Why the NWO Might Actually Win - #130 Otpor!

Would you like to know more?

Would you like to play the Game?

.

The Feckless Unemployed

I've just spent ten minutes typing out a response to question someone asked me underneath an earlier post and, f*** it, that makes it long enough to be a post of its own...

Anon - 05 January 2009 13:00

Stef, what do you make of this statement? (something I hear quite a lot in certain social circles):

Although it is true, there was a whole program on BBC dedicated to it. I said that we don't do the jobs on average as well as they do. That's not opinion, that's fact. There are plenty of stats flying around about workforce productivity in the labour market comparative to earlier years. A trip to Google might suffice.

The jobs will likely be filled at one point or another, although I wouldn't expect it to be the kind of speed at which they were taken a year ago. The sad truth is that a British citizen can quite effortlessly gain 15k a year through benefits, so why earn 11k at subway and have to work for it? Unemployment has far too many benefits, no pun intended.

As for those who are employed, take builders for example... It's pretty common knowledge that if you want an excellent individual job done you don't employ British labour. It's par to say the least, where as the foreigners really earn their money and do a great job (talking averages here), and do it a lot cheaper.

The absence of the immigrants means that we're not going to be filling jobs as fast, we're going to lose out on productivity, and it's going to waste money for corporations. Be that on recruitment, productivity, employment (maternity rights, anyone?), and general service. And that affects our economy.

A lot of people slate the Polish for reasons they don't understand, but they were actually a great benefit to our nation - and they expect very little.

Stef - 05 January 2009 14:32

There's a lot of talk in the press about one group of benefit scroungers, the 'feckless' unemployed, and fuck all talk about another group of benefit scroungers, exploitative employers, who can get away with paying shit wages and benefits because the shortfall in what they give their staff is picked up by the welfare state

The DSS, that would be the rest of us, effectively subsidises lousy companies

So maybe, just maybe, a large part of the problem is not that the benefits are too high but that the wages are too low

Anxiety Culture

It's also worth remembering that the expression 'productivity improvement' is largely a euphemism for paying people less money to produce more output

Maybe you could argue that was a good thing if that money made was reinvested in productive infrastructure or paid out in dividends to the people who took the risks and created the jobs in the first place.

What usually happens in practice is that the financial benefits of 'productivity improvements' are trousered by senior management who have no problem with paying people more to do less; provided they are the people being paid more and doing less

By any measure, income inequalities in the UK have increased over the last 10-15 years off the back of this kind of mentality

And, as well as being inequitable, it's unsustainable because, sooner or later, once you've ripped off ordinary people past a certain level they can no longer afford to buy the goodies that make your system go round. They can start borrowing, of course, but that can only work for so long; as we're currently in the process of finding out

People forget now but about 10-15 years ago the press was full of talk of a 'leisure bonus', as new technologies promised to reduce the amount of time people would need to spend at work.

Fifteen years on and now we're being told that we won't be able to afford ever to retire

What happened?

Imagine for a moment you're a member of the Evil Overlord class. Can you imagine anything worse than the prospect of the plebs having more free time on their hands and becoming financially independent?

Fuck that

Think about the kind of useless jobs so many of us are engaged in. Jobs that offer no real benefit to society as a whole and absolutely no sense of satisfaction or self-worth to the people doing them.

Anxiety Culture

The Evil Overlord class would have us believe that any job, however pointless and soul destroying, is worth having just for its own sake

Bollocks to that

It's also worth pondering upon the fact that the vast majority of jobs people would identify as being intrinsically worthwhile and offering a sense of self-worth to the people doing them usually sit at the bottom of society's pay scales. And, speaking as someone who's held down a couple of highish paying jobs in his time, I can absolutely guarantee that higher pay is absolutely in no way intrinsically linked to high ability, high intelligence, high integrity or high commitment

Migrants play along with this shit because they're economically desperate and easily exploited. Neither of these qualities strike me as something we should be encouraging in our society; however profitable they may be for The Few

.

