CRASH 2: Take your partners for the menage a trois waltz….

Portuguese obesity advertisement Manolo Barroso tweeted this morning that he was “signing autographs” on his arrival in Vienna. I’m generally in favour of Austrians, although one must remember that Adolf Hitler emerged from their ranks. I’m thus mystified that anyone Austrian would want Barroso’s autograph.

Perhaps he was signing loan agreements without realising it, rather as the Germans have been doing for the last few years. But enthusiasm for the practice is waning fast in the Reich, Germany having followed the US into the Bad News Cage with Christmas sales for November and December down some 0.7% from the previous Mammontide. December in particular was a wipeout, with retail sales plunging 1.7% from November. The expected number was -0.1%; so – only seventeen times underestimated. A bloody nose for Berlin bullishness…or bullsh*t, depending on the level of your cynicism.

I think we could probably all just about cope with things going more and more obviously tits-up if there was the slightest sign that our politicians’ endeavour out there was an honest one. Sadly, evidence to the diametric contrary roars forth in a rampaging flood of corruption news on the hour every hour here at Slogger’s Roost. Hard on the heels of the Italian MPS bank scandal comes a Spanish one going right to the very top: Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and former IMF managing director Rodrigo Rato are among dozens of MPs fingered by El Pais this morning, in an exposé demonstrating that corporate political donations went to them in cash…and stayed there.

Just to be sure that both the private and public sectors were ripped off, most of the slush recipients then under-declared how much they’d received. Rajoy himself has been trousering €25,200 a year via this scam since 1997; so doing some quick maths, around a cool €400,000 has gone directly to the task of affording the lifestyle he must (I would’ve thought) enjoy very much. Either that or he has a serious crack habit.

And as trailed here under the Pester Hester banner, the Daily Telegraph has today confirmed that more than 90pc of the complex interest rate derivatives sold by UK banks to small businesses were probably mis-sold, according to the findings of a review by the Financial Services Authority. Here we have the guys supposed to be the engine of creative capitalism firing renegade scuds at the creators. You might think they’d need a safe house somewhere in northern Pakistan after pulling that kind of sh*t, but nope: Stephen Hester remains Number One Top Back-Slapping Bloke at the British Treasury.

But the triumph of inefficient greed and generalised bollocks over sane fiscal management and sovereign investment is everywhere to be seen. Since June 5th 2012, the Athens Stock Exchange General Index has more than doubled….the best performance of any bourse in Europe. Greece’s 10-year bond yields are at 10% or thereabouts….down from 30.55% over the same period. And just a few days ago, Hellenic Finance Minister Stournaras predicted a turnaround recovery by the autumn. Yet the entire political class stands accused of tax evasion and embezzlement, the economic figures are absolutely dire, and you’d be hard pushed to find an accountant anywhere in the eurozone who doesn’t think Greece will need another bailout within the next six months at the very latest. (Short of a miracle involving loaves, fishes, and debt forgiveness, it’s a mathematical certainty).

There is a game going on here, and it works like this:

“Most people think it’s about us and them, but it isn’t: it’s about us, them and you.

“We know that you know that we and they are just playing out a charades game in which they pretend to be convinced by our assertions, and we hope that you will get directionalised by them so that they can profit and keep all the signals looking good which gives us a better than 150-1 chance of survival, which as you know is not much better than no chance at all, but the one thing we all know is that anything is better than nothing. So as ever, we expect you to do your duty and fall for every scam they try, to pull us out of the mire: because in the end we’re all in this thing together.”

Earlier at The Slog: The enriching experience of negotiating with Iran

IRANIAN ENRICHMENT: diplomatic community dithers as Tehran presses forward with the enrichment of fissile material

Ashton….dynamic, confident

Iranian officials informed the Vienna-based nuclear watchdog today that they plan to mount as many as 3,132 new-generation IR-2m centrifuges in their development of uranium enrichment. Tehran issued a confidential note to the International Atomic Energy Association’s 35-nation board saying that ‘domestically developed’ centrifuges would be used in the next stage of research. The only logical rationale for so doing would be the production of weapons-grade uranium.

Diplomatic sources in Iran have confirmed that Iran notified the IAEA of its intention to upgrade the centrifuges at its nuclear development site at Natanz. The centifruges would make the high-level enriching of uranium possible. Although the Iranian regime continues to insist that its nuclear program is strictly for peaceful purposes, the signs at every stage of this saga between Iran, the US, the EU and the IAEA have suggested that a more belligerent aim could well be involved. This development will convince some hitherto doubtful opinion that such is the case.

The Natanz plant already uses several thousand centrifuges to purify uranium as a nuclear fuel, but none of them is capable of developing weapons-grade uranium. The ‘P5+1′  group – the United States, France, Russia, China, Britain and Germany – last held negotiations with Tehran in June 2012, but the talks broke down…as they always do, of course, when anyone from the 5+1 dares to suggest that the purely peaceful alleged nature of the nuclear development be monitored more closely by independent observers.

The clear and fairly obvious extrapolation from recent history is that Iran is taking the piss, and does indeed want to develop nuclear weapons – but is as yet quite some way off doing so…..unless there is a shadow operation somewhere thus far unknown to the West. Given the accuracy of satellite photography now, the chances of this being a reality are remote: the only game in town here is getting the Iranian project controlled before it’s too late. So we should all be rather concerned that our very own Baroness Ashton seems to be of pivotal importance, or perhaps even impotence, in the ongoing process.

“We’ve been saying to the Iranians that we want to propose dates and venues in order that we can get the discussions moving as soon as possible,” she blathered earlier today, adding that she is “confident a meeting will happen soon”. So that’s alright then.

The reality is that as long as the Tehran leadership continues to stall and tease (thus making the absence of Western balls apparent to anyone) the easier it is for Benjamin Netanyahu to whip up militarist fervour in Israel.

