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Not fully. I also think the aristocracy moved away from itself, grabbing onto any ideological fad of the day). Maybe they were kept busy in the days of colonialism.

Europe is going to have to find a new direction after the state failures that I think is coming soon. One 'new' direction might simply to go back to the old aristocracy. 2 generations of liberal democracy have been one heck of a party, but now many euro nations are facing demographic collapse, epic debts to foreigners, paralyzing bureaucracy to name a few big issues.

Nice find, I was going to look for a 10 year graph on the Argentina peso but figured it would be too hard to find! That one looks painful like losing 66% of its value very rapidly even with the interventions. Until you raised the point, I didn't realize many hyperinflations happen basically in a day(the day the national state defaults on foreign creditors I guess). Little of my money is in the UK, I already had moved it out in mid-2007. Last month I sold out of my euros too which I had a lot sitting in them. But I think a number of Euro countries are going to default, and don't want to be there if Germany and France start bailing them out. I think those who want to survive this thing with most of their capital are going to have to keep moving the money as the situation warrants. Also was thinking it would be interesting for those in Iceland who had their investments outside of Iceland. When their currency lost half its value houses would be half the price effectively to foreign investor people.

Insane amount of good info you found, now we are seeing some details on the QE. At first I thought this was some new 500 billion pounds, but it appears most is the £400 billion toxic loan guaruntee I believe they had talked of earlier. Btw to put it in perspective the national debt of the UK before this started was £637 billion. And their cost cutting sounds like a joke to me. £28 billion in losses for the year.. £1 billion in cutbacks. Also somewhat exciting the massive sell off of assets.

Interesting post. Thinking of how much a currency could move in one day I looked up a graph of the Iceland Krona when the state couldn't make the payment. And imo this wasn't as bad as it could have been, as the IMF and some nations stepped in and backed up Iceland's loans. If they hadn't done that I wonder how far their currency would have fallen. In the case of a UK bankruptcy or a tidal wave of bankruptcies across Europe, the IMF likely wouldn't be able to bail out everyone, as it would need trillions.

Exactly they are going to keep going on the same path until it hits a wall. It reminds me reading of some of the failing banks, one was Washington Mutual a company with 45,000 employees.. on Washington Mutual's last day, the day they went down, the press release they sent out was about a high ranking they had received for diversity in the workplace. Right up til the end there were no layoffs, no reduction in bonuses, no stopping hiring high priced consultants, no reduction in air travels and 'meetings'. Total denial of reality right til the end. Then they filed for bankruptcy over a weekend. They were bought by another bank with a government backup in the deal I believe. And what I know for sure was when that new bank moved in they fired about 90% of the white colar workers of Washington Mutual which was 19,000 people. I think this is the path we'll see of western european liberal-democracies, they'll keep on keeping on, until they literally can't. Even Ireland who is getting credit for reducing public sector pay by 7% is really not doing much. That measure is said to save 2 billion euros a year. While Ireland is said to be facing a 22 billion euro deficit just this year.

An analogy I have is say you need some serious surgery, or you are going to have continually growing pain and very severe issues down the road. But you choose not to have surgery as it would be too painful and costly in the short term.

Continuing with my money transmission theory... if 'the masses' don't get money into their hands I think unemployment will just grind higher and higher continually. Look at cars, we have thousands of people who want to make cars, we have thousands of steel workers who want to make the steel for the cars. And we have millions of people who want a new car. But those potential customers dont' have enough money to buy a new car! Unions hammered down, jobs outsourced, jobs automated has meant there is many more workers t han jobs. Whcih means wages continually fall. Which means people have less money to buy things. It is a vicious cycle. There are different ways of tackling the problem. But we will know it is being tackled when demand for labour starts exceeding supply and compensation(through wages or contractor income or whatever) starts rising.

If I was dear leader I'd put anyone who publicly advocated for a wealth tax in a re-education work camp camp for 5 years. And that is if I was in a good mood.

I'd be pumping all this printed money right into the economy.. instead of the black hole of bank balance sheets. Instead of all this fancy bs, which looks of questionable value.. I'd just send the £20 billion directly to people. It works out to £333 per every Brit.. so a family of 4 would get ~£1300. Make it tax free and not means tested. Edit-reading through the capital spending looks not too bad, same with increasing job seeker help.

I think the problem is west European banks have lent insane amounts of money to eastern europeans for houses, commercial real estate and businesses. Driving eastern european home prices up to near the same level as western europe even though average wages are far lower. So it always seemed to me most of those loans would default once the increase in house prices stopped, let alone reversed. Now factor in the eastern european currencies are cratering and the loans mainly were made in foreign currency. A telegraph Ambrose article a few days ago said 60% of the loan in Poland are written in Swiss Francs. But the Polish currency has lost 40% of its value in a year. So already insanely unaffordable mortgages just grew by 40%. I'm assuming a wipeout of Ukraines sovereign debt will mean their currency craters even harder. Making it even more unlikely the loans west european banks made into the country will be paid back. Ironically I've been arguing east europe itself comes out of this just fine. At the end of the day east europeans are going to say sorry we cant pay the debt back and shrug their shoulders. It was foreigners who pumped 100's of billions into their economies. Then prices of everything in eastern europe will simply adjust to the new reality, and life will go on as normal. If people are only capable of paying 100 euros a month in rent, then that is what rents will adjust too. But many hundreds of billions in losses to west european banks could be the tipping point. My personal estimate has been the total losses will be 70-80% of the total.. so 1.7 trillion in loans made to east europe by west euro banks* 70% = 1100 billion in losses, if my prediction happens.