Meanwhile...

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

.

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...

.

Apocalypse Clarkson - now with even more Apocalypse

The Vauxhall Insignia

From The Sunday Times December 7, 2008

Vauxhall Insignia 2.8 V6
An adequate way to drive to hell, Jeremy Clarkson

I was in Dublin last weekend, and had a very real sense I’d been invited to the last days of the Roman empire. As far as I could work out, everyone had a Rolls-Royce Phantom and a coat made from something that’s now extinct. And then there were the women. Wow. Not that long ago every girl on the Emerald Isle had a face the colour of straw and orange hair. Now it’s the other way around.

Everyone appeared to be drunk on naked hedonism. I’ve never seen so much jus being drizzled onto so many improbable things, none of which was potted herring. It was like Barcelona but with beer. And as I careered from bar to bar all I could think was: “Jesus. Can’t they see what’s coming?”

Ireland is tiny. Its population is smaller than New Zealand’s, so how could the Irish ever have generated the cash for so many trips to the hairdressers, so many lobsters and so many Rollers? And how, now, as they become the first country in Europe to go officially into recession, can they not see the financial meteorite coming? Why are they not all at home, singing mournful songs?

It’s the same story on this side of the Irish Sea, of course. We’re all still plunging hither and thither, guzzling wine and wondering what preposterously expensive electronic toys the children will want to smash on Christmas morning this year. We can’t see the meteorite coming either.

I think mainly this is because the government is not telling us the truth. It’s painting Gordon Brown as a global economic messiah and fiddling about with Vat, pretending that the coming recession will be bad. But that it can deal with it.

I don’t think it can. I have spoken to a couple of pretty senior bankers in the past couple of weeks and their story is rather different. They don’t refer to the looming problems as being like 1992 or even 1929. They talk about a total financial meltdown. They talk about the End of Days.

Already we are seeing household names disappearing from the high street and with them will go the suppliers whose names have only ever been visible behind the grime on motorway vans. The job losses will mount. And mount. And mount. And as they climb, the bad debt will put even more pressure on the banks until every single one of them stutters and fails.

The European banks took one hell of a battering when things went wrong in America. Imagine, then, how life will be when the crisis arrives on this side of the Atlantic. Small wonder one City figure of my acquaintance ordered three safes for his London house just last week.

Of course, you may imagine the government will simply step in and nationalise everything, but to do that, it will have to borrow. And when every government is doing the same thing, there simply won’t be enough cash in the global pot. You can forget Iceland. From what I gather, Spain has had it. Along with Italy, Ireland and very possibly the UK.

It is impossible for someone who scored a U in his economics A-level to grapple with the consequences of all this but I’m told that in simple terms money will cease to function as a meaningful commodity. The binary dots and dashes that fuel the entire system will flicker and die. And without money there will be no business. No means of selling goods. No means of transporting them. No means of making them in the first place even. That’s why another friend of mine has recently sold his London house and bought somewhere in the country . . . with a kitchen garden.

These, as I see them, are the facts. Planet Earth thought it had £10. But it turns out we had only £2. Which means everyone must lose 80% of their wealth. And that’s going to be a problem if you were living on the breadline beforehand.

Eventually, of course, the system will reboot itself, but for a while there will be absolute chaos: riots, lynchings, starvation. It’ll be a world without power or fuel, and with no fuel there’s no way the modern agricultural system can be maintained. Which means there will be no food either. You might like to stop and think about that for a while.

I have, and as a result I can see the day when I will have to shoot some of my neighbours - maybe even David Cameron - as we fight for the last bar of Fry’s Turkish Delight in the smoking ruin that was Chipping Norton’s post office.

I believe the government knows this is a distinct possibility and that it might happen next year, and there is absolutely nothing it can do to stop Cameron getting both barrels from my Beretta. But instead of telling us straight, it calls the crisis the “credit crunch” to make it sound like a breakfast cereal and asks Alistair Darling to smile and big up Gordon when he’s being interviewed.

