The Co-operative: an announcement

Organisers of the Co-op's funeral service have asked for no Flowers. Donations may be made to a number of uncharitable funds instead.

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From telegraph.co.uk

From Elle magazine

North Korea Chic

Some iteration of the military trend stomps the runways every few seasons. This time, it's edgier, even dangerous, with sharp buckles and clasps and take-no-prisoners tailoring.

What does one say? Are they taking the p*ss?

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Selecting the shameless

Is it the case that only shameless spivs and crooks are able to withstand the intense, manipulative scrutiny of the internet age?

If so, is the internet weeding out principled people in favour of the shameless?

Maybe by our endless, web-enabled scrutiny of public life we are deselecting anyone with an ounce of moral awareness or a scintilla of self-knowledge. They are too wary of the ghastly, furtive dishonesty of it all.

The hide of a rhinoceros and the moral compass of a rattlesnake may not be what we want from our leaders, but perhaps the internet is ensuring we get exactly that. Or more than we had before at least.

The subtle power of a web-enabled selection process could have dangerous consequences if we don’t sharpen up in time for the dwindling number of meaningful elections we have left.

How many is that by the way? One? Two?

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. 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.

EU for the confused

As we lurch ponderously towards another General Election - John Ward thinks it might be called early by the Tories - doubtless there will be renewed efforts to paint UKIP and other Eurosceptics as haters of foreigners, European culture etc. This infographic may help clear up the confusion:

And if the term "Little Englander" (original meaning: anti-Imperialist) is misused yet again, please apply the following test of discrimination to the offender:

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Does economic recovery require inflation?

"Employing more folks who earn more produces inflation," says John Ward, and it's a brave man who takes him on... but... can I offer this and duck my head?

In the course of researching a piece last month about inflation, I came across this chart:



http://www.hist.umn.edu/~ruggles/hist5011/phelps-brown%20and%20hopkins.pdf

... and this information:

But the money system stabilised again by the late 17th century. The Bank of England's website has a page that lets you calculate cumulative inflation for any period from 1750 onwards. According to them, a basket of goods and services costing £1 in 1750 would have cost (the equivalent of) £1.80 in 1900 - an average annual inflation rate of 0.3%.

... from which I surmised:

That period covers the tremendous increase in productivity introduced by the Industrial Revolution and further late-nineteenth-century scientific and technological developments, so inflation is not needed for business and prosperity.

Indeed, it's possible that much of that 80% cumulative inflation over 150 years (1750 - 1900) could be attributed to war financing and profiteering e.g. during the conflicts with France.

So, do we need inflation at all?

More people making and selling more stuff and services may turn over more money, but then there's more for that money to buy, and more income and spending on which taxes can be levied.

So isn't deflation more about (a) wealth trickling - or rather gushing - up the social scale and then being socked away in investments rather than spent to stimulate domestic demand, and (b) the offshoring of production, whereby the poor of other countries do the work and the middlemen here (via entities that may be also sited offshore) taking much of the turnover as their profit, which leads us not back to doh but to (a)?

I tried to graph these putative connections in June last year as a reckless simultaneous opening of all the lock gates, thus:




Well, maybe I'm wrong.

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Stockmarkets: when will the third shoe drop?

Pic source: http://thebeltwayboys.blogspot.co.uk/2005/06/waiting-for-other-shoe-to-drop.html

The stockmarket (Dow, FTSE) has halved twice since the beginning of 2000, bottoming in 2003 and 2009. Earlier this year I wondered when the next drop would come ("Killing the Small Investor",  28 June).

Since then I have read that banks are being asked to consider the effects on them of a 50% drop in equities; and now John Hussman (htp: Zero Hedge) is saying the same thing:

"I continue to believe that it is plausible to expect the S&P 500 to lose 40-55% of its value over the completion of the present cycle, and suspect that whatever further gains the market enjoys from this point will be surrendered in the first few complacent weeks following the market’s peak."

I have long been of that view, and in fact having worked for 20 years in the financial services industry my mindset now is that I don't trust it as far as I can throw it. The politicians have allowed - encouraged - the banks to pillage the economy with debt bubbles that give the temporary impression of prosperity, and now we're maxed-out, so after fraud will come outright robbery by inflation, confiscation or whatever.

