UKIP quote of the day

Peter Hitchens:

I think UKIP is not a conservative formation, but Thatcherism in exile.

Don't know if it's right, but it flies off the page.

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.

Daily Telegraph in hysterical fear of conservative policies

Mary Riddell:

So consider, this morning, what a Ukip Britain would look like. it would be a locked-down land, armed to the hilt, where good foreigners were repelled and bad ones expelled, no questions asked. It would be a country concreted over for extra jails (though never for high speed rail lines). It would be a quaint place – an old curiosity shop of matrons and smoking rooms.

It would be a nation of wild spending, of derisory taxes for the rich and – not least because all talk of climate change would be abandoned – a country programmed for ruin.

I don't understand why she's working for the Barclay brothers.

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.

Wealth inequality in the US: a visualisation

Info: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/04/23/a-rise-in-wealth-for-the-wealthydeclines-for-the-lower-93/

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.

Securing Energy Supply (4) - How Is It To Be Done?

"Safety and certainty in oil lie in variety and variety alone"

The reliable delivery of oil, gas and electricity represents a set of significant engineering challenges – but they have been solved.  However, disruptive and malign political forces are in play.  We have seen that the security and reliability of our energy supply is at the mercy of factors as mundane as strikes, protests and ill-conceived energy policy, as well as the more dramatic interventions of blockade, sabotage and war. A chilling prospect in every sense.

How, then, do prudent policy-makers go about securing our energy supplies ?  There are several tiers of defence and we will conclude this series by surveying the field.

Some reliability measures are put in place primarily against ordinary contingencies such as plant failure, extreme weather etc.   They may also serve against more sinister forces.

Over-capacity:  if one power plant in 20 is statistically liable to be out of order at any one time, there is a natural argument to have 21 or 22 plants in service.  Engineers being people who like building plants anyway, this solution to unreliability is very congenial to them, and when possessed of monopoly powers as many energy utilities used to enjoy, are inclined to follow this approach to excess.  Liberalisation of energy markets is characterised by reductions in the margin of over-capacity when economic factors start being given proper consideration: some assert this can go too far, a thought which we return to at the end of this piece.

Storage:  holding a strategic inventory of a vital commodity is as old as Joseph’s advise to the Pharaoh on how to prepare for the seven years lean.  This is easily organised for oil and coal; less easily for gas; and with currently-available technology near-impossible for power on any scale (aside from pumped-storage of water for hydro-electric generation where geology and geography permit).

Diversification:  as Churchill knew (see the quotation above), ‘variety’ or, as we would say, diversification of sources, is a key measure against insecurity of supply.  A century ago he was addressing the problem for the British Fleet, newly converted from coal-burning to oil, and relying almost exclusively on supplies from distant Persia.  Whatever the reason for having concerns about the reliability of any one source, it is a good idea to have several.  

The UK is among several European nations that have achieved a good measure of diversification in energy supplies, but several instances of risky concentration can be identified.  France is hugely reliant on its vast nuclear sector for electricity, and if there were to be a systemic problem (perhaps a catastrophic design fault) that caused their reactors to be closed, they would be in significant difficulties.  Famously, a number of eastern European countries are heavily dependent on Russia for their gas.

Interconnection:  when supplies are interrupted from one source it is important to be able to access as many other sources as possible.  For this purpose it is obviously best to be connected to as many other supply-chains as economically possible (a concept we shall return to below).  For oil this is generally very easy, as ships and trucks can easily be re-routed.  For coal it can be slightly more problematic, as there are many different types of coal, and coal-burning plant are often configured for specific grades.

Gas and electricity are restricted to largely static infrastructure.  Switching to an alternative supply route can be difficult, and is rarely possible unless inter-connections for the purpose have been built in advance of problems occurring.  The EC actively promotes developing new cross-border gas and electricity connections, and uprating existing ones, and European interconnection is improving all the time.

Free trade and other regulations: closely bound up with diversification and interconnection, anyone wanting to access an emergency source of supply (other than one they already own) needs to be confident that they can buy what they want from those who have it – provided they are willing to pay, of course. 

