Month: April 2010

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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