Big US banks are making people homeless through secondary loansharking

Read this outrageous story from Michael Snyder. JPM and others are buying up local government tax debts, multiplying them with their own charges and forcing homeowners onto the street.

Some people are losing the roof over their heads for a debt that costs no more than a good meal in a restaurant: "big banks and hedge funds keep tacking on interest, penalties and legal fees until the tax bills are many times the size that they originally were."

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/how-big-banks-can-steal-your-home-from-you-even-if-your-mortgage-is-totally-paid-off

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Time to ease the Green Belt a couple of notches?

Professor Paul Cheshire thinks so; I beg to differ, but not because I'm a rich Nimby. Doubtless the Professor knows vastly more than I do, but the debate is taking place on a new site called The Conversation and as they say, "two views make a market".

Here's a link to what he says, and here is what I say in the comments below his article:

Sorry to quote myself, but it's quicker if I give a couple of links to posts I've offered on this:

1. Per square kilometre of arable land, the UK has some 1,077 people to feed - more than twice what is sustainable without food imports. Just as we are now beginning to worry about energy security, we also need to make food security a higher priority.

http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/britains-food-security-future-challenge

2. You could say that we do not have a housing shortage, but heightened expectations of personal living space:

http://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/what-housing-shortage.html

Best wishes...

 I look forward to the riposte.

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Syria: a situation reading by David Malone

In the last of his 3-part series on Syria: Cui Bono? David Malone looks at the geopolitics and ends with a dark theory or two: the French are teaming up with Qatar in order to be freer from Russian use of energy as a political weapon, and powers outside Syria would be content to have a permanent multifactional revolutionary ferment there so that nobody ever gets the control, while the territory continues to be used as a conduit for oil and natural gas.

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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.

Energy efficiency: method vs. objective

Alzetta's petrol-driven mechanical horse (Pic: http://cyberneticzoo.com/?p=2595)

Is our thinking radical enough? Imagine if all we had done in the twentieth century was to replace living horses with mechanical ones to pull carts and waggons.

Similarly, making internal combustion engines more efficient and cleaner is good, but this still focuses on cars as a method rather than re-examines what they're for. ATOC reckons rail is better:

"... on average, passenger rail currently emits approximately half the carbon dioxide per passenger kilometre of cars and around a quarter that of domestic air... This analysis is based on average figures. Quite clearly, in any specific example, the occupancy of the vehicle is key. A fully-loaded car will perform well on a CO2 per passenger km basis compared to the most efficient train with very few people in it. Similarly the averages quoted here cover a range of traffic conditions and may well differ from those of individual operators running specific services. Nonetheless these average figures clarify the starting position. Further work is needed to consider the effect of practical policy options open to us to reduce emissions from transport."

Shame about Beeching, then; and about the way that rail travel has become so expensive on certain routes. Privatisation may have helped certain entrepreneurs and (indirectly) some politicians, but there was nothing much wrong with the old transport system in Birmingham in 1975, and the lower level of car ownership then. Now, some of my young colleagues prefer to run a car instead of building a pension and saving up to buy a house - this DM article says that lower earners can be paying 27% of their disposable income in this way.

On the other hand, there is a welcome new realism about "green transport" in the air. This week there will be an EU vote in Strasbourg on revising targets for the contribution of biofuels to energy production, as London MEP Mary Honeyball explains. This is, it seems in response to growing awareness of the impact of corn ethanol production on food prices; plus the relative expensiveness of alternative fuels. The EC Commissioner for Energy Günther Oettinger also admits that electric vehicles will contribute less to the solution than previously expected (see this video at 1:20 in).

Rather than design better mechanical horses, it would help more if we and our stuff were in the right places to start with. To quote Douglas Adams, one of the finest philosophers of the twentieth century:

"Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be."

Many of our current solutions are a sort of Marie Antoinette washed-sheep playing with a fantasy version of reality; alternative technologies can be cute and clean without really being green.

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Davy Jones' garbage

Look beneath your lid some morning,
See those things you didn't quite consume
The world's a can for
Your fresh garbage . . .

Spirit - Fresh Garbage[1] [2]

I loved that song when I first heard it in 1968, on the compilation LP “The Rock Machine Turns You On”[3] – Jay Ferguson’s distant, lost-sounding, disillusioned tenor voice, perfect for the teenager in turmoil.

It’s still relevant, and the biggest rubbish bin of all is the sea. A lot of this is plastic, not only on shores, where it represents 60% – 80% of all litter (Derraik, 2002[4]) but in vast swirling oceanic garbage patches[5] - and on the sea bed: in 1995 92% of debris on the floor of the Bay of Biscay was plastic[6]. A more recent article by Greenpeace says 70% of plastic litter sinks, and there is an estimated 600,000 tons of it at the bottom of the North Sea.[7]

The debris is unsightly, and can strangle or fill the stomachs of marine wildlife. It’s also toxic, so developing biodegradable versions doesn’t solve the problem – indeed, it could make it worse, since dissolved plastic is much harder to find and nearly impossible to remove.

