The Sovereign State formerly known as the United States of America just decided to dump its double incontinence all over the Sovereign formerly known as the United Kingdom. And the unelected Bank of England then did the same to its Government. That – and holes in the Nord gas pipeline – make one wonder whether any of the West’s alliances can withstand a Washington gone mad.
How about this as an example of rapacious, anti-social greed – aka, short term monetary gain at the expense of your closest historical ally?
Largely US-owned Hedge Funds have been shorting the £ Sterling since new UK Chancellor Kwarteng’s remarks over the weekend about cutting UK taxes to stimulate consumption.
Such a classically neoliberal excuse/rationale from Kwarteng when facing bust after completely unjustified boom would, you might expect, attract support from those markets who (dear old Margaret Thatchbag always insisted) simply must decide. But no: salt has now been poured onto the wound by America’s mafia-bank front the IMF, which condemned the cuts as “not helpful”. Depends on who you think you’re supposed to be helping, I suppose.
The descent of Sterling represents little more than another triumph of braindead material lust over naive or hypocritical professed ideology – ideology that insists on awarding more nobiliy and wisdom to our species than is justified.
Ideology continues to be the disease that binds monetarists and socialists together: whether you are Angela Rayner on the subject of the working class, or Boris Johnson going out to bat for the wealth and tax bonuses of the speculative banker, ideology gets in the way of the obviously empirical….producing shibboleths that block real socio-political progress.
Homo sapiens is a hominid type wired to amass storage during famine, panic when stores seem to be getting low, and misuse its unintentionally awarded imagination to leap from slavish God worship to belief in the Demigod status of its own members. However, only a very tiny percentage of the species allows such flaws to become obsessive egomania.
So how well-equipped is Chancellor Kwarteng to deal with this tangled anthropological web?
Initially an economic historian, Kwarteng is the first black MP to serve as a Secretary of State. Before briefly working as a journalist and market analyst, Kwarteng attended Colet Court, an independent preparatory school in London, where he won the Harrow History Prize in 1988. Kwarteng then went to Eton College, where he was a King’s Scholar and was awarded the Newcastle Scholarship prize. He read classics and history at Trinity College, Cambridge, achieving a first and twice winning the Browne Medal. He was a member of the team which won the BBC quiz show University Challenge, he was a member of the University Pitt Club. He attended Harvard University on a Kennedy Scholarship, and then earned a PhD in economic history from the University of Cambridge in 2000.
Or put another way, he’s an archetypal élite British Tory MP with absolutely knoball experience of real business, real life or genuine wealth-creating capitalism. All the tell-tale words are there: a kind of Harrow – Eton – King’s – Trinity – Harvard amble through the Ivy Leagues of Oxbridge.
What he does have is ruthless management of his public image in relation to unwise flings, while busily airbrushing all history of gambles on the wrong colleague: pace, Owen Paterson – a man I happen to like.
That stated, given the unseemly sight of Mr Kwarteng running around to and from the Bank of England ever since his faux pas knocked the Pound for six, it is extremely unlikely that he is anywhere near real power in the World of 2022. The nasty old crone of Threadneedle Street wasted no time in making it abundantly clear that she would raise interest rates some way yet before disappearing up her own central bank.
As one of my closest friends is wont to remark, “Which particular part of this outcome did you not foresee?”
Such an NWO-driven policy of course more than cancels out tax cuts to create consumption. You can do that sort of thing if the Sovereign finances are in good order and the Central Bank is in your pocket. But Blighty is broke, and the Bank has been more out of the cage than in anyone’s trouser facilities since Gordy McDoom from the Manse gave it independence on monetary policy in 1997. UK fiscal policy has been walking a fibrous, frayed tightrope ever since.
More specifically, in the immediate terms that questions of zero foresight could be directed at Truss Kwarteng Policy Mastication plc – a less than dynamic duo that can’t even get the nonstop digital teleportation to Davodystopia working on time. But hunting them down is, let’s be fair, akin to investigating the driver of the slow train to Gelsenkirchen.
No: power having shifted inexorably towards Bank Central, it is there that we need to look for today’s Slog human sacrifice.
Naturally, I refer to Andrew Bailey.
Oh dear, Andy Bailey. Thus is a genuine ducks-in-a-barrel shoot.
