One supposes that clearing the pistes makes a change from taking the piss, but in the better ski resorts, the pistes get cleaned to make way for some important event like Eddie the Eagle goes for Flying Lessons.
But at the moment, we look on from the sideines at metaphorical snow levelers working feverishly around the clock ….but as always, it’s impossible to gauge whether the balance of their heavy-duty crunching brushes is more about distraction or thinly-disguised military exercise.
First up is the following the Airport Outage fiasco in the UK. It just halved my income from a rental deal here, but that’s not important right now, as the White House spokespersons would say. Take a sken at this Google search engine page-capture ‘Rationale’ for bad stuff:
Is anyone out there really so daft as to believe that solely airport-based techno-failures of five different kinds could happen purely by coincidence in one tiny country to screw up flights to over 53 destinations covering Asia, Southern Europe and Africa?
* Power cuts and outages
*BA allocation systems
*E-gate failures
*Terminal transfer confusion
*Evacuations.
To offer queries on each descriptor in turn….
*What’s the difference between a cut and an outage?
*What was BA allocating – seats, passengers, take-off permissions or pilots?
* Were the failures to do with – opening, closing, or Fred’s gone home and he has the only manual override key?
* Who was confused – the passengers, the terminal staff, the transfer bus drivers, or all of them?
* What was being evacuated…aeroplanes, terminals, or bowels?
Whether you call it an exercise, a test market, a psyop prep or a dress rehearsal, it is what it is: a trial run designed to smooth out any further glitches in global travel control.
Accompanied by the following:
“UPLOADING OF THIS POST FAILED. YOU ARE PROBABLY OFFLINE”
As my router is blinking blue in a relaxed manner, and all searches are working normally, I think I am probably online. But let’s see how the rest of this goes…
Don’t be in the stock etc markets at the moment unless you’re a fully-seasoned and trained pro who knows how to cheat his colleagues, clients and employers by pressing false UP buttons, collecting end-of-the-day profits, then puzhing the DOWN buttons the day after.
We’re now heading into the tertiary stage of Apocalyptic fiscal and financial crash, wherein the only way left for the broker/trader is to give the various market sectors a blow-job every 36 hours in order to extract every last trace fecundity left in the Old Order – or as the neolib/neocon demigods would have it, the New Normal.
The markets no longer reflect sentiment, just greed. A non-stop avalanche of Grade 1 banks sliding towards the nearest crevasse is, at most, nine months away. Which ones will be the first to go?
Bankers try desperately hard to obfuscate how easy it is to understand their continuing ability to survive….it’s all a hangover from the Masons and Guilds of the middle ages, where clamped down secrecy about the skills required was maintained [and continues today] as the means towards the end of a closed-shop monopoly. Fringe banking, Shadow banking, Systemically-linked bloc banking, Merchant banking, Secondary specialist banking or Retail banking…in reality, they are all based on simplistic mark-ups of lending prices, largely regardless of whether the purchase of something is a good or bad thing for the client in the first place, or the economy in general.
Lest we forget, no less an institution than the Economist Magazine declared in 2004 that sixty percent of all bank- managed mergers destroy shareholder value. Not ‘threaten’, not ‘dilute’, and not ‘risk’, but destroy. Check out Rupert Murdoch’s bank-rolled media acquisitions since the late 1960s: he may be the Great Destroyer of Cultures in the First World, but by God, Rupe the Dupe is cute: he has the Greediots taped and he spotted very early, once his Dad croaked, how to rape valuation to his own massive advantage. (See also Elon Musk and Twitter)
Since 2009, we have had crazy loose-money ultra-low interest rates that disguise economic, Federal-fiscal and real growth failures. Maintaining these is the only way that lending institutions can survive, floating upon the fantasy of cheap borowing that keeps clients happy and the bank’s margins wide enough to continue be wide-boys of a devil-may-care nature.
As long ago as 2018, I wrote this piece about how interest rate abnormality could never be “normalised” unless the US Sovereign State made revolutionary changes to its fiscal and economic definitions. Looking back now, I see this as the key paragraph:
‘A recurring Establishment narrative about rates is the one of “a gradual return to normal”. Do the maths: there can be no return to anything approaching normal. The abnormality of Zirp is unique. Taking a mean between extremes, a “normal” interest rate average across all forms of borrowing is about 6%. The rate at the US Fed Reserve after the June hike was 2%. It may or may not be 2.25% after September. The Fed Treasury’s bond yields go from 1.9% to 3.1% (1 year to 30 year repayment terms), and this year just managing the yield cost will come in at $310 billion. In 2016 it was $203bn. At 6% it would be close to $1trillion, because a higher proportion of the issue will have to be long term in order to sell out. Spending one tax Dollar in 3 on debt management simply isn’t sustainable. Other economies like Italy, India and Argentina would be facing social collapse, higher taxes and hyperinflation to stay afloat. If borrowing rates return to normal, then universal debt and valuation ‘forgiveness’ would be obligatory. The average citizen would not find the experience forgiving on the whole.’
Note how Billions so easily slide up the scale to Trillions
But the rate correction to anything even remotely normal is now essential if German early 1920s hyperinflation is to be be avoided. With the explosion in sovereign, commercial property and domestic debt – alongside new and aggressive currency valuation from the rising Brics – the US, the UK and the EU can no longer decide on a whim to create a thinly-veiled devaluation that gets them out of every Jackson Hole.
RATES MUST RISE
Banks do not look after their own. When a fellow crocodile floats belly up on the Daintree River, they eat him. Meanwhile, the 275 other crocs get nervous about becoming the next cannibal victim. And before you know where you are, the Tiber runs red with blood.
