Monday, April 01, 2013

New government plan: "Send them all to China"


The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr George Osborne will later today unveil radical proposals for tackling the financial burden of the benefits system. It will replace the controversial "bedroom tax" with a package of reforms even more ambitious than the postwar establishment of the Welfare State.

The central plank of the proposals is that all those who, over their lifetime, are likely to receive more in benefits of all kinds than they pay in taxes, are to be relocated to China and supported there, far more cheaply. This will greatly ease the pressure on British housing stock, and at the same time create much-needed additional demand for the PRC's 64 million unoccupied apartments, many of them brand-new.

The scheme's potential is staggering. For example, there are an estimated 1.8 million people in "pensioner poverty", 2.5 million unemployed, 3.5 million low paid workers, 1.7 million children with special needs and 11 million disabled, which suggests that up to 20 million Britons could be set for the one-way plane (or slow boat) trip to China's provinces.

"The exact figures are impossible to assess at this time," said a spokesman. "Partly, this is because the savings will be so great that taxes can be slashed, which will have a knock-on effect on prices. So people who previously would have been categorised as poor will find it much easier to make ends meet.

"However, this factor is likely to be counteracted by the economic impact on huge numbers of people whose living depends wholly or partly on servicing the poor. Social workers, DWP claim processors, special needs teachers, nurses, occupational therapists, psychologists, police, lawyers of all types, magistrates, prison officers, charity professionals, pubs and off licenses, betting shops, the National Lottery, cheap supermarkets, compensation claim outfits, loan sharks, Chinese takeaways... the list is endless.

"All these will see their income reduced, and some will fall into the same bracket as their former clients and customers. The latter will be offered the choice of continuing in their role, but on Chinese pay rates and conditions, or simply becoming claimants themselves."

A confidential source tells us, "Osborne's team had intended to work through the details for at least another year, but the Americans had got wind of it and so the announcement has had to be brought forward to beat them to the punch." It is understood that half the empty houses in China have been reserved for the UK.

The plan has no official name as yet; but some say it will be dubbed the "Osborne resettlement plan", others think it will be called the "Shipham Scheme" in order to allow the Chancellor to distance himself from it if it turns out to be a failure.

Speaking from New York in his new position as president and chief executive of the International Rescue Committee, Mr David Miliband said, "What this plan really shows is the importance of pay rises for the poor, since we all need them, especially my Party." Mr Miliband pledged to contribute a proportion of his £280,000 salary towards a fighting fund to oppose Mr Osborne's plans; asked exactly how much he was intending to give, he replied that it was hard to say, as he needed to relax a lot in a job like his.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Great April Fool jokes

It had me going for a minute, this report on Iceland Review Online. It claims that the Icelandic króna will be replaced tomorrow by a multinational West African currency backed by the French Treasury and pegged to the Euro; and that Iceland is to join the EU by the end of this year.

Equally ridiculous is the spoof British welfare reform plan to cut housing benefit by 14% if there's a spare room in the house. As though the beleaguered underclass can change house at the drop of a hat, find new schools for their children etc. Or maybe rent the room to a non-CRB-checked stranger - would they have got away with calling it a Jimmy Savile tax, I wonder? I almost believed that one, too. And it's taken in so many others, including organisations that should know better. No fair trailing it in the Press weeks before, though: the wind-up should only take place before noon on April 1st. Speaking of which, I've got one, if you want to use it: all housing benefits to be paid via Bank of Cyprus accounts.

Nearly as good as the spaghetti tree leg-pull of 1957, which I still remember:



All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Saturday, March 30, 2013

John Ward calls for debt default via democratic election

Reposted from John Ward's blog, at his open invitation...
 
 
Why electing defaulters to power is the only way left
 
Friday having seen the enthusiastic support of De Nederlandsche Bank President Klaas Knot for Djisselbloem’s plan to pick the pockets of every despositor in Europe, there are now hardly any major nations still in the closet when it comes to Global Looting.

On Thursday, Canadian bloggers cottoned on to the plans of their government via the annual budget statement. On pages 144 and 145 of “Economic Action Plan 2013″ (already submitted to the Canadian House of Commons), it openly proposes ‘to implement a ‘bail-in’ regime for systemically important banks’ there.

