It’s not as bad as you think. It’s worse.

I couldn’t find the right slot for this extract from Hunt’s website yesterday, but it seems to go well with today’s middle post:

It’s good to see Jezzer giving employment to the dyslexic (or geriatric, or both) but I love the pronunciation behind this wonderful typo – ‘Germy’.

Now tut-tut Mr *unt, you really must use the antiseptic spray provided for people with germs. Otherwise, the NHS might catch a nasty infection. Like privatitis.

I suspect the Health Secretary doesn’t wash his hands in Germicidal because he is a germ. Let’s start a conspiracy theory.

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And as the men from the markets get marched up the hill again this week, I offer you this pithy heads-up from Reuters:

“Sooooo” as Janet Yellen would say, for the purposes of clarification among those of you whose glasses don’t stretch to type that small, China has speculated and profited from empty hopes, Hong Kong has jumped because of the rebound from everyone jumping up and down on the other side of the planet, and although both HK and China are tracking it they’ve voted 1 for and 1 against so it’s tie, but Hong Kong petered out because oil dropped back.

Previously on Bourse Bonkers, oil dropped back because its hopes for a better deal between Saudis and Ivans were dashed, oil rose because the deal looked good before somebody read the copy, and the markets are powering up because Mario Draghi  announced his new second career in acting. Before that, markets and oil were falling everywhere for reasons yet to be established, admitted, noticed or published.

Warning: Bourses are a cross between a cockpit and a betting shop. The value of your investments can go in, but may not come out. When that happens, you will need to borrow money to make margin calls, and for that you need to go to a bank but if too many of you do and/or cash-rich globalist companies need to bump up the share price as well, we will have a liquidity problem, and you will be the one liquidated, not them.

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US shares yesterday were ‘buoyed’ by the news that the US economy grew in January. Drill into the numbers, and you’ll see that a huge proportion of it was institutional spending on heat during the extreme cold…..on cheap oil….because global oil demand is falling. But none of this got mentioned in context.

The context it did get mentioned in was a 3.5% fall in housing starts…which doesn’t count you see because there was extreme cold and, um, borrowing rates rose. Borrowing rates rose because the Fed raised them…so we blame the Fed, yes?

Nooooo, of course we don’t, because the Fed decided not to raise rates in March (we hope) and so with low rates for some time to come, “we expect a pickup in the housing market and property prices to be one of the brighter spots in 2016,” said Mark Vitner, a senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities. Before that, Mark was riding shotgun on the Deadwood Stage.

So you see, whether oil goes up or down, or rates go up or down, or we have winter in summer and 2020 in 2017, everything will be alright. Nothing is real, nothing to get hung up on, stay long in Strawberry Fields.

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Except that, um, the OECD doesn’t agree. It has cut its global gdp forecast for 2016…as it had to repeatedly during 2015.

Maybe – if I may pun excruciatingly for a second here – we need to take a proper gander* at all this propaganda. And the best way to do that is to see what the Thinking Right has to say:

• Larry Summers went back onto Bloomberg today and said negative interest rates are a symptom of deep malaise in the real economy
• Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at the Daily Telegraph writes that ‘The world’s central banks should take a deep breath and step back from the calamitous misadventure of negative interest rates.Whatever theoretical profit can be mined from this thin seam, it is entirely overwhelmed by the slow ruin of the banking system’
• In the same paper, Ben Wright concludes bluntly, ‘Bubbles always burst. But some grow a little larger and float a touch longer on the breeze before they do. The question, therefore, is not “if” but “when”. One wrong step by the world’s central banks and that could be sooner rather than later’
• The Telegraph also acknowledges the OECD intervention in full: ‘Global leaders must take “urgent” action to stop the world becoming stuck in a low-growth trap, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

  The OECD slashed its growth forecasts across the board on Thursday as it urged policymakers to deploy a “full set of tools” to prevent another slowdown’.

   

  Ben Wright is Right, and also right: it is when not if. We’ve been putting this Big Reckoning off now since 2003. It’s time to face it and deal with it.

*Proper gander is cockney rhyming slang for a closer look

Earlier at The Slog: And Baron Green burst out laughing after Brussels…