Welcome to Helloway

Fans of the sublime beauty of North London's Holloway Road might appreciate this quality signage seen outside an ex(?) squat the other day...

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Piggies

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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...Not time to buy Zimbabwe Dollars

Global Crisis? This is the real crisis!

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Time to buy some roubles?

Cheers to anon for this link to a clip of Dmitry Medvedev declaring war on the dollar whilst simultaneously doing a very passable Thomas Jefferson impression





Peculiar times indeed

The really impressive thing is that you can hardly see Putin's lips move throughout

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Black Swans and Austrian Teddy Bears

At the bottom of an earlier post there's a little discussion about a couple of books I've been reading that contain some overlapping themes

The first is Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan

- Black Swans being large-impact, hard-to-predict, random, unplanned and rare events beyond the realm of normal expectations.

The second is Naomi Kein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

- Disaster Capitalism being the corporate exploitation of people in the wake of disasters or upheavals

The big problem I have with both Taleb and Klein is that they both do a stand-up job of peddling that absolutist, stochastic, 'shit just happens' world view which is so useful to those people who gain the most when things get fucked up

Klein pays nowhere near enough attention to the possibility that many of the disasters and upheavals she refers to were staged, or at least anticipated

Taleb quotes events like the 9/11 attacks and stock market crashes as being examples of unpredictable, Black Swan events, when there's copious evidence that they were anything but. One person's Black Swan; be it due to deceit, dissonance, indoctrination, or plain incompetence, is very often another person's Bleeding Obvious.

Even the majority of natural, as opposed to man-made, disasters cannot fairly be described as Black Swan events. The people who live in places like New Orleans, Mexico City, Los Angeles or Naples know full well that their cities are inevitably going to get creamed sooner or later, and very possibly within the span of a human lifetime. The fact that many of those people engage in denial doesn't change the predictability of that creaming

Property Hot Spots of the Future #17 - Napoli

As such, both Klein and Taleb and the output of many others given prominence in the supposedly alternative, dissenting media, is paving the way for a truly useless, profoundly ineffective analysis of the ghastliness which many of us believe may be begining to overtake our world

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At the heart of the ghastliness which many of us believe may be begining to overtake our world lies the imminent (?) collapse of the dollar and related currencies

The Imminent (?) Collapse of the Dollar Story goes something like this...

• Forty or more years ago America abandoned the Gold Standard and embarked on a policy of paying for its imports with increasingly devalued, worthless dollars
  
  
• America simply printed as many worthless dollars as it needed and exchanged them for imported stuff that was actually worth something
  
  
• This was made possible by the fact that everything sold on global markets was priced in dollars, so everyone around the world had to hold stocks of this intrinsically useless paper to buy essential commodities
  
  
• Any time anyone comes anywhere to buying and selling essential commodities with anything but dollars the Americans blow the shit out of them
  
  
• There are now so many useless dollars in circulation globally that the entire system is about to choke catastrophically. The Russians, the Chinese and others have had enough and are about to walk away from the whole stinking mess

On-line economician Peter Schiff tells a story about five Asians and an American stranded on a desert island. One of the Asians is responsible for fishing, another for hunting, another for growing vegetables, and so on. The American's 'job' is to eat a big fuck off meal prepared by the Asians every night and leave them enough crumbs to survive through to the next day...

Schiff is one of a loose group of bearish, Libertarian, Austrian School Economicians much beloved by Internet Loons, including my goodself

Other members of this elite club include Jim Rogers, Jim Puplava and, of course, Maaaaaaaax Keiser

(and Michael Hudson and F W Engdahl, sort of)

All of these guys have, to one degree or another, predicted that...

• The dollar and other fiat currencies of non productive countries will tank

• There will be a commensurate and massive rise in the dollar price of tangible commodities such as oil, wheat and gold

As it happens, commodities did rise and the dollar did fall earlier this year - to accompanying cries of 'this is it!', 'this is it!' from the little dollar bears

but it wasn't 'it'

The US dollar has subsequently strengthened massively and commodities, commodity-based shares and commodity-based currencies have dived to the floor

Any private investors following the advice of Schiff, Rogers, Keiser and Puplava will have lost up to 50% in two or three months. Anyone who follows their podcasts can't help but have been entertained by listening to Schiff attempting to placate one of his investors who called up after losing half of his life savings or the sound of Keiser melting down into a pool of despair and babbling about buying into dollars a few days ago




It's not that Schiff, Keiser, et al are actually wrong about the future

• The dollar and associated currencies are fucked

• The prices of things we can't do without - oil, food, water - will go up in a big, scary, unaffordable way

• The prices of things we can do without, or need a loan to buy - houses, cars, plastic tat will fall
  

Their problem is that the secret of good economic commentary, as with all forms of comedy, is



... timing



These guys have got their timing wrong because...