Which is why the Chinese are piling up gold and Chinese rich are diverting their wealth into portable assets like fine art. In the short term - when the panic is on - these assets, too, may decline in value, but sooner or later the wretched, crooked game of pneumatic prices will resume.

Smart, daring, quick-handed investors may make a killing in the disruption - just selling at peak and buying at trough would have quadrupled the value of your equity holding since 2000 - but when the game is on some of the players may find they're not so fast and smart after all. Remember Jesse Livermore.

This is why I continue to campaign for a safe, government-guaranteed store of value, such as National Savings Index-Linked Certificates. There should - must, if government is to have any moral authority - be an option for those who don't wish to gamble and so cannot fairly be expected to suffer loss. US investors still have TIPS available. Even then, we shall have to watch out for attempts by the thieving swine to misrepresent price inflation.

They say you shouldn't give a price forecast and a time frame at the same time, but I'm getting the feeling from what I'm reading that the third shoe will drop to the bedroom floor within the next year.

Maybe that's why the intelligence services are spying on us all so assiduously. If you can't control the problem, control the customer.

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Council blocks payday loan websites

From the Derbyshire Times we learn:

A decision to block payday loan websites from all of a council’s 7000 computers has been met with approval.

Anyone trying to access lending sites from any of Derbyshire County Councils computers will instead be re-directed to sources of safe, affordable loans such as Credit Unions, financial support services and welfare rights advice.

The move will affect all of the computers owned by the council across the county including those in libraries and those used by its employees.

Well they are council-owned computers so it's up to them what they allow and what they block even though they are blocking access to a legal activity. 

Even so, I've no problem with it per se. It's the mission creep I don't like. It never ends, slithering into every nook and cranny of daily life.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. 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.

The weirdness of unreason

Another World - M C Escher - from Wikipedia

Have you ever been in a meeting where certain people seem absolutely set on dredging up every irrational argument they can think of?

Yes?

And apart from the frustration, do you ever find irrational ideas a little weird? How do we explain them for example - how do we picture what is going on in the irrational head?

Instead of thinking in terms of rational and irrational ideas, suppose we think in terms of allegiance - a personal allegiance to some social situation, trend, norm, cause or whatever. That something could be allegiance to a person, social group, project, profession, institution, fashion or any one of countless other possibilities.

It may be an allegiance to Arsenal Football Club, holistic therapy, quantum theory, yoga or a political party. There is no difference – it is all allegiance.

So there are no rational or irrational structures inside our heads. Reasons are essentially tactical and strategic. Beliefs may feel like a nexus of rational ideas but are nothing of the kind. Our beliefs and ideas are merely our allegiances expressed in all their infinite variety.

We are not rational, but merely complex, subtle, resourceful and often covert in expressing our allegiances. Reason is how we raise, gauge and foster support for those allegiances, but that’s all. There is no structure to reason other than the structure of allegiance. That’s why your reason can be my unreason.

We have differing allegiances – that’s all.

So we don’t think rationally or irrationally, but merely offer our allegiance to different social norms, situations and events from the trivial to the essentials of daily life. The central influences over these allegiances are numerous, from language to our personal welfare and the welfare of family, friends, business interests and so on and so on.

However, when it comes to less central concerns, many of us do not seem to have strong allegiances and are willing to probe them. Yet this probing, this apparent vacillation can seem odd and obstructive to those with a strong allegiance to a particular narrative or agenda. In my view this explains human intransigence quite well where the notion of reason and unreason does not.

Maybe this is the value of those of us who mistakenly see ourselves as rational. We are not so much rational as able to see the allegiances others skate over in their pursuit of an agenda. By not having strong allegiances ourselves, we are able to weigh their various claims, especially where popular allegiances are neither as beneficial nor as harmless as commonly assumed.

So rational behaviour is not so much an ability to apply reason, whatever that might be, as a reluctance to offer one’s allegiance without weighing the consequences. Often not even then.

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Aqueduct Cottage

Aqueduct Cottage by Brian Cass

By the side of Cromford canal in Derbyshire is Aqueduct Cottage, a derelict canal keeper’s cottage occupied until the late fifties or early sixties.

