TURKEY: Press freedom flourishes beneath the tailored leather shoe of Recep Erdogan.

Bekir Coskun, a militantly secular columnist for a Turkish mass-circulation daily, Habertürk, was sacked last month. Pressure from the government had nothing to do with it, said the newspaper’s owner: it was Mr Coskun’s “aggressive style”, which violated the newspaper’s editorial line. Oh yes, that was the problem.

A steady cull of anti-government journalists from the mainstream press has reinforced the view that Turkish PM Recep Erdogan is intolerant of criticism. There was a huge row in September last year, when Aydin Dogan, a powerful media magnate, was slapped with a huge fine for alleged tax fraud (with accrued interest, the fine stands at $3.7 billion). Mr Dogan’s leading titles have since demoted or fired some of their shrillest anti-AK hacks. Dogan-affiliated journalists say they face constant pressure to temper their copy. Mr Dogan is reportedly in talks with Rupert Murdoch, among others, to sell his media empire. (See Slog previous re Asil Nadir and his tax problems).

 “Under AK [Erdogan's uling Party] the press has been declared the enemy,” says Ferai Tinc, who runs a media watchdog. According to the International Federation of Journalists over 40 Turkish journalists are in jail and around 700 others face trial, many of them Kurds accused of spreading separatist propaganda. One, Irfan Aktan, was sentenced to 15 years in prison in June for quoting a rebel of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Mehmet Baransu, an investigative reporter who has exposed a string of alleged coup plots and episodes of army incompetence, has faced 40 separate court cases and received six convictions in the past 15 months.

The AK government has reneged on promises to ease tough media laws, but then reneging once he has the upper hand is a major part of Erdogan’s style.

David Cameron’s idiotic statement in favour of Turkish entry into the EU will come back to haunt him – as the Munich Agreement did Alec Douglas-Hume. And as for Hague – well, I despair. He’s clearly decided a career in consultancy, memoirs and speaking tours beckons.

IRISH CRISIS BREAKING: SLOG FORECAST VINDICATED AS NEW BANK BAILOUT ESTIMATE COMES IN AT 50Billion EUROS.

THE ESTIMATED COST OF IRELAND’S BANK BAILOUT HAS RISEN 16 BILLION EUROS IN 12 HOURS.

Last night, Ireland Taoiseach Brian Cowen put the the Irish bank bailout bill at 29.7 billion euro.   This morning’s Daily Telegraph estimated 34 Billion. The Slog said higher – maybe over 40 billion.

The cost of bailing out the country’s banks may ultimately rise to about 50 billion euros, under a “stress case” scenario for Anglo Irish, according to figures published by the country’s finance ministry and the central bank in Dublin this lunchtime. The base case estimate is about 45 billion euros, the figures show. Allied Irish may also need an additional 3 billion.

The scenario also suggests Anglo Irish may need up to an additional 6.4 billion euros of capital, rising by another 5 billion euros in the event of unexpected losses. And Irish Nationwide Building Society may need a further 2.7 billion euros.

Last night The Slog posted a piece based on inside information that was highly critical of Dublin’s estimates for a bailout. We specified:

‘ 30….35….40 or more: these things have a habit of going up. A deficit alone at a fifth of total economic output, alongside a total debt of six times the Irish gdp…’

This morning’s earlier piece quoted the same source as observing:

“”There’s a lot of pie in the sky with numbers between Lenihan and Cowen” said our informant, “but these institutions are haemorrhaging cash. The bailout will nudge the debt to just over the size of the gdp…”

 Both The Slog and its sources remain dubious about this claim of Ireland being ‘funded until July 2011′. This means, in layman’s terms, the Government having no access to an overdraft at all for nine months. In our view this simply isn’t feasible.

Here at Sloggers’ Roost, however, we are still asking the same (largely rhetorical) question: where are the ECB cavalry? Where is Trichet and his much-lauded AAA ESFS….the loan facility that dare not speak its name?

I don’t give a f**k about David Miliband.

Eight articles about David Miliband in the Daily Telegraph today was nine too many for The Slog.

 

That feels much better now – and, I would imagine, mirrors what over 95% of Britons think.

