Britney's Piers
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Posts posted by Britney's Piers
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Don't worry, all that debt is denominated in sterling, and we own the printing press. It's only when you owe a foreign currency that you really have to worry. (The euro is effectively a foreign currency for the PIIGS - they cannot print more as required.)
And what's that light blue non-household, non-financial debt?
Who is "we"?
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The questions still remains...how can yields be so low when the issuing states are obviously heading for bankruptcy? What are markets waiting for exactly? Are they so habituated to their risk on/risk off paradigm that they cannot do anything else?
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Humans want to be free to ascend the ladder, but once at the top, wish to pull the ladder up so no one else may come up.
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UK public and private debt will be 10 trillion Gbp. by 2015. Austerity (what austerity?) is rearranging deckchairs.
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They are just too. real. for me.
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They are to be treated like greedy little sods, which is what they are, in the main.
People voted for Labour because they pushed living standards beyond sustainability. Then Labour reaped what they sowed and the Tories said they would "sort it all out" and people thought this would see them get the best living standard over the short term, so they voted for the Tories.
Now people are going back to Labour as they don't like living within their means.
And so the debtocracy continues until an external force makes us stop.
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it, good and hard." H. L. Mencken
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JPMorgan Chase announced surprise “significant mark-to-market losses” on credit derivatives in its chief investment office, an opaque unit whose aggressive trades have recently drawn controversy.
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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/828376bc-9ae4-11e1-94d7-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1uVOMTnQ6
MOD EDIT -- ONLY ONE SENTENCE FROM F T ARTICLES
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It's old private sector shuffle - they take the profits and you take the risks.
Sweet.
This is the paradox of nuclear energy. The plants are built near bodies of water, however this is also the highest risk place to build them because of flood risks, near faultlines along coastlines etc. If/when something does happen, the state will inevitably always be called upon to clean it up.
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Even if a corporation does well and it is in a booming industry.. the management might take all the money for themselves. And there is nothing you can do about it.
See Britain's best corporations, the banks, even backed 100% by the government.. they still wiped out their shareholders money, while giving themselves enormous, historic bonuses.
Then there is the small issue of lying about what is on their books..
This is a good point. When shareholders vote against management it is called "a rebellion" but how can the owners of a company rebel against the employees, surely that power dynamic is wrong.
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Must be priced in already surely, Sarko was never going to win it.
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Banks are supposed to be professionals in assessing and pricing credit risk (stop laughing at the back!)
Hairdressers, milk men, care workers etc are not.
Hammond seems to be arguing that banks are completely devoid of any skills to do their job of financial intermediation. Logically then he must be arguing for them to be stripped of their govt. licences and shut down for operating fraudulently.
In other news I dare say he blames Milly Dowler for allowing her phone to be hacked by Murdoch and Harold Shipman's victims for being injected with too much morphine.
#dissemblingidiotlookingforabankjobwhenkickedoutofgovt
I thought they did assess the risk of debtors but then for some reason bundled up the low risk and high risk together into one instrument therefore defeating the purpose.
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I don't understand the title. Having to do shopping puts me off shopping. I go to the shops when I need to buy stuff. What on earth has the weather got to do with that unless it dumps too much snow on me for it to be possible to get out?
That's because for you shopping is a means to an end, but for most of the population now it is an end in itself, spending money is a legitimate leisure past time. Shopping as a play activity is largely what our economy is based on, GDP relies on nice weather so people can go out to play.
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We Are Not Powerless: Resisting Financial Feudalism
It's comforting to think "I can't do anything to resist the Central State and its financial Plutocracy," but it's not true. There are many of acts of resistance you can pursue in your daily life; here are 12 perfectly legal ones.
That we are powerless is one of the key social control myths constantly promoted by the Status Quo. What better way to keep the serfs passive than to reinforce a belief in their powerlessness against the expansive Central State and its financial feudalism?
But we are not powerless. Our complicity gives the aristocracy its power. Remove our complicity and the aristocracy falls.
The pathway of dissent is to resist financial feudalism and its enforcer, the expansive Central State. Here are twelve paths of resistance any adult can legally pursue in the course of their daily lives:
1. Support the decentralized, non-market economy. The core ideology of consumerism and financialization is that non-market assets and experiences have no status or financial value. This includes social capital, meals with friends, projects done cooperatively with friends, home gardens and thousands of other decentralized activities that cannot be financialized into centralized market transactions. Identity and social status are established in the non-market economy by collaboration, sharing, conviviality and generosity. Decentralized generally means localized; farmers markets are examples of local market economies where the transactions are in cash (so banks can’t skim transactions fees) and the money stays in the local economy rather than flowing to some distant concentration of capital.
If you start valuing non-market assets and experiences as the most important markers of high status, you are resisting both financialization and consumerism.
Top-down centralized “solutions” imposed by the Central State are the problem, not the solution, as they further the concentration of wealth and power into unstable monocultures. Stop looking to overly complex “reforms” and centralized solutions to unsustainable systems and start exploring decentralized, localized solutions that bypass both the Central State and its financial aristocracy.
