At the End of the Day

Every day, I read increasingly desperate rationales in the media – put forward by those who are motivated personally – and/or paid – to toe the line in terms of opposing any and all forms of financial regulation. They are of the highest quality as examples of creative invention, but utter bollocks when it comes to any kind of rational, empirical analysis. Indeed, if this amount of creativity was applied to actually solving our econo-fiscal problems (as opposed to explaining them away) a solution might be in sight. But the blind defence of what is becomes in the end indistinguishable from turning the blind eye to what could be.

So tonight I want to put a simple proposition to all Sloggers: why should financial services as a sector of commerce be the unique exception?

As I have written several times previously, the mere word ‘regulation’ is spat forth by the City of London and Wall Street chaps as if it might be a highly contagious form of Socialist leprosy. But the commitment of these idiots to The Golden Calf makes them oblivious to the many other equally vital areas of life where regulation is, um, equally vital. It might well be instructive to look at a broader professional world to which total deregulation had been applied.

Take medicine, for example. Imagine applying the ‘expertise’ level of the clowns running HBOS at the time of its implosion to the issue of surgical procedures. Triple heart bypass operations being performed by lobbyists, and complex intravenous brain investigations being undertaken by former market researchers…..my goodness me yes, what a splendid case history of deregulation that would’ve provided. Very much in line, really, with Mao’s Cultural Revolution, wherein peasants became doctors and doctors worked in the paddy fields.

Or the legal profession. How about a no-limits Court procedure under which every form of hearsay is admissable, and anyone can pitch up to a Grand Jury hearing with nothing beyond GCSE Geography with which to defend his or her client? You may think this parallel extreme, but if so you should think again: the four most senior directors of HBOS – during the period of its descent into obscene debt and taxpayer rescue – had not one single banking qualification between them.

Let’s have a deregulated architectural profession. Never mind all this tedious red tape about load-bearing calculations and proper foundations: this kind of crap is getting in the way of growth. Get the bloody project built, like they do in India….then we can praise the bravery of the rescue services as one small child is rescued, and the diligence of the police in arresting nine developers. What we won’t be able to do, however, is bring back the 79 people killed.

My own former profession of advertising was heavily regulated. Do I think it would’ve been a good idea to deregulate it? I do not: the business was full of reptiles who would’ve declared open war on the consumer the minute regulations were removed.

We’ve seen the way things are among ‘professional’ (but totally unregulated) politicians, have we not? Broadscale corruption, cash for questions, cash for access to Ministers, fiddled expenses….and then yet more fiddled expenses. Should politicians face exams and regulations? Yes – actually, I think they should. They should face serious examination on their knowledge of social anthropology, commercial experience, and Right from Wrong. And then they should be warned before standing that any dishonesty involving taxpayers’ money will be rewarded with serious prison sentences…not poncey open prison flower-arranging jollies à la Chris Huhne.

Does anyone remember deregulated Murdoch at work? Illegal phone hacking was Murdoch’s work. I don’t want press regulation: but I do want gargoyles owner like Murdoch out of the UK’s media offering for good.

If you want to know what a completely deregulated world would be like, then just go on the internet for half an hour. There you will find that free = expensive, unique = commodity, guaranteed = zero warranty, and hand-made = slave-laboured.

Not only should financial services not be the exception, it should be the main industry to be gone over with a fine tooth comb.

My message tonight for all those who would deregulate commerce in all media is this: first, re-engineer the culture so that people know how to behave. Then come and talk to me about deregulation.