In my hierarchy of importance, the Gurney One comes after banks, globalism, sovereign debt, Lloyd Blankfein, The Irish crisis, Trichet, Van Rompuy, Lawyers, Accountants, Architects, Islamists, Piers Morgan, Rupert Murdoch, Nick Clegg, Barack Obama, Silvio Berlusconi, Nicolas Sarkozy, Christine Lagarde, Harriet Harman, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, George W Bush, Bill Clinton, GPs, flies, goats, Jacob Zuma, Vladimir Putin, ISPs, Orange, Google, Verizon, Man United losing, Victoria Beckham, vegans, and Mahmoud Ahmadinnejhad as something worth getting upset about.

He is and always was an over-promoted and hyped politician, and probably the most pompously incompetent foreign secretary we’ve ever had. And allegedly, Hillary Clinton has the hots for him – so that tells you all you’ll ever need to know.

EURO/IRISH CRISIS: Markets suspicious of Euro rally as Irish news worsens.

 MARKETS PESSIMISTIC AS DUBLIN CANCELS BOND AUCTIONS.

An informal sample of currency and credit market managers approached by The Slog yesterday and this morning told us they regard the euro’s rise against most currencies as “naked manipulation”. Specialist websites (Xe.Com for example) are also carrying headlines offering the same sentiment. ‘Markets suspicious of euro rise’ was a fairly typical headline.

“The ECB [EU central bank] is running scared of overt action on Ireland” theorised a top UK-based currency trader, “If they pile in [to Ireland] with stabilisation fund cash, the market will panic. They’re spending the money on the currency to try and calm people down. It makes sense to do that, but you’d walk a long mile to find anyone here who believes this is anything other than Trichet buying his own currency.”

This must make the ECB a holder of the worst investment portfolio in history: billions in junk bonds, billions of bad debt in euros, and increasing holdings of the shared currency.  A sour comment from one credit manager – “guess who’s gonna pick up the tab for that one?” – was stated more politely by Xe.com as it noted, ‘it is very difficult to reconcile the euro’s remarkable climb with the lingering financial and economic troubles the EU continues to face’.

But the euro-hoovers may be outsold today when they take in some of the Irish Government’s comments over the last 24 hours. The Slog’s posting of last night has been widely picked up across financial websites, and our emerald mole is proving accurate so far.

It now transpires, for instance, that Irish Nationwide is in a position as parlous as that facing Anglo-Irish.  The Irish regulator was also (I’m told) keen to point out to Brian Lenihan yesterday that Allied Irish ‘is in need of urgent and immediate additional capital’.

“There’s a lot of pie in the sky with numbers between Lenihan and Cowen” said our informant, “but these institutions are haemorrhaging cash. The bailout will nudge the debt to just over the size of the gdp”.

Rather more baffling to many people was the quietly slipped in decision to cancel its bond auctions in October and November. The mantra about Ireland being ‘fully funded until late June 2011′ was trotted ou as reassurance, but as I noted last night, what happens then?

“It smacks of the one-legged man deciding not to climb Everest for the moment” cracked a Paris-based US credit manager last night.

This morning, the FT’s headline records an early drop in the euro, and the Anglo-Irish rescue coming in at 34b billion euro – 5 billion more than Lenihan’s estimate of yesterday. I’d give you the link, but the FT is paywalled these days. Rather like the ECB, I’d imagine.

ANALYSIS: AS ECONOMIC COLLAPSE ERODES THE INDIVIDUAL’S POWER STILL FURTHER, HOW WELL IS ‘BIG’ WEATHERING THE STORM?

Banking’s ‘recovery’ is being used to enable the Big to get even bigger – at lower and lower prices.

I watched a somewhat obese and casually uncaring US analyst on a video-conference panel this morning. It’s what I do rather than than listen to the stream of banal inanities emitted by BBCNews. I’d rather sniff iron filings than watch BBCNews any more.

He was bald as well – not that this matters – and he had that drawl very clever Americans have to understate (and thus underline) the importance of what they’re saying. And what he was saying was that things were looking just great for the M&A sector in the forthcoming Quarter. M&A, by the way, stands for mergers and acquisitions, while ‘forthcoming’ is American for ‘next’.

