The delicate bonds/bourse balance. Now that Sci-fi hero Ber Nan Ka has set aside his glowing QE sword after vanquishing the evil Flatline Empire, some of us find it interesting to note that a 100pt rise in US bond yields evoked a global equities sell-off. So, um, if some other event such as non-farm payrolls, poor output or a few bad Bigco results produced even a 50 pt further rise in yields, what might the sell-off then turn into?
And rubbing not too hard at the crystal ball, what would a full-blown Chinese stop-grow do to stock levels?
Or, for example, another euro crisis based around ClubMed’s ever-deepening stroll off the pier and down the steps arrowed ‘To Seabed’?
Everyone knows this is an imbalance that can’t be balanced much longer. Keep your eye on it.
Justice catches up with G4S at last. Maybe this is just another case of the private sector fleecing the taxpayer via Whitehall naivety: you may have read yesterday that a spending review has found G4S massively over-billed the taxpayer for running the Government’s tagging schemes, in what the minister called “a wholly indefensible and unacceptable state of affairs”.
G4S you will doubtless recall as the bunch of overclaiming clowns who very nearly screwed up the entire security operation of the London Olympics last year. However, what has several seniors in the ranks of Conservative Big Dicks worried this morning is the media tracing back to precisely who engineered the hiring of G4S….and what that Cabinet Minister’s relationship was with the company. You can also rest assured that Chris Grayling’s wobbly eye has settled upon several senior Sir Humphreys involved in this racket.
The Minister for Culture Media & Sport at the time was Jeremy Hunt. I remain sure that this is an unhappy coincidence. Let’s see what develops.
Shuffling the deck and tying Dave’s hands. There’s a growing feeling around Westminster and in the Street of Blame that there’s going to be something of a minor Cabinet reshuffle next week – Guido Fawkes has a piece about it this morning, and several hacks I know are confidently expecting the same as Guido – that the reshuffle will be a bit of a non-event. Behind all this distraction, however, something considerably bigger is going on.
Because the Newscories have no real spine when it comes to fisticuffs (and the 1922 is largely populated by guffawing twerps), the core of anti-Camerlot rebels remain in their usual mode – “I wanna hit him, quick hold me back….HOLD ME BACK I SAID!”. The majority of realists know they missed the boat in the Spring, and have settled for mutterings, abstentions and all the usual onanism one associates with Lobby-fodder. The general line now is, “We’ve passed the point of no return – Cameron will be the Leader taking us into the 2015 election”.
The smarter, top end of the Nasties are working not on removal now, but control. Talks between Camerlot and Rupert Murdoch No Turning Back have been ongoing for some ten days already, and the Newscories goal is becoming eminently clear: to make any further ‘Coalition’ with the Cleggies impossible. At the centre of their demands are retaining Trident and a solid-gold pre-election guarantee that no Government containing the Conservative Party will pass a ‘Mansion Tax’ on the ‘rich’. Not even Slick Nick could carry his Party along with those millstones: Vince Cable would resign.
The Tory Party is being slowly but surely hijacked by the Friedmanite/Murdochite fanatics. Realistic about their chances of getting elected on their platform (zero) they’re going to try and do a Ken Livingstone GLC maneouvre: let the drones vote for Dave, and then make life intolerable for Dave later.
The Slog 