Earlier at The Slog: Volatility is the new norm

CRASH 2: “We are 100% certain that it just doesn’t matter”.

Truth, Lies and Tickertape in America and Europe

It’s a desperate politician that ever uses the term ‘one hundred per cent’, but yesterday Greek Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras said he was that certain 2013 will be Greece’s last year of recession. Whether it’s a forever thing or just until 2014 we can’t be sure, but speaking to the BBC’s Mark Lowen, Yannis said the Greeks had reason to be optimistic.

Missing from his statement was why they should feel optimistic, but just to back himself still further into a newly-painted corner, Stournaras added, “Towards the last quarter of 2013, we are going to have recovery. The probability of Greece leaving the euro – Grexit – is now very small.”

I would imagine this is what passes for being ‘on message’ in the Eurozone at the moment, and if nothing else it offers an example to French ministers about how they’re expected to behave. In a desperate attempt to disarm a self-inflicted torpedo yesterday, colleagues in the Socialist administration said Labour Minister Michel Sapin was only highlighting faults of the previous government of Nicolas Sarkozy when he said France was ‘totally bankrupt’.

‘Totally’ is another of those ‘one hundred per cent’ statements. Not that you can be slightly bankrupt, but either way retreating from such an observation represents a toughie. His boss Pierre Moscovici said: “What he meant was that the fiscal situation was worrying”, but nobody in history ever rang up the administrators to say the situation was totally worrying. As if to prove the point, a poll yesterday by Le Figaro had 80% of readers agreeing that France was bankrupt. You ain’t outta the woods yet, Pierre baby.

But if things seem anything from rosey to awful on the mainland, things are catastrophic on Cyprus. You know there’s a big issue at stake when they drag in the clerics, and last week the island’s orthodox leader Archbishop Chrysostomos II requested financial assistance for the rapidly sinking island nobody wants to sink. However, Chrysostomos turned towards Russia, asking his counterpart in Moscow to try to persuade President Rasputin to grant another emergency loan….on top of the 2.5 billion euros Cyprus got from Russia just 13 short months ago.

According to Fitch, in fact, the total Cyprus now needs is 17 billion euros, which represents seventeen eighteenths of the gdp there. I’d call that ‘worrying’ even on a good day and 25 mgs of Valium; but then, I’m getting hazy on what ‘bankrupt’ means. I’m also unclear as to when Archbishops began to have numbers like monarchs: does this suggest delusions of grandeur, we ask. Or is he the follow up to the last movie, Archbishop Chrysostomos I, in which the Bish looked West but saw only a Belgian skull writing kamikaze poetry?

We may never know, but it’s good to see that the Phantom Finn Olli Rehn has joined the certainty club. “It’s essential that everybody realises that a disorderly default of Cyprus could lead to an exit of Cyprus from the Eurozone,” he said, adding pointedly and yet pointlessly, “It would be extremely stupid to take any risk of that nature.”

That’s another fine mess you got us into, Olli: but as the irrepressible Mark J Grant pointed out yesterday, a big slice of the formula for Europe is that ‘no country will leave the Euro under any circumstances so not only is money thrown about, but deficit goals are relaxed, relaxed and ignored as demonstrated quite clearly in Spain, Greece, Portugal, Italy and Cyprus. The actual financials in these European countries have gone from bad to worse but it is irrelevant, as there has been a change in the mindset of the Europeans which is being reflected in the minds of investors – which is that “it just does not matter”’. He is of course right on the money, reflected by the fact that Catalonia has just requested another 9 billion euros in aid from Mariano Rajoy’s Madrid Government.

Grant’s brilliant piece was marred only by the growing inability of folks under forty to get the compose/comprise verb right. Something is either composed of, or it comprises. You can’t comprise of something any more than you can compose of music. English is full of comprises, but it does no harm to know the rules.

Knowing the rules has never held the Italians back, and the smell surrounding Monte dei  Paschi di Siena Bank (MPS) is getting more pervasively gaggo by the hour. Siena prosecutors have been looking at the MPS accounts, and found suspicious bank transfers for €17bn in 11 months from May 2008 to April 2009 to various other institutions. That’s a figure I’d rank beyond suspicious and heading towards smoking gun held in bright-red cordite-stained hand. I mean, €17bn is a lot. The money went to ABN Amro, Santander and Abbey National, and has an air of f**king enormous bribe about it.

Talking of bribes, Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanka’s latest round of bond buying will reach $1.14 trillion before he ends the programme in the first quarter of 2014, according to estimates in a Bloomberg survey of economists.

Despite the US being in complete, obvious and unstoppable recovery, Benny the Banke will press on with purchases of $40 billion a month of mortgage bonds, and $45 billion a month of Treasuries – although more than a few Fed officials warn his unprecedented balance-sheet expansion will “impair efforts to tighten policy when necessary” as one mole put it.

I am very happy to be quoted as offering the view that this is a one hundred per cent certainty. But as they say in Brussels, “it just doesn’t matter”. Thank God for that: we are saved.

At the End of the Day

The greedy inefficiency of  lawyers, bankers and bureaucrats that this site (and millions of others) try to illustrate on a macro scale has been converted into an excruciatingly tortuous micro-experience for Yours Truly over the last two days. The basic story here is that I’m moving house, trying with my brother to put my recently late father’s probate in order, and ordering medication/currency funds prior to an extended stay in France.

We need a new word in the language for my ongoing person-to-corporatist Britain interface on this one. Kafkaesque, infuriating, greedy, inefficient, exploitative, or rapacious don’t get anywhere near to the encapsulation of this farrago of foul complication.  Maybe something onomatopoaeic might fit the bill – and boy, what a bill.  A noun perhaps – for example, twangphurrt. Arrgoof. Owbastards. Wothefuckareyounuts. It’s work in progress.