The sector was already enjoying ‘relaxed’ money, he added. Come October, he felt, “we’ll be swimmin’ in the stuff”. I’m serious: that’s what he said. I found his innocent insouciance chilling.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this about M&A, and when you think about it, the bloke’s predictions make entire sense. Or rather, they are an inevitable outcome of the policies being conducted by fiscal managers in the West today. That’s not sense as such – but it is a logical extrapolation.

Let me tell you what zero rates (ZIRP) and QE have done so far in terms of energising the flow of credit, and generally aiding a broad socio-economic recovery. Zilch.

Now let me explain what these strategies have done for some elements of our ‘risk’ capitalist system – which in terms of wealth generation, by the way, can still knock agrarianism and communism into cocked hats….when it’s not being stitched up for the benefit of around 0.6% of the global population.

Zero rates have allowed big fat banks to sit on their big fat buttocks and earn 2-3% on Government debt with their free bailout money.
QE purchasing any old bond rubbish has allowed lenders to get out from under mad loans they made to Greek tavernas and Cypriot donkeys entirely scot-free.
But zero rates have also enabled already omnivorously huge big businesses to get hold of cheap money, and use it to fund M&A, thus making them even more corpulently corporate than they were before.
And handling/arranging these marriages of convenience has enabled big fat merchant banks to become morbidly obese on the fees they earn.

Zero rates have also rendered the biggest single demographic – Silvers aged 55+ – devoid of earned interest. (These are the folks Charlie Beanstalk was earlier this week ordering to spend the money they are no longer getting, so that this M&A fun can so that the recovery can get under way some year soon.)

QE purchasing is debasing the value of the money you and I have been assiduously squirrelling away all these years, taxed as it was so that Lord Humphrey & his Pals could in the dark future sit on their pimply bottoms in high-walled Sussex back gardens, and listen to the street-fighting going on in the distance as rival gangs fight it out for the last anorexic potato.

It is also wrecking the balance sheets of central banks everywhere, because it consists largely of buying worthless junk bonds with which to paper the Boardroom walls over there in Bankfurt.

And yet, and yet….the M&A sector will shortly be awash with all the cash that its tumescent, CEO onanists might desire.

I think it’s time to add some numbers here, so that the facts underlying my intemperance can be brought to light – and you too can become one of the high bp sufferers currently littering the chaotic, underfunded A&E departments*of the western world. (*US readers – ER Rooms).

Last month, UK lending in Sterling currency to small and medium business contracted by £400 million. In the Atlantic EU, Ireland is being brought to its knees as the result of insane bank lending to it in general, and  the Anglo-Irish collapse in particular. In the Mediterranean EU, Greece, Spain and Portugal are about to empty the ESFS, ECB and IMF as a result of insane lending to them by largely Franco-German banks, with a fat dollop of help from the inmates at Barclays. And in the States, while Main Street Momma and Poppa businesses face fund starvation and foreclosure by the very banks they saved from self-destruction, Ben the Bernanke and his Fedelves are about to start another round of money-printing, this time more publicly than the stuff they’ve been doing since March.

But in the rarified stratosphere that is Growing by Getting Bigger, there is none of this air of desperation that infects the rest of us.

The Dow Jones Nasdaq website totally supports Mr Baldyfatty’s optimistic outlook. In the second quarter of this year, Dealogic’s statistics showed that the total US M&A value was $552.7 billion – a major pick-up from 2009, but still less than the expected YOY growth of 43% in the third quarter….to  an eye-popping 730.3 billion bucks. Now that is big bucks. In fact, let’s be specific: that’s what Bernanke is going to spend making it even easier to pull this kind of stunt each and every month in the planned next round of US QE.

In the Europe we had previously thought of as Bankruptcy in a Basket, says Nasdaq, M&A in August – normally a slow month as Vodka Palaces cruise the Mediterranean in search of Government ministers to corrupt – was up 100% on August 2009. In Q2, EU M&A grew 6% on the previous quarter. In Q3 it is forecast to grow 13% on that. Cross-border M&A in Europe grew by 60% this year so far over 2009 in total.

