing eugenic global eco-scam

I'm fucked if I know what he was playing at

He doesn't seem to be taking the piss in that video

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edit#2:

and, on the subject of the Fucked Middle Class Consumer, this warms up nicely towards the end...

Hmmm, the Power of Nightmares...

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Ghosts

Ireland...

Spain (I've linked to this one before)...

Detroit (a long video but a good one)...

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Michael Hudson explains Neo-serfdom pt27

Scroll forward to 13:30 and sit back whilst Prof. Hudson lets rip with his smooth, easy-listening, duck-like tones...

IMHO it's worth spending a little time switching onto what Hudson has been saying all these years because the explanatory and, more importantly, the predictive power of his model of how economics works is solid. If you want to know how things are expected, by the powers that be, to play out in Austerity UK he most definitely is worth listening to

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Green Shoots of Recovery, Yay!!

Some debt porn nerd over at House Price Crash forum has put together a lovely little graph of average UK house prices as a multiple of average UK annual wages, based on data from the Nationwide Building Society going back to 1953...




Average property prices peaked a couple of years ago at over six times average wages. Every property crash in the last 50 years has seen property prices fall back to at least 3.5 times average wages. Which, if history repeats itself, would be a fucking excellent thing - unless anyone really thinks shackling future generations to a historically unsustainable ratio of housing costs to wages is a remotely sensible idea

Wages are either going to have to go up, lots.

Or house prices are going to have to fall further, lots

And I know which of the two options I think is most likely

That's it. That's the story

You are Here

And no amount of bollocks peddled by vested interests from the mainstream media, politics or business will change that


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And now for some chart music...

Meanwhile...

When the number on the right becomes the same as the one on the left David Icke gets to wet his pants

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The fine art of prediction

I can't put my finger on exactly when but at some point over the last six months a crossover point was reached when the alleged spoof news on The Daily Mash became more factual and less satirical than the current affairs coverage offered by the BBC

At least a couple of times a day now I have to do a double check halfway through reading a news story just to remind myself which site I'm actually on

Here's today's most recent example...



WTF!!?

Too difficult?!!

Being shit at making predictions has never stopped them before. And it has certainly proved to be no impediment to the Bank of England, the Meteorological Office, the Intelligence Services and just about every other fucker out there who's been earning a tidy living churning out dishonest bullshit

nope, I can't see any kind of a clear trend there...

For 'Too difficult' read 'We could make an objective, rigorous prediction but it's not the objective, rigorous prediction we're paid to make and we can't even pretend the lie is true anymore. So we're packing up and starting Christmas early, bye. PS UK house prices are fucked'

Me, I'm confidently predicting that 2009 is going to be a peach

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And the Crazy Old Loons shall inherit the Earth...

I just got this in an email from the Mrs over at the other side of the world...

"Met an old work friend of dad's for coffee this afternoon, with dad. He has taken NZ$40,000 out of the bank and buried it in his green house. He was wondering what would happen to the banks in the UK if all the rock stars wanted to get their millions out..."

Hehe, the insane old bastard

What's he doing burying cash when he should have got his hands on some GOLD!!

You're indestructibleeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!

1 GBP = 1.0996 1.0972 1.0953 1.0942 1.0879 1.0777 EUR and falling...

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Blah

I'm currently suffering from that strange, joyless feeling serial pessimists experience when their worst fears are fulfilled

Where's the fun in being right about something if people are suffering

Whilst not monster-significant in itself, the UK pre budget report earlier this week was, for me, the final straw

The UK is officially broke

The only solution the UK government has to offer is a small reduction in tax on discretionary consumption. A cynical incentive to encourage a few more people to buy just a little bit more imported shit to stick on the final bill

Even using the most optimistic figures, our government has admitted that the country will be driven deeper and deeper into debt until at least 2015

The banksters have won

Again

The reaping will begin shortly

What a lot of people don't comprehend is that the really big fortunes are made not in economically good times but in the immediate aftermath of economically awful times

As mentioned previously, the heavily promoted ideas of the likes of Klein and Taleb support the fairy tale that 'Disaster Capitalism' and the exploitation of completely unexpected financial catastrophes is in some way a new idea

That's a lie

The truth is that these kind of events are totally predictable, often deliberately engineered. and carpetbagging is as old as the hills




...though the concept of people funding their own serfdom, by thoughtfully stuffing their future overlords' carpetbags full of 'bail-out' cash, is a nice new touch

Ordinary UK citizens will now endure decades of debt slavery, where increasingly huge slabs of national income are siphoned off, directly and indirectly, in interest payments

At some point the government will attempt to reduce the value of debt with a Weimar/ Zimbabwe style printing frenzy...