Or there again, you might get a better sense of it from verbs -  like in the TV campaign of a few years ago, “You know when you’ve been Tango’d”.  I know that I’ve been shagbummed, ballsbricked, pissucked, footslogged, jargonackered and brainstoned.

Example 1: The lawyer. To sorting out the simple task of making ten phone calls, reconciling an Estate with no tax due, then submitting same to the DWP and HMR&C axis of highly-pensioned urban guerrillas: £15,000, Ithangyooo. And if there are any complications, well….we’re talking eighteen months squire, but five years tops.

Example 2: The banker. Sorry mate, once he’s dead, we freeze all deposits until someone forces tells us to release them. Never mind all that guff about Little Nell’s brain aneurism requiring urgent surgery: don’t ask me to go against a law giving me medium term rates on £180,000 worth of free money, more than my bonus is worth chummy. Haha.

Example 3: The banker (ii). Ah – right, I see, you want to pay a bill with your own money to a Forex outfit in order to be able to buy stuff while you’re away? (SFX tooth-sucking – Sffffffs ) bit tricky that one. See, if this was a direct transfer to a foreign bank, well – nothing to pay, simple SWIFT, off we go. But as it’s another UK Forex with its account at another UK bank…aah, now you’re talking. Or rather, you aren’t because you need CHAPS, and that costs £25. Mind you, I can set this up now as a regular transaction and then you can do it online, but not on the telephone. Only takes ten days.

Example 4: The doctor-bureaucrat. Your bp’s rather high. Yes, I know we’ve kept you waiting fifty minutes and we cancelled your appointment without offering you another one two weeks ago….but even so, it’s a high reading.  Have you ever considered anger management, medication, meditation, stopping alcohol, boot camp,  blah blah bah lecture lecture lecture oh alright then just this once but do try to cut out food and sex from now on.

Example 5: The pharmacist-bureaucrat. “Collecting it now are you? That’s fine, won’t be a minute”. Twenty-five minutes later: “Sorry, we’ve only got half the things you need…can you come back tomorrow after 11.30? Fine – but we’ve got the private prescription you needed…that’ll be £79.33 pence please”. The following day: “Sorry, it won’t arrive until tomorrow now. That’s absolutely guaranteed – but you can ring us to check if you like….just to be on the safe side.”

Example 6: All of the above. When a person expires, nobody from the Death Registration, Bank Account-freezing, or Probate-administering spectrum of bullsh*t tells you that the only thing that matters is to tell the DWP and the private pension providers that your Dad has expired, otherwise you could be waiting around 30 years from now for lukewarm signs of action.

It’s all down to a traditionally British professional amateurism – overlaid since around 1982 with a greasy film of American amorality: as I said way back at the start of this piece, greedy inefficiency. No free and open, decisive, demand-driven market affects these jerks in any way whatsoever. They cling onto your money, charge you silly money, and cost you money with gay abandon. None of it matters to them, because it’s not their money. All they want is that enough of your money carries on morphing into their money.

The true measure of an economic system is how its professional services behave. Our problem in 2013 is that not only does that sector behave like a sociopathic brat, far too often it is the tail wagging the dog of cultural creativity and ethics. It is the driver of idiotic beliefs about elite rights, minority rights, and two wrongs making a right.

CRASH 2: The mad, the bad, and the hysterically silly

George Osborne yesterday showed once more that he’s ahead of the game by suggesting that Britain faces “a difficult time”, the gdp results were “disappointing”, and thus the Pound is falling…so Brits abroad in the eurozone will “feel the pinch”. The Daily Mail noted all this, and then wrote that the FTSE had ‘smashed through the 6,300 barrier’. No dots were joined up or brain-cells overworked in the reporting of these facts. The phrases ‘currency wars’, ‘selling the Pound to help exports’ and ‘indescribably bonkers’ were absent.

Still, the American ‘recovery’ continues to be the only one in history wherein the Federal Government owes more money every month, over half the public sector pension fund has been thrown at the debt, and the absorption of failed banks by healthier ones is a process taking place 4-5 times a month on average. 53 banks failed in the US last year, and for those of a vengeful disposition, The FDIC  has all the gory details.

Doing this sort of thing, of course, simply means that bad banks infect goodish banks with their toxicity….which quietly moves from one balance sheet to another, becoming yet another lump of pulsating radioactive gunk ready to lay the system low.

But heh – volatility is just so now baby. CBOE Holdings, buoyed by the phenomenal success of options and futures contracts based on its Volatility Index (VIX) is ratcheting up its efforts to broaden their appeal.

“The volatility business is only eight years old, but we see terrific growth,” Ed Tilly, CBOE’s president and chief operating officer, told a gathering of reporters in New York recently. “We see hedge funds, prop trading firms, (commodity trading advisors), insurance companies and other institutional users migrating to the product. It’s very important for us.”

‘The volatility business’. Doncha love it? Here we are, it’s the 21st century, and fully grown up adults are gainfully employed building a new sector specialising in calculating the Fanshit Factor. Buy fanshit futures. Compare your own fanshit fear to the fanshit feelings of other calmer souls. Spot the fanshit index falling as more fanshit sprays your new YSL suit an interesting shade of fanshit. Be a fanshit fan: You Know it Makes Sense. Human beings are never funnier than when examining the interior of their own backsides in search of fanshit.

But desperation breeds criminality too – imagine that. Suddeutsche Zeitung reports that Germany’s bank regulator Bafin has now started an investigation against four German banks in connection with alleged manipulation of the Euribor. So far, the German authorities have only cooperated with the Libor investigations, but this is a new investigation.

Do we need a trial to establish guilt here? Probably not: they’re all guilty. Still, some sort of judicial process would be nice. I mean in the sense of politeness to the 65% of us suffering a pythonic grip while the authorities work out how to save themselves. QE does nothing that it claims on the tin. Zirp pauperises anyone on a fixed income with ‘proper’ investments. Libor manipulation screws the borrower. Welfare cuts play well in the markets while leaving all worthy recipients of it even more desperate than the authorities.