Globally, bank-sponsored management buy-outs (MBOs) more than doubled. The BHP Billiton hostile bid for Canada’s Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan alone racked up $43.4 billion. In Asia, the new kids are learning fast from the old lags: there’ve been 9,000 M&A deals in Shanghai so far in 2010, totalling just under 50 billion Yuan. Beijing has spoken: the Chinese Government has laid out plans to promote industrial mergers and acquisitions ‘in a bid to accelerate economic restructuring’. In other words big = good.

Well I’m sorry, but when Beijing thinks something might be good, then risk capitalists who believe in the individual’s right to generate wealth creatively need to think again. Specifically, they need to think: what the Bejesus is going on here?

In simple terms – and simple doesn’t mean simplistic – you do not have to be mathematician of the year to work this out: banking and business are using our money and Government-sponsored ZIRP to get even more dominant, quasi-monopolistic and multinational than they were before. They have taken the money we foolishly gave them, and turned a Dunkirk rout into a D-Day triumph in two years flat.

Big is not good. Big M&A destroys shareholder value in 43% of cases (says that hard-line Moscow Commie magazine the Economist) and lays off much-needed breadwinners in almost 95% of cases. Big business stuffs the retail trade with stock to keep out better but smaller competitors. Big Retail in turn kills communities and personal-service retailing wherever it rears its Elephant Man head. And above all, Big Banking helps Big Business to accelerate this process by giving it cheap money to merge with other Big Business. It does this not because of some wicked global plot, but because dumb Governments chock-full of yet more bankers give Big Banks Free Big Money with which to facilitate these Big Deals.

The Slog has been saying for some time that the future of politics no longer lies in Left v Right. The Libertarians insist that the future will be one of State v Individual, but that’s because most libertarians have little experience of business. The future will be this simple: Controlling Big v Independent Small.

In the UK right now, Controlling Big = Edache Labour and its Union bully-boys. Unfortunately, even the Coalition of the Cleggerons is Controlling Big – but in the shape of Banks and EU. This Government is not going to control either of these undesirable elements….any more than the last one did.

Independent Small has few weapons – but one is still hugely powerful: the internet.

This is why, last month, The Slog rattled on so much about the coming demise of net neutrality. Allow Big to take over – to both control and censor the Web – and it is game over for Small Independent.

But on our small canvas here in Shakespeare’s Sceptred Isle – outside of the virtual, and on the ground of the real and ordinary – there is a further option: the creation of a new Party. A  more intelligent version of America’s Tea Partiers – and our UKIP – that would favour the innovative over the formulaic, the economic over the Fluffy, the family over the State, a new world over the old EU, merit over mad pc, believers in risk over banks, sane over same….and above all, small over big.

WHY THE IRISH CRISIS WON’T BE CLEANED UP BY EYEWASH.

Irish bailout: The European Central Bank is damned if it doesn’t, and dead if it does.

Although Brian Cowen, Ireland’s prime minister, said yesterday, “We are determined to do what’s necessary to achieve international confidence and build domestic confidence”, so far it’s proving hard to do either. There are obvious commercial (Anglo-Irish) and fiscal (the huge debt and deficit) reasons for that – but they aren’t being helped by an EU hierarchy desperate to save itself.

The European Central Bank (ECB) is keen to focus on the Anglo-Irish Bank problem,and pretend that the deficit Elephant is elsewhere. Yet the Anglo-Irish issue is pretty damn big on its own….no matter how small the Irish keep saying it is.

For Standard & Poor’s, the ‘very least’ the Anglo-Irish bailout will wind up costing is €35bn.
Standard & Poor’s credit analyst Trevor Cullinan told Bloomberg yesterday that the total cost of bailing it out would exceed the agency’s previous 35 billion-euro forecast.

“Estimates which were previously strongly against our 35 billion now seem to be coming in line with that recapitalization cost. So the government’s kind of Plan B with Anglo means this 35 billion euros could be exceeded.”

But today finance minister Brian Lenihan lobbed in another €5bn for the bank, and told the media that all was now hunky-dory…at a total of €28bn. Then RTT news said the final bill ‘could easily top €30bn’.

In this morning’s Spiegel there is a rather more dispassionate view:

‘Wages and salaries in the public sector have been reduced by up to 15 percent, leading to savings of over €3 billion. But what is €3 billion compared to the €40 billion that a single bank could end up costing the state? This year, Ireland’s deficit will rise to well over 20 percent of GDP, a much higher level than Greece’s. To make matters worse, this figure only takes into account a small amount of the total cost of the bank bailout. In early October, the government intends to finally disclose how high the final bill for the Anglo Irish Bank will be….’