Earlier at The Slog: The swivelling eyes on offer in 2015

2015 GENERAL ELECTION: the final showdown between olive oil and swivelling popeyes

In a week when the European Commission passed a law to ban olive oil dipping bowls from restaurant tables on the grounds of hygiene, Nick Clegg said that having a referendum to decide whether or not we should remain in the asylum “would hit jobs and growth”. The two events taken together do explain why Slick Nick  feels so at home in the EU. Speaking later to a carefully selected audience of single-cell molluscs, Mr Clegg asserted that “A vote on our membership of the EU at this critical point in our history will lead to an invasion of lizards armed with clubs hitting every job they can find in the most vicious manner imaginable. As for growths, if you have one anywhere visible I strongly advise you to stay indoors and not go anywhere dangerous like a polling station for example”. Nick Clegg is the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

A close ally of David Cameron meanwhile has called Conservative grassroots supporters “mad swivel-eyed loons” who are forcing Tory MPs to take extremist positions opposing gay marriage and Europe. The Minister – “a close confidante” of Mr Cameron who didn’t want to be named – is very probably Mr Oliver Letwin, well-known habitué of London litter bins for the use of Top Secret document disposal, and the brains behind elected police chiefs. I personally find that cv far more extreme than being against gay marriage and the EU, but each to his own. David Cameron is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Across the corridor in the House of Common Criminals, a close ally of Ed Miliband has urged the Labour Leader to pave the way for a coalition with Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrats. The man (happy to be named, as he is rapidly becoming the forgotten man of British politics) is Peter Hain, the man who built his career on being carried away by policemen and digging up cricket pitches. “We need back channels on this issue,” Mr Hain added – not a wise choice of phrase in the current Parliamentary environment. The former South African said that he would be “fighting tooth and nail for an overall majority” but thought it was unlikely to be achieved, possibly because there won’t be any job-hitting or growth-jabbing, which he admitted he found “disappointing”.

Five days ago Ed Miliband said that Britain “must stay in the European Union”, and three days ago David Cameron said that both Miliband and Clegg were “sticking their heads in the sand” about the need for a referendum: they should, he insisted, be prepared, like him, to extract their heads from the sand some time in 2017. In the light of these and many other bits of evidence, former Labour donor Lord Sainsbury called Miliband “average” as a politician, and earlier this week Mary Riddell called him “the Doctor Who of British politics” without satisfactorily explaining in the article what she meant. His speech of earlier in the week was found “disappointing” by those present, “although he was good when taking questions” said one lady. A middleweight Labour MP confided that he “cannot believe that Ed wants to lead us into an Election where everyone wants out of the EU, and we are the only serious Party ruling out a referendum”. Ed Miliband is the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition in Parliament.

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Just sort of let the aggregate of those facts sink in a bit, and then carry on reading.

After the 2015 General Election, we could very easily find that we have somehow – probably inadvertantly – voted in a Coalition between one man who believes olive oil pourers to be a real and present health hazard, and thinks referendums hit things; and another man who may have ambitions to be a Time traveller, but won’t even contemplate leaving a madhouse where olive oil pourers are banned. Whichever way you cut that combo, it doesn’t look good for reality, or indeed Italian restaurants.

On the other hand, we could wind up (as the lesser of two bubonic plagues) with another term of Dave the man, who thinks only swivel-eyed loons are against gay marriages in the EU…and who could very soon afterwards find himself ousted by people who look to me for all the world like half a dozen loons whose eyes never close, on account of swivelling 24 hours a day.

The other runner in the 2015 contest will be a Party led by Nigel Farage, a man infamous this week for his ability to shoot off both feet at once in Scotland….by putting the phone down on a BBC Scotland interviewer, and calling SNP supporters fascist scum. He too might become part of a Tory administration, but if he did Dave would have to go. Thus we’d be left with Government by Seven Swivel-Eyed Loons.

One vaguely comforting thing about this prospect is the, to my mind anyway, very strong likelihood that these coalitions will cancel each other out in terms of electoral support. But when it comes to the choice before the electorate, it’s going to be between one team led by those who have a morbid fear of olive oil bottles, and another crowd dead keen to hand Rupert Murdoch the job of BBC Director General. I wonder what the turnout will be.

It’s hard to see how anyone could construct a Nazi-Soviet pact between those two opposing barmy armies, and that’s why I have a terrible fear that something else might emerge. There are, after all, three people in this Eton-Wall-Game-Meets-Underwater-Rugby unpleasantness who have one thing in common: they would much prefer to stay in the European Union rather than leave it. And they are, of course, Cameron, Miliband, and Clegg.

