Author: Bill Kruse

SIGsec for the Mensa International Special Interest Group for economics, trade and finance.
Posted on

Myners Gets The Bird

Here’s former financial services minister Paul Myners in the house recently, attacking the government of which he was a part;

“There is nothing progressive about a government that consistently spends more than it can raise in taxation…” he says and goes on to criticise Labour’s economic policies as “flawed economic thinking”. 

Um. Would consistently spending money created out of nothing either by quantitative easing or fractional reserve banking and using it to fund business endeavours, the kind large and small that at the moment are either never getting past the conceptual stage or being starved of funds into administration, that would be regarded then by the great Lord Myners as nothing progressive? I think that for a time at least it’s exactly what this country needs, an alternative money supply to the private banks, one readily available and quite prepared to lend cheaply to foster business creation and support until businesses are bringing in enough mony (and so taxation) for the stimulus to be withdrawn or reconsidered… bring it on, I say, and the sooner the better. Such a shame there’s no discussion of this in the House… 

http://www.politics.co.uk/news/legal-and-constitutional/myners-attacks-his-former-colleagues-$21379502.htm

BB

Posted on

Government Loans

I’m watching David ‘Dave’ Cameron live on TV at this moment, earnestly (and quite rightly) explaining how the interest we pay on loans to the government are overwhelming us. True enough, and the subject deserves an airing. However, I note he isn’t pointing out that much of the National Debt is to banks, banks who haven’t actually loaned money they already had to the government but instead have loaned money created out of thin air using their authority to do so granted to them by that same government. This doesn’t get a mention, where the National Debt actually comes from. The banks conjure money from the air under license from the government, loan it to the government at interest and we, the taxpayers, have to find real money out of our pockets to pay it back with. Nice work for the banks, you might think, and it is – but what about us the electorate – aren’t our politicians supposed to be working for our interests, and not the banks? Shouldn’t all debts created under this Alice In Wonderland system be voided in full? Where’s the discussion about why we, or any nation, should have such a thing as a national debt in the first place???

BB

Posted on

The Tide’s Coming In…

If Greece fails, or Portugal fails, or Spain fails… when they fail, I should say rather, I can’t see it making any difference what stamp of parliament we have in this country. Politicians of all parties, perhaps in order to magnify their authority and diminish their shortcomings, seem determined to deny the reality of their (and our) existence. We’re like tiiny creatures, wholly engaged in futile squabbling, in a rockpool at the edge of the sea. Approaching and increasingly visible, the tide’s coming in. Lib-Lab, Lib-Con, whatever; these minor divisions will soon count for nothing.

BB

Posted on

Stupormarkets

Sainsbury the supermarket are in the news boasting Huge Stonking Great Profits today, and their spokesman is stoutly proclaiming that even in these straightened times Sainsbury are creating jobs! Their workers are paying taxes! This is presented as if it were some kind of laudable effort where in reality it illustrates how badly Britain’s doing. Paying taxes Sainsbury as a whole may be but how much of it will be in Britain, going to our Chancellor to be redsitributed here and how much will be shuffled discreetly off to anonymous tax-havens? What good does this do Britain? If the supermarkets are doing well, they’re doing it by putting local companies out of business together with their advertising oulets, local accountants and vehicle servicers, etc. Huge, huge knock on effects all bad for the country. They act like giant wealth siphons on any area where they’re allowed to settle, sucking the wealth out of it and away to foreign parts, never to be seen by this country again. Consumers commute to work in other areas and return to their domicile to spend their earnings, but when they go to a local supermarket those earnings don’t go towards enriching the locality as they otherwise might. Supermarket prosperity is thus very bad news for the rest of us. Oddly, this aspect isn’t highlighted, or even mentioned, in the conventional media, all of which, we must remember, is corporate-owned – just like supermarkets – and is unlikely to be presenting a point of view sympathetic to the interests of the consumer. Instead, we read about the ready availability of cheap food. I don’t think this is cheap. I think we pay a terrible price as wealth earned and bought in by the residents of a community is promptly sucked out of it, not redistributed locally as it could be thus enriching communities. I can’t see any place in a community-oriented culture for supermarkets at all. Probably worth mentioning in this context that the Grand Poobah of Tesco and so all supermarkets by association is Sir Terry Leahy, who was plain old Terry Leahy till he was knighted by Tony Blair. When you understand the damage that supermarkets actually do, when you begin to grasp the deleterious effect they have on communities and see the praise they get from those elected to represent the interests of those communities you realise that neither politicians nor corporations are really on our side in anything at all.