The second wave of evidence about what’s coming I referred to yesterday: the banks hastily sending out acres of fly-shit to their customers to blame any future disappearance of money-substances from their accounts. The general line of defence being offering by these creeps is “ve are only obeyink orders”. The first one out of the blocks appears to have been Santander. Yesterday, the one from HSBC started landing on Slogger doormats. Guess what? The wording and headings are exactly the same as the Santander mailshots.

In short, the entire operation is being coordinated and run by the Treasury. Any chance of Ed Miliband – our friend in tough times – asking a PMQ about this next Wednesday? Don’t hold your breath. Our MPs these days simply do as they’re told, or what they want – whichever is the easiest and most profitable route at the time.

What we are seeing come to pass at the moment is what those previously nutwhack sites from three years ago were screaming at a deaf audience: in the end, they’ll confiscate our money to bail out the lunatics. But where will it end?

There’s a Radio 4 audio clip of Michael Winner at his best in the BBC archives, grumbling two decades ago about how restaurants steal from their customers. Winner says:

“I called a waiter over and said look, you’ve added an obligatory 15% service charge to the bill and a cover charge of 10%. Now my credit-card slip has arrive and you’ve left a blank space so I can add a further gratuity on top. Should I just undress so you can have my clothes as well?”

Bizarrely, we now have to ask ourselves the same about Djisselbloem Plan…and where it will end. After all, there’s plenty to go at.

For example, behind the guise of us “all being in this together”, George Osborne could painlessly announce an emergency Budget in the UK, and slap a 5% levy on all houses valued over £250,000.

“The rich must help depress house prices so the young can get on the bandwagon” the Squeaky Draper would allege. If nothing else, this would please Vince Cable, who has been demanding a ‘mansion tax’ for two years already. Note the use of ‘mansion’ there, to suggest ‘a tiny minority of the rich’. But it wouldn’t be of course: a good 60% of all houses in London are now worth over half a million, and the average British house price is currently about £160,000. So at least 40% of property owning Brits would have to cough up £10,000.

How they’d raise it is another matter – which is why thus far the emphasis has been on theft via a willing intermediary. There, the government takes what it already knows you’ve got available….without taxpayers having to bother the poor banks for a loan, they too having no money either, allegedly. The increasingly vicious nature of this circle is mind-blowing.

But such complications about property are seen by Treasury nomenklatura (and their accountancy advisers) as merely obstacles needing some creative thought applied to their removal. One said to me earlier this week, “It would actually be remarkably simple: the tax would be declared, payable with interest on the sale of the house. It would simply be a disguised way of bringing the Stamp Duty further downmarket”. Easy when you know how innit?

The problem for the Brussels-am-Berlin rapists in Greece was that they were (and still are) forced to demand tax monies from those who haven’t got any left. When one gets to the same stage of madness as Louis XVI, it’s time for a rethink. Cyprus was it, and this is now – quite clearly – going to be the future for all of us. But care must be taken not to turn a depression into a slump, so direct takes on future purchases have to be avoided: even the FinMin mobsters can grasp that much.

So the next stop could be property. But how much further could they go after that? I would say “not much”…because again, it is a classic case of taxing the sans coulottes and raising the price of their bread: you don’t collect any tax, and it results in Bastille-storming. Greece is, I would say, very close to this stage now, as is Italy. I suspect that only Tsipras and Grillo can stop it. Who might come after them, however, doesn’t bear thinking about.

For what it’s worth, here’s my two-pennorth: I suspect that what we’ll get is banks being ‘rescued’ worldwide, the quicker to empty them of SME and private deposits. It would be Communist seizure spun as national necessity.

Take the situation with Britain’s RBS. The Treasury has been trying to flog it for eighteen months without any success, and its CEO Stephen Hester has tried to rape his SME customers but been caught, stupid boy. Along the way, to save its subsidiaries the bank has had to inflict several ‘glitches’ to avoid paying some £80 billion by a certain date. But the situation inside the bank remains as dire as ever.