The location is attractive, but there is no nearby road, no water, sewage services, electricity or gas supply. In other words, the cottage isn’t worthless because it is derelict, but derelict because by modern standards it is has become worthless.

In bygone times, the canal keeper who lived in Aqueduct Cottage would probably have used candles for lighting and logs from nearby woods for cooking and heating. He may also have bought supplies from passing boats and his water may have come from the nearby river. I don’t know about sewage disposal though – the canal?

Now the boats are gone and picturesque as this mode of life might be, it only appeals from the safe distance of modern comforts.

While out walking I’ve seen one or two derelict stone cottages in a similar condition and with similar problems. They became derelict because they are now worthless, not worthless because they are derelict.

It underlines how much the value of our homes depends on those essential services. Remove them and the value disappears as completely as it did for Aqueduct Cottage. Here it is in 1905 looking like a chocolate box idyll.

From Friends of Cromford Canal/Julie Simpson

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Upper class crime dwarfs underclass crime

In the last two posts, I hope I've shown that the incompetence and greed of the financial sector has recently cost more in money than all the crime in the UK put together, and thousands of innocent lives to boot. I don't suppose that the deaths were intentional, but there is such a thing as criminal negligence, and if bankers and traders don't understand what they're doing they shouldn't be doing it, any more than useless paediatric surgeons.

Why are there not mass trials for corporate manslaughter, and utterly crushing fines and compensation claims against the "too-big-to-fail" banks and their senior employees and directors? And why are they too big to fail? I don't see why we couldn't set up entirely new banks to do what the old ones did well, and not do the things they shouldn't have done. It's only the hope of future employment with these moral idiots that seems to stay the hand of the politicians.

So we now turn to the politicians, who directly or indirectly have given instruction and encouragement to the banks to simulate prosperity by inflating the money supply for decades. Let's compare murder rates, shall we?

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime counted 5,096 intentional homicides in the United Kingdom for the years 2004-2009. But as Peter Hitchens has often pointed out, the murder rate would have been much higher had it not been for great improvements in emergency medical treatment since the 1960s (when the death penalty was abolished), so let's boost this figure, say, tenfold, to 50,960.

Compare that with the toll of the Iraq invasion. Wikipedia gives a range of estimates, the lowest of which is 109,032 for the same period, i.e. 2004 - 2009 (the highest is over a million). Two-thirds of them are civilian, by the way.

Who bears the responsibility?

It's tempting to spread the blame - in Britain, the Cabinet and media boxwallahs like Alastair Campbell could be tarred with the same brush - but perhaps it helps narrow down the liability when you consider what might have happened had Prime Minister Blair told President Bush that the UK was not going to support military intervention. (Instead, as Peter McKay tells us today, "25 notes from then-president George W. Bush to Blair — and some 200 Cabinet- level discussions — have been withheld by No 10", so we are forced to draw our own inferences).

It's quite possible that absent Blair's buddyship, Bush might have stayed his hand. After all, look what happened when President Obama's finger had taken the trigger on Syria to first pressure but Prime Minister Cameron "got it" when his consultation of Parliament resulted in a "no". Gosh, how quickly the world's attention turned to other things, such as Miley Cyrus' arse.

So let's argue that Blair and Bush are jointly guilty of the low-estimate six-figure deaths. That makes 54,516 corpses each (assuming you don't accept that these politicians are jointly and severally guilty, which would double their butcher's bill).

Not intentional homicide? Whoever heard of a bloodless invasion of a major, modern-equipped Middle Eastern country? If B&B had been in the UK in the 1950s and killed a householder while burgling, they'd have swung. It's why criminals used to be very hard on any of their number who brought a shooter on a blag.

And that's just overt action. I suppose we'll never find out the whole truth about the covert operations that caused Arab nations, latterly Syria, to erupt in multivarious civil wars.

Blair - whose full name anagrammatizes satisfyingly as "born actor; lethally nannyish" - is a posh boy who went to a very posh school, where he learned how to escape the consequences of his actions by enlisting guardians. Bush is a millionaire former oilman and the son of a former US President. Leaving office and an economy heading for ruin, he handed what in rugby is known a "hospital pass" to the new guy (so which of them is the dumb one?)