This requires a market to exist – which shouldn’t be an issue; but in gas and electricity, it cannot be taken for granted.  Even oil and coal have at various times not been fully tradable.  Gas and electricity were historically, though erroneously, viewed as ‘natural monopolies’, and anyone needing to buy (or sell) at short notice might have had nowhere to go.  In western nations, gas and electricity ceased to be statutory monopolies well over a decade ago, but in some areas there are distinct deficiencies in the workings of the ‘market’ – generally because of blocking actions by former monopolies who have lost little of their de facto dominance, and none of their overbearing arrogance.

Even where markets are working well on a good day (e.g. most of Europe), there can be issues when problems occur.  For example:  French regulations on ensuring the security of supply of La France used to be what many would deem to be irrationally strict; so that when a perfectly ordinary practical problem arose in the UK gas grid, even at a time when supplies were ample on the other side of the Channel, French operators would declare ‘problem ahoy’, and would start paying any price to fill their already well-stocked storage, safe in the knowledge that the regulators would endorse them passing through the costs of this fatuous operation to their customers.  What should have been a simple matter of UK spot prices rising to attract surplus gas from France and elsewhere, became a more serious problem than objectively necessary. 

Resolving this issue, while at the same time respecting every nation’s right to take legitimate security measures, has required harmonising regulations.  This can work well at levels where fairly effective supra-national bodies exist – the EU being one example.  Whether entities such as the WTO are genuinely effective for such purposes remains to be seriously tested.

Of the above measures, we can say that all of them are useful in times of purposeful external threats to security of supply, as well for dealing with run-of-the-mill contingencies.  Yet further steps may be contemplated against sinister possibilities.

Hardening infrastructure:  energy commodities being highly combustible and generally dependent on large, static infrastructure, they are perennially vulnerable to outright attack.  Most nations mandate at least some level of high security for these facilities, as inspection via Google Earth will readily confirm.  Since 9/11, ‘resilience’ measures have been stepped up considerably.

Diplomacy:  avoiding conflict always helps.  More positively, securing alliances designed to improve secure access to commodities is a major pre-occupation for many nations: the USA in the Middle East, and China in Africa come readily to mind.

Multi-national contingency plans:  following the AOPEC oil embargo of 1973-4, the International Energy Agency was given powers to mandate the holding of strategic oil stocks in OECD nations, and to direct the use of these stocks in emergencies.  The IEA’s direct interventions to allocate oil supplies during the embargo, coordinated in practical terms by Exxon, saved the targeted nations (in particular Holland) from even greater economic trouble than they suffered in the event.  

(Incidentally, in the mid 1990’s the IEA made a major study on how Europe would fare if ‘the single biggest source of supply’ – viz Russia – were to interrupt gas supplies for 6 months.  Even in those pre-market days, it concluded that with multinational coordination, no European nation would face complete ruin.  More than 6 months might have been a different story …)

Armed forces:  sometimes, passive and political measures are not enough, and the military may need to be deployed.  The navies of the trading world are, for example, constantly working against piracy in the Indian Ocean and elsewhere. More spectacularly, Western military interventions in Iraq have been attributed to the USA’s extended Middle Eastern oil policy – perhaps more easily asserted in the case of the first Gulf War than the second.

=   =   =   =   =   =   = 

The foregoing is a fairly pedestrian listing.  A more interesting line of enquiry stems from a simple classification of the various measures into two categories:  those which build towards self-sufficiency, and those which seek to make possible a system of mutual dependency.  In the former we would place over-capacity, storage, diversification, hardening, and armed forces:  in the latter, inter-connection, free trade, diplomacy, multi-national contingency plans and (to the extent we are part of military alliances) also armed forces.

There is a school of thought that values self-sufficiency above all other types of security.  In some spheres it may not be possible: for example, Belgium enjoys no indigenous natural gas resources whatever.  But in cases where it is possible, why would it not always be the solution of choice ?

