ZOMBIE END GAME - The financial undead continue to drag us down.

The disjointed musings of the financial media support groups and the politicians desperation to patch up the emperor's new clothes again, serve notice that the final act has begun.

The banks have sucked the blood from their governments through a series of bailouts.
The governments have sucked away the lives of their peoples through ongoing and expanding programs of austerity.
They have stolen from multiple generations of the unborn through bond issuance and leveraging so called "stability funds".
Financial institutions are stealing from their depositors as they begin to panic at the glimmer of the bottom of the shiny trough.

The managed retreat has begun.
Treaties are hastily being re-written. Doubtless constitutions, bills of rights and human rights legislations will go a similar way.

All areas of the economy have been fatally wounded. And even the most optimistic commentators are now describing the future misery in terms of decades.

It's a zombie paradise.

ROLLING BACK THE LANGUAGE OF ECONOMICS - Part 3 : MONEY

Money or currency is one of the most misunderstood ideas.

It used to be that money had an intrinsic value. It contained a specific quantity of a rare earth metal like gold or silver. Even paper money carried a written promise such that the issuer could exchange that banknote for a prescribed amount of gold on demand. This was known as 'specie money'.

However, printed money now carries no such promise. Not since 1971 anyway. It is now known as a 'fiat currency'. That is to say, it has no intrinsic value and its worth can only be determined relativistically with a view to how much of it is in circulation and what demand there is for it.

All sovereign countries now use fiat money. It is printed and issued by 'central banks' like the US Federal reserve or the Bank Of England etc. Of course, these organisation sound very official and they also sound like they are owned by the governments of their host countries. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

They are private banks and they always have been.

The Bank of England was founded in 1694. Even though it was nationalised in 1946, it is still a privately owned company with Directors. This anomaly was formed in 1977 by creating a wholly owned subsidiary company called Bank of England Nominees Limited. This company was granted a special exemption by the Secretary of State for Trade such that it could trade without declaring who the Directors are and using the Official Secrets Act to protect their anonymity. This is wholly unique and a special case when considering the normal legal requirements of The Companies Act.

According to their website, the US Federal Reserve Bank is a government body. However, all of its shareholders (Directors) are private banks. None of its stock is owned by the US government.

These central banks have the ability to print money whenever they see fit. A private company creating money from thin air. They also provide money to their governments in order to make up their revenue shortfall or spending excesses. The government pays interest on these debts. This interests is guaranteed to compound and spiral with time.

The last time the USA balanced its books was in 1835.

A couple of quotes from the past that resonate profoundly today:

Paper money eventually returns to its true intrinsic value - ZERO ! (Voltaire 1694-1778).

If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered - (Thomas Jefferson 1743-1826)

ROLLING BACK THE LANGUAGE OF ECONOMICS - Part 2 : STIMULUS

Various Western governments have introduced stimulus plans. These measures have also been called 'quantitative easing' (QE) among other things but basically they amount to printing money.

The mirage created with QE is that the central banks created electronic money out of thin air and used that to buy their own government's bonds. These bonds are basically IOUs and in time the governments will have to repay those debts to the central banks with interest. When the payments are recovered the central banks will then electronically destroy the imaginary money.

This process of printing money causes a devaluation of the 'fiat currency' due to the laws of supply and demand. If you make more of it, each piece of it is worth less.

As the majority of all money 'exists' only in a digital form, it can also be argued that what is actually being printed is digital debt.

The problem with introducing a stimulus is that you have to maintain that stimulus for a significant period as global markets take time to react to the change in the economic system. By maintaining that stimulus, the system can become dependent on it. This happens when a sick person is treated with stimulus drugs. They can soon become addicted to the stimulus and side effects appear. The side effects can be harmful. Even more harmful than the original disease.

These unorthodox processes are hitherto untried and untested, and it is only because it is mathematicians offering these 'solutions' to governments and banks that any credibility at all can be given to the process.

WARNING !!! These are the same breed of mathematicians that sold the financial services industry the ideas of complex derivatives including 'securitization of mortgages' and 'credit default swaps'. Watch out for Global Banking Crisis II, coming to a town near you soon.

