Cameron's hypocrisy on World hunger as economy halts

Quite clearly Britain's Prime Minister sees world hunger as a further "fantastic" opportunity for promoting himself, in fact it must now be obvious to the world at large that he cares for nothing else. Note this comment from the paper that supports his obnoxious political party the most amongst all UK media - the Daily Telegraph, on 26th July, here:

The former England footballer (David Beckham)met the Prime Minister at No 10 as Mr Cameron said world leaders would meet on August 12 – the last day of the Olympics – to thrash out plans designed to help starving people across the globe.
 Mr Cameron said: "Britain has a "fantastic" role to play in this." 

The blog editor's own emphasis was added to the extraordinary use of the word "fantastic" to stress its more than strange context!

Over and beyond the well-known self-obsession and over-powering conceit of Britain's Prime Minister, such a meeting takes with an even more macabre element that being all the newer financial concerns that have arisen for Britain during the course of the Olympic Games. The events by which the nation's leader has become clearly further dazzled and distracted from reality, so he possibly has yet to notice.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, close friend and political fixer for the similar slime-ball who lives next door has now quite obviouqsly entirely lossed control of the economy. One of the few backbenchers in his party with a grasp for economics, John Redwood MP, pointed out on his own blog the shortfall in growth expectations revealed even by the BoE, without detailing the obvious consequences.

Among such results will of course be hunger in many of Britain's cities. Warning signs have already been published in The Guardian in April and June, of this year, both of course completely ignored by the Bullingdon Bullies in Downing Street and almost all other members of the Coalition Government elsewhere.

It is perhaps fortunate that our PM sees hunger as such a fantastic thing, it appears he and his next door neighbour are busy creating the ideal circumstances for much more of it, right in his own backyard.

Danger of Capital Flight from Eastern Europe

EurActiv has a startling report this evening which partly explains some of the recent EU hysteria over Hungary, linked here. The following briuef quote provides an idea of the seriousness of the problem which appears to have been discussed yesterday in Vienna:


Up to 12 of the 16 key western banks in Eastern Europe, under pressure from regulators to recapitalise, have resorted to shrinking outside their home markets to beef up capital levels, the EurActiv network recently reported.
Many of the foreign banks that dominate the region – including UniCredit of Italy, KBC of Belgium, Commerzbank of Germany and Raiffeisen of Austria – have suffered as a result of the eurozone debt crisis. Several are reportedly limiting credit availability for Eastern Europe in an effort to recapitalise their home bases.
After the downgrading of Austria's AAA rating by Standard & Poor's - in part due to its banks' exposure abroad - Berglöf said banks could be posed to more swiftly reduce their exposure in Central and Eastern Europe.

Lucas Papademos was mid-wife/nursemaid to the € in Greece

One point upon which almost every pundit, expert and commentator on the disaster that is the Greek experience within the euro never seems to disagree is the proposition that Greece should never have joined the common currency in the first place.

Yet now the head of the Greek Central Bank throughout that process and big wheel in the ECB thereafter, when the various mis-reporting on Greece's adherence to the membership terms was underway, Lucas Papademos, has now been chosen as the unelected and elite-imposed, new "interim?" Greek leader to restore the hugely complex consequent disaster that is Greece today, back to normality. I have chosen the opening of the article from M &C linked here, to illustrate the ridiculousness of this situation as follows:


Athens - The man who supervised Greece's entry to the eurozone will be the new prime minister, as the country's future in the common currency zone hangs in the balance.
Lucas Demetrios Papademos, 64, has never held political office. He was Greece's central banker for years and also served several years as vice president of the European Central Bank (ECB).
The new interim coalition government will be sworn in at 2 pm (1200 GMT) Friday, according to a statement from the president's office.
The trained electrical engineer and economist is the embodiment of an expert, whose sober-mindedness and expertise could be key to securing the trust of international creditors in the new unity government.