That's assuming the existing system actually holds up

Otherwise things could get very interesting indeed

The New Look UK Treasury Team c. 2012

On the bright side, British police will be packing 10,000 shiny new tasers real soon now and the roll-out of the new ID/ Ration/ Travel Permit/ Record of Personal Indebtedness Card is well on its way.

The UK will start looking and feeling just a teensy wee bit like a naturally-moated, open prison

Snake Plissken - reportedly thinking about settling down in SE London

There are paths we can follow to avoid the oncoming mess but no-one in mainstream media and politics, and depressingly few in the alternative media are talking about them

Of course, these are just the worst fears of a serial pessimist

For everyone else, here's a picture of a puppy...



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All my life, I've been in love with its colour, its brilliance, its divine heaviness...

There is much talk of the virtues of putting one's savings, if one is blessed with any savings, into gold at the moment

Given that leaders of the 20 richest (sic.) economies in the world are meeting in Washington today to discuss just how much more money they're going to print, this is perfectly understandable

One of the big problems with gold however (aside from the fact that its supply is controlled by the same bastards who are responsible for the current economic crisis) is that, here in the UK anyway, the retail gold business and its practitioners have a somewhat, um, sleazy image

On many internet financial forums, people who talk about gold and gold dealers are treated by other forum members in more or less the same way as if they'd admitted to a taste for visiting specialty prostitutes

Well, the specialty prostitutes have started going door to door

I just pulled this out of my Mum's letterbox...




Apparently, now that gold is fetching a 'record breaking price' a local jeweller is altruistically soliciting to take that crappy old gold off people's hands in exchange for wads of valuable cash




The 'top prices paid' are considerable...




...topping out at a breathtaking £250 /oz for 22ct gold*

"Do you expect me to talk Goldfinger?"
"No Mr Bond, I expect you to sell at £250 an ounce"

I'd recommend getting in touch with these guys and selling your granny's wedding ring tout suite, before the gold price crumples and people are queuing in their thousands trying to offload wheelbarrows full of their increasingly worthless bullion in exchange for valuable, high-interest bearing British pounds which people are clamouring to get their hands on all over the world


Though, unfortunately, by some inexplicable oversight, I've scrubbed the contact details off the flier





*NB UK Dealers are currently selling 1.09oz 22ct Krugerrands at £550-600 plus, if and when they have any stock - which isn't very often


(Personally, I would have thought that if someone had five hundred quid to spare and believed that things really could get that bad they'd arguably be better off buying a few sacks of rice or something)

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Damn those pesky schoolboy errors

Cheers to anon for these clips of Nassim Taleb and Benoit Mandelbrot strutting their funky stuff







Personally, I agree with virtually everything Taleb is saying, and has been saying for some time now

Except one tiny little thing

Taleb seems to think he was the only fucker out there who saw what was coming

Taleb is essentially promoting a varient of the 'cockup not conspiracy' aka 'tragic schoolboy error' explanation of how the world works

This is important, I think, because some variant of Taleb's Black Swan' thesis is set to become the orthodox explanation for what is happening to the world's finances

and, as such, no-one is to be held accountable for what lies ahead

Sure, the majority of mid-level contributors to this mess were daft fools driven by greed and fear; with no comprehension of where they were headed

But to believe that only Nassim Taleb, and some net based Loons, were the only people who could see a crash coming is nonsense - and more than a little arrogant

It's also worth remembering that, at the same time the seeds for the current crash were being sown, the key components of a fully-blown surveillance and detention state were being rushed into place in the same countries that were inflating the bubble.