The official date suggest that ‘the taxpayer’ already owns 82% of the Royal Bank of Skullduggery, which is of course bollocks because all we own is a ginormous debt. The Establishment owns and runs it as a means of trying the fleece the taxpayer. But it would be a matter of two days work to nationalise (“save”) the bank completely, and then enact a Laika-style assets freeze. The rules having been changed already (see mailshots previously spotted) the Treasury would simply say to everyone – “the rich” – with monies over £100,000 in the bank that they they were no longer insured. Money is then printed by Carney the Canuck in Threadneedle Street to amortise the RBS debt into a ‘Bad Bank’, and the rest goes into the freezer….aka Her Majesty’s Government. What’s left – smaller savers and investment banking – is then given to another disaster like HBOS, thus making their balance sheet look better. Sorted. Until HBOS goes tits-up.

Of course, in the end you run out of things to nationalise rationalise. A wannabe popular Labour administration could dash in to stop electricity, water, gas and local councils ‘profiteering’ at the citizenry’s expense….an election winner if ever there was one. This gives you a free hand to put up all the prices and hand them straight over to the HMRC. But then you run out of things to improve, save, rescue and freeze. Inflation goes up and economic growth goes down. So ergo the tax take falls. What then?

It isn’t going to work.

The answer is that there is no “what” to happen “then”. The strategy is so obviously doomed, it cannot possibly get that far. Once the wealthy have all the ‘glitz bricks’ property and the gold, the global system will ban gold sales to the public. FDR did it, this mob wouldn’t hesitate to. For real people, there will be nowhere to invest, no way out of being levied, and in the end, nowhere to work.
But this still has no, zilch, zero and f**k all chance of monetising the debts, derivatives and other insurance calls sitting out there in the ether. What the Eunatics are doing today – and the other leeches will do the day after tomorrow – is a pointless waste of time, a last few yards along which to kick the battered can before it finally rolls over the cliff, has a string attached to it, and they all promise that hanging onto the string is the only way, and thus represents our socio-patriotic duty.

Wake up Dumbos, it isn’t going to work.

You’ve tried taxes, you’ve tried austerity, you’ve tried levies, you’ve tried asset freezes, and you’ll try every sneaky-snakey trick in your little black book: but it isn’t going to be enough. More and more money will go to Asia, more and more worthless fiat money will be printed, more and more debt will accrue in the West, and then one day when nothing is being produced and bond markets, stock markets and commodity markets are going through the floor, we will end up with what I identified years ago as Indeflation – inflated Sovereign demands, deflated goods value, and zero demand.

You will I’m sure all be bored by this by now, but as I have been saying since Spring 2009, debt forgiveness is the only way out.

The current asylum inmates will never do that: never never never. Be they BamBers promoting their euro, Wall Street running Washington, Beijing exporting crap and owed trillions by its buyers, globalist bankers, multinational producers, politicians, tax accountants or corporate lawyers, they will never relent. They can’t: if they do, the problems will be horrendous but soluble. Their downside is that there will no longer be any place in it for them.

While we still have the democratic electoral power to do so, the one and only way now to force debt forgiveness globally is for we, the People, to elect politicians who promise to default on all debt the day after they are elected. Yes, I know this will evoke a crisis via immediate capital flight from that country, but they’re just going to have to live with it. The alternative is, as I’ve tried to outline above, an unthinkable can-strewn road heading towards mass lemming impressions.

The first country to do this, I imagine, will be Italy. Greece may well be next, but I think Spain could still beat them to it. Without doubt, the nation that can do it with the least pain is France – given its relatively sparse population sitting on a huge amount of food-producing land. For Britain – dependent on services and hugely overpopulated – it would the the end.

But once such things happen, the game really will be up for mercantilist globalism. ‘Siege economies’ need be no such thing: self-sufficiency by nation – with judicious trade in surpluses – remains the best way forward: and the only way to avoid a cataclysmic thermo-nuclear conflict in the end.

Too many visitors to this site see me as ‘doom-mongering’, but they rarely leave anything in the way of rationally argued support for their opinion. My prediction is very simple:

1. Global Looting is coming and it will be self-defeating.
2. The people at the top are mad and stupid.
3. They will not countenance debt forgiveness, so they must be replaced by those who will.
4. The mercantilist model of global economics and Friedmanite econo-fiscal ideas are a busted flush.
5. Self-sufficient Sovereigns trading in surpluses represent the best future for the human race.
Tell me why I’m wrong – with the facts to support it – and I’ll happily listen. For me, it’s Page One sanity compared to what we have now. Over to you.