2. Stop participating in financialization. Financialization is the insidious imperative of the financial aristocracy that seeks to turn every interaction into a financial transaction that can be charged a fee and all assets into financialized instruments that can be sold for immensely profitable transaction fees.
As the finances of local governments implode under the weight of their protected fiefdoms, many are heeding the siren song of financialization as a temporary (and inevitably disastrous) “fix” to their structural insolvency. For example, the revenue stream from parking meters is financialized into an asset that is sold to a private corporation. When parking fees double, the residents of the city have no recourse via democracy or petition, as the meters in their city are now “owned” by a distant concentration of capital that can double late fees, charge outrageous transaction costs, etc., at will.
This is how financialization inevitably transitions into financial tyranny.
The erosion of America’s middle class financial security has several structural causes, but chief among them was the financialization of the housing market. This led to a bubble of credit and housing valuations and the widespread extraction of equity for consumption—the classic “windfall” that financialization always produces in its first toxic blush. Mortgage debt doubled from $5 trillion to $10 trillion in the bubble, and now America’s indentured homeowners “own” negative equity of $4 trillion. That is, the difference between the market value of the homes they ostensibly “own” and the mortgages they took on to buy the homes is negative $4 trillion.
3. Redefine self-interest to exclude debt-servitude and dependence on consumerism and the Central State. Unless you are long retired and have no other option, minimize reliance on the State. Reliance on the State weakens the correlation between sustained effort and gain, so the work ethic and entrepreneurism both atrophy as they no longer offer competitive advantages in a system where bread and circuses are guaranteed by the State.
4. Act on your awareness that the nature of prosperity and financial security is changing. Dependence on centralized concentrations of power (Wall Street and the Central State) is now an extremely risky wager that what is demonstrably unsustainable will magically become sustainable at some distant point in time via pixie dust or the intervention of aliens from Alpha Centuri. Security flows from resilience, self-reliance, decentralized, diversified sources of income and abundant social capital.
5. Stop supporting distant concentrations of capital that subvert democracy by using their gargantuan profits to buy the machinery of State governance and regulation. For example, stop watching broadcast programming owned by the six global media corporations that control the vast majority of the media/marketing complex.
Stop eroding your health and sending your money to corporate headquarters for distribution to the financial aristocracy—stop frequenting corporate fast-food restaurants and stop buying unhealthy packaged foods from corporate agribusiness.
Close your accounts with Wall Street investment firms and the five “too big to fail” banks that dominate the mortgage, credit and debt markets in the U.S. If you need such an account to transact your business, then maintain low balances so the banks cannot “sweep” your capital for their own use every day.
6. Stop supporting the debt-and-leverage based financial aristocracy. Liquidate all debt as soon as possible, take on no new debt except for short periods of time, explore localized or “crowd-sourced” private-capital loans that exclude the banks and limit the number of financial transactions that enrich the banks and Wall Street.
7. Transfer your assets out of Wall Street City of London and into local enterprises or assets that do not enrich and empower Wall Street.
8. Refuse to participate in consumerist status identifiers and the social defeat they create. Stop admiring and respecting those displaying status signifiers; start thinking of them as pathetic prisoners of a pathological mindset. Stop judging people as “lower value” based on their lack of status signifiers. Free your own mind from the toxic sociopathology of consumerism and social defeat. Stop watching commercial television and minimize your exposure to marketing and consumerist propaganda.
9. Vote in every election with an eye on rewarding honesty and truth and punishing empty promises. Unless the incumbent has renounced corporate contributions, unsustainable debt, financial tyranny and Central State encroachment of civil liberties, then vote against the incumbent, for they are just another lackey of the State-plutocracy partnership. Avoid voting for either the Demopublican or Republicrat branches of the plutocracy; vote for an independent or third party candidate.
Remember that resistance isn’t just about refusing to participate in pathological plutocracy; it’s about establishing a sustainable alternative to the unsustainable State-plutocracy partnership. When people say that voting for a third-party candidate is “wasting your vote,” reply that voting for either of the plutocrat parties is the real waste of a vote because their “leadership” is dooming the nation to destabilization and insolvency. As independents pick up more and more “wasted” votes, they shift from being “marginalized” to becoming powerful voices of honesty and transparency.
10. Stop supporting inflationary policies such as “money creation” by the Federal Reserve and Federal deficit borrowing. Act on your knowledge that inflation is theft and that the Federal Reserve is a private consortium of banks that is the enabler and protector of the parasitic financial aristocracy.
11. Become healthy, active and fit. Refuse to consume unhealthy junk and packaged food, refuse to squander much of your time in sedentary “consumption” of corporate entertainment and digital distraction, and devote your energy and time to mastery, new skills, developing social capital and friendships, projects you “own” and enterprises that benefit your true self-interest. Refuse to follow the marketing/media siren song into chronic ill-health, addiction and social defeat.
12. Embrace self-directed coherent plans and construct a resilient, diverse ecology of identity and meaning. Build a social ecology of positive, active, collaborative, non-pathological people of like minds and spirits. Be powerful via resistance, not powerless via complicity.
