Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Down with Brown

I became wary of the Labour Government ever since Gordon Brown removed the Dividend Tax Credit from Pension holdings of equities.

When Stephen Byers and Railtrack happened, I blatantly distrusted the Labour Government financially.

The Iraq war came, and Tony Blair went, yet still the sun was shining out of Gordon Brown's arse.

You see, it has always been young and fashionable, to support socialist ideals.

But nobody stays young for long, and these days we spend more of our lives being old than being young.

Once upon a time we had to hate Thatcher because Thatcherism wasn't the young thing to do.

Now Margaret Thatcher is struggling with senile dementia, and Britain has been struggling with the results of 11 years of Gordon Brown.

Down with Gordon Brown.

I hate Labour and its pseudo-Socialism. Its people whom cannot count, nor care about money, nor know what constitutes real wealth. Its champagne socialists who hammed up the sham pain of archaic working class affiliations.

In a few years, when Gordon Brown is history, we can all look back at the clouds of lies and untruths that were sold to us under the banner of Socialism. Lies and untruths on a scale that was not achieved even under the banner of Thatcherism.

For the difference between Thatcher and Brown? You knew what Margaret Thatcher stood for because she did what it said on her tin, even if you didn't like the colour. Gordon Brown, on the other hand, is famous for not saying anything at all, like a Value Brand, No-name, generic tin. Today everybody knows that the stuff out of his tin has already faded, turned flaky, and is peeling away to leave behind nothing but a pile of rust.

It's okay to hate Gordon Brown. What shame is there in it? There's no need to be violent about it. Just feel it, and say what you feel. We're supposed to have free speech, after all...

Friday, March 13, 2009

The US Dollar savings of China and others

The Chinese Premier said
he was worried about the safety of the huge amount of China's foreign-exchange reserves invested in US government bonds.

"I'd like to take this opportunity here to implore the United States... to honour its words, stay a credible nation and ensure the safety of Chinese assets," he said.

Almost half of China's $2tn in currency reserves is thought to be invested in US treasury bills and other government-affiliated notes.


This is amazing.

It has been known to me from spontaneous news surveying for over 3 years that the Savings of the Far Eastern nations has been financing the wasteful economic consumption of the USA and Western Europe, simply because there is no reliable Bond Market in the Far East.

What is amazing is that in the last 6 months, in the collapse of the Global Financial system, this awareness has not only permeated at last into the minds of ten-a-penny economists, political pundits, and journalists. It has also at last permeated into the official speeches of National politicians.

This is an official appeal to question the role of the US dollar as the basis of global trade. The time lag here is nearly 4 years after the facts were out in the magazines and the internet.

So why has the US dollar become so strong since autumn? The usual glib explanation is that this is because it is THE Global Reserve Currency. Yet here we have China making a public announcement that it is time to question this folly. The message will go out to the Korean, Japanese, Thai, and Malaysian governments and investors. The message is clear. They will now have to develop their own bond markets, and not depend too heavily on US Treasury paper. The Global Banking crisis has proven that their trust in each other should not be any less than their faith in the US dollar. Their trust in each other is the foundation of a bond market.

The recovery in the US dollar since last summer was recently explained by economists as this: Corporations and Institutions based in foreign nations (eg. from Britain and Korea) have in the main been issuing their Corporate debt in US dollars, not in local currencies, eg. Sterling or Korean Won. The money they raised was not kept in US dollars, and so there has been a scramble to cover their long term US dollar debts on their balance sheets. Say Globocorp in Britain raised 500 million US dollars on 5 year paper. Globocorp bought Sterling with its US dollar debt, to use as operating cash, and to spend on capital outlays. This made sense when the US dollar was declining everywhere. As soon as the US dollar became short on the money markets due to the credit crunch, Globocorp had to rush to cover their US dollars, because they would look expensive. They had to buy back US dollar positions, which can be done on the forex markets. Therein lies the recovery of the US dollar.