BB

Posted on

Missiles To Go!

Cruise missiles now come in handy boxes. They’re big boxes, mind, shipping-container-sized in fact (probably because they actually are shipping containers), but anyone with the wonga can now get a takeaway cruise missile and cart it around on your ship or your train or your lorry – and no-one will know. Scary, huh? Here’s the skinny…

http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63P2XB20100426

Point that leaps to mind is given a cruise missile can take out an aircraft carrier without breaking a sweat and that parties on both sides of the Atlantic are pushing for new carriers to be built and pressed into service, it’s now economic nonsense, in military terms at least, to spend billions creating a lumbering behemoth that can be knocked permanently out of commission by a missile costing a teeny fraction of its cost. So there’s a budget cut both countries could make, there’s an austerity measure right there!

BB

Posted on

Goldman Sachs

the damage is done… if you make serious money and it’s in a way that most people would disapprove of, perhaps violently, and if it’s handled by someone on your behalf at any stage, you want to keep your head well below the parapet and also you want your brokers (or whoever) to be keeping their heads down too. You don’t want their names in headlines. I think this is the end for Goldman Sachs whatever the outcome of the SEC’s prosecution, whether it’s successful in the punitive sense or not.

BB

Posted on

Soldiers Blue

American soldiers are being dischraged as having personality disorders, this after several campaigns in some cases. The reason would seem to be it saves the military a fortune as it counts as a pre-existing condition and so soldiers retired this way don’t get benefits. Read more…

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25293.htm

Hmmm… you’d think the testing they undergo before they’re accepted into the military would reveal any psychological flaws, wouldn’t you? So this appears to be a heartless exercise in economics. Couldn’t happen here… could it?

BB

Posted on

Taxing The Banks…

The problem with the banks is not bonuses or their pricing, it’s that they and they alone are allowed to create money. This gives them a unique advantage over the rest of the population, seeing as we all need it and no-one else is allowed to create it (save, of course, our government, who choose not to supply the electorate with money where it’s needed, either at interest or for free, but instead pack people off to the banks where they’re encouraged to borrow it at interest).
This very much needs to change. Tax the banks, rail against the banks, and they simply won’t care. The only thing that will hurt them is to supply the population with an alternative and cheap supply of money. That’ll be the end of three hundred years of effective rule by the banking community. Are we hearing anything at all about any of this from our proposed leaders? Not a word. Irrelevant, all of them. Client politicians who will nicely provide the banks with client government in the same way when the Romans invaded the then Britons were provided with client kings. Punch and Judy politics? Not even that – just a puppet show.

Posted on

Taxing The Banks And My Arse

Taxing the banks, something both Cameron and Clegg are keen on, won’t work to impress the banks in any way because they’ll immediately pass any costs on to the public.

Also Prime Ministers, in case you were in any doubt, do not have the authority to order private companies to operate in a manner against the interests of their shareholders, despite assurances to the contrary from all the major parties. None of them can order the banks to lend to anyone the banks don’t want to. They could if they were in China, but they’re not. In China, the banks are owned by the government, so when the government commands, they obey. It’s known as a command economy. I suspect the leaders of our major political parties are hoping that few of the electorate will know or understand this. A vain hope, perhaps, in this – the information age.

BB

Posted on

Riding In Cars With Politicians

There’s actually no inflation when the money supply is increased if there’s a corresponding increase in goods and services, that’s with a fiat economy of course. I think some get confused between a gold-backed currency and a fiat one, where the value of the currency is determined by the wealth (goods and services) it represents. On that subject, it recently saddened me greatly to see a picture of a disused airfield absolutely crammed with perfectly serviceable cars, many with several years of useful life in them, waiting to be drained of fluids and so forth before being crushed. They represent wealth, our wealth, and they’re being crushed as part of a political exercise where we’re given our own money in order to buy foreign cars and wipe out our secondhand car trade in the near future and our new car trade in the longer term. Very sad so many people fell for this. Economic literacy is an essential for the next civilisation.

BB