UK Manufacturing fell 1% Feb vs. Jan - Jan revised down 0.3%

The deliberate policy of the UK to turn its back on the world and concentrate solely on the tyrannical and sclerotic EU is having all the well predicted consequence! Read The Independent report from here.

Authorities twig the truth! Its the Worst in Human History!

The Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, Charles Bean, is reported in Forbes as saying that the present financial crisis will be the worst in human history - that includes the South Sea Bubble, Dutch Tulip Bulbs, the Great Depression, the disastrous economic consequences of the Plague known as the Black Death, etc.etc. Even this blog has yet to go that far and was earlier a little concerned that it was overdoing the gloom.... Slump, however, now seems mild compared with the view of the Bank of England itself!!

Treasures from the threads - Number Twenty-two

This comment from the aptly named "UK Debt Slave" at 11:08 am (I normally do not include anonymous comments but make an exception for this interesting posting) was to a rather strangely written opinion piece by Jeff Randall in the Telegraph this morning, linked here: The classic response to any and all ills in British society Let's have an enquiry! Let's spend million writing a report that will tell us NOTHING we don't already know. TO HELL WITH ENQUIRIES! Let's straighten a few things out for you Jeff. I'll save the public purse millions right now by explaining what has happened. A VERY BIG CRIME HAS BEEN COMMITTED. That's what's happened. We are supposed to believe this debacle is all just a terrible accident. All the talking heads are saying how foolish everyone has been. "Oh dear. What a mess. Let's put the kettle on." The FACTS are very different. 1. On both sides of the Atlantic, the central banking system, the Fed and the BoE have presided over the biggest credit bubble in history. by keeping base rates way too low. They knew damn well what the consequences would be. 2. The regulatory bodies charged with overseeing lending practices and regulating 'inflation' have all FAILED miserably. 3. Both the Fed and the BoE used a wholly bogus yardstick to measure inflation. They based their inflation statistics on an easily manipulated 'basket of consumer goods' called the CPI, NOT MONEY SUPPLY. Inflation is ALWAYS a function of money supply. The money supply in the UK has consistently grown by between 11-14% YOY for several years. This growth in money supply is what has funded the asset bubble in property and stocks and shares. The real rate of inflation in the UK has consistently been 8-9%. 4. House prices have tripled, not because they are intrinsicly more valueable than they were 10 years ago but because of excess liquidity and insane lending practices, none of which were held in check. 5. The media has contributed to this fiasco, poured petrol on the fire, by deluging the bovine masses with 'property porn' TV shows, encouraging people to borrow beyond their means to participate in the one way ticket of infinite house price inflation. 6. Banks and mortgage lenders have thrown caution to the wind and thrown every rule of responsible banking out of the window, lending insane income multiples or worse, lending to people who don't even have a job! To make matters worse, they immediately sold these worthless mortgages immediately to get them off their books. They have infested stock markets and pension schemes all around the world with potentially devastating consequences. Banks have ignored every basic tenet of responsibility from capital asset ratios to common sense...GONE 7. The people charged with overseeing the regulation of banking, the FSA, were obvioulsy on holiday for 10 BLOODY YEARS. 8. The people charged with overseeing inflation, the MPC, were using a Mickey Mouse method to measure inflation. It was complete nonsense to measure inflation based on just a basket of consumer goods. Nobody it seems realised the obvious. WHY? 9. The government first under the satanist Bliar and now under Stalin Brown has consistently encouraged this myth with their Orwellian DEBT IS GOOD mantra. They have consistently peddled the myth that DEBT IS WEALTH. This is O-level economics, yet the combined efforts of the BoE, MPC, FSA, Treasury and government didn't see what was coming........OR DID THEY? You see, THIS DEBACLE CANNOT HAVE HAPPENED THROUGH IGNORANCE OR NAIVETY! It had to be contrived at the higest levels. This economic collapse was planned and deliberately orchestrated well in advance. The people behind this disaster, and they are at the very highest levels of the international banking system, the political elite and freemasonry, have DELIBERATELY planned and conspired to create the biggest economic catastrophe in human history. This is NO ACCIDENT. It WAS PLANNED. It is a repeat of the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression, which was also a conspiracy, headed by Paul Wahburg and the Rothschild banking dynasty. This is the NEW WORLD ORDER folks. The asset stripping of the people has begun. Million will lose their homes, their businesses, their savings and pensions. We are to be reduced to penury. Their objective is the biggest seizure of private property in history. Millions are going to have their homes seized, their pensions and savings destroyed, their gold and silver bullion and coins confiscated. They are going to asset strip the people as surety against our humungus national debt. We are to be reduced to slaves. The time for worthless enquiries and writing reports is over. It will require revolutionary acts to bring these people to justice and return freedom and liberty to the people. There's very little time left. WAKE UP PEOPLE It all could be cock-up rather than conspiracy, I suppose, but can the West's political leaders really be that stupid, unhappily perhaps so - I doubt we will ever know!

John Lewis shows the Slump

Even our redundant and troughing Members of Parliament spending their apparently never-ending tax-payer funded allowances at John Lewis cannot now boost that stores sales sufficiently to disguise the reality of the SLUMP. Notably the Government supporting Guardian uses that very term "SLUMP" when reporting the stores 7.6% drop in weekly sales in the week to 18th October, read here. The reality cannot be much longer hidden, Alistair Darling pretending we are entering a recession (the credit crunch is 14 months on) by hanging his hat on the technical economic ' two calendar quarters of zero or negative growth' should be made to own up to the reality as defined in Collins for business activity:- "to decline suddenly; collapse" or in economics: "another name for depression" How can they not only be allowed by the media to escape blameless for years of economic mismanagement, but now be allowed to spin away as to the reality of the desperate plight they have put us in? I put the BBC at the head of the long, long list of fellow-travellers and culprits!

Inquiry into Britain's Finances

Jeff Randall writing in the Daily Telegraph calls for a full inquiry into the state of Britain's finances. Were such to be held it would be amazing if charges of criminal negligence at the very least were not to follow. The article may be read in full from here, this being a brief quote concentrating on the Conservative's complete incompetence in diverting attention from the looming disaster:

What with the Bank of England forecasting a prolonged downturn, Mr Brown at last acknowledging recession, the imposition of a three-day week at Nissan’s factory in Sunderland and the pound suffering its sharpest fall since the aftermath of Black Wednesday in 1992, it takes a special kind fool to oust Mr Brown’s shortcomings from the headlines.

Worse still, Mr Osborne has allowed Labour the luxury of moving on from its own “dodgy donations” mess, which culminated in November last year with the Prime Minister admitting that £600,000 had been illegally accepted and promising that it would be handed back. In short, Mr Osborne has facilitated government efforts to bury bad news on an industrial scale.

And for what? Fifty grand. It’s so cheap. Meantime, in the real world, 2,500 JCB workers in Britain have accepted a fifty pound a week wage cut in a short time working package, Asian stock markets tumble again overnight, Greenspan admits to error and Renaults third quarter revenue falls 2.2 per cent.