So the questions to ask yourselves if you are corporate financiers, economists, or politicians are these:

1. In the future, why bother raising debt in US dollars, when even China publicly throws doubt on the US dollar? Those US dollars were not even regulated by the USA Federal Reserve: they were money that was created through creative securitisation in now-defunct global Investment Banks. Even the Bank of England can invent sterling money with more substance behind it.

2. Although the US Dollar recovered as everybody scrambled to cover their long-term debts, why should it rise any more? Why should it stay up, when the money that it represented was as worthless as Dutch Tulips? Why should the US dollar stay up, when it is to the advantage of Globocorp, to raise new debt in the local currency?

The recycling of US dollars around the globe has been a joke since the Seventies game of Spot the Petrodollars. Why should anybody around the globe choose the US dollar as a global reserve currency, when it is no better than their own currency, or another neighbour's currency, or indeed of going back to gold? Why should the Saudis accept US dollars for their oil, when they can easily prefer Japanese Yen, Euros, and will now seriously even consider Chinese Yuan? Why should China hold US dollars, if the Saudis allow them to hold reserves of the Riyal?

Why should the USA provide the basis of international trust, when in fact it is no longer in a position to provide for itself?

Unlinking Oil prices from the US dollar will guarantee reduced global oil consumption. It will permit China to shift away from burning coal, which is much more climate-damaging than burning oil (there are more kilowatts per atom of Carbon in oil than there is in coal). It will permit the world to shift away from the American Dream, which even to lesser minds has at last become more obviously the American Nightmare.

A global shift away from the American Dream would help to save the Planet as much as the Global Financial Collapse. And it will help Americans learn once again how to be thrifty.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Wealth, Money and Planetary Ecosystem Economics

The recent Global Economic Hiccups of Financial Armageddon gave environmentalists their first real feeling of clawback in decades. Official human economic activity and consumption actually fell since last summer. A machete taken to the Global Financial System had more effect on mankind's carbon footprint than all the moralizing campaigns beseeching suburban housewives to use low-energy light-bulbs.

But oil prices collapsed last summer, and have stayed down. Nobody can be fooled into believing that the Global Human Economic Machine is defeated. The GHEM only choked on the ill-conceived biofuel mixture in its fuel lines. The GHEM is intact, still thriving, and without any designed alternatives.

Yes, in the continuing Age of Stupid, with the intellectual failure of academic economists now widely exposed and publicised, I notice the media are once again reminding us that the planet is staring into an environmental abyss. Today it is that the Amazon will become a local positive feedback process of ecosystem dieback from global temperature rises. (If you don't know what a "positive feedback process" is, count yourself lucky that you have lived in a bland and very controlled era, so go away and wake up before a Tim Kretschmer clone goes berserk in your neighbourhood! The Amazon is a very fragile ecosystem, and that's all you have to know.) Any number of scientists and academics are dancing around naked, waving their credentials, their scientific models, and their careful research, to draw attention to the vulnerabilities of the Amazon ecosystem. All these scientists are no more effective than the media that publicise their findings, aren't they? They are learned, intelligent, but they do not applythese two words: Carpe Diem.

Carpe Diem: Seize the Day. What use is a scientist if he/she predicts catastrophe, then stands by to analyse its progress without making any effort to halt it? What use are scientists, collectively, if they cannot seize control and prevent catastrophe?

So oil prices are low again. Too low. Carbon Economics is as yet the only notion so far driven into the thick skulls of our political Talking Heads. What to do?