All involved in the Euro project should now have the decency to step aside and absent themselves from further involvement in politics, economics or administration for all time! But they will not, of course, for they have grown so wealthy and so powerful theyt can no longer contemplate leading ordinary and truthful lives. This problem is covered in an item on "interventionists" linked here, from which I quote:

The choices presented by most analysts are always assuming that the giant leviathan the State has become must be preserved at all cost, if not enlarged even more. The fact that governments suddenly find it difficult to obtain financing for their vast debts is almost held to be an affront: how dare the markets refuse to bid for the debt paper of States? The debate ultimately always revolves around the question: how can the status quo be preserved? What can be done to preserve the  privileges and exalted positions of millions of politicians, bureaucrats and the intellectual elites in their employ that are the main purveyors of statist propaganda? How can we keep all those precious, irreplaceable people feeding at the trough in peace? 

The answer to the above question is obvious, we cannot either keep or support them. The most powerful and therefore the guiltiest, know that full well - that is why in Greece and Italy they are presently embedding themselves at the top of so-called 'technocratic governments'!

In some countries of the West, such as Britain, they have been running things for years, hence the plight of our economy, achieved without even the excuse of belonging to the euro.  

Two postings from the last 2 days in May 2010 - Greek Default & Economic Governance

This crisis is what the EU has always wanted and driven towards. These two warnings from this blog are from May 2010:

Monday, May 31, 2010

Economic Governance was always the EU objective!

There is a rather startling article in the Market Watch section of the Wall Street Journal this morning. It is written by David Marsh, linked here, titled "Germans to the front in Europe"and includes this assertion: The irrefutable message being relayed at home and abroad is that Germany is seeking gradually to take control of the European economy -- in a last-ditch response to what Berlin sees as other countries' widespread failure to put their house in order. Regular readers of this blog and its forerunner cannot help but be aware that non-democratic economic governance and its consequent tyranny of corporatist totalitarianism (once called national socialism now mutated to become an intra-national version of economic fascism) has been the objective for years as the progress towards this end has been clearly recorded and commented upon on an almost daily basis right here over many years. Given these blogs archives the following facts can thus not now be convincingly disputed: The common currency had to fail without fiscal union and social harmonisation. Greece never met the currency criteria and its present crisis was not only foreseeable but therefore became a desired objective. The emergency measures designed to save Greece were never going to succeed and were thus implemented to destroy the Treaties and therefore the rule of law within the EU. The silence of all governments, both within the Eurogroup and those outside the Eurogroup but within the EU since 10th May speaks for itself. If I, as a non-economist and merely interested commentator, have been able to chronicle and foretell these events down the years, how come the Wall Street Journal columnist and author of the linked article remains so blind?

Labels: Euro collapse

Sunday, May 30, 2010

"Greece must exit Euro and Default"

The following is an extract from this morning's Sunday Times, linked here.
The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), a London economics consultancy that is advising the Athens government, said Greece would be unable to escape its debt trap unless it devalued its currency to boost exports.

The only way for this to happen is for Greece to leave the euro. Until now, Greek politicians have played down the prospect of abandoning the euro, which some observers fear could set in motion the break-up of the single currency.

Speaking from Athens yesterday, Doug McWilliams, chief executive of CEBR, said: “The only option for Greece is both to exit the euro and to default.”

This blog has been stating this obvious fact as it appears in this posting's headline for some considerable time, in fact ever since the so-called Greek crisis first hit the headlines! Other common sense on the present terrible situation is in other postings below this.

Labels: Euro collapse

Reports are now circulating in the US that the IMF will advance no more funds for another Bail Out - How much UK Taxpayer's Money have they wasted so far to no purpose?

Multi- EU Summits to boost world stock markets!

The EU has always been run along the lines of playground infantilism, the quip in this posting's headline, apparently comes from a close aid to EU Council President Von Rompuy, it speaks volumes.

I can hardly credit it as true, but it is reported by no less a source than the German State broadcaster Deutsche Welle, linked here. The link is also useful as it provides the latest update of the present state of negotiations from the heart of the crisis in Germany, from whence the final shape of the way ahead must eventually be forged.