30….35….40 or more: these things have a habit of going up. A deficit alone at a fifth of total economic output, alongside a total debt of six times the Irish gdp: what does Brussels have to say about all that?

The EU’s first spin-attempt re this one has been for financial commissioner Ollie Rehn to put out more bollocks this morning as follows:

“”I know that the authorities have already quantified the consolidation packages they plan to implement in the following years, and is adopting already now the measures that will over the next years make sure that debt remains on a sustainable path. The Irish labour market is well-known for its flexibility, which will help in the adjustment. Being in the centre of the global economy and having a flexible and well-educated labour force are strong preconditions for growth.”

Mr O’Renn shows signs of suffering from a serious touch of the Blarney there; certainly Moody’s think so – the credit agency has today added some poison to its obvious doubts by saying that it would downgrade Irish debt to junk unless the Government ‘guarantees all bondholders against losses’. That clearly isn’t going to happen, and anyway would be a job for Brussels in general and/or Tricky Trichet’s ECB in particular.

The ECB is virtually doing this anyway: on its own admission it has been buying Irish bonds over the last few days as if they were four-leaved clover. But I know for a fact that the Cowen Cabinet  was ready to go public on its need for EFSF funds two days ago…and was blocked from doing so. Just as the IMF was told that it had not Been There two weeks back.

Yesterday, Cowen told the media that “The National Treasury Management Agency have confirmed that we are funded right up to the middle of next year and I think it’s important to emphasise that point.”

This too is complete bollocks: how can the NTMA confirm any such thing….do they know what bond yields are going to be by then? If they don’t even know what one bank bailout is going to cost, how can they estimate what sort of debt they’ll be servicing at that time? And what happens after June 2011…a miracle on the scale of loaves and fishes? A cure for financial leprosy?

I’m the last person in the world to put Ireland down. But there comes a point at which – even for the Irish taxpayer – it’s better to hold your hands up and admit it’s a fair cop.

The EU gargoyles aren’t going to allow the Irish to do that: they know that a confession now would put the whole eurozone (and most of its banks) in a perilous position. And so in short, this grisly tableau must continue….but not for long.

REVEALED: HOW BERNANKE PROPPED UP THE STOCK MARKET

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NEW REVELATIONS SHOW MARKET STITCH-UP BETWEEN US FED & BANKS

_________

‘Stealth QE’ in fact never ended

Shock exposures circulating in the US last night seem to show clearly that a covert operation between the United States Federal Treasury and Wall St’s major banking firms not only produced a falsely inflated stock market ‘rally’ this summer, and as late as last month: it also continued an undercover QE programme without the knowledge of either Congress or the taxpayer.

American QE1 officially ended last March, but between April 1st and 22nd July, the Fed’s own stats show that it greased the New York markets by continuing to buy Wall St banking debts – to the tune of $130 billion during that four-month period. Over a year, given lighter trading in some summer months, that would be equivalent to a half-trillion dollar QE exercise. QE1 contained $1 trillion worth of expiration purchases – so in real terms, a secret arrangement has continued QE at a roughly 50% level. The mini bail-outs ended in August – by which time the White House team had already decided on some form of QE2 anyway – details of which The Slog covered yesterday.

What makes the allegations especially damning is that ALL the big Federal Treasury bank payments were made during weeks when loss-making options were due to expire. Thus the major banks had most of their trading mistakes settled….the price for this action being that the monies must go back into stock purchases. This they duly did – creating the rally that never was. Effectively, investors who became bullish during that time have been cheated by the US Government….a scam the taxpayers underwrote without any knowledge of it.

While firms such as Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, J P Morgan and BoA were paying their staff vast bonuses, ordinary Americans were struggling to avoid foreclosure – but unwittingly ensuring the payment of those bonuses. The banks simply couldn’t lose.

Now, however, Slog sources in the US insist that Ben Bernanke’s secret slush-fund operation started up again last week, when some $15-20 billion were again ‘given’ to the primary banks.