Yes, I’m afraid the Grand Coalition is a real possibility. United by their common ground on the Olive Oil Pourer issue, this Unholy Trinity would easily command a majority, leaving only Monday Clubbers, Ukippers and Stalinists to pass the time in Opposition with daily eyeball-workouts. It would break the mould of British politics. And every olive pourer in Europe.

Earlier at The Slog: More food for thought on market manipulation

THE SATURDAY ESSAY:What else are they manipulating?

Answer: FOOD PRICES

Too much food costing too much money is killing people

Sector by sector, the truth is at last trickling out: ICAP, Libor, Gold, Currency values, oil…..none of them are natural markets, all of them are being ‘directionalised’….as in, manipulated for the good of the few – and never for us. But the most important commodity we have probably represents the most criminal scam of the lot.

The ‘price’ of gold plunged another $33 net yesterday. As usual, the drop made no sense. As usual, it took place on a Friday. As usual, the two steep declines happened when the London and New York markets opened. Those who have spent half a decade or more presenting clear signs pointing to manipulation of everything from fiat currencies to interbank rates have in the last year gone from fringe conspiracy theorists to vindicated commentators.

If it can be manipulated to the advantage of those in charge, then it will be. One thing big business can’t manipulate is the weather. And the weather is behaving strangely at the moment. The Italian Giro Cycle Race director Mauro Vegni confirmed to Agence France Presse yesterday that snow and winter-like temperatures on the upper flanks of the Col du Galibier may force Giro officials to remove the historic climb from this Sunday’s 15th stage. Yesterday was the 17th of May. Multiple freezes in U.S. hard red winter wheat country have further reduced the expected size of this year’s crop – after drought screwed up the region last autumn and during the winter.

So it makes sense that the wheat futures are suggesting high prices, right? Er no actually, it doesn’t: global cereal production will increase 6% to 2.708 billion tonnes in 2013 from the previous year, said the usually definitive Food & Agriculture Organisation (FAO). For while Asia is consuming more wheat now, to meet that demand more countries around the globe are growing it.

Yet the very same FAO yesterday pointed out that World food prices rose during April…for the second straight month. Now obviously, there’s more to ‘food’ than wheat, but let’s get this into some kind of perspective. Here in South West France, for example, we have had a cold and wet Spring: but every tree I can see is heavily laden with fruit. We are going to have a bumper harvest. Indeed, wholesale food prices should fall this year, according to the world’s large agricultural trading houses – like Glencor, which expects bumper crops in the US and South America. USDA says 125m more bushels of corn will remain in silos before harvest, an estimate that should see prices tumble.

But world food prices still rose for the second month in a row. In Brazil, for example, the price of tomatoes has gone through the roof.  “I’ve had this restaurant for 48 years and this has been the worst price rise I have seen,” said Walter Taverna, whose restaurant Conchetta is a fixture of São Paulo’s historic Italian district, Bixiga. Where I live in France, not far from me is Marmande – Europe’s biggest producer of tomatoes. I go to the markets and supermarkets to buy fresh almost every day: my observation is that tomatoes have gone up by a good 25% year on year. In India, wholesale onion prices rose 50-60% in December and are up sixfold from a year ago. But the Government admits there is no crop-failure reason for this.

The fact is that there are umpteen ways to manipulate the price of food: it’s done by governments, by agribusiness, by Wall Street speculation – and then by supermarkets. (It’s also done indirectly via oil-price manipulation, which affects the cost of using machinery to crop, clean and prepare everything from apples to prunes. But we did that story already).

Many governments around the world depend on big cash crops to balance their deficits and amass foreign exchange. Argentina has had money problems forever, and there is blatant evidence to show that big farming there, hand in glove with government, has been hoarding soya beans given that the price has been depressed for a while now. Although Argentina isn’t a major-league heavy hitter in the global soyabean market – it accounts for about 10% of world production – its warmer temperatures allow it to crop early… and meet demand from huge net importers like China – until the US starts harvesting in the second half of the year. They’re hoarding the crop right now, and so prices are rising.