So when reading or re-reading "Freakonomics", ponder who does more harm, the children of the poor or the scions of the Establishment.

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Max Keiser's "financial terrorists": some statistics

Giotto: "Massacre of the Innocents" (1305)

Ever since 2008, econo shock jock Max Keiser has famously - and repeatedly - called bankers "financial terrorists". It's hard to assess the exact cost in human life because the causal chain is complex, but be assured that white-collar thieving and financial manipulation is not victimless.

For example, a study published this summer in the British Medical Journal estimates that nearly 5,000 suicides are indirectly attributable to the economic downturn.

Also this year, a paper by Friedman Schady at the World Bank looked at infant mortality in sub-Saharan Africa, and concluded that in 2009 alone there were an additional 28,000 - 50,000 infant deaths - mostly girls, by the way - because of the "bankers' global financial crisis". That's only one region, in only one year.

The Germans have a phrase: "Wehe, wehe!" - "Woe, woe!" - a lament, but also a warning.

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Abort the ruling class!

One of the more controversial chapters in "Freakonomics" (2005) suggested that abortion among the lower classes helped to reduce crime by killing off potential offenders in the womb (though pro-lifers now argue the opposite case). The authors hastened to repudiate the implication that this should influence public policy, but people do now sometimes cite that vicious factoid as a ho-ho response to the problems of our economy; if we were to take them seriously, then like King Herod, they would be prepared to kill a whole town's infants in order to nail the future threat represented by a single child.

But when considering crime and social class, we run into difficulties of definition with respect to crime. If the underlying principle of the common law is "do no harm", then whether by incompetence or callous negligence, far greater crimes have been committed by financial manipulators than by common criminals - and the former are not only unpunished, but continue to be unbelievably well-rewarded for it. Indeed during the emergency bailouts, some bankers got bumper bonuses because they included the bailout money as part of the turnover on which their payouts were based.

Looking at conventional crime, a Home Office study issued in 2000 estimated the total economic cost to the UK at £59.9 billion p.a (about £1,000 per head of population).:



http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110218135832/rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs/hors217.pdf

 

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110218135832/rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs/hors217.pdf

Compare that with the IMF's 2009 estimate of the cost to the UK of the 2008 banking crisis: £1,227 billion; the equivalent of some £20,500 per man, woman and child in this country - in one year! Not to mention the £375 billion p.a. "quantitative easing" still ongoing.

We can also ask, how do we define cost? John Mortimer's fictional barrister Horace Rumpole points out that criminals make a good living for professionals like himself. GDP, employment and tax revenues (though not real net wealth) are increased by all this economic "activity". But how much prosperity and employment did the financial rescue create? Not that it is actually a rescue: I suspect that disaster has merely been deferred, and possibly exacerbated to boot.

I do not support abortion; but if I did, I should rather be looking to terminate potential bankers than potential burglars.

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Great God! this is an awful place

Do Captain Scott’s words chime with you? They certainly do with me. I can’t read anything about the Antarctic without being reminded of his ill-fated expedition to the South Pole. Beryl Bainbridge wrote a fine novel about it called The Birthday Boys. Worth reading if you come across a copy.

From Wikipedia

For this and other reasons, Antarctic sea ice extent is one of the parameters I keep an eye on in my fruitless desire to anticipate the global climate’s next move.

So this chart of Antarctic sea ice extent concerns me a little, but it’s an emotional concern all concerns must be. As you see, Antarctic sea ice has been spending quite a bit of time well above the 1981-2010 average.

Is it a herald of anything? Well for me there is something awesome and scary about the Antarctic, much of it deriving from Scott’s words and what we know of that tiny tent where he finally succumbed only eleven miles short of One Ton Depot and safety. Defeated by hunger, exhaustion and the implacable cold of the Antarctic.

My head says it doesn’t mean much in terms of climate change and it probably doesn’t, but my heart says keep an eye on it all the same.

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Agribusiness: the Skynet moment...

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Another question

How come a person with a bone problem can see an osteopath, but one with an emotional problem doesn't consult a psychopath?

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Pedestrian power

Video of a driverless Nissan Leaf being tested in the UK. The stated aim is to test it on public roads if permission is granted.