I can’t say I blame it, really. If an enormous meteorite was heading our way and the authorities knew it couldn’t be stopped or diverted, why bother telling anyone? Best to let us soldier on in the dark until it all goes dark for real.

On a more cheery note, Vauxhall has stopped making the Vectra...


-


edit: for some reason I feel the need to include a clip of the car race scene from On the Beach...





.

Getting ready for the Big Ride baby...

.
Sterling/ Euro - heading towards parity, and beyond...?

My foreign exchange screen is showing the sterling/ euro exchange rate down below 1.15, with depressingly little sign of support. I have a Chertovian gut feel that if it breaks the 1.10 level, barring an even bigger fuck up in Europe, it'll pop onto the express elevator down to parity where the Big Fun will really start in earnest

Looking around some shops today and chatting with some chums in retail I've come away with the distinct impression that no-one's ordering any more stock for next year. Once current stock is liquidated everything we need to import (which would be everything) is going to cost 30-40% more

All that pissing around and financial rhetoric of the last few weeks has changed nothing and has almost certainly made the eventual outcome worse. UK interest rates are near zero, the printing presses are being cranked up and it's getting harder and harder to find foreign mugs willing to feed and clothe us in exchange for nothing more than our fucked up, yieldless, worthless money

However, looking on the bright side...





er...



Still, there's no shortage of entertaining, domestically produced child abuse stories to take our minds off things...



Baby P. is sooooooo last week

.

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...



.

Beat the impending Economic Apocalypse with 2.5% off take-away pizza (for a limited time only)

You don't have to look very hard to see that British retailers are expecting a pretty awful Consumptionmas season this year

Every day both my physical and virtual mailboxes are stuffed full of 'We miss you. Here's a 5%/ 10%/ £5 off money voucher which expires in a month's time. Please do some shopping. Please. Because otherwise we're totally fucked. Go on. Please....'

(The reason why so many retailers are potentially fucked is that they have colossal debt obligations, either directly in the form of loan charges or indirectly through rent, and need to clear a certain amount of money every month just to keep their bankers happy. For every £1 spent on British retail a large chunk goes straight to the banks, a similar chunk goes to the government (and then to the banks) and the teensy weensy bit left over goes to some Shanghai sweatshop owner. This is how vibrant, sustainable, 21st century economies work apparently)

The UK government also appears to be about to get in on the act

When faced with the prospect of the greatest economic recession in a lifetime, the powers that be could have chosen to pour state-funded investment into great public works which would create real jobs and benefit future generations - solar powered personal jetpacks, a national maglev train network, fusion powered hydroponic food for all - or it could take the braver and more farsighted decision to spank all that money on some discount vouchers on imported crap instead

I'm delighted to say that it looks like the imported crap is going to win


According to the latest news from the Ministry of Official Speculation...


VAT cut mooted for recovery plan

A VAT cut could be at the centre of the pre-Budget report on Monday, according to widespread speculation.

Reports suggest VAT could drop by 2.5% to 15% as part of Alistair Darling's plan to revive the flagging economy.

My latest money off voucher from ebay - 2.5% more than on offer from UK plc but it expires a little sooner

Readers of Robert 'He is become Pure News' Peston's blog will already be aware that major VAT changes are in the works, as yesterday he wrote...

"For the sake of transparency I should say that I don't know that there will be a VAT rise (after a temporary VAT reduction)"

Robert Peston

Robert is indeed transparent

in the words of one adoring commentator...

"From that I think we can all read that Alistair Darling has already given you the lowdown on what he's planning and that this too shall come I to pass. Much like your blog a month or two ago where you said "This may be hubris, but I think the way to solve the problem would be for the Government to take large stakes in banks and be paid a very high rate of interest". And what do you know, a few days later this is what was announced. Not foresight on your part - more like insider information. This blog seems to be the Government's new leak machine of choice, where future policy decisions are "suggested" by Robert to sound out opinion and get people used to the idea. Robert does this for reasons of hubris, as he can then claim he had the idea first, even though it's no such thing."