Those who try to beat the system by offering savers higher interest yields are the first to go: much sooner than later, the funds of the institution run out. In the UK during 2007-8, Northern Rock became the classic example.
So: who might be next?
Since Q4 of 2023, the 10-year treasury yield has leapt from 3.86% to 4.5% as the Federal Reserve Board has been steadily raising rates in a vain attmpt to combat inflation. But as I posited earlier, when rates go up, the values of long-maturity securities decrease, inflicting huge losses on many banks.
Again, it’s a simple case of a social overspending Democrat administration engaged in a 15-round pugilism bout with the Fed.
Even more bottom line, ordinary Americans find themselves in an upside down world in which a vote for the CIA clique around Biden begins to look more and more risky than the lower-spending isolationist management of a commercially sound Trumpist MAGA approach.
As I write this evening, 300 US banks have been declared “wobbly” by Jerimiah Powell. The Silicon Valley Bank failure was the largest collapse since the 2008 financial crisis. At times, this all feels like death by relying on Trench Warfare to win WWII.
But there are experts out there who, in their casual musings, mention J P Morgan – asking just how safe are its views on medium to long term interest rate variations.
J P Morgan…are you kidding?
Well, every sane observer going forward needs to factor in the new almost complete absence of secret escape tunnels now that the DollarUS is no longer a monopolous measure. Major commodities such as oil are primarily bought and sold using U.S. dollars, and some major economies, including Saudi Arabia, still peg their currencies to the dollar. Factors that contribute to the dollar’s dominance include its stable value, the size of the U.S. economy, and it’s geopolitical clout. This looks like it’s coming to an end
Six years ago, I posted to offer this and other views:
“A recurring Establishment narrative about rates is the one of “a gradual return to normal”. Do the maths: there can be no return to anything approaching normal. The abnormality of Zirp is unique. Taking a mean between extremes, a “normal” interest rate average across all forms of borrowing is about 6%. The rate at the US Fed Reserve after the June hike was 2%. It may or may not be 2.25% after September. The Fed Treasury’s bond yields go from 1.9% to 3.1% (1 year to 30 year repayment terms), and this year just managing the yield cost will come in at $310 billion. In 2016 it was $203bn. At 6% it would be close to $1trillion, because a higher proportion of the issue will have to be long term in order to sell out. Spending one tax Dollar in 3 on debt management simply isn’t sustainable. Other economies like Italy, India and Argentina would be facing social collapse, higher taxes and hyperinflation to stay afloat. If borrowing rates return to normal, then universal debt and valuation ‘forgiveness’ would be obligatory. The average citizen would not find the experience forgiving on the whole.”
Catastrophe, Apocalypse, Armageddon, Cataclysm, Debacle, Doomsday and Calamity. These nouns encompass the entire rainbow of potential horrors.
And launching the New Normal approach as a weapon against these issues isn’t going to cut it. The surreally abnormal nature of New Normal reflects solely the ridiculous ideas of deserved privilege harboured by the Greediots who got away with “it’s not your money, it’s ours” during the latter years of the 19th century. Those [of whatever profession] must be swept away, and replaced with the orginal Dutch commonsense Borsa mentality. This argued for a socially mutualist approach based on investment in talent and potential as the vastly superior option to redistribution of wealth through Communism….which favours only the lazy, the corrupt, the bureaucrat and the sleazy local Party Creep edging his way up the heavily Brylcreemed pole.
Without the sweep of the new broom, we will never return to the healthy debate of soci0-economic strategy that was – for most Euro, Amerophile and Anglophone citizens before 1963 – the obvious way to do things.
It was the nearest any consciously intelligent life-form was likely to get to peaceful normality in a 3D universe.
In closing, note my use of the word ‘normality’. A lot of Americans call it normalcy. I’m all for accepting the difference between rubber and eraser, bomb and bombed or cookie and biscuit…but not normalcy.
Normalcy is literally wrong. It was one of many utterances of President Warren Harding after the Great War that demonstrated his inability to avoid malapropisms and mixed metaphors, as this original speech from 1920 shows hilariously well [my emphases]:
“My countrymen, there isn’t anything the matter with world civilization, except that humanity is viewing it through a vision impaired in a cataclysmal war. Poise has been disturbed, and nerves have been racked, and fever has rendered men irrational; sometimes there have been draughts upon the dangerous cup of barbarity, and men have wandered far from safe paths, but the human procession still marches in the right direction. …
America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality. It is one thing to battle successfully against world domination by military autocracy, because the infinite God never intended such a program, but it is quite another thing to revise human nature and suspend the fundamental laws of life and all of life’s acquirements…
This republic has its ample task. If we put an end to false economics which lure humanity to utter chaos, ours will be the commanding example of world leadership today. If we can prove a representative popular government under which a citizenship seeks what it may do for the government rather than what the government may do for individuals, we shall do more to make democracy safe for the world than all armed conflict ever recorded.
My best judgment of America’s need is to steady down, to get squarely on our feet, to make sure of the right path. Let’s get out of the fevered delirium of war, with the hallucination that all the money in the world is to be made in the madness of war and the wildness of its aftermath. Let us stop to consider that tranquility at home is more precious than peace abroad, and that both our good fortune and our eminence are dependent on the normal forward stride of all the American people. We want to go on, secure and unafraid, holding fast to the American inheritance, and confident of the supreme American fulfillment.”
So let those of us with square feet be careful not to spill our cups of barbarity, but rather take the right path towards cataclysmal healing, while perhaps excluding the nostrums who fly, quack and land on water like ducks, but just might be the enemies of equipoise.
Harding died three years later….thankfully, before he could confuse the State Department further, or render the English language nothing more than a string of inappropriate forward strides to ensure America’s inheritance of the supreme American fulfillment.”
Until the next time, then.
The Slog 