1. They underestimated just how crooked supposedly free markets are.

The Chinese increased their oil imports by 46% in September and bullion traders around the world cannot meet demand, yet the reported market price of oil and gold have fallen dramatically. Conclusion? The markets are bent


2. They are attempting to comment in real time about insanely volatile markets

The poor quality of market information available to mere mortals and the volume of market 'noise' is such that only a completely bow-tie wearing berk would attempt to extrapolate daily moves out into the future. The Internet deserves a lot of blame for the rise of this kind of commentary


3. They are nowhere near Loony enough

A lot of people have heard the famous Jefferson quote...

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."

...but don't seem to have understood its implications.

The process Jefferson was talking about 200 years ago is deliberate and managed. Switches between inflation and deflation are only nurtured when it suits the people doing the managing and they are not in the business of telegraphing when that would be.

Years of inflation have already ensnared the bulk of people in debt. All that remains is to mop up the minority of people, mostly Baby Boomers who until a few months ago were expecting a nice, cushy retirement, who actually put money aside over that time

And those who placed their money in the markets have just lost 40-50% of their savings

Those who've kept away from the markets and are holding cash instead can look forward to a 0% interest rate, whilst prices are rising 10%+, as their reward

Once the savers have been rogered good and proper, that's everyone in the bottom 99.99% of society accounted for, then all the money our governments have released to the shadow banking system can be unleashed to buy everything that's worth buying unopposed

A massive transfer of real wealth will then take place and a glittering future of supercharged debt-serfdom secured

And even if some ordinary people manage to avoid mortgaging their lives away and actually retain some savings, there will still be plenty of tricks left in the toybox to deal with them

None of this is too far off now but I won't be picking any dates

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Mainstream Conspiraloons #129 - Baron West of Spithead

Lord West of Looney Tunes

"Some of the measures that we have put into place in the past 15 months have made us safer, but that does not mean that we are safe"

"The threat is huge. It dipped slightly and is now rising again within the context of 'severe'.

"There are large complex plots. We unravelled one, which caused damage to al-Qaeda and the plots faded slightly.

"However, another great plot is building up again, which we are monitoring.

"We have done a great deal to protect ourselves and to look after our water supplies, our resilience, underground trains, our preparedness and communications.

"We have done all the things that we need to do, but the threat is building - the complex plots are building."

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Political Puppets ...now available in Black

Back again

After a couple of weeks away in the Boondocks I returned home to discover that billions of people around the world appear to be gripped by post-election euphoria...

Key triumphant as Clark era ends

The astute voters of New Zealand can now look forward to a future of glittering prosperity, packed with the kind of economic 'reforms' much beloved by the likes of the IMF and the World Bank, delivered by an ex.(?) employee of the Federal Reserve

There really is nowhere to run to

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Meanwhile, in the wake of a only slightly less globally significant election, quite a few people appear to be whacking off deliriously at the prospect of America's first Blackish President

President-Elect Barack Obama

Yay!

Presumably, the people who think that Obama's election is going to change anything are the same kind of fucknuts who thought that the election of Margaret Thatcher 30 years ago heralded a new era in gender equality or who didn't feel like vomiting when exposed to the 'Things Can Only Get Better' mediawankfest that accompanied the 1997 General Election

As it happens, clips of people dancing in the Millennium Dome to 'Things Can Only Get Better' in 1997 are thin on the Internet - I suspect eternal, irredeemable shame has got something to do with it - and I've only been able to locate this partial record put up by a Labour Party droid...





One comment underneath that clip's page on Youtube really did bring out the misanthrope in me. Does any species capable of supporting even a solitary individual as stupid as this really deserve to survive...

"The Conservatives may be leading in the polls at the moment, however, would David Cameron be able to take on the world banking system like Gordon Brown has? I think not..."


Fast forward back to 2008 and anyone who expects true change for the good from a President-elect who surrounds himself with psychos like Emanuel, Volcker or Brzezinski truly is an uttter, utter fucknut

One comment I saw over at Lord P.'s blog sums up my own feelings about the US Presidential Election nicely...

"What happens when you replace a sociopathic lunatic with an eloquent, sane man who espouses the exact same policies?

The Daily Mash

A very good question imho. One we're about to find the answer to

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