The answer is that it might be much more expensive than mutual dependency – perhaps prohibitively so.  We hinted at an economic cost-benefit trade-off when speaking of desiring to be connected to as many other supply-chains as economically possible.

If there is an economic trade-off to be made, how might one decide an optimal degree of self-sufficiency ?  This important question is reserved for another day, concluding here with the observation that we need our politicians to make their judgements on security of energy supplies carefully: for civilisation is energy-intensive.

 

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.

UK: is inflation and national ruin inevitable?

See the Broad Oak page for "The Quiet Collapse of the Pound."

The quiet collapse of the pound

 

The forces ranged against the British pound may be so powerful that the government is in no position to offer inflation protection to savers.

 

I show above what has happened over the past five years. Nominally, UK inflation has advanced by 17 or 18 per cent, depending on how you choose to measure it.

 

Gold has soared, and had already done so for some time before 2008, but it had been at a low point for a long time during the years of the phoney boom. I still feel that, bearing in mind the amount of extra money pumped into the economy, gold is fairly valued. But compared to other assets it's a small market and so more volatile and subject to manipulation, so for the active trader it's full of traps:

 



So let's return to the first graph and look at the currency market instead, to get a feeling for our relative performance and a hint about the future.

The euro has risen 8% over the period - not dramatic, but the EU has its own large problems.

The US dollar has risen 29% and although it is an ailing giant, the dollar is still the world's major reserve and trading currency, so when crisis hits there may be a flight to USD. Longer term, the US economy is out of kilter, like that of the UK and EU, so all three are in a quandary - the choices appear to be painful deflation and social unrest, monetary inflation with all that attends it, or debt defaults and forgiveness (which powerful creditors are determined to prevent).

My feeling is that the UK will pursue the first course until it's politically impossible, then the second (by which time the smart money will have got out, as happened in a different way in the Cyprus bank debacle).

The orange columns (except for Saudi Arabia) show the progress of the six currencies tipped for 2013 by the Money Morning website. I have no idea whether their recommendations are good. And again, I'm not one of these nimble traders that draw lines all over their charts and make references to the Fibonacci series, tramlines, head and shoulders etc. Like all professional gamblers, they're terrific until they get to the point where they sell their binoculars for one last punt. Good luck to them but I haven't got their nerve.

What I'm looking for - and what was available for 35 years in this country, until the Coalition took over in 2010 - is something for the humble saver. Something safe that will simply hold its value in spending terms, after inflation and taxation. In short, something that makes saving worthwhile, instead of a form of slow financial suicide. I don't see why the cautious, prudent saver has to choose between losing to the pickpocket of inflation, or alternatively to the croupiers in the marble-halled casino of stocks and bonds.

But we may have gone beyond the point of finding the right bank for our safe haven; we could be at the stage of backing the right country. There's a stealthy run on the banks going on now - not only in Cyprus, but capital flight from the Euro area; soon enough, I fear, there'll be a sort of run on countries.

In which case, I'd be looking for one that is politically stable, balances its budget, is strong enough to defend itself (and isn't near a psycho state like North Korea), doesn't feel obliged to join in competitive devaluation to maintain its exports, doesn't have porous borders or an over-generous welfare system, and has what other countries will still want once the international disaster is over.

Australia, with its industry-relevant natural resources? The USA, with its high arable land-to-population ratio?

Wish I knew. Perhaps I should back all the best horses in the race. But one thing seems clear to me: the UK is not one of them.

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.

Fighting the Government for savers and against inflation (2)

This series is a report on my attempts to get questions raised in Parliament about the Government's failure to protect small savers against inflation, taxes and theft by banks. Part 1 is here.

The latest news that should (ought to) turn up the gas under this issue is Matt Taibbi's article for next month's edition of Rollling Stone magazine (htp: Jesse) detailing another gigantic price-fixing swindle by banks who have previously been exposed in the Libor scandal. As Taibbi reports, not only has the door opened to reveal that virtually all markets are rigged (against us, the ordinary people), but - astoundingly - an American court has accepted defendants' argument that nobody expected the interest rate market not to be fixed.