They’re called the authorities, by the way, because although they’re rarely authoritative – and never able to command authority through respect – they do have unlimited authority to do WTF they like to anyone and anything at any time they fancy. This is what makes investing such a joy at the moment. But if nothing else, the competition authorities are still on Michael O’Leary’s case, so it’s not all bad.

Ryanair has put out quarterly results showing turnover, profit and passengers continue to rise. The last of these is an especially good sign for any company in the business of getting people into the air, and predictably the results are accompanied by a bullish statement from chief executive Michael O’Leary. As O’Leary could be bullish about the imminence of an asteroid hit, that doesn’t mean much beyond his infinite determination to take over Aer Lingus.

Mad Michael claims that his plan to sell Aer Lingus routes to two separate airlines meets all concerns raised by the competition authorities. They just don’t address my concerns about the possibility of him being a wing short of an aeroplane, but then I’m picky. I once drove a six hundred mile round-trip to pick up four teenage children who unexpectedly found themselves in the Loire thanks to the immaculate scheduling and navigation skills of Ryanair. It is for this and many other reasons that I still think the price of O’Leary buying the national airline of his homeland should be the authorities insisting on rebranding it Cunnilingus.

But just when you thought Absolute Zero Sanity had been achieved, there’s always the Greek austerity problem to prove you wrong. Charis Theocharis, the new Hellenic revenues general secretary, made an astonishing claim in public last week. During his appearance at
the congress of  the Association of Property Owners, a number of people
started to shout and protest about the many different taxes imposed on
property.

“I have no money to pay property taxes,” shouted someone from the audience.

An obviously stunned general secretary shouted back, “Me neither”.

Last night at The Slog: Newscorp piles the ordure onto Cameron

CAMERON DOOMED (2): the lies and pernicious Times of Rupert Murdoch.

Monday gets even worse as Murdoch serves up some HS2 for the PM to smell

Further to today’s earlier post about David Cameron having trouble inhaling while he is head-down in a hill of sh*t, you may not have thought this possible, but things got worse as the day went on. “I don’t like Mondays” sang Geldof’s Boomtown Rats way back in those innocent days of tertiary and post Punk, but one hopes that – as he sits at home tonight in Number Ten munching on Sam’s home-made Doppia Mozarella with extra Humble – the Prime Minister is capable of being philosophical about how his week got out of the blocks.

Shortly after I posted, various backbenchers, Tory-voting constituencies and new stalking horses popped up to say just how much additional excrement they wanted to pour onto Dave’s hill in relation to his pet project, the HS2 rail link. This is the one that will enable business people only on the train for the cooked-expenses breakfast to arrive in Manchester before they leave London. It’s also the one that is about to take the concept of Nimby to new heights of door-jamb biting opposition.

But the main thing to note here is that Murdoch’s Times once again has the spoon out, and is stirring the heady melange of turds, hate and division prior to depositing it on the only bits left sticking up from the hill, the PM’s calves and feet. The front page lead screamed ‘Tories push high-speed rebellion up the line’: yes, it was another Newscorp exclusive about what the HS2 blueprint will actually say, and why the Party’s grass roots are never going to stand for it. Page 5 had more Tory plotters planning to promote the likes of Graham Brady and Adam Afriyi as stalking horses ‘when’ King David of Camerlot comes a cropper.

You see, this is what happens when you’re the sort of ne’er do well who refuses to stand by Newscorp sociopaths who have broken more laws than Ned Kelly: Rupert will get you. Why else do you think that the Labour Party beyond a few brave backbenchers has an urgent bowel movement every time old scrotum-features tweets something unpleasant about Ed Miliband, or offers warm support to Alex Salmond? Why do you think Jeremy Hunt is Health Secretary, when much of the Tory Party and half the Cabinet would really rather he was the Deputy Foreign Secretary with special responsibility for Bolivian shrimp-farming?

A tame Health Secretary in place is a good thing for an ambitious antipodean-American diversifier to have….and the NHS is another potential medium in which things can be sold – even itself. So today’s Times was an NHS As Brand special. Suddenly, Roop decides, the Health Service is not a sinbin of Commies and truculent nurses desperate to become as incompetently deadly and costly as possible: for while once it was a many-headed dragon burning money, today it is ‘a respected brand the world over with the value of commercial gain for the taxpayer’ (Leader, Page 2), ‘a health service with a lot to shout about’ (Health Correspondent, Page 3), and a thing that should ‘create value and not just be seen as an expense’ (Opinion, Page 20).

You have to hand it to Merdeschlock, when there’s even a passing whiff of more power and mega-money, he is never held back by any commitment to moral consistency. The Digger is the isotopic Dayglo Pimpernel of Mammon: a being capable of both shameless and shameful behaviour at one and the same time -  a spinning electron in two places at once, neither of them where you’d expect him to be, because both are where he would never be if the world was sane.

The idea of taking a pale reflection of what the NHS once was sixty years ago – and selling the image of that to an unsuspecting world – is a betrayal of why the world admired us for it in the 1950s. But much worse than that, it is the worst kind of shallow branding bollocks. And I say that as a man who spent four decades at the branding coalface.

On a smaller scale, and with marginally less nefarious objectives, Sir Richard Branson is already powering ahead in the primary care sector of the NHS. Thus far in my neck of the woods – as I pointed out in a recent grumpy post - things can not ‘only get better’, because they are getting worse by the day. Having had my last appointment cancelled at 24 hours notice after waiting ten days for it to happen, I demanded an appointment this morning and was given one that promised a time 53 minutes before I was seen, as such. During this session, the doctor took my bp and found it to be 160/110.  I got a concerned look, but suggested by way of riposte that next time, she should take it when I’ve been kept waiting 3 minutes, not 53. Medical people really cannot cope with irony. I fancy this might have something to do their belief that God exists, and they are his representatives on Earth.