I like yahoo finance.

Having a constitution with unelected judges overuling parliament where they violate the constitution, is a good example of limiting democracy. Injin's theory seems to be the state collapses through bankruptcy and or inability to act.. And then life goes on. So in that case democracy would be limited simply because the state would play a much smaller role in daily life.

I for one don't think more democracy is the future. It was an interesting experiment of the 20th century in western europe mainly. But invariably the people realize they can vote themselves whatever they want. So of course they promise themselves lavish pensions, benefits, the state goes greatly into debt to finance this spending. But sooner or later the promises become larger than the state can deliver on, yet it still can't turn back. Imagine a political party trying to cut back benefits or promises. Instant death. There are other deep issues that I could write a whole book on(and in fairness there is plus sides as well).

Exactly, our monetary system requires constant growth just to avoid bankrupty. Look our economies are down like 3% and there is a mass wave of bankruptcies everywhere. It should be they contract by 3%, but not collapse. But because we have to pay back loans + interest, even though only the loan amount of money is created we constantly must be growing. Every western nation when faced with declining population because their people have decided to have less children is importing at least as many immigrants as the annual fall in their indigenous population. I believe it is because the price of land capital will collapse if they let supply get ahead of demand. Apartmnet buildings, houses, commercial real estate. If there was a constant and growing oversupply, prices would approach zero. But isn't that what we shoudl want as a society, very cheap housing prices? We need a different monetary system ro at least use ours in a different way.

Yes the government made the decision that the French are so good at developing and building nuclear power we might as well let them do it here too. So late last year EDF aquired British Energy which supplies 20% of UK electricity and I believe most of the nuclear. These are the proposals for new reactors in the UK from the world nuclear association. Some of it is replacing aging British reactors that are scheduled for closure. EdF / BE Sizewell, Suffolk EPR x 2 for 3200MW online 2017 EdF / BE Hinkley Point, Somerset EPR x 2 for 3200MW 2017 EdF Wylfa, Wales EPR for 1600 online 2018? EOn Oldbury EPR for 1600MW online 2020 RWE Npower Wylfa, Wales ? 3600 2020

I'm more optimistic than you about nuclear's ability to keep going for many hundreds of years.. But I fully agree on the population issue. Europe and North Asia seem to have the population growth under control, there are even fears of too fast a fall in some nations. But many developing nations have very high birth rates. The main focus of environmentalism imo should be on reducing the birth rate third world nations with high birth rates. For example the main cause of loss of habitat is a growing population of people expanding farming. There is modern basically non-invasive tubes tying procedure. I'd pay women in the third world thousands of dollars each to have that procedure done, which millions would actually want especially those with several children already that they are having trouble getting enough food for. Side benefit: it would also make the alleviation of poverty a lot easier in those nations, for both themselves and international aid organizations.

Brown's economic plan starting to work!?!

Gotta disagree with this report, I study nuclear energy a lot for fun and have a different view. What happens in resources is once mankind has found like 60 years of reserves people stop looking. So the reserves gradually get used up, and no new reserves are being found. So researchers look and see demand rising yet reserves not rising, and project when it will run out. But eventually reserves do start getting low, demand starts catching up with supply and the price rises on the resource. Then there is a flurry of activity looking for more. Right now there is 80 years of known recoverable uranium reserves at today's useage of uranium. If one day we actually can't find new cheap uranium to mine, then we switch to fast breeder reactors. Which a couple breeders have already been built around the world to prove the technology. They increase the utilization of uranium by 50 times. And they can use the waste uranium from all the regular reactors around the world. Thats one reason when I hear people including experts talking about the nuclear waste problem it frustrates me. As that waste is actually fuel for the future. I generally think about the history of fuel for humans like this; wood---> coal----> oil and nat gas--->regular nuclear reactors---->breeder reactors----->? Amazingly in the world today wood is still the major source of energy for hundreds of millions of people.

If car sales in Europe decline by 25%.. 25% of the workers aren't need in manufacturing. Actually throw in another 5% for the continual automation, so make it 30%. This is why stimulus needs to be on the demand side.

I did not know that.. but that is exactly the type of thing I'd expect us to be good at. And real value add for the very mature fiannce and law in the UK. Also one that having a lot of capital to insure lets us play at whereas an upstart nation is going to want to spend the capital on development.

Good way of describing it to get the point across!

It shows we can actually build things though. We can't build a nuclear reactor on land with all the bureaucracy and green bs but we can build one in a submarine, that can travel under the arctic ice.

Must say I'm pretty proud to have a British manufacturing company so successful atm. I know its not really on the free market, but the military equipment BAE sells is world class, in a very competitive industry.

China's engineer leaders are incredibly intelligent. Now is the time to go on a commodity buying spree.