It's OFFICIAL!!! Banking crisis over!!

Huzzah!!

and remember, from here on, we have nothing to fear but Fear itself

Sorted

... and fear of Global Terror, obviously

...and fear of Global Warming, that's pretty scary

...and, yes, well, the threat of Global Economic Meltdown hasn't really gone away

...and, remember, Global Problems call for Global Solutions

...and a Global Coalition of Governments that will employ whatever means are necessary to ensure Global Stability




Global Famine and Global Pestilence will be popping round shortly

.

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

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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...

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Look at my Wad!!

So, there I was for most of last week, staring at Forex and Stock Market feeds, trying to pick out the right transaction and precise moment when my well placed £100 trade would be the butterfly in the rain forest that brought the whole stinking facade down once and for all

I think I must have blinked

The Jesus Nut of global finance eluded me once again

Ah well, the system lived for another week

Just another

The UK economy passed an interesting milestone on Wednesday, though I don't think it was subject to much comment

Interest rates were cut to 4.5% from 5.0%

...passing the official inflation rate of 4.7% on the way down

Yup, anyone with money in a bank, is now officially getting shafted and can look forward to watching the purchasing power of their savings officially shrink day by day

and that's before you take taxation and the real rate of inflation into account

The fact that the bank might accelerate the process and decide to take the lot in a puff of smoke is just a bonus

It is a real mystery to me how anyone can still think that the system we are subject to can be called capitalism

In a real capitalistic system reward is supposedly commensurate to risk. Someone who places their capital in a situation where they might lose it has every right to expect a higher level of return on that capital

Unless, apparently, you are an ordinary mug putting his savings into a deposit account. In which case, you are guaranteed to lose at least some of your capital at a steady rate, maybe even lose the lot, and get fuck all in return

On the other hand, if you are a god of finance you can take spectacular risks with non existent capital on rigged markets, carve off the bulk of any profits and demand a state sponsored bail-out if things go tits up

That's kleptocracy, not capitalism

And the super-funny thing is that, within the confines of the current system, there's fuck all the average mug can do about it

All the exits have been closed

There's no way any ordinary person can secure their income or savings from the predators

All entirely accidental of course

-

There's been a lot of talk on the Internet, even in some comments on this blog, about how fab gold is at times like these. Worryingly, even the BBC and Sky have been including features about gold's fabness in their news programming this last week

which should be enough to make any Conspiraloon feel at least a little bit nervous

A True Loon takes a contrary approach to any established, and well promoted, wisdom

So, what's the catch with gold?

The most obvious catch is, I think, that the same bastards who have created this bullshit financial system and bullshit money have already used some of that bullshit money to secure a fair pile of the shiny stuff in advance

More importantly, I think they've also secured control of most future gold supply (and oil, and food, and water, and infrastructure) and are in the process of mopping what's left up as I type

How else do you explain the apparent paradox of people falling over themselves to buy bullion, and mints stamping away 24/7, at the same time as a suppressed market gold price?

I always thought that in a capitalist, free market system if something was in short supply its price was supposed to go up




By most technical measures, gold is selling at a very reasonable price right now

Try and find some

And it's worth checking out who sets the gold price...

* Bank of Nova Scotia
* Barclays Capital — Replaced N M Rothschild & Sons when they abdicated (yeah, right)
* Deutsche Bank
* HSBC
* Société Générale

One of the impacts of an artifically suppressed market gold price is that all the gold still left in the ground, which is a lot, also falls in price

Which means that the stock price of any company that owns a gold field also falls in price

Which, combined with a little, or in the case of Canadian mining stocks, a lot of, naked short selling means that you (or rather NOT you) can buy all the world's future gold production for a song

With all this in mind, the gold producers' page on the excellent miningnerds.com website makes for amusing reading

Whilst the little guys are buying a few poxy coins, the big guys are taking over the mines

I understand the arguments for a gold based system and they have merit but, sorry Conspiragoldbugs, unless we live in a more honest world it doesn't matter what our coins are made from

First the honest world. Then the honest money

-

Having said all that, there is a strong argument for buying a little gold and silver to tide yourself over for a few weeks or months if the system does come crashing to a halt

But here's a thought

One I'm still working on, so it's a little rough around the edges

The biggest problem with a paper based, fiat money system is that, unlike a gold-pegged system, money supply is unchecked by any physical restrictions

The central bankers can literally print as much cash as they like, and do



Or can they?

What the central bankers actually create is an unlimited supply of electronic IOUs

Actual physical cash constitutes less than, maybe much less than, 3% of our money supply

Thanks to fractional reserve banking, notes and coins are in short supply.

And if the banking system did grind to a halt and the banks closed one day, people would start using existing notes and coins, not gold, to facilitate transactions in place of cheques or debit and credit cards

After years of forcing people over to electronic systems to facilitate greater control, the infrastructure simply doesn't exist to distribute inflationary amounts of physical currency. It's all done with computers now and to put a wheelbarrow-filling Weimar-style physical money machine in place would take months

For a time at least, physical cash truly would be King

And it's not as if keeping it in a bank is particularly safe or earning much of a return these days

That's what They are most scared of. They're not scared of a few people buying and selling a little gold. They're scared of everyone calling the Big Bluff and asking for their money back en masse

Visit your local ATM today!