Footnote: For those healthy capitalists who might gain the impression that I am not of their persuasion, let me say that I am for entrepreneurial creativity, and virulently opposed to monopolism – be it State or neocon. But for those things concerning the social weal (and the promotion of genuine ethics) I am a massive fan of mutuality.

 

Lassoing the ether called David Cameron is impossible. But he will hang himself in the end.

Dave is still dodging, but Boris is coming. Be very afraid.

Brussels-am-Berlin is telling him he can’t have what he wants. Boris Johnson has told Davos his government’s austerity policy is a crock. The IMF says the same thing. As predicted here, last Friday’s ONS economic ‘growth’ figures showed Q3 to be a blip before a triple-dip. The Barclay brothers are now seriously on his case: this morning alone in the Daily Sarkograph, the omnipresent Bojo calls any refusal to hold an EU referendum ‘undemocratic cowardice’, there is talk of a business backlash against Camerlot attacks on corporate tax avoidance, Grant ‘Identity Crisis’ Shapps is already talking about leaving the EU once Cameron’s renegotiation fails, and there’s a feature on the ‘four mavericks’ who would replace Dave once he has fallen from his two-headed horse.

Other omens are ominous, ominous being what omens usually are: he has fallen foul of the Newscorp hydra, the shady old Tories behind Jeremy Hunt are working hard at his demise, Michael Gove already has one foot in the lifeboat, and across the length and breadth of southern England Conservative MPs are queuing up to make way for a return to the Commons by the Mussolini Man in London’s Town Hall. The liberal press can’t stand Cameron, and the latest ‘post-speech’ opinion polls show no appreciable impact on voting intentions: depending on who you believe, the Tories are still 6-9% behind Labour, and the success of the Coalition can be measured by the Liberal Democrats continuing to languish at around 11%.

Holy wagon trains Camerman, looks like we’re surrounded.

The thing about Dave’s speech is that nobody now can remember WTF he said. And this is the way with our Prime Minister: his mind and his mouth move in obfuscating ways. In the current climate, I think I’d advise that this is both a weakness and a mortal illness. I am unable to discern any strengths.

The heads-up is this: we’re going to have a renegotiation in which the other side won’t be listening, then an election, then a referendum about whether we leave or stay in the EU two years after an election Mr Cameron may well lose. It’s that straightforward – as straightforward, in fact, as his recreational habits, his relationship with senior Newscorp executives, the influence of  Jeremy Hunt and George Osborne on his actions, and what he really thinks about the gathering paedophile storm down in Barnes.

Over that same period, it is very likely bordering on almost certain that the world will fall into a deep economic depression….with or without the collapse of large parts of its banking system, the dangerous inflation of at least one sovereign currency, and the default of perhaps three major Western States.

The sloppy lightweights who surround this ethereal man are no doubt arguing that will o’ the wisp is the only way to be under such conditions, but they could not be more wrong. The only way to be is searingly direct and frank, for one simple reason: the worse things get, the more the man with myriad answers but no solutions will be seen as a brief interregnum rather than a national crisis leader who can pull us through. Cameron talks a great deal about Churchill – and come to think of it, except for their differences on guts, principles, vision, diplomacy and statesmanship, they’re really quite similar. Foot off irony pedal, proceed to next paragraph.

The advantage would swing to Labour, were it not for the fact that its leader is no leader either, and has been outflankedon Europe (for the time being) by Cameron’s yes-no-possibly-definitely-unshakeably-wobbly speech last week. The real coming man at the minute is Boris Johnson. This is, I’m sad to say, what I most dread short of Harriet Harman succeeding to the Throne.

Stay tuned.

Earlier at The Slog: Davos drivel decoded

DAVOS DECODED: The five bits of thunderclap-trap we should all ignore

‘More than $114 billion exited the biggest U.S. banks this month, and nobody’s quite sure why’. So said several prominent websites today.

While the sentiment is accurate, it’s not as if there are no reasons why at all. The US’s unlimited bailout for current accounts held there came to an end on December 31st 2012. So some nervous (aka far-sighted) folks in Dollar accounts will want out. And in a more general sense, Europe is repatriating money at the minute with other projects in mind: for example, buying top-end properties…which are still going through the roof around the globe, as reported first here last September.

This isn’t to knock those who spot such things: I don’t have time to do it, so I’m grateful for the hawkeyes of others. I’m also grateful for the knowledge of others still who tell me the know-all stuff that was in the previous paragraph. But the problem remains as I’ve been diagnosing it since the turn of the year: the big guns are putting more and more fixes into every sector where they have a vested interest in value manipulation. The only difference now is that they’re being more overt about it. As a reliable US source wrote to me today, ‘Draghi and Bernanke have killed all the signals of stress in the financial system and the rapidly evolving bubble-itis in the equities markets of the US, UK, and EU; the next symptom to appear is rapid hemorrhaging of account balances, and then margin calls at hedge funds leading to selling of all kinds of uncorrelated and seemingly safe assets.’

Nothing is safe in 2013, and no call must make sense. The stock markets are way overvalued, but that doesn’t mean they must fall. Gold is way undervalued, but there is no longer a law that says it must rise. US and UK bond yields are farcically low considering the medium to long term risk, but they too can be smoke-mirrored into another Universe where big is small and old is young.

However, these things can’t be continued forever. That is absolutely impossible in a three-dimensional existence.