Sarkozy in Frankfurt meeting Merkel, Lagarde & Trichet

The surprise meeting comes as progress towards the euro, possibly even the EU's disintegration gathers pace. Reuters report is here. More from the WSJ here.

Rumours, earlier in the day, questioned whether the second Greek bailout might even be officially abandoned, confirming what many have long suspected, particulalry this blog, that the deal would never work, since its first announcement on 21st July, at what became a long and agonising summer of pure pantomime!!!

Perhaps the protesters on the streets of Athens today are finally being noticed in the EU's corrupt and thoroughly rotten corridors of power!

Mervyn King BoE Governor names it a solvency crisis!

Mervyn King, urged surplus countries, such as Germany, to boost demand. Read Reuters from here.

A word to British voters from Luikkerlog

A post which concludes with the following, may be read from here:

Our national debt isn’t meant to be escaped from. However, it needs to managed so that it can be used to steal from us without us getting upset – and that means keeping the rates low. Our government doesn’t want to provoke us to the point where we turn on them, and throw them into a jail cell for the duration of their days. They might try to provocateur some social restlessness so that they can bring in a full-on police state in response, but if we are sensible we will avoid this. If we use the legitimate avenues yet still open to us – i.e. not voting in any election ever again for the LibLabCon – then we will achieve a situation whereby we can create a constitutional future in which corruption cannot thrive and where indeed, David Cameron will be rotting in a prison.

Treasures from the threads - Number sixty-six - The EU's end!

The following selection, has been made from a comment thread to Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's column, in this morning's Daily Telegraph, which adequately summarises the main failures that have brought the EU down, linked here:

andafterpeakoilcomes

Today 12:02 AM

Ambrose - I think it was in early 2008 you wrote a piece which featured in a Saturday edition "will europe's industry ever recover ?".  I cut it out and kept it for a couple of years.  (It was exactly what I though of the UK's industrial base post 20 years of slash and burn by 1994.  It had happened here, it could happen there.)

I think we are seeing the answer quite clearly.  What we can't see it what is really frightening.  This will only be sorted with currency exchange barriers, duty tariffs and rationing.  If the "rich" have to have it as bad as the "poor" then it maybe, just maybe we will not have mass civil unrest. 

We cannot afford our lifestyle and benefits and we certainly don't earn it.  The debt collector is coming.

Russian President Medvedev to visit Greece.

The surprising announcement, quoted in this posting's headline above, is attributed to Greece Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos in a report linked from here.

China has already been shopping for influence in Greece as the financial strains across the ill-managed and unsustainable EU become unbearable for the West, read a CNNreport from last June, linked here. A quote from that report states:

China is hunting for bargains in some unlikely corners of the world. Earlier this week, it opened its checkbook to make 14 commercial investments inside Greece, which is struggling to avoid defaulting on its mounting debt.

China's vice premier Zhang Dejiang signed off on each contract, securing deals in major industries such as telecommunications, real estate and shipping during his four-day visit to Greece, which began on Monday.

These overtures are continuing, as may be read from this report from Reuters earlier this month which reported Chineses willingness to purchase Greek debt when is once again issued!

The truly lamentable leaders of the former EU nation states have forgotten their responsibilities as national leaders. First they ignored the growing signs, plain to see, over many years that the Euro project was a fragile pack of cards - now even more seriously, they are ignoring the geopoltical implications of their long-running financial imprudence.

In Britain's case, our Prime Minister, David Cameron, acts as if by being outside of the euro currency he has some kind of magic immunity from the consequential maelstrom from the decades of EU economic incompetence, which will soon be swiping the entire world sideways!

Putting faith in the promises of Merkel and Sarkozy is exactly what the world has done for the past eighteen months - nothing has come of it and nothing is what will arrive with their latest deadline of 3rd November! Remember this  from 4th February of this year:

Protesters set fire to Defence Ministry in Rome

One report , which states the roof of the building is on fire, following "Occupy Wall Street" type protests in the Italian capital is from CBS News, linked here.