Personally, it seems only fair that the business editor of the State Broadcasting Company should serve such a valuable public function

The fact that the UK government is about to evaporate billions of pounds (which will be added to the tab owed to the banksters) on a stunt that is so obviously destined to fail is, however, just a tad perplexing

If the current government isn't engaged in the final stages of a deliberate plan to destroy the UK economy that started way back in the reign of Thatchler, it continues to do a fucking good impression of one

.

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...)

.

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

.

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

.

Jim Rogers: Cash is King

I love it when a plan comes together

There are a few stock phrases being bandied around by financial commentators which are starting to get to me, either because they're meaningless; offering no explanatory power whatsoever, or simply misleading

My favourite cliches of the moment include...

'The Credit Crunch'

Coined early on in the current crisis and now blandly and repeatedly used as the 'explanation' for everything that is being and will be inflicted on us

'Why have I lost my job?'
'The Credit Crunch'

'Why is my pension worth fuck all?'
'The Credit Crunch'

'Why did my life savings disappear?'
'The Credit Crunch'

etc etc


'Banks are hoarding cash'

Misleading because it gives the impression that great big piles of touchable, sniffable cash actually exist. I've even seen the words '...in their vaults' used a few times. For fuck's sake

Also perplexing because I've yet to hear anyone identify which of the banks actually are the ones hoarding all that cash in those, er, vaults

That would be kind of interesting to know, given that virtually all of the banks are actively pleading poverty and holding their hands out for trillions more. Solely for the Common Good, obviously


'x billion pounds was wiped off the value of shares today'

Misleading because it supports the impression that those shares were ever worth their inflated values

The market value of a company's shares (or market index, or houses, or special collectors edition Beanie Babies) is based solely on the price paid for the last one sold

So, in theory, if one irrational idiot pays way over the odds for a share, or a Beanie Baby, everybody else holding the same share, or Beanie Baby, gets to kid themselves that they'll all fetch the same price

For a while anyway

and vice versa if one irrational idiot sells a share, or Beanie Baby, for way under the odds


'Too big to fail'

Which is a euphemism for 'They've got us by the nuts' or, more accurately, 'I think they've got us by the nuts because I'm not permitted to conceive of any alternative way of doing things'

There Is No Alternative

On the subject of 'too big to fail' here's a clip of Max Keiser talking with Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky does a very passable impression of a total fucking idiot...





I make no bones of the fact that the attraction of Chomsky has always passed me right by. I find his prose turgid and, as far as I can tell, his political reputation is based largely on expressing something very obvious; something that any cab driver, or blogger, would tell you, but in a turgid academic way. Chomsky's pseudo-rational attitude towards 9/11 was just icing on the cake

In the clip, Keiser articulates a thought that quite a few Loons seem to share; that stock market prices are being manipulated to scare the crap out of people. To use fear and panic as a means of manufacturing their consent to hand over 'hoards of cash' to the banks

Chomsky just doesn't seem to get it

He even goes so far as to say that a market crash is harmful to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's interests

/ scratches chin

Hmmmm, is it really

Henry Paulson

And, in the same vein, I suppose George Bush appearing on US television every five minutes crying out 'Don't Panic!! Don't Panic!!' really is the sort of behaviour that's genuinely intended to positively discourage panic

George Bush

Yes, in exactly the same way that cutting interest rates is a sure-fire way of boosting stock markets

As the chap who left me the link to the following article suggested, I'm also thinking that F. William Engdahl is sniffing along the right lines...

Behind the Panic: Financial Warfare over Future of Global Bank Power

One World Banking - You Know you want it

And even if you don't think you do right now, you will

.

C4 News losing it?

This, somewhat unusually phrased, subscribers' email plonked into my inbox from Channel 4 News this evening at about 7.30pm...




"Greetings all – Alex Thomson Tomomailing here…

They said it would get worse…they said right. Talk tonight of the need for the government to impose exchange controls, given the dire straits we are all now in. And the likelihood now that at least another two banks will be part-nationalised on Monday or thereabouts.