There was a very interesting (often for the wrong reasons) piece in the Telegraph today by Kamal Ahmed, The five things you need to know about Davos 2013. Ahmed noted that ‘….the general mood of Davos has been optimism….American fundamentals are better, the eurozone crisis has abated….Dr Xiang Bing gave an electrifying presentation on Thursday, claiming that it was a total “misconception” that China operated a closed, state-governed economy…..Much of the conversation has been dominated by how countries are approaching their currency as a tool of growth….The big message from [Russia] is that it is a place to do business. The  economy is expected to grow from $2 trillion (£1.3 trillion) in 2011 to more than $3.2 trillion in 2017……Mark Carney, the next Governor of the Bank of England, has been in Davos…..[his] big fear, I’m told, is that controlling shadow banking will not be high on politicians’ agenda. Why? Because they don’t understand it.’

It was an interesting column chiefly for the almost entire lack of common sense in much of the sentiment reported. For those who find this harsh, I pose the following:

1. Optimism based on US fundamentals and an abating euro crisis is not the kind of optimism I’d ever want to sign up to. On the whole, I’d rather be in Harare.

2. Xaing Bing can boff on until the 12th of never about Chinese genius: without markets to export to (and with weak consumption at home beyond the wealthy 7%) recession and unrest there are inevitable.

3. Countries that use their currencies as ‘a tool of growth’ need to learn the law of retaliation. Growth comes from making and delivering stuff of high quality at the right price, not farting about with fiat paper.

4. I am at a loss to understand why Russia is ‘expected’ to grow given that world demand for energy (on which it heavily depends for export income) is about to fall off a cliff.

5. If politicians still don’t understand how mad it is to create a tenfold inflated poisonous funny-money stratosphere above the oxygen of real commerce (in which leveraging levels are at times over 10,000 to 1) then it may well be time to start digging wells and rotivating the fairways of the world in favour of potatoes and walnut trees. Because let’s face it, carbs and proteins taste a whole lot better than bullshit.

The simple point I am trying to make here is this. Even if the MoUs are tampering with the speedometer, it doesn’t mean the cliff has disappeared. It just means we no longer know precisely when the Ford Edsel will career over it and onto the shards below, exploding on impact. It emphatically does not mean that the automobile will sprout wings and soar high into the infinite peaks of eternal economic growth. It really doesn’t.

Let us now don long trousers and recap the five things you should know about the bollocks coming out of Davos: the US and the EU are trading insolvently, 9 out of 10 Chinese can barely consume a Hershey Bar let alone ten billion solar garden lights, selling your currency and buying those of competitors is a zero sum game, Russians are good at gas, fraud and espionage but not much else, and derivative bazookas have a tendency to blow up in one’s face.

To those who insist on seeing the Davos attendees as a tight-knit regiment of psychotic humanity-cull fanatics, I can only offer this observation: if that really is their plan, then we are all as safe as houses. For people who can cling to optimistic delusion in full sight of an Andes of evidence to the contrary couldn’t hit the side of a barn with a peanut from three inches away.

Related: The hide and seek of Crash 2

ELM HOUSE PAEDOPHILES: Cyril Smith named, but Coalition in fear of evidence closer to home about Rocks Lane parties

Brittan worked for Cameron, promoted Clegg

Brittan….speculation about Rocks Lane scandal

As the late MP Cyril Smith was last night named as a suspect in the case of paedophile parties at the Elm guest house in Rocks Lane Barnes, media and Westminster sources close to events broke cover to suggest that “a sense of great unease” permeates senior Coalition Ministers this weekend. The Slog investigates why.

Although most people have now forgotten the event, two and a half years ago David Cameron – unable to find anyone who’d take the job as Trade Minister – appointed Leon Brittan as a consultant to do the job ‘full time for £500 a day’ – or roughly £170,000 per annum. The former Thatcher aide worked in the role from September 2010 until February 2011, taking time off from his Vice-Chairmanship of UBS investment bank to do it.

This is not, however, the only direct link Mr Brittan has with the Coalition. He was also Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s first political boss in Europe, and on LBC recently David Mellor mentioned that Brittan had promoted Clegg: “He [Clegg] got the job because Clegg’s father was a very close friend of Leon Brittan” said the former toe-sucking Conservative Minister. It is not clear whether Clegg promoted Brittan’s cause for the 2010-11 consultancy job, but the LibDem leader admits himself that Mr Brittan first introduced him to Paddy Ashdown.

Brittan first became a controversial figure during the Westland Helicopters affair in 1986. He resigned when he was shown to have leaked a letter critical of the minister at the centre of the scandal, Michael Heseltine. Heseltine stormed out of Cabinet, but was later said by some to have felt ‘framed’ by events during and after the events of that time. Sources told The Slog late last year that Heseltine’s appearance in the ‘little black book’ of American paedophile pimp Jeffrey Epstein was “a plant designed to discredit him”, but to my knowledge nobody has ever accused specific individuals of the frame-up. (The Daily Mail rang Heseltine at the time, who told them he had “no memory of even meeting Epstein”.)

However, what is clear is that several photocopies of what purports to be an Elm House ‘regulars’ guest list have been circulating around the internet over the last two weeks. They clearly feature the name Leon Brittan. Shortly after the Westland affair, Whitehall and Westminster openly gossiped about Margaret Thatcher “banishing” Brittan to an EU bureaucratic post. Clouds of accusation have followed the former Trade Minister ever since, including on one occasion rumours about “irregularities” in the contents of a diplomatic bag coming from the EU into Britain.

Last November there was speculation in media circles that the ‘senior Tory politician’ accused by Steve Messham might have been Leon Brittan. Then the entire episode became clouded by a BBC supplier wrongly hinting that Lord Alistair McAlpine was one of the men concerned. In 2000, a £13m investigation by Sir Ronald Waterhouse QC made a series of recommendations after finding ‘systematic abuse, a climate of violence and a culture of secrecy’ existed in Welsh children’s homes. The Elm House ‘parties’ are thought to have been regular affairs in the 1990s. The enquiry took statements from 240 people abused as children in 40 homes, and mentioned 200 people who thought to be paedophile child abusers. Many of the names discussed were never released.