In 2008 he helped to oversee the huge loans that kept HBOS afloat until its eventual takeover by Lloyds, and he was involved with the bailout of Royal Bank of Scotland. In fact, Bailey conned the UK political class and taxpaying public into spending its own money bailing out a bunch of half-baked believers in permanent growth who had already lost their deposits….as well as diluting the value of stock held by the unfortunate shareholders. It’s a staggering fact, but Operation Getawaywithit in 2008 cost the same in Ye Little Olde UK as it did in the US.
Er…and he also ensured nobody went to jail.
In April of 2013, he took on his highest profile role yet by becoming Deputy Governor of the Bank of England and chief executive of the new Prudential Regulatory Authority (PRA). There was wild applause throughout the bourse-bank-investment community – hardly surprising given that Little Osborne giving those jobs to Andrew was rather like letting BoJo loose in Fort Knox.
At the time, Bailey told the media he was “in no doubt that the system has let down the public” – an understatement that those who should’ve known better took to be a sign of reforming zeal. in another unintentionally hilarious interview, the new Deputy Governor said, “I can’t sit here and dictate culture and ethics in banks…..Only the boards and senior management can do that. They have to adopt standards and ethics themselves that fit the frankly very reasonable expectations of society.” Nobody thought to ask Tubby what he would therefore be doing all day.
When it came to Barclays boss Jes Staley in 2017, the answer was “sweet Fanny Adams”: for harassing a (fully justified) whistle-blower aka perverting the course of justice, Staley got away with a fine, did not lose his job and received only a mild rebuke from Bailey’s PRA. Similar shenanigans at Tesco bank produced similar results.
As 2018 unfolded to reveal itself as yet another year of Funny Business as usual, Bailey had to deal with several high-profile scandals that have hit retail investors, including the collapse of mini-bond firm London Capital and Finance, the implosion of Woodford Investment Management and the gating of the M&G Property Portfolio over liquidity issues. His inability to properly supervise Neil Woodford and ensure open-ended property funds were fit for purpose attracted widespread criticism of Bailey – along with disappointment at his failure to enforce Mifid II and address greenwashing in the industry.
And so in the light of this track record, in December 2019, Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid announced that Chief Weeble Bailey would become Bank of England Governor in March 2020, replacing Mark Carney…..a case, some might think, of honour among thieves. (Javid is ex Deutsche Bank and Carney ex Goldman Sachs). The investment Association expressed its delighted approval, announcing that ‘Andrew’s extensive experience and able leadership, demonstrated at the FCA, will enable him to successfully guide the bank during this critical period for the UK as we prepare to leave the EU’.
Hmm. Right.
Since then, Bailey has been a prominent keynote speaker at the World Economic Forum….and he had attended Davos on several occasions prior to that too. In fact, when one observes the timing of his governorship appointment – and dubious role in the 2008 carve-up – it’s hard to avoid the sense that he wound up being ‘in position and ready’ rather than ‘getting the job’.
Remember: the Bouncing Bailey presided over the most ridiculous overspending virus panic in our Nation’s history. In Spring this year, he had to answer critics who blame the Bank of England for allowing inflation to accelerate to an unacceptable degree. It didn’t go down terribly well, not least because it contained the same incredibility as Jerome Powell’s attempt at self-exculpation after the Fed sat and played with itself in the US. For myself, I’m with former Governor Merve the Swerve King who thinks the BoE panicked on the money-printing front.
What’s in no doubt at all is the way in which Bailey (who must have known what Kwarteng and Truss were going to do) let the gaffe go ahead and then negated the tax cuts idea from a great height the following day.
So much for a “united” Davostopia.
Andrew Bailey has the history of appointments, views and actions to suggest that he is a hardline corporacrat in the Davos mould whose calling in life has been to put banksters above the Law. I have spoken to two people since last Monday who are in no doubt that the BoE governor thinks Truss is a terrible mistake…and needs to be removed with all haste. She is without doubt a willing NWO whore – but she is not their choice…any more than I suspect Boris was.
However, overshadowing most of this is pipeline sabotage. Despite the brave MSM two-faced nonsense about Russia sabotaging itself, the reality is that several key EU capital cities are today at the end of their tethers with US Deep State megalomania. It remains to be seen whether the Biden nutjob régime can repair damage that goes way beyond oceanic holes.
The Slog 