“It’s a sweet deal,” an informant told us, “in that just like with the banks buying low-cost US securities, everyone wins. The Feds clear all the debts and the Banks keep buying the stocks.”

The story in its most cogent form can be read at US professional website Zero Hedge, but during the last 24 hours The Slog has used a combo of maths and contacts, both of which support the story’s veracity. In turn, the ZH piece also confirms the extra ‘pumping’ done by the Fed last week ‘to ramp up the market’. 

Related: How Governments have ZIRPed us.

Irish Government may now face defeat on Budget.

The West’s democracies have a weak grasp on power….just when it needs to be strong.

In a recent client circular, JP Morgan said pressure on Ireland’s bond yields ‘reflects concerns about the fiscal cost of bailing out the banks and the likelihood that more fiscal adjustment will be needed over time, and that it may need to be more front-loaded.’ The spread between the yields on 10-year government bonds issued by the German and Irish governments widened to a fresh high of 4.5 percentage points Tuesday, indicating that investors believe there is an increasing risk that Ireland will be unable to repay its debts.

Things seem to be going from bad to worse in Ireland. But political instability also lies ahead.

While struggling to retain the confidence of bond investors, the government faces another battle: to maintain its majority in the Dail, the nation’s parliament. It seems increasingly likely that the government will lose its majority in the early months of next year, and that voters will have to choose a new administration.

Finance Minister Brian Lenihan’s forthcoming budget is proving increasingly unpalatable to some members of his own party. Last weekend, Mattie McGrath—now an “independent” Fianna Fail politician after voting against the government in a bill to ban stag hunting—threatened to withdraw his support for the coalition unless planned health cuts in his constituency were reversed. Independent Noel Grealish made a similar threat last week regarding hospital services in his constituency. If he and Mr. McGrath refused to support the government in future votes, it could reduce the government’s parliamentary majority to 82-80.
The opposition will in turn call for by-elections in three empty parliamentary seats, and given its historically low popularity in recent polls, they could easily lose them….producing a minority Government.

The opposition Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny senses blood.

“We’re nearing the end game in the lifetime of this government,” he said. Fine Gael, which like Fianna Fail is right-of-center, this week decided to limit a “pairing” arrangement where an opposition party member abstains from voting if a government backbencher or minister is ill or away. It will only offer it for Council of Europe and north-south Irish political meetings.

One intriguing thing most Western governments now have in common is a relatively weak hold on power. The Irish situation also pertains to a greater or lesser extent in France, the UK, America, Portugal and Germany. What weak governments tend to do is court popularity rather than tackle core problems. Not exactly what one needs when trying to persuade the markets about one’s determination to cuts costs, repay, and get the economy back on its feet again.

ANALYSIS: The europarrot is dead. He’s not resting, he’s dead.

The elite gets up to its old tricks as belief in Ireland evaporates.

The cost of insuring against defaults on European government debt surged, led by Ireland, amid concern the bill for bailing out the region’s banking system is growing. Credit-default swaps tied to Irish bonds jumped as much as 30.5 basis points to a record 519 after more than doubling in the past two months. Default swaps insuring Anglo Irish’s senior bonds rose 24.5 basis points to 960.5, a record based on closing prices.

Credit-default swaps on Portugal increased 12.5 basis points to 442.5, close to May 6’s record-high closing price of 461, while Greece climbed 20 basis points to 833 and Italy was up 4.5 basis points at 201.

In such an environment, the logical thing for gold to have done at the market’s opening this morning (BST) would’ve been a further steep rise in price. In fact, it fell off a cliff from $1293, falling seven bucks in the first hour of European trading, before evening out again. This will be dismissed by commentators as ‘profit taking’, but that doesn’t make sense: why take profit on a precious metal whose only way is up?

There was some strategic selling of gold, for sure…almost certainly by the boys in Bankfurt. This could potentially act as some form of protection against mass desertion of the Bonds market in favour of gold, and thus the finger of blame must point at Monsieur Trichet’s piggy bank. And sure enough, the moment New York opened, gold shot up to $1309. 