As international capitalism continues to eat itself, we can take some comfort from the hope – surely more than a hope – that at least the further controls of governments upon banks mean more of the overpaid clowns who got us into this mess will lose their jobs – let alone their bonuses – at said banks.

With unemployment likely, nay certain, to begin spiking up seriously, at least some of the banking fat cats may join the other victims in the dole queue.

Sorry if I appear angry.

No, on second thoughts I’m not sorry at all. As no taxpayer should be."


Exchange controls?! WTF!!?

Naturally, I tried to open up the C4 News webpage and was greeted with this little number...




The page is back on-line now but of 'talk of exchange controls' I can see no mention

Or in any other news bulletin as far as I can tell

Will Hutton was dropping some hints earlier on today though

Tomorrow could be very nasty indeed...

.

Black Swans and Viking Kittens

Conspiraloons could be forgiven for pointing to the application of 2001 Terror Law powers to seize Icelandic assets this week and crying out 'I told you so!!'

Fans of 1950s British comedy could also be forgiven for thinking that there's more than a little whiff of The Mouse That Roared about this week's outbreak of distractive shenanigans between the British and the Duchy of Grand Fenwick Icelandic government

It's a real shame that The Mouse on Wall Street never got filmed

The Icelandic armed forces sailing into action - fear them for they are mighty

There is something genuinely comical about a country with 200 times the population of Iceland, with a claim to being one of the great financial centres of the world, getting reamed quite so badly by inhabitants of a tiny little volcano surrounded by fish

What isn't so funny, or is if you enjoy reading about people who had more money than you losing their life savings, are some of the stories coming out from Kaupthing Singer & Friedlander (Isle of Man) depositors who have almost certainly lost everything they had in the bank.

(It's worth bearing in mind that many UK-based banks won't open accounts for non-residents and so a lot of people who have retired or are working abroad open offshore accounts out of necessity. Any sense of schadenfreude on reading about their losses will almost certainly be misplaced in at least some cases)

And, reading through some of the KS&F depositors' stories, it seems fairly clear that KS&F were disappearing customers' money, presumably over to Iceland, days before the bank's parent went bust - which is what is technically known as thieving

This is the tip of the iceberg. The majority of people, in debt up to their eyeballs, are already in the bag. The harvesting of the minority of people who actually have a decent amount of cash put away has begun.

The number of people who will lose money in collapsing banks (taking their deposits but not their loans with them) might turn out to be small. That's a relatively crude and obvious way of thieving from people

The number of people who will lose out due to hyperinflation and hyperdeflation, a much more refined method of thievery, certainly won't be

One thing that did strike me as curious when reading through the KS&F customer stories is how could people shrewd enough to accumulate such relatively large sums be so daft as to stick everything they had accumulated into a single shonky bank

One of the answers to that question is that a fair few of them aren't that shrewd at all

For the last fifteen years or so virtually any Muppet who assumed risk, particularly property risk, made money

If you were prepared to take on multiple mortgages on multiple properties it was virtually impossible not to make a stonking profit off the back of the relentless price rises

A cautious nature, or any sense of decency and restraint, were positive handicaps

(It wasn't an income thing. In the course of a previous life I met a fair few people who had built up scarily leveraged property portfolios off the back of little or no income. They did, however, all have boundless and totally unjustified optimism for their lucrative future, along with a capacity to fib shamelessly at strategic moments)

Even if you do have a cautious nature, the quality of your assessment of risk is highly reliant on the information you are fed by mainstream sources

And, until a couple of weeks ago, the chances are your average punter was more scared of the risk of, say, Islamic Terrorism and roving bands of Internet-based paedophiles than getting fucked up the arse by the banking system

Well, shucks, gee, we live and learn don't we

I can't help noticing that Nassim Taleb is starting to pop up on tele a fair bit lately. Ah well, only about five years too late...

.