The last fifty years have seen a decline in the numbers of small to medium-sized farms across the world. Last year, deep in the constipated bowels of Brussels, a committee set up to find out this sort of thing came up with a frightening statistic: only 6% of European farmers are under 35. Farming is going out of fashion. Or rather, family farming is: agribusiness is going from strength to strength. Or from bad to worse, depending on your moral outlook. In 2004, the market share for the Big Four agrochemical and seed companies reached 60% for agri-chemicals and 33% for seeds. Seven years earlier, the figures were 47% and 23% respectively. The concentration continues – again with help from Big Government. The European Union is currently trying to slip through a law making it illegal for home growers to trade in seeds.

Today, it is impossible to separate the dominance of agribusiness from the power of hedge funds. The United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food Jean Ziegler recently indicted multinational companies for badly aggravating the food crisis and raising food prices. Speaking in Geneva, Ziegler told journalists, “Until early March, prices of many food articles followed the demand and supply forces. But since then there has been an explosion in prices which is largely due to the role of big corporations and hedge funds.” These big agri-corporations, he said, had huge stocks and, aided by hedge funds, had indulged in speculative activities so that “food access decreased for poor people while the profits of these companies were inflated”.

I’ve never met Mr Ziegler, but his empirical data clearly reflect my shopping experiences since February. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) agrees that there will be food-price inflation in 2013: it forecasts a 2.5 – 3.5% increase for all wholesale and retail food prices in 2013. But the snag with this USDA forecast is that such an increase is way, way below what we’re seeing on the ground.

Some of this reflects the concentration in turn of food retailing into the five main UK multiple giants, the four in France, the five in Germany and so on. They all have form when it comes to screwing both farmers and consumers on price to lift their margins: the UK’s main shops nearly killed off the entire lamb farming sector some years back, and both milk and eggs have seen farmers in poverty while shoppers pay through the nose. Not only does this exacerbate the trend towards large agribusiness, it also lets the Tescos of this world look dirt cheap on, say, pork products in order to pile more margins onto other foods and thus end up making more money.

But the most damning evidence points the finger clearly at Big Business and Wall Street. According to a report in January 2013 from the World Development Movement, Goldman Sachs made about $400 million betting on food prices last year. (In 2010, they made a billion doing it). But using the word ‘bet’ implies that Goldman took a risk. In fact, the firm has a track record of buying long and in bulk to artificially push up prices…..and making a quick exit before the late price drop then inevitably occurs. By this time, of course, the folks who need the food to be cheap may well be dead. But Lloyd Blankfein is doing God’s work, so we mustn’t get in his way.

As always, the banks and hedgies have an answer for the anti-speculation lobby most obviously represented by Oxfam: they (Deutsche Bank and Allianz being prime movers here) argue that there “is no evidence that price rises are to do with anything beyond population growth and rising demand”. It’s a Jeremy Huntesque answer, because most of the evidence in fact points the other way. Indeed, other banks are clearly sensitive on the issue: Oxfam’s Belgian office has targeted KBC Bank and Dexia’s exposure to agricultural commodities, and has had some success in France by getting Credit Agricole and BNP Paribas to drop their food ETFs. In the UK, Barclays too has withdrawn from food commodity trading. This last, of course, is yet more backwash from the Bob Diamond era, and on message with being a nice clean rather than nasty cheating bank.

These are, however, small victories in the scheme of things. If pro-speculation people say price rises are solely to do with demand, then they need to explain this: the market for hedge betting and speculation in global food prices began to take off big time around 2007. Up until then, there had been considerable success in reducing the percentage of malnourished humans and deaths from starvation. But as a recent FAO report shows, ‘Since then, global progress in reducing hunger has slowed and levelled off….the undernourishment estimates do not fully reflect the effects on hunger of the 2007–08 price spikes or the economic slowdown experienced by some countries since 2009, let alone the more recent price increases’. It’s not necessarily causal, but it is correlated. It requires a better answer than “there is no evidence”.