The EU hobgoblins are trying now to do for eurobonds what the US did three years ago to defend the Dollar, but the market is far bigger than the European Central Bank. Anyway, the ECB has clearly been selling gold out of one door and buying both euros and bonds out of another….because the euro hardened against major currencies despite a tidal wave of bad news throughout the Mediterranean and Ireland. Thus, in selling gold and buying euros, Jean-Claude Trichet is up there in the Bonkers League, knocking Gordon Brown off the top spot.

In historical terms, when it comes to the eurozone, the Russians are pouring down the Kurfustendamm, and the only thing between them and defeat is a brigade of short-trousered Hitlerjugend. If there was an ounce of decency anywhere in Brussels or Frankfurt, this criminal waste of taxpayers’ money would be stopped now, and nature allowed to take its course. Where is there an Albert Speer when you need one?

Forward to the past with EdAche.

This afternoon marked the moment in history when Labour finally began to believe its own spin. Never in the field of conference politics was so much praise heaped upon so little inspiration by so many.

“Today we saw Ed the leader,” was clearly the script, and true to form several senior Labour luminaries said these very words like so many Stepford wives. Listening to them, I first of all wondered if they’d been watching the same speech as me, and then realised with a slight frisson that I was watching the process of mass delusion so common to barmy religious cults. Had the whole assembled gathering taken a death-pill in admiration of Ed the Miliband of Hope, you couldn’t have called it entirely unexpected.

There have of course been so many of these new dawns for Labour since the only asset they ever had was dragged screaming from the limelight to pursue new careers as estate agent, arms dealer, banker, after-dinner speaker and writer of blockbuster fiction. Gordon of Ourdoom was himself relaunched many times with speeches that weren’t half bad – speeches which became “mesmerising” once the cameras were on a senior delegate. But this effort from Mr Ed was well over half bad.

The speech was delivered competently. That’s it. As The Slog predicted yesterday, however, it became both bogged down and utterly directionless as as Miliband’s didactic style and high-spin moral compass set out to please several types of mad person. Where Blair was once a master illusionist, Labour’s new leader was a masturbating delusionist.

On the podium in front of him was last night’s late-night cobbled-together slogan, ‘A new generation for change’. Straight from the Labour Bollocks Mint, it showed that in fact nothing had changed, and this was almost certainly another Change We Can’t Believe In. People often take the mickey out of my former profession of advertising, but at least we knew when to give the client stern advice. My advice to the inventor of this effort would have been to take a course in current events, after first of all shutting up for the next five years at least.

He kicked off with lame jokes about people giving him advice about not wearing a red tie, after which it got steadily worse: back not forward, perhaps.

“We will pursue rigorous reform in a gradual manner” he began, “and not tackle deficits too quickly while spending to ensure that the cuts are spread out fairly in order to blur the focus of our economic strategy for full employment and an empty Exchequer. I will personally work to show that fleeing from the Nazis in order to be the sibling of my extraordinary brother was not in vain, and also to work day and night for everyone in this country who belongs to a Union, the land that gave so much to my parents and ensured that I, a simple Oxbridge intellectual, might one day lead this Party beyond awful New Labour and all its great achievements to another world where women must be a third of everything but the needs of real people like asylum seekers must be met by reaching out to the ordinary middle class people like me who don’t vote Labour any more and don’t get married but not forgetting our core support…..”

Actually, he didn’t say any of that, but he might as well have done. This afternoon I said to my wife Jan that if by some ghastly twist of fate this bloke winds up running Britain (and given what’s coming, this could so easily happen) then I’m selling up and leaving. She usually takes these things with a pinch of salt, but on this occasion she knew I meant it.

Surely no electorate could do such a thing, I hear you think. Wrong. Whatever you might make of Ed the Younger, he’s not as bad as Brown, and he’s exceedingly unlikely to call his core supporters bigots – even if Charlie Whelan, Jack Dromey and Harriet Harman are exactly that.

And now in the way of light relief, I can announce the results of The Slog’s What Can We Call Him contest that has had the nation gripped by torpor for the last three days. I shall announce the result backwards while wearing a wire-wool wig and a string of pearls.

While here in Slogger’s Roost we were particularly taken with Mildred, Ed Militant and The Other One, the surprise winner due to a late surge of Welsh Nationalist support is Captain Kayos, who suggested EdAche.

UK OUTPUT: Encouraging news that isn’t really encouraging.