ROLLING BACK THE LANGUAGE OF ECONOMICS - Part 1 : INTEREST

This post will be the first in a series of posts that looks at how the use and perception of economic and political language have been changed over time.

INTEREST is a concept that we are all familiar with. Usually because we have to pay interest to banks, credit card companies, shops etc. Sometimes we receive interest on savings or other investments. The word interest comes from the notion that if you borrow for, say a house, your lender will charge you interest in order that you get to buy a house and the lender makes a profit. The lender also has an interest in your property. That is to say that he is interested because if you fail to complete the transaction at any point, that property may be sold. It may be sold for less than the outstanding value of the loan in which case the lender would make a loss. So it is no surprise that he is interested.

Compound interest means that interest is applied on an ongoing basis with respect to time. This causes problems for entities like governments where situations can occur such that the amount repaid in a given year is less than the interest due. In this case the interest will not only apply to the original debt, but it will also be applied to the interest too. Interest on interest.

Compound interest looks like this. If left unchecked, it runs away very quickly. This is due to the effect that compound interest has a mathematical function known as positive feedback.

It works in the same way as acoustic feedback. For instance if a microphone is placed too close to a speaker, the sound from the speaker goes back into the microphone, gets amplified and then comes out of the speaker a little louder. This new louder sound, goes back into the microphone and is amplified again and comes out of the speaker even louder. Effectively the amplifier adds compound interest to the sound each time. After a period if these repetitions, the noise becomes so chaotic and unbearable at which point somebody usually cuts the power to the system.

Another natural phenomenon that follows the same mathematical principle is sickness (i.e. diseases like cancers and viral infections).

As all financial services rely on the concept of interest to make profits, it is advisable to remember the analogies above.

Who's interested now?

It is interesting to note that the texts of the Christian, Jewish and Islamic faiths all expressly forbid the use of interest as the concept is seen as a levy on God's time. However, over time these ideas have been relaxed through a series of reinterpretations.

Nobody can be free of paying interest even if you save up for things before you buy them. Currently, due to the way interest has permeated through all aspects of the world economy via credit markets and commodities markets, about 45% of the price of all goods is used to service the interest on debt held in the supply chain.

Because of the invisible interest that has attached itself to the sales price of everything, most people are nett interest payers. In fact 85% of people are nett interest payers, about 5% of people are interest neutral and about 10% of people are nett interest receivers. In other words 10% of the people receive 90% of the interest that everyone else pays. Doesn't that sound like another more well known statistic. Yes, it is interest that is entirely responsible for the massively uneven distribution of wealth. How can you become a nett interest receiver. Well you just need to have a spare £500,000 hanging around that you don't need but you could invest.

Notwithstanding all of the above, the whole notion of interest is totally flawed. As an example, say that Jesus had deposited 1 penny into a bank account in the year 32AD with an account that would yield a typical long term interest rate of 5% per year. If he had returned in the year 2011 and gone to the bank to withdraw all of his money with interest, that amount would be

£8,582,678,794,222,570,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

That amount is difficult to imagine. However if the bank paid out in gold balls at today's gold value, it would amount to 44 trillion gold balls. Each gold ball would be the same weight as planet earth.

A great investment? Yes, but this financial model (INTEREST) cannot work in the long term.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT - The commodity conundrum

Data just released by the World Bank shows that 44 million more people in developing countries have been pushed into extreme poverty in the 8 months since June 2010. They say that food commodity prices have hit 'dangerous' levels.

Reasons why global food prices are heading out of control.

Droughts, storms and fires - These have impacted on rising food prices. However, these events happen every year and are not responsible for the current spikes in commodity prices.

Emerging markets - Rapidly developing central Asian countries are seeing phenomenal economic growth activity. Corporations are exploiting their rising disposable incomes and these countries are now sucking in a diversification of 'en vogue' agricultural products. These are being sourced on the world commodity exchanges and driving prices higher.

Bio fuels - Developed countries, particularly those who have signed up for multinational climate change mitigation agreements, are chasing every megawatt from every possible area. Vast tracts of land have been turned over to produce bio crops. This leaves a significant reduction in the available acreage required to produce sugar and cereals in these cash crop producing regions. Lack of supply pushes prices higher.