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From: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-we-are-not-powerless-resisting-financial-feudalism
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And the elephant in the room remains Immigration. Why, when we can't support our existing population or provide them with jobs and homes, do we keep our doors flung wide to the world?
Well, This is the question, isn't it.
There are countries in the world whose governments work in the interests of their nations, if something will bring harm to their people, they don't want any part. Likewise policy decisions will be made on the basis of giving them a competitive advantage. Countries in this group include China, Japan, Germany and Russia. Then there are governments whose aim seems to be to cannibalise its own population as much as possible, and decisions on international trade, immigration, foreign policy, social policy and finance seem to just bring more and more harm to their own peoples. This happens especially in Britain and USA.
The question is, who has so much influence over governments of USA and Uk to cause them to bring harm to their own people, but doesn't, historically or currently, have anywhere near the same sort of influence or lobbying power over say, the Chinese or German governments.
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I might amend that it's your right to have children, but only if you have sufficient means to provide for them.
This has never been the case in the whole of human history. The normal human way of reproducing was to have many children in the hope that at least 1 or 2 would survive to adulthood. The notion that all children are special darlings who will all be successful in life is a consequence of affluence. If it is true that a resource crisis is our future, humans in the west will just have to revert to the normal way of reproducing.
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And what's the point of millions sitting around in financial hardship because of fiscal austerity?
Perhaps you enjoy the spectacle of Greek parents giving their children into care because they can't afford to buy food for them!
Growth never started after the global depression of the 1930's until goverment stimulus around the world built war machines. The lesson of history is that stimulus is needed.
"Stimulus" is just a tax by another name, on the holders of currency. You are taking money out of their hands to be spent on, what, concrete paving the sides of little country streams (this happens in Stimulus Japan). There is no growth. The lesson of Japan tells us, stimulus doesn't work. In fact it has dragged the crisis on so long that the "lost generation" have failed to reproduce and Japan now have no next generation. It is toxic poison to a nation, but they will try it anyway.
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Is this veering towards the broken window? Isn't automation and its associated increase in productivity better for society as a whole?
What does it matter? I thought the free market was about consumer choice, if people want to be served by a fellow human instead of ordered around by some uppity software then why can't they, and if enough people want this as to make it a worthwhile venture for the supermarket then it should be supplied, no?
What is the goal of the economy exactly, to serve human demand, or to follow some bunch of technocratic economic laws?
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Japan did try stimulus and ZIRP, yet the author says we need stimulus?
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1) Dramatically shrinking economy, leading to
2) Soaring defaults, leading to
3) Massive bank losses, leading to
4) Severe contraction of lending, leading to
5) Further shrinking of economic activity, leading to
6) Collapsing tax receipts, leading to
7) Exponentially increasing budget deficit, leading to
8) Higher taxes, leading to
9) Further horrendous contraction of economic activity, leading to
10) Huge political pressure for easier credit and bank bailouts, leading to
11) Further dramatic expansion of the money supply, leading to
12) Runaway inflation and currency depreciation, leading to
13) Skyrocketing prices and long term interest rates, leading straight back to 1) in a vicious circle of biblical proportions
credit: CGNAO
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The UK is in a compound debt death spiral. Its debt trajectory a little bit behind Greece and Spain, a little bit ahead of Japan.
Things should start to deteriorate at a clip from here on. Energy costs are pernicious. The fabled upswing in private debt consumption non-existent. A great bulge in public sector redundancy is about to manifest itself in the unemployment stats. Our principal export markets are stuck permanently in reverse.
And the American economy, still the world's unchallenged debt-originator, is set run clean off a fiscal cliff on January 1st, 2013.
Only the printing press can save us, temporarily, and after that there won't be much worth saving at all.
Agreed, anyone with any foresight spent the last 4-5 years in preparation and protecting themselves.
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Fire up the printing presses.
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Are they opening up a call centre in India or something? Presumably these people were employed because people need to phone the gas company, so it's not as if the work has become redundant?
I needed to phone British gas last week. For 3 days in a row the message I got was "we are currently experiencing high volume, please only remain on the line if it's an emergency, otherwise call back tomorrow".
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French culture will cease to exist because it is inferior to Anglo Saxon culture. Who you vote for cannot change that, nothing can.
????
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Le Pen and Sarkozy are miles apart on most issues, particularly when it comes to economics .
In fact if you take out immigration some people might think the main diference between Le Pen's right wing NF and the Melenchons socialist LF is the initial in their name.
Le Pen is the only hope for France. The alternative is that the nation of France and French culture will cease to exist 100 years from now, and all this talk of who is slightly more pink will be purely academic since all matters economic will be determined by the Sharia.
Electricity Bills Up £200 To Pay For Nuclear Dream: Families Hit To Ensure Profits For Firms Who Build Reactors And Wind Farms
in House prices and the economy
Posted · Edited by Britney's Piers
Perhaps the pill was sweeter for past generations to swallow, not having their bills skimmed for share dividends and director bonuses whilst being told they must pick up the tab for investment also.