Prince Philip once said that, after death, he’d like to reincarnate as a virus. Woody Allen wants to come back as Warren Beatty’s finger. Stranger things are happening.
So I braved my French train journey in the face of rabid neo-fascism. Not a great deal of courage was required – if I’m being honest. No flics, no temperature takers, no checks of attestation, indeed no showing of tickets.
A mentioned this to a couple of people here today. Their view was that the cops have lost interest in the entire scam: they see the new travel restrictions as a mere ruse to keep up the fear. The locals here see Macron as a man with dwindling authority: if there is a third lockdown, they expect the People to say no.
We wandered round the main tourist attraction – an ancient bourg inside 11th century ramparts, replete with bars, restaurants, gift shops, bio artisanale food products and pretty, meandering alleyways.
All shut of course. All close to bankruptcy. All asking why this was necessary, considering the huge limitation of threat and obvious lack of efficacy. The anger here is greater than in Haut Aquitaine. It’s not hard to see why.
Already, the choices for Fear Stage II are being laid out. “Planet in Danger” warns a seminar being prepared in New York…..more climate dross long ago discredited being recycled for the bo-bo virtue signallers who wouln’t know a model from a short-term weather forecast.
Yet in the same breath, a bunch of loons called The Great Lakes Electric Future are creaming themselves about the plan to reduce the Lakes water level by 21% in order to achieve “clean” electricity generation.
The deranged hypocrisy is breathtaking.
Our allegedly sapiens species has been around for circa 800,000 years, and multiplication has taken us from 0 – 7.8bn during that time. The sum of total potable water remains exactly the same….and that’s only 5.2% of all fresh water. So the jerks think what a great and jolly wheeze it would be to remove a major supply to fund the generation of electricity.
Nobody in a position of responsibility is that dumb. Some of these Schwabites are planning for a world of at most 850,000 people, and we’re not invited.
And on the markets? Interviewing Jerome Powell – Chairman of the US Federal Reserve – last week, CBS Sixty Minutes anchor Scott Pelley observed, “The securities industry has reported that $814 billion has been borrowed by people investing in the stock market, borrowed against their portfolios. That’s a 49 percent increase over last year….the last time it grew that much was in 2007, before the Great Recession. And the time it grew that much before that was 1999, just before the dot com implosion. At what point does the Federal Reserve start to rein in this speculative bidding up of stock prices based on borrowed money?”
This seemed to me like a reasonable question, given that Stage II of panic always hits the stock markets when goforit brokers can’t borrow fast, affordable money to meet margin calls – WallSpeak for “pay up” to meet credit exposure created by, um, borrowing money to speculate on stock. Barmy, isn’t it? Especially when you think that such stock probably rose because its Board borrowed money to pay out a dividend in the first place.
Yes, it was a very good opener from Pelley – albeit rhetorical . Mister Powell answered, “I don’t know that statistic. I really can’t react to that statistic. I would say the main thing that we do is we make sure that the financial institutions that we regulate and supervise understand the risks that they’re running”.
Six ‘thats’ in three lines. No, seriously – it’s important: there speaks a man filling in with words – ‘really’, ‘would’, ‘understand’ and so forth. It’s the kind of BS George Carlin could’ve built into an entire routine: “I’m getting real about this, but I really couldn’t say how real. I would say we regulate, but not noticeably so. I have to hope they understand the risks, because if they don’t, then we’re all in the doo-oo.”
Thus, Numéro Uno global economic debt manager says, “Dunno. Mind you, that is what I do, ha-ha”. On a classic reassurance scale, it’s up there with Hitler saying – after raping Czechoslovakia in 1938 – “This is my final territorial demand in Europe”.
Other phrases like ‘asleep at the wheel’ certainly do spring to mind, but that’s the last thing Powell is. He’s letting debt rip for the same reason the IMF is happy to drown sovereign treasuries in debt: the Reset cometh, so the bigger the excuse, the better. And believe me, reported direct margin call debt for most of the last thirty years has rarely been more than half the iceberg’s total size: this lulu could sink a Tritanic, let alone Titanic – perhaps closer to $1.5trillion.
Ah well, not to worry: Phil the Greek’s sign-off caper showed impeccable timing. The UK media took 72 hours to plant him, and it’s still going on. Planting while Jerome burns? There goes the Knighthood….
The Slog 