It's also worth asking yourself just how much, or little, wealth the people responsible for inflating the bubble have lost personally

The fact that history is littered with, admittedly simpler, smaller scale, occurrences of the same kind of kleptocratic economic terrorism is also a bit of a give away

No doubt any non Loons passing through this blog would, if they could be bothered, dismiss my outpourings as being those of a deranged paranoid lunatic

But then there's the small matter of my blog, and countless others out there, detailing quite specifically what lay ahead

So, sorry, claims that what is happening was inherently unpredictable don't impress me much at all. And shame on all those fuckers out there in cyberspace and the mainstream media who devoted their time to sticking the knife into us 'tinfoil hatters' when the infrastructure for chaos-driven rape and pillage was being laid down piece by piece

Taleb's almost certainly correct when he argues that the specific outcomes of this crash can't be predicted with any degree of certainty

But, there again, if you control all the guns, money and food would you need to?




(Something which dawned on me whilst pondering the Conspiraloon vs the Non Conspiraloon mental models for comprehending how the world of high finance works is that the Loon looks upon the financial markets as being a means of waging war on ordinary people. And, in war, any successful general makes provision for the unexpected, engages in contingency planning, retains reserves, and makes cold-blooded calculations about what proportion of his own forces he is willing to expend. In warfare, chaos and Black Swan events are pretty much a given and positively encouraged. Your objective is to comprehensively fuck up your enemy's ability to comprehend and respond to what you are doing, and then kill him. Non Loons who simply take the markets at face value will probably lose me totally at this point...)

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... or how about some Tugriks?

If you're the kind of person who relies on BBC News to keep you up date with what's going on in the world it may have escaped your attention that sterling is in the process of being ritually slaughtered in the world's markets

Lord Patel has chosen to illustrate that slaughter by posting a UK £ / Singapore $ exchange rate chart

Personally, I've always been more of a Mongolian Tugrik kind of guy




In a world filled with competing currencies that are steadily turning to shit, the mighty British pound can hold its head up high as being one of the very shittiest

If you live in the UK and were planning to buy any Christmas presents made in the US, Europe, the Far East ...or Mongolia ...or anywhere really, they just got 4% more expensive today alone


(Why foreign investors aren't falling over themselves to buy sterling so that they can invest in quality, bargain-priced properties like this is a complete mystery which defies all rational analysis)

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Thought for the Day

and today's Thought for the Day comes from Harry Lime





...actually, 500 years of democracy, peace and brotherly love produced the cuckoo clock and a great big fuck-off bill

Just in case any fellow Loons still aren't up to speed with this thing, this is what's going on

• Banks engaged in billions/ trillions/ quadrillions of of nonsense paper trades amongst each other
  

• Our governments are now in the process of honouring the debts and liabilities arising from those nonsense trades
  

• Governments are underwriting the debts and liabilities of those trades with the income that will be extracted from our future labours. Those fuckers are mortgaging and swopping all our futures like casino chips
  

• Because the bank trades weren't based on anything real, the resulting debts and liabilities potentially exceed the value of everything in the known universe, plus interest

• The current system is fucked

• It will not die easy or voluntarily

None of the above is LoonTalk©, a Loon would add...

• This was all encouraged and manufactured deliberately

Here's the link to the full version of Harry's timeless soliloquy, featuring my personal favourite line...

"You know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things. Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax - the only way you can save money nowadays."





Best British film ever? 'course it is

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Competition Results 16/10/08

Monday 13th October 2008

Blogger paul said... So how long do you give it? I see 4 or 5 full days of uninterrupted growth in confidence.
What price can you put on the feel good factor?
13 October 2008 16:06


Blogger Stef said...
oh at least, maybe even as many as six or seven
price wise, I'd say feel good has got to be worth at least 30 or 40 billion pounds a day
remember, they're not worth as much as they used to be
13 October 2008 16:14

Not Monday 13th October 2008

According to the ancient and sacred rules of The Price is Right Blogger Paul wins!!*


I'm not sure that the human brain, even the Conspiraloon brain, has the capacity to fully comprehend just how very, very shit, and consistently very, very shit, mainstream media commentary truly is

* = All winnings payable in non-existent, naked short-sold HBOS share certificates

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