Commodity speculation - Investment bankers have switched their strategies in light of the financial crisis and the post crisis equity fear expeienced in dealing rooms around the world. Commodities and complex commodity derivatives are now being transacted with the fury once reserved for stocks, shares, options and futures. With all of these new middle men taking their cut, offloading prices have soared.

Globalisation - This has facilitated a tsunami of commodity exchange possibilities. These new 'panaceas' will realise themselves as speculative bubbles followed by spectacular and chaotic collapses.

Currency wars - Because of the financial crisis and the subsequent debt hangover and austerity programs, Governments around the world are doing their damnedest to reduce the value of their fiat currencies in order to inflate away their structural sovereign debts. This only facilitates a race to the bottom. The result of low currency values is higher import prices.

Crude oil price - For a whole raft of reasons previously discussed, crude oil prices will only be heading in one direction and that is not down. Many pesticides, animal feeds and crop fertilisers are derived from oil based products. Most commodities also attract vast fuel miles and transportation costs.


The Tunisian, Egyptian and future middle eastern, central Asian and African stories all have rising food prices as a catalysing process. In the short term a welcome regime change may come. However it is unlikely that regime changes will curtail the longer term future of escalating food prices.

SECOND DARK AGE - Reasons to be fearful Part 3

They're closing in at a phenomenal pace now.

Dogma fueled and ideologically regressive, the class and connections based elite ruling class are back in town and it's only taken 6 months or so to get to where we are now.

It is beginning to look like the last 20 years never happened.

All of those little victories culminating in a more understanding if maybe dumbed-down society now being slashed and burned through an 'oxymoron process' of stealth based shock and awe.

Smoke and mirrors. It hasn't taken long to remove the heat from the bankers and financial centres hangers-on to be forgiven or should that be forgotten.

The new demon is the old demon. Blaming previous administrations for ALL of the WORLDS ills. Spinning a web of confusion as the beast lurches from its slumber towards its sociopathic destiny, our social predestination. And all of this occurring while we sleepwalk into our futures of serfdom and systematic bondage.

We have crossed the rubicon without any knowledge of its identity or existence.

What will the resistance look like this time around? Will it even come?

More fearful than 1984, we look backward and see our futures writ large with capital Cs.

Like an intern in a national stargazey pie, we stare expresionless at death and decay in equal measure, caught at the margins of a Venn diagram, squeezed by the perpetual machine, into the void, into the vast expanse that is the 2nd dark age.

FOOD DEMAND = FOOD PRICES = FOOD RIOTS = CHAOS

Food prices and other commodity values have been rising considerably during the last few years and particularly since the 2008 global financial crisis.


There are several structural reasons for this which have been discussed in earlier blogs.

While in the West, we find these inflationary food prices annoying or worrying or stressful (depending on which social level you exist), it is becoming a far more desperate story for others around the world.

Here in the UK, an individuals food budget is not too significant, and we can always cut down on other things, shop around, find offers and bargains etc.

When food begins to take significant proportions of a family's budget, people begin to attach a political dimension to their concerns and this may result in protests, riots and even regime change.

Here is a list of 25 countries that like Egypt and Tunisia are finding that their food budget is getting out of control. The list shows the percentage of household income that is spent on food:

Venezuela 32.6 %
Lebanon 34.1 %
Latvia 34.3 %
Tunisia 36.0 %
Libya 37.2 %
Dominican Republic 38.3 %
Sri Lanka 39.6 %
China 39.8 %

Romania 45.4 %
Philippines 45.6 %
Kenya 45.8 %
Angola 46.1 %
Pakistan 47.6 %
Egypt 48.1 %
India 49.5 %
Bulgaria 49.5 %
Vietnam 50.7 %
Sudan 52.9 %
Algeria 53.0 %
Bangladesh 53.8%
Azerbaijan 60.2 %
Ukraine 61.0 %
Morocco 63.0 %
Nigeria 73.0 %

It's not just armies that march on their stomachs.

GLOBALISATION - Chickens coming home to roost - ( FROM CLUCK TO FUCK! )

Globalisation has had many critics over the years.