Firstly, it is essential that oil prices should be driven sky high again. Secondly, scientists all over the world should be inserting Planetary Ecosystem Economics in place of either Finance, Politics, and Economics. Planetary Ecosystem Economics does not just get stuck on the gases of the element of Carbon. It takes into account all things in the Planetary Ecosystem, eg. water, light, space, habitat, air, salinity, alkalinity, species rarity. It accounts for the impact of humanity, and it costs all the effects of human economic activity. P.E.E. places a value on all things in the Planetary Ecosystem, not just those which are tritely recognized as essential for human consumption, comfort, or multiplication. Money is an essential currency for accounting in P.E.E, but unlike in ordinary Economics, values and wealth are not left to be established by markets of delusional people catering to their mass selfish wants. Values and wealth are established by specialists trained to view mankind as short-term guests of the planetary biological and physical resources. How are these values set? Now you're thinking.... They don't teach this at the London School of Economics, do they? Of course not... They who teach, cannot think original thoughts? Just see how long they were stuck on the ideas of communism!

Sunday, March 08, 2009

The Age of Stupid

Nice banner on this website for this EcoGreen Movie...you can fly in a metal machine from the CN Tower, over smoking powerstations to the Petronas Towers. Through all the Globalist City towers, can you identify the others?

The Age of Stupid has nothing to do with Plane Stupid, which was recently famous again for smudging the Champagne Socialism on Peter Mandelson's face. It appears to be a populist film. An Inconvenient Truth, which I never bothered to see because I knew it all was not populist enough, and because of Al Gore, it was hardly apartisan. Maybe this film is intended to plug the gap, the way films about Nuclear Holocaust succeeded in motivating the decline of the Cold War?

It is of course well known that the Age of Stupidity had its beginnings in the Industrial Revolution in England in the 1700s, although it quickly spread thorughout Europe, the Americas, and the rest of the world. The measure of stupidity has been graphed by historians, and the Peak of this graph is arbitrarily somewhere between 1950 to 2008. Peaks don't matter if you're on a high-up plateau that has a few molehills! Stupidity, I expect, has been quantified as an aggregation of several parameters, primarily of course : 1) Quantity of devastation to Planetary Ecosystem Habitats. 2) Deliberate ignorance of available knowledge and failure. 3) Failure to identify and address the deleterious ecosystem effects of new forms of human economic activity. What other measure would be properly scientific? The Nobel Prize is no measure of scientific quality, and my qualitative science is as good as any current social science.

Well, for the price of a British Bank, especialy the part-Scottish banks, how many carrots and peas could you buy? Oh yes, Lloyds Halifax Bank of Scotland has become the second Royal Bank of Scotland Natwest Algemene Bank Nederland. It is owned by the British Government. For the price of a British bank, how many peanuts could you buy? If the price of a British bank is beyond your imagination, why not think about the price of an education in a "Developed Nation". Wonder how many carrots and peas can the average person in a developed nation grow by themeselves?

The British Government now owns majority shareholdings in half of its commercial banks. Mervyn King and the Bank of England has taken so long to explain Quantitative Easing, you would think it was nuclear physics, and at last it will be introduced. (Although in nuclear physics, nuclear bombs were tested in a controlled conditions, even if they never took into consideration Environmental effects). So UK Gilt prices have risen, and interest rates are tending to zero. Whoopee, for the wasteful Labour Government economic policy?

Meanwhile all this time, the European Central Bank has already been providing unlimited liquidity to its Member Nations, (as if we didn't guess), so has effectively been doing a sort of quantitative easing. Indeed, since the ECB has to play politics between supporting the Government Bonds of more than a dozen nations, it doesn't even have the simple economic system that the UK monetary system presents. (You can see why people will pay to read the Financial Times, whereas the Economist magazine is nothing but a propagandist tool used to destroy alternative economies that already existed all around the planet. Globalist Hegemony has of course been over-shadowed by Global Hedge Money.)

I can't decide. Is it worth saving some Economists, and retraining them to PEE (Planetary Ecosystem Economics)? Or should all pre-2009 economists be sent to landfill? New Ecosystem Economists can be designed, and a large factory can be set up somewhere on the planet, where they will be manufactured more cheaply due to economies of scale, and rapidly shipped around the planet and dumped cheaply on existing Human Ecosystems. It would be the quickest way of ensuring that the Global Human Economic Machine will never again arise. Oh Asimov would be laughing!