James Higham posts a picture[8] of a cleanup device still under development. It’s a giant static filter that the inventor, Boyan Slat, hopes will trap surface garbage but allow plankton to pass safely through; work continues.[9] But even if it works perfectly, that still leaves the other, sunken 70% to deal with. Yet again, techno-fixes have limitations.

I can remember when we had shopping baskets and produce wasn’t shrink-wrapped. Will those days ever come again?

 

---

[1] http://www.metrolyrics.com/fresh-garbage-lyrics-spirit.html

[2] http://youtu.be/k7MQ5rxUZsc

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rock_Machine_Turns_You_On

[4] http://www.caseinlet.org/uploads/Moore--Derraik_1_.pdf

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Marine_garbage_patches. There are in fact more than three of them, as the articles go on to explain.

[6] Derraik, Table 1 (see note 4).

[7] http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/oceans/pollution/trash-vortex/

[8] http://nourishingobscurity.com/2013/09/09/plastic-gobbler-of-the-seven-seas/comment-page-1/#comment-221633

[9] http://www.boyanslat.com/plastic5/

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.

Honey traps

I like honey, so I tend to notice honey-related stories and it is surprising how much skulduggery there is in the world of honey. Take these comments from the head of a Derbyshire supplier.

"The honey industry is used to launder money, with people buying large quantities and then selling it at a loss. In the past, I've been offered payment of substantial bills with plastic carrier bags full of cash," said Tony.

He said: "There is a lot of cheap foreign product on the shelves, claiming to be honey. One retailer in Derby has a product on the shelves that is so cheap that by the ton it would cost £12,500. For 20 tonnes of unrefined product in a 40ft container the price would be £13,000 so the prices I see on the shelves are a physical and financial impossibility.

I know 70 tonnes of unlabelled synthetic honey is imported into the UK but I've never seen synthetic honey on sale and it can't just vanish into thin air," said Tony.

He has experienced problems with corruption in Italy and Greece and does not deal with either nation. He said: "In Greece, you can pay for official paperwork to certify your honey is whatever you say it is and this is what we're up against.”

It’s obviously a tough business because this same supplier’s name appears in an Australian article on fake Manuka honey. I've bought honey from this guy and suspect he was the victim of yet another honey scam.

In October 2011, Britain's Food and Environment Research Agency (FERA) tested a small sample of five brands of manuka honey from shop shelves. Only one, made by Comvita, was up to standard. The other four (from Nelson Honey, Honeyco Rainforest, Littleover Apiaries and Native New Zealand Manuka Honey) showed no detectable "non-peroxide activity", the anti-bacterial properties special to manuka honey.

Of course the issue of chloramphenicol in Chinese honey has been rumbling on for some time and still appears to be a source of concern.

How to detect fake honey? This article dating all the way back to 2007 has some simple tests, including one extraordinary piece of advice.

When poured very slowly honey will flow as a spiral in a clockwise direction. This is because the honey molecule is non-symmetrical with a right-hand bias which causes the stream of honey to spin.

Complete nonsense of course.

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How to price the British housing market?

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/11/global-house-prices
 

The Economist magazine published an interactive tool at the end of last month, to show what's happened to house prices since 1975. They say that (thanks to Osborne's vote-buying house purchase schemes) "the British market is picking up even though its fundamentals—unlike America’s—suggest continued overvaluation."

This is just fun with statistics. Prices "in real terms" may change when food and fuel get more expensive and "average incomes" ignores widening regional and income-group disparities.

I have also suggested before now that we don't have a housing shortage, we have a housing misallocation. Rents would be lower if we had some properly enforced policy on economic immigration. And there is the vexed question of all those spare bedrooms - "taxing" them hits families that don't have it easy, yet very many old people are clinging on to property that's dauntingly difficult and expensive for them to look after (my wife's grandmother hadn't been able to go upstairs for decades).

But thanks to the fragmented family, people are less likely to take in their elderly relations. I know a doctor who, when a chap wanted to complain about how his old 'un was being looked after, agreed enthusiastically and offered to have the ambulance follow the chap home so she could be safely installed into his loving care; gosh, how fast the complaint went away!

Inflation is a matter of choosing A and B and comparing them. Unless Osborne plans to imitate Rudolf Havenstein then his (and the supposedly independent BoE's) pumping has to stop, probably after the 2015 General Election. My guess is that except for "hot spots", house prices will decline in cash terms, especially as unemployment and underemployment continue to undermine the workforce.

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.