Also during November last year, The Slog posted an extended piece running through the names of senior MPs suspected by some of having paedophile proclivities. At that time I specifically offered the strong view that Ken Clarke (one of the accused) had quite definitely been wrongly accused. Earlier this week, a senior media contact close to the issue confirmed to me that the Clarke accusations “are complete tosh”. This in turn raises a question mark again over soi-disant ‘whistle-blower’ and former child actor Ben Fellows, who continues to accuse Clarke of things that appear to be obviously false. Six weeks ago a Smoke Signals piece here suggested that Fellows might be working for a third party in this regard. This has never been substantiated.

The abuse trail first exposed in the Commons by Labour campaigner Tom Watson seems at times to be an unfathomable spaghetti of plot, rumour, stitch-up and cover-up. But strong suspicions of ‘a paedophile ring with close links to Ten Downing Street under Margaret Thatcher’ remain. The raid by police two weeks ago on the premises of those batting for the abused has raised further concerns about a potential Establishment desire to seize any damning evidence of active paedophilia among Britain’s political class.

Related: Richmond Council ‘supplied Elm House kids for money’

At the End of the Day

There are some news stories where one knows it is offside to laugh, poke fun, or otherwise parody what’s been going on. But at times, such bad taste can be brought to bear in the support of long-held views. What you are about to read is, I suspect, about as incorrect politically as it gets. But that doesn’t negate the very obvious point it’s making.

The football situation in Egypt at the moment is, to say the least of it, inflationary. Last year, two bitter rivals met in a match there, and fighting broke out between the two side’s supporters that resulted in the deaths of seventy people. In order to administer justice in this case, an Egyptian court earlier this week sentenced a further twenty-one of those involved to death. I would not have relished being the forensic copper charged with sorting out who killed whom in order to arrive at the verdict that occasioned these sentences. To be blunt, I think such a process would be impossible. To my mind, all the Egyptian court did was needlessly raise the death toll to ninety-one. I am not and never have been a fan of State vengeance when it comes to the death penalty: killing is wrong, period. But Egyptian Islamics disagree, and it’s their country, not mine.

As a result of the sentences meted out however, a further twenty-seven citizens (and counting) have died in the riots that followed. So the Roll-Call of the Dead now stands at one hundred and eighteen.

The snowball effect being in play, there is no limit to where this might end. Protesting the fact that twenty-seven people have been ‘needlessly mown down by fascist police supporting the anti-democratic forces of the military’, it is highly likely that murderous attacks on police stations will follow by Islamist factions, during which there will be clashes between religious and secular forces arguing about who should cast the first stone. The army will then come in with tanks to sort it all out, and by the end of next week it is perfectly possible that the Egyptian population will be down by around one thousand souls. Full-scale civil war may be no more than a month away. Perhaps the Western media will call it The Arab Premiership.

And my point? It is this:

 Can anyone imagine a riot at an Israeli soccer game in which 70 die, and an Israeli court then whacks a further 21 with the death sentence?

No, neither can I – and the reason is simple: the Israelis would never behave, either in sport or judicially, in such a manner. Jews are not, on the whole, unruly – and they don’t kill each other about anything very much, least of all football.

I have friends whom – I know perfectly well, and why – would disagree with me violently about the politics of the Middle East. But the fact of the matter is, the politics of the Middle East are insoluble – and none of the combatants either Jew or Arab are to blame. The post World War One European powers in general are to blame, with particular excrement deservedly to be dumped onto the heads of the clowns in the British FCO for their role in the Sykes-Picquot accord of 1926.

My chief concern here is with Realpolitik. Would I rather rely upon an Egyptian Arab or an Israeli Jew to take a reasoned position on how and why to be my friend – and a loyal ally? I would without hesitation plump for the latter. Notwithstanding my support for the Palestinian case, I have my reasons for the Jewish preference, the foregoing explains why, and nothing is ever going to shake me from them without the use of fingernail extraction torture and so forth.

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The Slog has long been following the inexorable rise and rise of Benito Johnsonini. As early as 2008, I pinpointed him as the most dangerous politician in Britain alongside Harriet Harmblokes. Some months back, The Slog was one of the first out of the blocks to spot the start of his leadership campaign. Well, things are hotting up.

Bojo trolled over to Davos today and told an audience including Cameron and Osborne that what Britain needs is hope and infrastructural spending, not austerity and flatlining growth. Mr Johnson, of course, doesn’t know WTF he’s talking about (worryingly, neither do the other two) but such considerations have always been peripheral to the board game that is politics in the media age. The London Mayor now has the scent of power in his predictably flaring nostrils, and has become The King over the River.

For me, one of the most disturbing developments of the last eighteen months – accelerated by the Olympics – has been the emergence of Boris Johnson as a credible saviour of Britain. Among the tabloid-scanning knuckle-draggers of Essex and Daily Mailers of Surrey, the blonde Turk is these days described as A Good Bloke, A Straight Talker, A Chap with Balls, and The One Man Who can Get Us Out of All This. He is none of these things, but with the tacit support of unelected Murdoch and the overt influence of unelected twin Barclay Sarkopaths, the Johnson ticket will continue to be pushed. As things get worse in the coming year, his candidature will begin to seem increasingly valid among the numpties of our septic isles.

Always beware the politician with a plan containing several points. At Davos today, Johnson set out a seven-point plan to get Britain back on track. Always beware the politician using military syntax. Austerity, BoJo told his audience, was “not the stuff to give the troops”.

You have been warned. You will be again.

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Last but not least, Greece. I refrain on the whole from recycling individual tragedy stories about Greece, if only because once you start, there are so many, The Slog would become The Sorrow Avalanche in short order. But they’re real enough, and as usual involve the vulnerable about whom the mad folks care nothing: babies, old people, the otherwise infirm, and the mentally ill. (Sometimes, of course, they are myths hijacked by the Far Right and Far Left as a cross with which to assault foreigners of every hue…but not often).

