Everything’s coming together, as it were
We’re entering one of those interregnums at the minute, where a large number of things one dreads reach the stage when it is very difficult to deny their imminence any longer. Having clung for months or even years to the hope that they might be overblown (or even invented) updates just keep telling one otherwise.
1. At the weekend, we had the Elm House revelation from Exaro (like them or not, they’re good at what they do) about a private cops’ forum. On this, former officers openly admit and discuss how political and MI6 interference has been protecting Westminster/celeb paedophiles for the best part of thirty years. As these officers, I assume, have no axe to grind, I’m satisfied that my own view – that of all the conspiracy theories about abuse, this one is both genuine and shocking – will on day be borne out. If so, then it is yet another nail in the coffin of a once-civilised country…with a rule of law that no longer means anything.
The Ed Miller Band, of course – your friend in tough times – is shying away from any of this, because its own guilty secrets in local politics would quickly rebound on them. It’s a disgrace:and until they’ve all gone from the Halls of Westminster, it will never get better again.
2. The plunge in the oil-price is going to have unstoppable consequence along at least seven dimensions, but it now means – for certain – that there is no business case at all for fracking. I always insisted there wasn’t even before the oil meddling went bad: but now comes yet more hard, quantitative data about the reality of diminishing returns.
Leading oil analyst David Hughes has put together data on recent studies. His database is the biggest ever aggregation, and the data show that the average first-year decline is 70%, rising to 85% by year three. He also points out that – naturally – the oilcos chose the best ROI opportunities first. He seems convinced that the second rank mines will show an even greater disaster in terms of payback.
I’m not an expert at all in the oil sector, and so I remain puzzled as to who was doing what and why during the last five years, when the denial among pro-frackers was evident on an epic scale. Either way, any further attempts by the Hannanite Tories to ‘get fracking’ should be stamped upon by those still of sound mind.
3. “It is entirely possible that the Yen decline will become becomes disorderly and swift,” said HSBC experts last week, while issuing a blunt warning about the madness contagion that must follow the insane asset-purchasing policies of the Bank of Japan. David Bloom and Paul Mackel at HSBC also assert pretty clearly that Shinzo Abe already leaning on the Bank of Japan (BoJ) to fund policies aimed at boosting household spending.
They don’t come any madder than this one. A long-ago shattered monetarist myth being blown out of all proportion hasn’t worked (this is only the eighteenth time since 2008, so you never know) and now the mad bellringer of Shinzo Abbey wants to cut out the middle-man and simply give people munneeee.
But the key point remains this: long ago Ben the Banker told us all about his tool-bag of tricks and magic. All of these having been used, we’re now even more skint than we were in 2009. Neoliberal economics having failed, Abe san now wants to parachute cash onto consumers….cash that isn’t backed by any objective value at all. I could spend a day just writing about all the ways that this plus falling commodity prices (and the return of spiking ClubMed bonds) could turn to meltdown at hypersonic speed.
4. I’m obviously not the only one who sees this and other disasters coming: and once you spot the bankers closing the shutters in expectation of a merde storm, then brother, you know it’s coming. At the BIS etc bash in Australia recently – and then back in Washington – there was yet more evidence of the financial community sticking more knives into Dodd Frank – the Act designed to get these headcases back under control. Yep, they can see the rising plume on the horizon
5. Last but not least, the odds are stacking up against George Osborne keeping the incontinent cat in the bag until the May 2015 Election is over. This morning in the Telegraph, Sir Martin Sorrell writes:
‘…the [UK] deficit remains stubbornly high, and borrowing in nominal terms is greater than it was under Labour. Moreover, a long-term strategy built on high-value manufacturing, services, education, technology, hard and soft infrastructure, immigration and tax policy remains unarticulated…’.
This is Sorrell’s polite way of pointing out what many of us have been recording since 2012: the Coalition Government is clueless on the issue of rebalancing the economy, and cutting immigration. When the disasters hit, Britain will suffer far more than most – because no other developed country in the world has an economy so massively dependent on banking services…and grows so little of its own food.
In the event of a bad derivatives Tsunami (for the sake of argument, crazy bets about the oil price) the worst and most exposed offenders are once more deemed to big to fall. We, sadly, aren’t considered too small to pay. And we Brits will pay more than anyone.
Never in my life have I shifted fiat currency into solid assets at the rate I’ve been doing throughout the year. Not surprisingly, constantly signing cheques and sending electronic transfers with lots of noughts at the end sometimes makes a chap wonder if he might be doing the wrong thing. But not now.
Coming shortly before these latest developments were the following signs: OPEC’s collapse, Greece’s imminent election, France’s awful output figures, the canyonesque split at the ECB, the plummeting Rouble, and falling UK house prices.
Yesterday, Jean-Claude Juncker warned the Greek people “not to make a mistake” by voting for Tsipras. There is a pernicious man. And more disturbing still, there is a desperate man.
The Slog 