Note how the car reacts when a pedestrian walks into the road. Changes the balance of power between motorist and pedestrian doesn't it? Cyclists too presumably.

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Chekhov on teaching

How can we undertake to bring up the young? In old days people were simpler and thought less, and so settled problems boldly. But we think too much, we are eaten up by logic. 

The more developed a man is, the more he reflects and gives himself up to subtleties, the more undecided and scrupulous he becomes, and the more timidity he shows in taking action. How much courage and self-confidence it needs, when one comes to look into it closely, to undertake to teach, to judge, to write a thick book.

Anton Chekhov – Home (short story published in 1887)

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Lost words

There are things we can’t say concisely and with sufficient emphasis because too many words have been softened by political familiarity.

A good word for authoritarian politics is one we could do with as a matter of some urgency. We have communist, Marxist, Stalinist, Maoist, fascist and one or two others but we already know them to be inadequate. They fail to capture the acute political danger of centralising all decisions. They fail to get behind the fluffy velvet glove.

Communist and Marxist have been shorn of their terrors by cartloads of fellow travellers infesting western politics and academia. Somehow, the human horror of killing innocent people by the millions has left no seriously indelible mark on our language. How convenient that is for modern central planners - but surely not a healthy situation for the rest of us.

As for Stalinist and Maoist I think the same problem applies. Many people of a certain age once knew self-professed Maoists and comfortable middle class faux radicals with Soviet sympathies. They were those for whom Stalin and Mao were no more than over-enthusiastic in their ruthless application of industrial scale murder.

As for fascist, it has evolved into little more than a term of abuse, although very often it is all we have. So we drift towards a kind of soft fascism because even our language has betrayal woven into its threadbare and endlessly ameliorative fabric.

What else can one say – without better words?

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BAe and Scottish independence

Is the Government leaning on BAe to threaten Scots with unemployment if they secede?

If so, let's reverse the Highland Clearances. I'll change my name to C U Jimmy and buy an Arctic sleeping bag. Portsmouth will never get independence and I'm about up to here with the dreary white man's way, where they pump house prices to win elections and turn your dwelling into the financial equivalent of an open prison.

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Chekhov on smoking



40 (packs) a day: http://news.malaysia.msn.com/photogallery.aspx?cp-documentid=4283455&page=2

“By the way, Yevgeny Petrovitch, I should like to ask you to speak to Seryozha. To-day, and the day before yesterday, I have noticed that he is smoking. When I began to expostulate with him, he put his fingers in his ears as usual, and sang loudly to drown my voice."

Yevgeny Petrovitch Bykovsky, the prosecutor of the circuit court, who had just come back from a session and was taking off his gloves in his study, looked at the governess as she made her report, and laughed. "Seryozha smoking... " he said, shrugging his shoulders. "I can picture the little cherub with a cigarette in his mouth! Why, how old is he?"

"Seven. You think it is not important, but at his age smoking is a bad and pernicious habit, and bad habits ought to be eradicated in the beginning."

"Perfectly true. And where does he get the tobacco?"

"He takes it from the drawer in your table."

"Yes? In that case, send him to me." When the governess had gone out, Bykovsky sat down in an arm-chair before his writing-table, shut his eyes, and fell to thinking. He pictured his Seryozha with a huge cigar, a yard long, in the midst of clouds of tobacco smoke, and this caricature made him smile; at the same time, the grave, troubled face of the governess called up memories of the long past, half-forgotten time when smoking aroused in his teachers and parents a strange, not quite intelligible horror.

It really was horror. Children were mercilessly flogged and expelled from school, and their lives were made a misery on account of smoking, though not a single teacher or father knew exactly what was the harm or sinfulness of smoking. Even very intelligent people did not scruple to wage war on a vice which they did not understand.

Yevgeny Petrovitch remembered the head-master of the high school, a very cultured and good-natured old man, who was so appalled when he found a high-school boy with a cigarette in his mouth that he turned pale, immediately summoned an emergency committee of the teachers, and sentenced the sinner to expulsion.

This was probably a law of social life: the less an evil was understood, the more fiercely and coarsely it was attacked.

Anton Chekhov – Home (short story published in 1887)

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