Another report, calling the protesters "indignants",  is here.

The G20, meeting in Paris seems to  appear to be unaware of what their inaction is causing!

Moves afoot to delay 17th October EU Summit

Yet more indications that the EU is in complete disarray comes with various reports that next week's EU Council summit is to be postponed, ie Reuters from here.

Update - On posting Von Rompuy tweeted that the meeting was put back to 2"rd Ocyober, still eight days before the French and Germans have to announce what the hell it is that they now propose to do!

Why the Dexia Bank failed!

A tale from my childhood, offers the best explanation for the failure of the French/Belgian bank, Dexia, (already the recipient of €6.36 Billion in 2008,) just announced. It also offers a salutary lesson for the even worse events almost certain to now follow.

I was particularly lucky as a child, for I had a Godmother, who every Birthday and Christmas would include in her greetings card to me, a cheque for £2-2s-6d. The half-a-crown was for me to buy myself a gift, while the £2-0-0 was for deposit to my Post Office Savings Account. Around the time I was 12 years old, I queried the low rate of interest I was being paid, and began agitating for the right to move the money to a deposit account paying higher rates of interest. I was dissuaded by being lectured on the "well-known fact" that higher rates of interest could only be obtained by accepting a loss of security, the British Government, as ultimate guarantor, (not then having descended to the level of lies and deceit with which we are all too familiar today,) was seen as solid, the difference in interest paid being likened to an insurance premium against default!

Dexia Bank's liabilities, will now be completely  underwritten by the taxpayers of France, Belgium and Luxembourg apparently to protect those depositers who chose higher rates of return than normal, disregarding the obvious fact that higher returns ALWAYS indicate greater risks! AND that they have enjoyed the benefits of such higher returns in the past!

To offer depositers these higher rates of interest, Dexia, we are told, has extensive investments in Greece, and also lent long and borrowed short. It was driven by greed. Those depositing the funds under there control with that bank, therefore negligently opted for higher returns at the expense of security and should therefore pay the price!

Many of the depositers are apparently small local authorities with elected officials. Is it not, therefore, now the case that taxpayers are being asked to pay for the mistakes of people who rightly deserve to be voted out of office?

As sovereign nation's themselves now also stand on the edge of ruin, be aware that elected national politicians are preparing similar expensive and ruinous blame avoidance, to protect themselves from the consequences of their incompetent actions!

The appointed Mervyn King, Bank of England Governor, who decided to push £75 Billion into the UK economy last week, is engaged in the same task, to protect his own position, itself made possible by the very politicians, similarly desperate to maintain their own positions even as evidence of their startling dishonour and incompetence, becomes ever clearer.

Update 0935 BST: Douglas Carswell gives a timely reminder of how currency debasers were dealt with in the past, here.

How €2 Trillion became €200 Billion in just over a week!

Lets have a look at these amounts from the above headline in actual figures:

€2,000,000,000,000 has become €200,000,000,000

Difference €1,800,000,000,000

All the talk, a short while ago, was of leveraging the EFSF to create an apparent €2 trillion euros, a number plucked from thin air, presumably, as it sounded enough to fix all the combined problems of all the countries in the Euro Group.

This weekend, as Sarkozy first met IMF head Lagarde in Paris, and now moves on to Merkel, in Berlin, this evening, the number has become €200 Billion, the maximum apparently that France believes it can get its hands on for its banks, all that still remains from the shock and awe, 1 billion US dollars first announced in May 2010 in what became the EFSF.

The lower and later figure, however, is all money signed up for by the 17 Euro Group members and thus payable by their taxpayers. (Malta and Slovakia have yet to agree, but are presumably sufficiently small to eventually be bullied into granting their consent - Finland's Prime Minister and governing parties have betrayed their parliament in granting their consent, the consequences of which will presumably only become clear as the promised collateral proves worthless).