All the more reason why you might look at the Move Your Money website.

Here are some of the newer email exchanges between myself, my MP and his researcher:

MP to me - March 3, 2013:

I am happy if you wish to work with my researcher on written parliamentary questions on this issue.

(N.B. note the "written")

Researcher to me - March 12, 2013:

[...] I understand you wish to ask ministers about maintaining the value of savings vis a vis inflation and purchasing power parity of the pound against other currencies – it would help if you could give me an indication of exactly what you would like to ask or if you could draft a question I could amend?

For instance, I’m not sure if you would like to simply ask a question along the lines of ‘ To ask the Chancellor of the exchequer what steps he has taken or plans to undertake to maintain the value of savings against increased inflation and devaluations of the pound’ -- or alternatively you might want to ask the Treasury if you have a particular scheme or strategy you would like them to adopt?

Don’t worry about phrasing, I can amend a question so that it will be accepted by the table office.

We can table a written parliamentary question to any department with ease and departmental oral questions in the house occur every few weeks, I am sure we could arrange for John to ask an oral question if his diary allows – Questions to the Prime Minister during PMQs on a Wednesday are more tricky – you can put in written Questions for oral response or try to catch the eye of the speaker if you are a member, but demand is, obviously, high and this would require John to both be in the chamber and willing to use what is an infrequent opportunity to gain significant publicity for a cause, on this issue. That’s not saying he would be unwilling to do so but I don’t know if he has an issue he does want to raise at PMQs and it might take a few months before that opportunity presents itself.

A written or oral question to the Treasury would be most feasible with a reasonable turnaround on a response.

 

Me to researcher - March 12, 2013:

[...] I have some ammo to use in framing questions, the idea being to get govt to accept that there is a moral case for protecting the value of savers' money and in fact there's a couple of passages in Hansard that strigly  [sic; intended "strongly"] indicate that acceptance in the year that NS&I Index-Linked Savings Certificates were first introduced.

It may well be true that the financial situation is serious, as your boss says - in fact I've been blogging about it since 2007 and warned of the banking crash both there and in the letters pages of the Spectator - but there is absolutely no justification for making the prudent pay the cost, or for forcing them to gamble with their money just in order to try to avoid losing it to inflation.

I wd very much like your help in framing Qs that will make the ministers, Chancellor and PM bloody well squirm.

 

Researcher to me - April 18, 2013

 

I’ve still got this on my list of things to do – You suggested you would be back in touch, but I do not seem to have a follow up email from you since the one below

Could you confirm if you have a question in mind, or if the more general one I suggested below would suffice? [The question was omitted from his email]

Me to researcher - April 21, 2013:

Sorry, been away a few days.

I don't see the general question you refer to, but since Cyprus I have two serious worries - which should apply to many of my ex-clients and people generally:

1. How to set aside money and preserve its spending value, without being eroded by inflation and taxes and without being forced to accept any kind of investment risk;

2. How to be sure that no portion of savings below the deposit insurance ceiling will not be seized in some form of bank bail-in or pseudo-tax, but be payable in the form and to the schedule expected by the saver.

I understand that Tam Dalyell was feared as a Parliamentary questioner because his questions were short, to the point and allowed no room for irrelevant waffle in reply. Do you think you could frame questions on that model?

Also, should they not be asked as PMQs rather than handed off to get some dusty reply from the Treasury? My experience of the latter pretty much destroyed my confidence in getting anything other than fluff and party political twaddle.

 

No reply received before my next email to him - April 27, 2013:

 

Further to my last email of 6 days ago, perhaps you could spare the time to look at the latest article by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone. It may give you some idea of why I now (as a former IFA of 23 years' experience in the financial industry) regard the whole bank and trading shebang as irredeemably systemically corrupt. Any government that wishes to retain its claim to authority needs to protect the life savings of the little people.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425

Do please let me know how you are getting on with framing appropriate questions as previously discussed.

Best wishes

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.