And for the rest of us who know the self-styled élite will wind up killing us all given half a chance, I’m making a special appeal for you to forward and repost this essay in as many places as possible. Hits are of absolutely no importance to me beyond the raising global awareness of the need to do something before it’s too late. Thanks.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

John Ward calls for debt default via democratic election

Reposted from John Ward's blog, at his open invitation...
Why electing defaulters to power is the only way left
Friday having seen the enthusiastic support of De Nederlandsche Bank President Klaas Knot for Djisselbloem’s plan to pick the pockets of every despositor in Europe, there are now hardly any major nations still in the closet when it comes to Global Looting.

On Thursday, Canadian bloggers cottoned on to the plans of their government via the annual budget statement. On pages 144 and 145 of “Economic Action Plan 2013″ (already submitted to the Canadian House of Commons), it openly proposes ‘to implement a ‘bail-in’ regime for systemically important banks’ there.

The second wave of evidence about what’s coming I referred to yesterday: the banks hastily sending out acres of fly-shit to their customers to blame any future disappearance of money-substances from their accounts. The general line of defence being offering by these creeps is “ve are only obeyink orders”. The first one out of the blocks appears to have been Santander. Yesterday, the one from HSBC started landing on Slogger doormats. Guess what? The wording and headings are exactly the same as the Santander mailshots.

In short, the entire operation is being coordinated and run by the Treasury. Any chance of Ed Miliband – our friend in tough times – asking a PMQ about this next Wednesday? Don’t hold your breath. Our MPs these days simply do as they’re told, or what they want – whichever is the easiest and most profitable route at the time.

What we are seeing come to pass at the moment is what those previously nutwhack sites from three years ago were screaming at a deaf audience: in the end, they’ll confiscate our money to bail out the lunatics. But where will it end?

There’s a Radio 4 audio clip of Michael Winner at his best in the BBC archives, grumbling two decades ago about how restaurants steal from their customers. Winner says:

“I called a waiter over and said look, you’ve added an obligatory 15% service charge to the bill and a cover charge of 10%. Now my credit-card slip has arrive and you’ve left a blank space so I can add a further gratuity on top. Should I just undress so you can have my clothes as well?”

Bizarrely, we now have to ask ourselves the same about Djisselbloem Plan…and where it will end. After all, there’s plenty to go at.

For example, behind the guise of us “all being in this together”, George Osborne could painlessly announce an emergency Budget in the UK, and slap a 5% levy on all houses valued over £250,000.

“The rich must help depress house prices so the young can get on the bandwagon” the Squeaky Draper would allege. If nothing else, this would please Vince Cable, who has been demanding a ‘mansion tax’ for two years already. Note the use of ‘mansion’ there, to suggest ‘a tiny minority of the rich’. But it wouldn’t be of course: a good 60% of all houses in London are now worth over half a million, and the average British house price is currently about £160,000. So at least 40% of property owning Brits would have to cough up £10,000.

How they’d raise it is another matter – which is why thus far the emphasis has been on theft via a willing intermediary. There, the government takes what it already knows you’ve got available….without taxpayers having to bother the poor banks for a loan, they too having no money either, allegedly. The increasingly vicious nature of this circle is mind-blowing.

But such complications about property are seen by Treasury nomenklatura (and their accountancy advisers) as merely obstacles needing some creative thought applied to their removal. One said to me earlier this week, “It would actually be remarkably simple: the tax would be declared, payable with interest on the sale of the house. It would simply be a disguised way of bringing the Stamp Duty further downmarket”. Easy when you know how innit?

The problem for the Brussels-am-Berlin rapists in Greece was that they were (and still are) forced to demand tax monies from those who haven’t got any left. When one gets to the same stage of madness as Louis XVI, it’s time for a rethink. Cyprus was it, and this is now – quite clearly – going to be the future for all of us. But care must be taken not to turn a depression into a slump, so direct takes on future purchases have to be avoided: even the FinMin mobsters can grasp that much.