And if you're worried about the durability of paper money break it down into small change. Small change is fire-proof, too heavy to steal in large quantities, has some inflation-limiting inherent scrap value and if push comes to shove you can hit anyone who's got some gold over the head with a sock filled with it

.

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...

.

It's a Bear Market in Iceland

.
Financial Crisis: Iceland gets €4bn Russian loan as banks collapse

+

U.S. base in Iceland packing it in quickly

=

hmmm, multipolartastic

New Cuba

/ big Ice Station Zebra fan
.

Tricky questions

I just came across this brain teaser in a form I'm completing...




Well that should sort out the genocidal maniacs who fill out forms honestly from those who don't quite effectively

...and, um, ex Prime Ministers

Having said that there was one time when I filled in a visa entry form, into New Zealand as I recall, with a dozen questions like - 'Are you are spy?', 'Are you a wanted criminal?' 'Are you a wanted terrorist?' and some bureaucrat with a sense of humour had hidden a question like 'Are you NOT a drug smuggler?' in the middle somewhere - just ticking the 'No' box twelve times without reading the questions wasn't a good idea

How we laughed at the desk as the customs official reached for the rubber gloves...

.

Very serious charges at the Met

I haven't seen too much crowing in cyberspace about the demise of part-time Ridley Scott lookalike and full-time shit copper Ian Blair earlier this week

Sir Ian Blair

The problem is, I think, the fact that there's a very strong possibility that Blair is going to be replaced by someone even more reactionary than he is

Whilst undoubtedly perplexing for those of us who have issues with Blair because he repeated untruths about JCdM, blocked the investigation into JCdM's execution and was an enthusiastic and high-profile booster of the nonsense War on Terror fairytale, the biggest criticism of Blair promoted by the establishment media was that he was 'too PC' and too soft on potential evil doers

Not that I personally expect Blair's successor to be that different from Blair

Conspiratorial thinking aside, it's a plain fact of Life that the people who rise to the top of large institutions usually do so not because of any technical ability they might have but because they have mastered internal politics or have been mentored by masters of internal politics

If you're busy trying to do your job properly there's no way you've got the time to get stuck into the serious business of putting the shaft into your fellow team members

And the bigger the organisation the more scope there is for dead weight, non accountability and parasitism

The Metropolitan Police, and every other large, centralised organisation, all the way up to old favourites such as the EU, the UN and the big corporate cartels are and always will be Institutionally, and inherently, Corrupt

and you don't need to be a Conspiraloon to acknowledge this

and then, popping my Conspiraloon hat back on, you've got to admit that stuffing the special duties sections of our police forces with serial shaggers and the kind of dishonest fuckers who have no qualms about getting beered up on tens of thousands of public money does make for a very malleable security establishment doesn't it

and if that doesn't work it's nothing an ill-fated camping holiday or Sunday afternoon stroll in the woods can't solve

.

The Grand Old Folk of York - They had Ten Thousand pounds...

There seem to be quite a few people currently shuffling money around from bank to bank in a desperate attempt to avoid having their savings evaporate

Of course, given that the root cause of the problem is the inherent worthlessness of the money itself there really isn't much point

Some of the more shrewd savers are looking to switch their loot into gold - but, thanks to its rigged low price, it's in short supply. On top of that, even if someone did mange to build up a small stock, all those lovely new money laundering laws will have the totally unforeseen consequence of the authorities knowing exactly who to call on if and when things really do get that bad

You might be one of those people who were planning to get into the housing market when prices fell and have been saving what they can in recent years.

And yes, house prices will fall - but unless you can find a house made out of gingerbread and coal, the rising prices of everything except houses will mean that you won't be able to feed or warm yourself inside your lovely new home




Inflation must and will be allowed to destroy the capital of the minority of ordinary people who were fortunate or astute enough to avoid debt slavery

but if you must go through the ritual of switching a worthless accounting entry from one useless fiat bank to another useless fiat bank there really can, and will, be only one...

Lloyds Halifax TSB Bank of Scotland

and if this all gets a bit much to bear may I recommend the excellent 'Recession Blocker' news filter...

e.g.



.

It's 1979 all over again

A correspondent, in response to my previous post, writes...

"Che(e)r up,old fruit, it might never happen!(but probably will)"

As it happens, I'm actually quite keen on 'it' happening

The recent consumerist binge proved once again, if ever it were needed, that selling and buying useless shit doesn't make people happy and fucks up their environment and other people in its production

So, if this system does break down I don't think we'll be losing very much in the long run

And, more importantly, we really could do with some decent music (and cinema - I saw Ironman last night - how shit was that!?)

Vapid, superficial, self-indulgent times make for vapid, superficial, self-indulgent tunes


So, I was delighted to discover, via a Youtube link someone sent me, that ska warriors The Specials have apparently reformed in anticipation of the impending Global Economic Apocalypse...





though their line up appears to have changed a little since their glory days back in 1979...




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