As yet more fiat cash suddenly appeared in the money tree orchard yesterday, scrumpers threw it at stock markets to little or no avail. Briefed on top secret Coronavirus news ten days ago, two US Republican senators went straight out and sold millions of Dollars in shares before the Crash, so they’re alright Jack.
Meanwhile, new draconian measures were introduced that will lessen immunity levels, but disguise the disgraceful mess that is lack of infrastructural investment in health services.
But allegedly, They Work for Us.
On Wednesday, the Dow fell a further 25%, and its futures overnight suggested a new plunge yeserday. Instead, it rose 2% in the first two hours…but then closed under 1%. NYSE veterans described the atmosphere as “Quietly resigned” and “Eerily fearful”.
It took Frufru Lagarde precisely six days to do her first volte-face and launch a €750 billion ECB “rescue package”. The eurostoxx index rose 2.9% and the Dax by 2%. Like most people, the new ECB boss has realised that Brussels has gone catatonic, and will do nothing. So that’s reassuring, then.
It was confirmed yesterday morning that Michel Barnier had tested positive for COVID19 – the best excuse the EU has yet to come up with to delay Britain’s exit further. I am at best dubious about the veracity of this “news”; perhaps the virus was aiming at Verhofstadt, and missed. Medical staff in Brussels are concerned that, should Monsieur Barnier expire, very few of those monitoring his condition will notice any difference in his demeanour.
New Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey cut interest rates again today (that’s more than at any point since 1694) and the FTSE rose 1.4%.
To sum up, what we have now is Einstein’s definition of madness, viz, “Doing the same thing over and over in the hope of a different result”. Muddled neoliberal monetarists continue to cut rates and launch new QEs. But Lagarde must have hoped that three quarters of a trillion euros in bond buying would produce rather more than we’ve seen. As to what Bailey expected from the second rate cut in three days, I have no idea.
Desperate not to give “the investment community” any kind of safe harbour from the boiling waves, in the last ten working days, the prospering cheats have rigged the CB interbank gold price by $200 downwards. In an unintentionally hilarious observation on Wednesday, the FT called this ‘counter-intuitive’; that’s a little like saying Spring mountain ice melting upwards is ‘an intriguing phenomenon’.
Meanwhile, owners of real bullion can continue to smile: the world will buy it at almost any price.
What the central banks are handing out yet again is more parcels from the grab-sack. But what’s left in the perma-Christmas grotto is now almost entirely sawdust.
This is not good news; in fact, it’s very bad news indeed. You can’t get out of jail by bribing the warders with sawdust. It’s a by-product sometimes useful in packaging: but as a replacement for salt, it isn’t up there with Imperial Roman “payments” to the marauding legions.
Only one question now remains: who’s going to pay to clear up this mess? You will be unsurprised to learn that the answer is “us”.
From the day her ECB appointment was announced, Christine Lagarde has been seeding the barren financialised landscape with disturbing statements like, “In a crisis, what do want – a roof over your head, or a healthy savings account?”
This represents the sort of brass neck that makes it difficult to guillotine members of her obscenely privileged class. As a bloke who worked hard and successfully to help manufacturers and retailers employ people (in a 35 year comms career) my riposte to Lagarde is “Both, you cheeky fake-tanned tart”.
Let’s stop pussy-footing around this one: we are weeks – perhaps only days – away from major bank collapses and sovereign defaults. Tale your pick – Deutsche, Italy, Repo loans and now Bond carnage – the edifice is collapsing. There were reports yesterday evening from Austria of bank “glitches” leading to customers being unable to withdraw funds via ATMs.
Two days ago, US banking regulators were reported to be ‘considering loosening bank liquidity rules to boost loan volume’. Yet again, a debt-dependence crisis being treated with more debt…but the network floating this lunacy (CNBC) could not resist inserting ‘in the face of this Coronavirus emergency’.
If you want my view on this manufactured emergency, see yesterday’s Slogpost.
But I wonder how many of you have noticed how the MSM in general these days cannot preface any reference to COVID19 without the words ‘deadly virus’. Net-net, this virus is deadly across demographics at the level of 0.6%. I’m not here to justify familial loss: I’m here to say, “For God’s sake, can we please just review the data and then wonder why the Alternative States are trying to frighten us into acquiessence in totalitarian serfdom”.
The real beauty of having a pandemic to hype and a depraved fiat money-machine to rationalise is that, after a while, it becomes impossible to separate them. This leads to spin, obfuscation and then downright lies.
Without the last thirty years of news IABATO* and conformist educational values, such a humungous con wouldn’t have been possible. However, if one puts these latter developments into the context of economic events since 2003, the Hoodwinking Factor really has levelled up to Warp Factor 9.
I can only give you an anthropologically informed view on what has happened. It is this: everything we’re seeing put out by the authorities on Covid19/Crash2 is simply a continuation of the confused and unnatural fantasies that have led to most Western societies being incurably divided along the lines of untenable belief systems.
That process has now produced a docile electorate ready and willing to believe any level of complete tosh.
Examining that extrapolation in more detail:
- Demonising the Chinese for their apparent “crimes” against world trade and the Wuhan outbreak is just another level of division. On top of that, we are now divided from each other by being forced into ‘self-distancing’, by viewing every cough with suspicion, and every old person’s sneeze as a direct attack upon us. This process began with a campaign of deriding ‘greedy’ baby-boomers of (a) hogging all the wealth and (b) acting as leeches on the back of young people who “have to look after” them. It’s utter drivel: all State pension and welfare systems rely on that model…and the young benefit as they grow old.
- The rush of naive and narrowly educated kids into an admiration for the unnatural means there is no longer a social bedrock aware of the fact that milk comes from cows, not bottles and tetrapacks. The entire LGBTQ phenomenon requires every fellow-traveller with its narcissistic (and baseless) assumptions to ignore every sexuality statistic in general – and the reality of democracy as a majority system in particular. But in the COVID19 context, the result is a refusal to accept that a 0.6% overall death-rate is preferable to a lower death statistic that leaves 50% of the population with zero immunity.
- The self-isolation model now adopted by both Macron and Johnson will not see off Covid19: all it will achieve is a reduced level of embaressment for such neoliberals when their poor investment in public health comes to light.
We have lost the ability to weigh consequences and then take tough decisions: rather, we prefer to dramatise every situation….and then admire the politicians who have “solved” a problem that never existed in the first place.
I am reminded of the old gag in which a curious citizen asks a park-keeper why he is spreading yellow dust everywhere.
“To keep the crocodiles at bay,” the Parky replies.
“But there aren’t any crocodiles at large in London,” the citizen observes.
“Absoutely,” says the Parky, “bloody effective isn’t it?”
When the élite-controlled media finally tell you it is your duty to lose everything in order to save the human race, it would be as well to bear that gag in mind.
As bourses collapse, unrepayable debt accumulates and banks fail, the media will continue to ratchet up the Big Lie that “everything was just fine until COVID19 appeared”.
What we are going to see then is the long-trailered appearance of the global bail-in. I so desperately want this to be the point at which the self-interested, smug conservative tendency in Western electorates says, “No…you are not separating me from my money because you failed to prosecute the guilty Masters of the Universe”.
Will they awake from their torpor to do that? The Jury is out.
The Slog 