So the next stop could be property. But how much further could they go after that? I would say “not much”…because again, it is a classic case of taxing the sans coulottes and raising the price of their bread: you don’t collect any tax, and it results in Bastille-storming. Greece is, I would say, very close to this stage now, as is Italy. I suspect that only Tsipras and Grillo can stop it. Who might come after them, however, doesn’t bear thinking about.

For what it’s worth, here’s my two-pennorth: I suspect that what we’ll get is banks being ‘rescued’ worldwide, the quicker to empty them of SME and private deposits. It would be Communist seizure spun as national necessity.

Take the situation with Britain’s RBS. The Treasury has been trying to flog it for eighteen months without any success, and its CEO Stephen Hester has tried to rape his SME customers but been caught, stupid boy. Along the way, to save its subsidiaries the bank has had to inflict several ‘glitches’ to avoid paying some £80 billion by a certain date. But the situation inside the bank remains as dire as ever.

The official date suggest that ‘the taxpayer’ already owns 82% of the Royal Bank of Skullduggery, which is of course bollocks because all we own is a ginormous debt. The Establishment owns and runs it as a means of trying the fleece the taxpayer. But it would be a matter of two days work to nationalise (“save”) the bank completely, and then enact a Laika-style assets freeze. The rules having been changed already (see mailshots previously spotted) the Treasury would simply say to everyone – “the rich” – with monies over £100,000 in the bank that they they were no longer insured. Money is then printed by Carney the Canuck in Threadneedle Street to amortise the RBS debt into a ‘Bad Bank’, and the rest goes into the freezer….aka Her Majesty’s Government. What’s left – smaller savers and investment banking – is then given to another disaster like HBOS, thus making their balance sheet look better. Sorted. Until HBOS goes tits-up.

Of course, in the end you run out of things to nationalise rationalise. A wannabe popular Labour administration could dash in to stop electricity, water, gas and local councils ‘profiteering’ at the citizenry’s expense….an election winner if ever there was one. This gives you a free hand to put up all the prices and hand them straight over to the HMRC. But then you run out of things to improve, save, rescue and freeze. Inflation goes up and economic growth goes down. So ergo the tax take falls. What then?

It isn’t going to work.

The answer is that there is no “what” to happen “then”. The strategy is so obviously doomed, it cannot possibly get that far. Once the wealthy have all the ‘glitz bricks’ property and the gold, the global system will ban gold sales to the public. FDR did it, this mob wouldn’t hesitate to. For real people, there will be nowhere to invest, no way out of being levied, and in the end, nowhere to work.
But this still has no, zilch, zero and f**k all chance of monetising the debts, derivatives and other insurance calls sitting out there in the ether. What the Eunatics are doing today – and the other leeches will do the day after tomorrow – is a pointless waste of time, a last few yards along which to kick the battered can before it finally rolls over the cliff, has a string attached to it, and they all promise that hanging onto the string is the only way, and thus represents our socio-patriotic duty.

Wake up Dumbos, it isn’t going to work.

You’ve tried taxes, you’ve tried austerity, you’ve tried levies, you’ve tried asset freezes, and you’ll try every sneaky-snakey trick in your little black book: but it isn’t going to be enough. More and more money will go to Asia, more and more worthless fiat money will be printed, more and more debt will accrue in the West, and then one day when nothing is being produced and bond markets, stock markets and commodity markets are going through the floor, we will end up with what I identified years ago as Indeflation – inflated Sovereign demands, deflated goods value, and zero demand.

You will I’m sure all be bored by this by now, but as I have been saying since Spring 2009, debt forgiveness is the only way out.

The current asylum inmates will never do that: never never never. Be they BamBers promoting their euro, Wall Street running Washington, Beijing exporting crap and owed trillions by its buyers, globalist bankers, multinational producers, politicians, tax accountants or corporate lawyers, they will never relent. They can’t: if they do, the problems will be horrendous but soluble. Their downside is that there will no longer be any place in it for them.

While we still have the democratic electoral power to do so, the one and only way now to force debt forgiveness globally is for we, the People, to elect politicians who promise to default on all debt the day after they are elected. Yes, I know this will evoke a crisis via immediate capital flight from that country, but they’re just going to have to live with it. The alternative is, as I’ve tried to outline above, an unthinkable can-strewn road heading towards mass lemming impressions.

