The biggest banking group in central/eastern Europe announces a whopping loss (entirely stress-test related) that makes a nonsense of all previous analysis of its outlook and safety. Hold it up to the light, not a main-media article about it in sight.

I don’t, on the whole, buy into MSM conspiracy theories to explain this vacuum where information should be. Having worked with City journalists over three decades, it has long been my opinion that they are (with a few notable exceptions) process merchants who are rarely thorough, lazy for much of the time, and often pissed. Most of the players in this soi-disant technical area of life have the technical skills and insight of a tree-sloth, and denial of everything beyond the predictable is one of only two gears they possess. The other one is ‘I always knew this was going to happen’…..after the event.

Almost every major title covered the entirely predictable story about the European Banking Authority advising banks not to invest or trade in Bitcoin; but when it comes to the Ponzi-riddled instability of the eurobanking edifice, the FT carried one small piece on Friday wondering if bank investors would get the jitters after the Erste revelations. That was it.

It seems to me the one thing City hacks have never quite grasped is that pretty much all investment bankers, corporate accountants and IT CEOs are incorrigible liars. The worst online sites see lies where there is nothing to see beyond stupidity, and the best financial web/blog sites use empirical data to highlight when press releases are utterly unsupportable drivel. So it is to the last of these one must turn….along with one’s own experience and contacts.

There, on various sites and in the odd discreet email, one finds the following:

1. Japan is chucking twice the level of US Fed QE at its economy, an economy which is, at best, only 34% of America’s. And at the same time it is increasing domestic tax rates. Go figure.

2. The Aussie dollar’s rise has come to an abrupt halt following what locals are calling “the complete evaporation” of domestic retail demand in Oz, and “plunging” export numbers. As predicted here many times, Beijing catches a cold, and Canberra contracts penuemonia. Aka, The Abbott Effect.

3. Following the Erste screw-up, Mario Draghi has declined to start another QE-style junk bond fire purchase. At the time of writing, global investors seem to have spotted this, and are thus selling bigtime.

4. The Slog has over and over again said that we will get food price inflation and government service inflation alongside falling durable prices at retail. Both are now happening, especially in France where clothes, white goods and DIY products are on permanent sale, but food prices are rising…as indeed they are in the States. Indeflation is here, folks.

Remember: IABATO! (It’s all bollocks and that’s Official)