Us banks vs UK banks

We are now getting used to hearing that the UK is the worst-placed among the G20 countries to recover from the credit crunch. One reason is that we have few banks, and almost all of them in trouble.

By contrast, as you see here, the US has 8,500 banks, most of them in good condition. The problems are concentrated in their handful of giants. Over there, it would be possible to bust them and have others ready to take on their books of loans (discounted) and deposits.

Here, I think we'd have to create a new bank, if only to provide some competition for Barclays and HSBC.

A lighter moment

I wish I could embed this one, but please click on the link to see an outstanding and very funny example of hysterical greed:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70wuAWxOEZA

... but the Revolution begins at home

We attended the memorial service for a friend yesterday, and the following quotation (Acts, Chap. 2, vv. 44-47 - King James version) was included in the readings:

And all that believed were together, and had all things common;
And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.
And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart,
Praising God, and having favour with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.

It's a big ask, as they say; and the more we have, the bigger an ask it is. Jesus' advice to the rich young man (Matthew 19, v. 21) is after the latter has confirmed that he already performs all the normal religious duties:

If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.

It was too much for that trustafarian, and it's too much for modern us. So we try to explain it away, Philadelphia lawyer-style. Clever people will explain that if you give away all, you'll merely be a charity case yourself. Or they'll tell you that the advice was case-specific: the young man needed freeing from his attachment to material things (and, presumably, we don't).

Yet the history of the early Church clearly shows that these sophisticated glosses are plain wrong. They were far, far closer to the revolutionary events (and witnesses) of the New Testament, and we must assume that they understood the message better. "Such as should be saved" must join the project, and obey the project's rules.

Reportedly, 82% of Americans are Christians (even the Simpson family). Many sincerely try to follow the early example - think of the people who took in refugees from Katrina-devastated New Orleans, and how some of these good hosts were robbed and even killed as a result.

But writing comments on US blogs suggesting sharing resources (even in the bureacratic form of the NHS) will get sharp ripostes accusing you of socialism or worse.

It's still a big ask, isn't it? And still too big for me, at the moment.

The Revolution is beginning

This Parliament has now lost all moral and political authority and ought, by rights, to dissolve itself.

It is now not only the Government that has ceased to deserve our trust. So many members of the House of Commons have disgraced themselves so completely that their right to make laws for the rest of us has evaporated.

Read the rest of this extraordinary attack on our corrupted Parliament and broken democracy, in the Mail on Sunday here. The blogger-whingeing has now gone mainstream.

The gold bugs are chittering - but don't get over-excited

Jeff Clark at Casey Research (htp: The Mogambo Guru) plays with the numbers to estimate gold's potential.

One stat is created from a comparison of all the world's cash with all the world's gold: "Total central banks reserves (including gold holdings) = $4.8 trillion, divided by 929.6 million ounces total gold reserves held by all official institutions that issue currency = $5,246 gold price." Or about £3,500 per ounce.

HOWEVER: the World Gold Council estimates that all the gold ever mined to the end of 2006 is about 158,000 tonnes, or 5,079.7 million ounces. If we round down to 5 billion ounces (to allow for some permanent loss, but offset to some extent by new mining - esp. in China - since 2006) we get a gold price of $960 per ounce - not far off where we are today. Allow a bit of cash held outside banks, and gold would be worth - what? $1,000? $1,200?

Yes, there may be a spike like in 1980 - and there may not be. But speculation/panic aside, it would seem that, globally, the current gold-to-money ratio is not quite so wrong as might seem at first sight. So the story is not really about gold, but about the weakness of the dollar in a heavily unbalanced US economy. Priced in a different, stronger currency, gold may not zoom to the moon.

Gold, and theft by inflation

A killer graph here from Charles Hugh Smith. Interestingly, the steady real decline of average incomes begins at almost exactly the same time as Nixon shut the "gold window".

Smith's take is that "the speculative mania in housing was fundamentally a tragic last-gasp effort to make up lost ground via speculation in housing". And if housing reverts to mean, it has a long, long way to go yet.

Is it worth a shot?

Our Founding Fathers were not all professional politicians. They were farmers, writers, inventors, lawyers and surveyors. They had organized estates, led men into battle, built furniture, and written books.

By contrast, our modern elite have often never generated anything. I believe that is why they find it so easy to destroy things that they don't understand (which is a long list).

Petty officials in Brussels attack the British banger and English chocolate, not by relevant measures such as taste or safety, but using purely arbitrary scales.

In Britain, the well-educated New Labour, demonstrating their reverse snobbery, diminish the Peerage, and complete the destruction of a once-great educational system.

In the US, we have the legions of draft-dodgers who steer high-ticket military contracts to their friends, while our exhausted troops salvage from junk yards. The managers, accountants and lawyers have brought our economy to its elbows by equating the movement of wealth with its generation. Our fragile education system is battered by consultants and administrators who confuse good grades with competent teaching and actual learning.

Perhaps some of this could be improved by adapting some of the Japanese model, where management trainees first must try every job on the shop floor?