More interestingly the background chatter has changed, in spite of Fridfay's Fitch downgrades of Spain and Italy, it is the French banks that seem at the forefront of attention, after the already clearly crippled Franco/Belgian Dexia, is haltingly explained away, that is!

Yet this question has to be asked, if some French and German banks can this weekend be saved, apparently the number one priority of all the rescue packages since May 2010, what will be then done about the ever rising interest costs of Spain and Italy. In another years time, post elections, will not Europe still be on the edge of the precipice?

Euro collapse - the state of play this Saturday morning & tips on dodgy banks!

The Irish Times has a good summary of the present differences and crisis points ahead of the Sarkozy/Merkel meeting tomorrow evening, linked here. Some quotes for a quick update:

The chancellor says money from the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) should be deployed only as a last resort, after private and government sources of capital are expired.

Mr Sarkozy, fearful that state recapitalisations could threaten France’s AAA credit rating, wants the right to deploy EFSF aid quicker.

The disagreement about when to use the EFSF, highlights the fact that the two main leaders of the Euro Group have still not grasped the full seriousness of the situation, itself brought into sharp relief by the Fitch downgrading last evening of Spain and Italy. The total funds available for dispersal under the EFSF remain at only €440 billion, a tiny portion of the shortfall now looming over the comparatively giant economies of Italy and Spain as compared to Greece, Ireland and Portugal!

The seriousness of the coming disaster is well illustrated by the morning Daily Telegraph in the UK, it providing a guide as to the likliehood, and how to spot, if your own British bank seems about to fail, linked here.

West's leaders, bamboozling us in billions -will soon be tinkering in trillions!

As an oilman I began to understand the import of big numbers at a fairly young age. In the early days of the North Sea discoveries, a giant oilfield, of which there were few, need contain over one billion barrels (each of 42 US gallons) of recoverable reserves in order to be so descibed. Such was, however, only a US billion, one thousand million rather than the British designation of a billion then being a million, million, which today we describe as a trillion.

Trillions were still at that time pretty hard to get the mind around, and only those in the natural gas end of the business seemed happy to rattle off production rates in the billions per day and eventual recoverable reserves measured in trillions.

What a contrast with today's world, where every new and/or glamorous media graduate (being female appears a similar prerequisite) can happily prattle of billions of pounds and dollars here and hundreds of millions there without ever blinking a heavily masacred eyelid. Yet, I reckon, it is only in the last ten to fifteen years or so that this became necessary.

Yesterday as Mervyn King announced more money printing for the UK, and the West's financial head tricksters met in Berlin, read here, it appeared to me sensible that I had better start pondering how many billion cubic feet of gas a field must produce, and for how long, to be considered a giant as measured in trillions of cubic feet of reserves - maybe then, in only a very few years time, I'll be better positioned to understand my groceries bill!

Or will the capital controls mentioned in the above link, also allow currencies to be reduced in value to a hundreth, or even a thousandth of their previous worth, as befits banana republics led by self-serving incompetents, and such research become redundant.

EBA carrying out crash 2 day revised stress test on Europe's banks.

The FT has the report linked here. A quote:

The EBA, which is mid-way through a two-day crisis board meeting designed to assess the potential hit of mass sovereign restructurings, will use market values, to set “haircuts” on banks’ sovereign holdings.

"No banking sector can sustain a generalized loss of confidence...

The IMF's Antonio Borges warns Europe it could not ignore reality:

"There has been a lot of talk about French banks, but ... the problem is very widespread," he said. "No banking sector in the world can sustain a generalized loss of confidence and we need to restore that confidence all over Europe."

Meantime, in Brussels, standing alongside the appointed and worthless EU Commission President Barosso, (now in his second term,) German Chancellor Angela Merkel, suggested re-capitalising the banks could soon be necessary, read here!

The Wealth Gap across the West

Further suggested reading is linked here.

Common sense on the EU from John Redwood MP!

The following is the entire morning posting on the Diary of John Redwood MP. It spells out the reality for the UK over the present crisis in the EU, clearly and precisely:

Protecting the single market?