The first country to do this, I imagine, will be Italy. Greece may well be next, but I think Spain could still beat them to it. Without doubt, the nation that can do it with the least pain is France – given its relatively sparse population sitting on a huge amount of food-producing land. For Britain – dependent on services and hugely overpopulated – it would the the end.

But once such things happen, the game really will be up for mercantilist globalism. ‘Siege economies’ need be no such thing: self-sufficiency by nation – with judicious trade in surpluses – remains the best way forward: and the only way to avoid a cataclysmic thermo-nuclear conflict in the end.

Too many visitors to this site see me as ‘doom-mongering’, but they rarely leave anything in the way of rationally argued support for their opinion. My prediction is very simple:

1. Global Looting is coming and it will be self-defeating.
2. The people at the top are mad and stupid.
3. They will not countenance debt forgiveness, so they must be replaced by those who will.
4. The mercantilist model of global economics and Friedmanite econo-fiscal ideas are a busted flush.
5. Self-sufficient Sovereigns trading in surpluses represent the best future for the human race.
Tell me why I’m wrong – with the facts to support it – and I’ll happily listen. For me, it’s Page One sanity compared to what we have now. Over to you.

And for the rest of us who know the self-styled élite will wind up killing us all given half a chance, I’m making a special appeal for you to forward and repost this essay in as many places as possible. Hits are of absolutely no importance to me beyond the raising global awareness of the need to do something before it’s too late. Thanks.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Cyprus bank disaster: small victims, big contagion risk

If past history is anything to go by, Cyprus' really big depositors and alleged crooks and money launderers will have got wind of the coming changes and shifted before the Argentina-style "corralito". I should certainly not like to be a Cypriot banker or politician trying to explain to a Russian mafioso why his money has gone.

Now the Daily Telegraph, quoting Reuters, explains the new arrangements. Depositors in Laiki Bank "stand to lose up to 80pc of their money" and those with the Bank of Cyprus "will receive shares in the lender worth 37.5pc of any savings over €100,000, while the rest may never be paid back... Of the 62.5pc of uninsured deposits not converted to bank shares, about 40pc will continue to accrue interest but will not be repaid unless the bank does well, while the final 22.5pc will cease to attract interest."

That Telegraph headline, though: "Big depositors..." Let's illustrate "big" with a little hypothetical situation. Assume you've been dutifully caring for a loved relative who has recently passed on, leaving you her flat in Streatham (SW16), where I used to live. The average sold price for a residence in one of the streets there is £247,362 according to NetHousePrices. That would convert to 293,064.

So you decide it's time for your place in the sun in your declining years. You sell your house, swapping it for a place in Cyprus, and the proceeds of Aunty's flat are banked to create an income.

And now... only 100,000 (34%) is accessible. Of the rest, 72,400 has become "bank shares" (shares in an all-but-bankrupt enterprise, so don't expect dividends), €72,400 is inaccessible AND earning no interest, and €48,266 is inaccessible but interest-earning.

Assuming that any interest at all is being paid (how? from what profits?), in the above example only €148,266 is earning it. That is, only 50.6% of your original capital is yielding any income (however derisory).

You have also lost control of 66% of your capital, and may turn out to have lost the lion's share of that portion altogether. Quite possibly all your shares are worth is some part of the buildings, fixtures and fittings of the bank branches, assuming they haven't been looted and burned. For I cannot see how anyone in their right mind would deposit another cent in these banks, or how they could be persuaded not to get everything they can out of their accounts, as fast as humanly possible.

I think these banks are dead, if still twitching.

The question of contagion remains - will those in charge stop a Europe-wide series of bank runs? I'm no longer even sure about keeping what we have in sterling in a British bank. And I'm constitutionally sanguine and cautious.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Friday, March 29, 2013

Bank of England "loses" 20 years of data

Until recently, BoE data for M4 was available online going back as early as 1963. Now the series starts at 1982. Why? Is this to avoid a potentially embarrassing examination of the connexion between M4 growth and price inflation in the 1970s?

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy.

Thursday, March 28, 2013

The Colours Of Venus


A palette of colours from Sandro Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" (1485-86) in homage to David Everitt-Carlson's ITOMB Project (2011- ). The hues are from the goddess' hair, body and the surrounding air.