Arguments against the concept include inequality, environmental impact, sweatshops, cultural normalisation, dumbing down through uniformity etc....

However for the majority first world perspective, it has facilitated a perceived rise in standard of living, choice, cheap food, goods and services. All this has become possible through communication advances in interconnectivity across the globe. The whole ponzi scheme is clearly based on convincing people to buy loads of tat that nobody really needs and only really want on the basis of its easy availability, brand marketing brainwashing techniques, availability of cheap credit etc.....

During the 'good times', this interconnectivity offers a dumbed down feeling of well being; an increased happiness quotient and an illusion of being able to buy freedom.

This model is so new that it has never been tested during the bad times.

What could happen if things went bad in the Global Village ? :

Firstly the connectedness of world financial markets means that if an economic boom or bubble emerged, the whole connected world would feed this bubble. This bubble would become bigger than any bubble experienced in the post industrial revolution period.

This bubble could for instance be cheap credit.

The banks may push the envelope by lending to riskier borrowers. They might even lend large sums to people who would have no means to repay.

The bubble might only stretch so far due to finite limits.

A nervousness might set in.

Banks might feel twitchy about the amounts on the wrong side of their balance sheets.

As if by magic the debt has moved from personal loans to private company debt.

They might stop lending to each other.

Credit availability may stall.

Some banks might fail.

Governments might have to rescue banks using hundreds of billions of taxpayers monies. Government might be forced to nationalise banks. In other words Governments would be nationalising debt and privatising profit.

As if by magic the debt has been moved again. From private companies to the public purse.

This might be called sovereign debt.

Interest rates may have to be slashed.

This could cause cash flow problems further down the food chain.

Businesses, large and small, could fail because their creditors refuse to supply goods and services on existing credit length terms.

Unemployment could rise.

Government spending could rise due to increases in benefits, lower taxation revenues, bank bail-outs.

Banks could restrict mortgage lending.

House prices could fall.

Economic growth might fall.

There could be a recession.

Entire countries could get nervous. They might feel that other countries may default on their debts.

They might buy the debt in form of government bonds at higher interest rates.

Their debt to earnings ratios might rise.

Their bond yield spreads might rise.

They might have to print more money.

Their currency may have to be devalued if it has its own fiat currency.

Other countries may drive down the value of their own currencies in order to maintain an export trade advantage.

A currency war could cause uncertainty in equity markets.

Financiers might switch to gold, looking for a perceived safe haven.

A secondary gold market may emerge. There could be high street gold buying shops. There may even be TV ad campaigns asking people to send their jewellery in the post in exchange for cash.

Gold prices could rise five fold or ten fold or ......

A secondary commodities bubble could emerge.

Agricultural commodities could get caught up in this speculative market. As could fossil fuel commodities.

Food and energy prices could be driven higher.

Governments may feel pressurised to accept rescue monies from other countries. There may be strings attached.

Those strings might be an austerity program.

That program may be painful to everyone living in that country.

They may have to take pay cuts.

They may have to cut millions of jobs in the economy.

There could be civil unrest, demonstrations, protests and even riots.

The government's revenues might fall again due to even lower tax revenues.

Economic growth may fall again.

Other countries may begin to falter.

The contagion could spread like a fire.

Firstly it could just be a few kindling republics and small countries.

Then maybe some larger countries may be affected due to their trading reliance with that failed country.

Recessions could turn into depressions.

And then..................................Protectionism.... Hyperinflation.........Nationalism.........War

Sound familiar ?

GLOBALISATION ! Forget the old arguments. THINGS HAVE MOVED ON !

KILLING THE FUTURE - What future ?

Old moneyists and post war families planned their financial affairs both for themselves and the future generations of their families.

This model was similarly adopted by politicians. The thinking was long term.

The babyboomers reduced their depth of field and focussed their efforts on the next generation and only the next generation. Their rallying cry was ' We're doing it for the kids'.

Their offspring focussed on themselves and everyone was living in the moment - Punks, hippies, yuppies. Various shades of exactly the same philosophical colour.

The current generation is borrowing everything from the future in order to slake their insatiable appetite for useless shit today. This version of non-planning applies personally, locally, nationally and globally.

Where next? There is only one place beyond the future. The End !!