By johnredwood | Published: October 5, 2011

           

Fear at last stalks Whitehall on EU issues. We hear that they are crisis gaming what to do if Euroland plunges rapidly towards more integration. Officials seem to see this as some kind of threat rather than an opportunity for the UK. They are worried that the UK will be excluded from meetings which have an impact on the single market. They seem to worry lest our “partners” use new EU powers to damage UK trade with the continent.
                 It has been blindingly obvious to some  of us for years that the single market project was more about centralising government and less about  free trade.  Continental politicians used the promise of more trade access to markets as the carrot to lead an ever reluctant and slow UK into more laws and binding government  arrangements. The issue before the UK now is not what  will some future more centralised EU do to damage  UK trade, but what can the present government do to stop the damage already done, and about to  be done, in the name of more centralised regulation and taxation?
                 The UK establishment needs to bury its own misleading rhetoric about the importance of EU trade. Our trade in services is primarily conducted with the rest of the world, thriving most in common law and english speaking jurisdictions. Most of the inward investment into the UK comes from outside the EU. Only in physical goods trade is the EU more important, and even there it is only around 40% after adjusting for the entrepot effects.
                       Government needs to grasp that as we are in heavy deficit on the goods trade with the EU there is more at risk for them than for us. I do not think we should take seriously any threat which boils down to Germany refusing to sell us  more BMWs.  The World Trade Organisation also gives us  various guarantees about access to continental markets, whatever the EU tries to do. Non EU members manage to trade with the EU without belonging to the legislative club.
                         The UK is vulnerable by virtue of being in the current EU structure. It is vulnerable to regulations and directives which do especial damage to sectors the UK is strong in, like finance. We are vulnerable to general anti enterprise laws which the EU specialises in. If being a member on current terms entails  having to fight endless rearguard actions against taxes and regulations designed to make business in our finance sector more difficult, we need a change of relationship. If our much heralded industrial revivial encounters uncompetitive energy prices owing to EU regulation we need to change things.
              That is why I made my modest proposal that in this crisis the UK allows Euroland to press on to single economic government in return for having an opt out from anything we do not like, past or future. If even this modest proposal is too much for the government, they may find the more radical option of seeking  to pull out altogether gains more support in the country (currently 29%), widening the divide between people and politicians on this most funadamental of matters. The polling shows there is a strong majority for much less EU interference in our lives. Many more people in the UK want a relationship which enhances trade and freedom. They do not like what they see as the gloom gathers over Euroland. If Euroland seriously thinks the UK should pay more of the bills for the Euro’s failure, they may merely succeed in radicalising the UK against them.
The Uk establishment needs to wake up to the reality that the EU is doing damage to the Uk economy by many of its rules and taxes. They need to grasp that we do not need to accept the current level of interference, let alone sign up for more, just so France and Germany can carry on selling us things.
Some of us have been urging a UK clause when the Euroland members go ahead with their proposed change to Article 136 of the Treaty to allow a Stability Mechanism. We regard this as a big change, involving the Commission, and would like a change of the UK’s arrangements at the same time. The government sees the Treaty amendment as an advance for the UK, as the planned ESM will replace the EFSF and EFSM, so removing  future risk of the Uk having to help with Euro area bail outs after 2013. For this reason they do not seem willing at the moment to demand more in return for consent to this Treaty Amendment, which was agreed in principle on 25 March 2011.
           The dire situation is underlined today. We learn of another sovereign bond downgrade for Italy. Greece is on strike. It is unlikely that more strikes will persuade the Germans to send more money to Greece. The strikes will simply make the problems worse, cutting Greek output and tax revenues further. They are striking against themselves. Finance Ministers are working on plans to support Euroland banks, but the weaker sovereigns have limits on what they can afford.  David Cameron is right that the way out of a debt crisis is to borrow less, not more. The UK public sector has to speed its work in this area as well.

Emphasis has been added by the editor of Ironies Too!