At some time during today, you’re going to see media reports based on the latest ONS data. They will talk of gdp growth and an improved balance of payments, and then – depending on the media’s agenda – eother sound muted or deliriously happy. Neither will be right.

The latest figures show the deficit is under better control (it could hardly have been worse than it was prior to the Election) and that while still massive (£7.3 billion) at least it isn’t growing. That is encouraging news: without question, it would not have happened under Gordon.

But two things should be noted. First, the narrowing gap does not mean we did more trade. It’s merely a reflection of a quirky income increase based on stuff already in the pipeline. And second, the real trade gap – ie, the real-world exporting of goods – got another 5% BIGGER to £23.2 billion.

The trade in goods is where I always tend to go for a true picture, because like the ‘economically inactive’ lot in the unemployment figures, it represents actuality rather than fiddling. Thus the truth remains the same as ever: the real economy is uncompetitive globally. During their 10 or more years of sunshine, Labour did nothing about this. But before them, the villain of this piece remains the Mad Handbag, who never gave any thought to what might replace the Unionised industries she hated so much.

Mr Bean is alive and well and living in the Bank of England. But he’s not alone.

Across the world, the impression grows that those in charge are both brainless and blind.

When people at the top say things as daft as Mervyn King’s deputy did yesterday, there is a sense of double shock for anyone paying attention. The first reaction is “Don’t you know anything about real people?”; and the second one – in many ways, more pertinent – goes along the lines of “Be careful what you say, chummy – otherwise you might face some very searching questions about what good ZIRPing has done for anyone or anything beyond bankers and their balance sheets”.

What Charlie Bean said was, “What we’re trying to do by our policy [zero interest rate practice - ZIRP] is encourage more spending. Ideally, we’d like to see that in the form of more business spending but part of the mechanism that might encourage that is having more household spending. So, in the short-term, we want to see households not saving more, but spending more…”

During the Q&A that followed, he observed that “Savers shouldn’t necessarily expect to be able to live just off their income in times when interest rates are low…” A stunning insight Mr B, but if they don’t have any other income, how are they supposed to start spending. You gonk.

Charlie’s basic salary is £250,000. He gets paid this (along with his fat Sir Humphrey pension) because of his skills in not noticing that ZIRP has made no difference, not spotting that UK citizens don’t believe a word of what any banker says any more, and not being able to see past next Thursday. As I write, the £ has risen 4 points against the euro in 20 minutes of trading, the direct result of a certainty now accepted by the Irish Government that the country needs tons of ESFS – and fast. And in that environment, he wants people to go on a spending spree?

But Bean is far from alone on the financial landscape: for while he was railing at spivs and gamblers last week, Vince Cable should also have had a go at the WUTS* apparent throughout banking and Treasuries the world over.

We’ve already covered Christine Lagarde’s loose grasp of aggregates. Now in the States (I was informed late last night) it seems that Bernanke has been given the go-ahead by the White House to buy up $100 billion of worthless assets a day in an attempt to get the show back on the road. This is, effectively, dribbling the money away in a strategy doomed to have no effect beyond medium-term inflation….and in my view, long-term hyper-inflation.

Meanwhile, the little men in Beijing are slugging it out with the equally little men of Tokyo, in a currency war of words that can only spread to the Swiss franc (via Brazil) in the end. And while the US grumps about the Yuan’s over-valuation, Ben the Bernanke is being given carte blanche to devalue the Chinese creditors’ pot. 

All this needs but one catalyst to set off a nuclear chain-reaction, and it looks as though Ireland is about to be it – not because their indebtedness is out of control, but because (a) the need for ESFS is going to make it even less possible for the Irish to borrow; and (b) the frightening exposure of the European banks to this bad debt must – no, will – be far too much for eurozone members to stop. Too Big To Fail doesn’t apply when there is no way to stop it. 

This entire shambles has been the direct result of insane targeting, greed beyond the dreams of those who suffer from compulsive greed disorder, blind hubris is the face of inevitability….and too many of us distracted and apathetic about it happening. The incompetence is mind-blowing: but it’ll be nothing compared to the crashing dominoes about to clatter around the globe. The final breakdown predicted by The Slog in 2006 is now moving into Stage Three. Hang on tight.