However, I present to you tonight – courtesy of the usual trustworthy sources – a truly sick construct inside the unfortunate Hellenic Republic. The European Stability Mechanism is due to to hold a teleconference on Monday to confirm the disbursement of Greece’s January bailout tranche, worth €9.2 billion. Of this, €7.2 billion will go to help banks that are, for all real purposes, already dead. Very little of the residue will relieve the plight of the Greek people. Tax evasion en masse by the Greek élite, the abject poverty of everyone else, and the slaughtered economy will act together – and mean that the treasury income is bound to be miles below target. The ESM leaders’ sole reaction to this uncomfortable reality has been to confirm that further cuts to pensions and wages will therefore be essential.

The only phrase applicable to this thinking is ‘mad, bad and dangerous’. It is nothing less than “Get up now, one-legged horse, or I shall be forced to disembowel you”. It is the exact same madness that produced Auschwitz, Soweto, Zimbabawe, Haut Garenne, Ceausescu’s orphans, and Lidice: the cul de sac at the end of a long road leading directly back to the First Big Lie.

Perhaps at some point in the future, there will be a legal specialism called Currency War Crimes. Or perhaps Warozone Crimes. It would be nice to think so….but much nicer to imagine an educational discipline devoted to avoiding any repeat, ever. Maybe we could call that Neoconomics.

CRASH 2: the hide and seek of it all

Italian banks have been hiding massive derivatives losses…so now MPS bank needs a €3.9bn bailout. The Talvivaara Mining company of Finland is secretly mining uranium, and covering up dangerous accidents. Both the Germans and the Swiss think the Americans are lending out or selling more than they actually hold in gold, thus raising the spectre of ‘fiat gold’: hence their growing desire to get the gold back before things get totally out of hand. Almost nobody believes the figures for Spanish bank liquidity – and the authorities have relaxed their liquidity requirements in order to get real about this.

All these stories have one simple commonality: deception. Alongside the trend identified by The Slog in recent weeks (the élites are becoming less bothered about fessing up to fibs) is another more encouraging one: the MSM has been rather more on the ball about spotting the mendacity in the first place.

What the main ‘old’ media still aren’t doing, however, is addressing specific reasons why the deceptions are necessary in the first place. In fact, this isn’t even slightly hard to do. The three main élite activities taking place at the minute are:

1. A scramble for energy and new-industry sector resources;

2. The appropriation by sovereign banks of gold as a bulwark against insolvency; and

3. the injection of more unelected technocrats into key positions in order to help carry that out.

Realities which might cause a derailing panic have thus been hidden. But reporting the instances and symptoms of this process is becoming increasingly irrelevant: it’s very good for hits – if you’re chasing hits – but as always, that gets in the way of intelligent analysis of how the rest of us should respond in the face it. And anyway, those ‘in charge’ haha are no longer that fussed about the media finding out about such stuff: the die is cast now, there’s little we can do to stop it….and they know that.

I think any investor or survivalist must therefore apply two critieria to any investment – whatever it might be: first, do I really understand all the fundamentals of this sector? And second, is anyone dicking about with those fundamentals for commercial or sovereign/central bank gain?

For me, silver is looking a better and better opportunity. So using the advice offered above, remember that the metal is prone to at times terrifying volatility…that’s the downside. The upside is that Mario Draghi, Mervyn King and Ben Bernanke do not (as far as I know) have plans for it. Nevertheless, other directionalising folks much nastier than any of us may well have such plans.

As always, caveat emptor applies: ignore what the buggers say, but oggle what they do like a hawk.

Finally, as a trailer to what will be coming soon at The Slog, I leave you with this thought. Every top fiscal Wally around the Western world is busy predicting confidently that Zirp will be maintained until such time as things improve. It is my considered opinion that the main emotion in play during such assertions is hubris. Hugh Briss is a loud sort of cove, but prone to delusions of grandeur: he is the Icarus of our world, convinced he can fly close to the sun, and control its effect. He cannot.

Stay tuned.

Earlier at The Slog: the unalloyed joy of privatisation

Winning ways with privatisation

My local gp Group Practice has been taken over by Virgin Health. Clearly, this branding is trying to tell me something. I suspect it is trying to tell me that, in future, the practice will only cater for the health of virgins.

Just over two weeks ago, I rang to make an appointment with my doctor. I was told he had left. Nice of them to tell me, as there goes my gp continuity for the last two years. A new doctor, Dr Jones, would see me…..a week on Friday. A week on Friday had almost arrived when I got a phone message saying Dr Jones was ill, and could I ring for another appointment. Yes I could, and yes I did. He couldn’t see me for another two weeks, so I asked for another doctor. The same diagnosis. But I could ring at 8 am and see if any appointments had been cancelled for that day.

Hang on, I pointed out, this cockup is not my fault is it, so why am I being asked to do all the work here: surely it’s your job to fit me in? Doris Stepford repeated her previous answer.

Privatisation is supposed to improve service and increase choice. Neither shows any signs of happening in this saga to date. Wait until I tell them I want five prescription orders at once because I’m going away. I shall keep you informed.

Banks are of course technically private (with the exception of worst offender RBS) and so one expects waste to be curtailed and efficiency to be good, does one not? I arrived home this afternoon to find four letters from Lloyds TSB. Each one was telling me the same thing, that they hadn’t been able to fulfil a transfer due to lack of funds. The account supplying and lacking the funds are both theirs, allegedly handled on my behalf to make life easier. Obviously, Ward L2 never talks to Ward L1.

I don’t know where to start with them on Monday in relation to discussing this one. So I won’t. I shall simply walk into the branch and close all the accounts. They will lose £1400 of free sight-money a month, and I shall lose 20 points of bp. Everyone’s a winner.