But the most damning data of all come from those with no agenda beyond stating the problem clearly. The fact is that 867 million people are woefully malnourished, yet there is enough food in the world today for everyone to have the nourishment necessary for a healthy and productive life. One in eight humans on planet Earth do not get enough food, making hunger and malnutrition the number one risk to health worldwide – greater than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.

There are myriad reasons why this is. But among these are definitely (1) The decline in smallholding farms that produce foods cheaply and locally, (2) the globalisation of food pricing putting the cost beyond the reach of the poor (3) hoarding by governments and agribusiness to wait for the best price, and (4) deliberate price-directionalisation by speculators.

Frederick Kaufman, author of Bet the Farm: How Food STOPPED Being Food told The Daily Ticker last October that the price of global grains tripled from 2002 to 2012…..after decades of stability, and just two years after deregulation allowing derivatives food trading was applied. “Something new has come to this market and we’re seeing absolute levels of volatility that we’ve never seen before,” Kaufman said, “the exponential growth of commodity derivatives. U.S. derivatives trading in wheat alone has surged from $10 billion to $300 billion in less than a year….speculators are completely overwhelming the commodity futures market, subverting a market that worked so well for over a hundred years.”

Again, it’s a seriously accusatory correlation. And as one finds so often with the financial community, all attempts to reverse the deregulation of the trade are met with a wall of lobbying cash. Call me suspicious, but common sense suggests pretty strongly that this means they’re making a bundle out of it. Throughout 2011, efforts to do re-regulate within the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Bill were met by massive Wall Street lobbying of everything from Congress to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Security Exchange Commission. Goldman Sachs alone spent $1.08bn protecting the trade. Now, you can’t make a turn by directionalising a sector downwards. Sure, you can win a bet by backing a fall in prices, but then that would mean shafting global agribusiness on occasions. And there are two chances of that happening.

Finally – and probably conclusively – we have to recognise that since 2008 the major part of the commercial world has been either heading for, in, or just limping out of recession. To suggest a boom in food demand when money is tight simply doesn’t make marketing sense….any more than Gold trackers falling in price while bullion roars ahead makes for the remotest iota of sanity. Certainly, there are specific factors of real importance: the Japanese Tsunami raised seafood prices, 2012 crop damage (especially in Australia) meant a spike in vegetable prices, biofuels have reduced the percentage of grain used for food, Chinese and Indian consumers are turning to wheat, and drought weather can ruin most crops before too long. Also some trends do have genuinely unforeseen consequences: it’s more profitable to sell grain to China than give it to laying hens…so that puts the price of eggs up, as laying hen numbers fall. But almost all of even these are the direct result of having globalised the food business: whether the troughers like it or not, market-driven global trade in food extends the length of the food hugely, creates concentration that increases the impact of one failure, and pushes up prices even without speculation.

But far too many factors cited by the greedy few are excuses: nothing more, nothing less. In a piece last year, Forbes magazine totted up the ten big factors impacting on food prices, and guess what? Speculation and derivatives were nowhere on the list. But even that article had to concede that food inflation early in 2011 (at the height of the recession) was the highest for 36 years – despite interest rates being close to zero. Ultimately, it cannot make sense for those from poor economies to pay the same prices as Sherman McCoy in Manhattan….but that is increasingly happening. The real impact of artificially expensive food is felt by the global poor. In places like Tajikistan, for example, the average family spends almost 80% of its income on food now. Price spikes in such regions can mean the difference between life and death.

The problem is globalisation of the food business, too much power held by big agribusiness, and financial provider speculation/directionalisation. Such ‘betting’ screws the price of gold, raises the price of oil, fixes the interbank lending rate, dilutes the value of a citizen’s currency….and raises food prices.

It is yet another reason why The Slog’s mantra remains tediously consistent: we should make regional self-sufficiency the goal of economies in general and farming in particular, and only trade in natural surpluses. This would reduce unemployment by putting people back on the land, secure the food supply with a far greater spread of risk, reduce national deficits, feed the Third World more cheaply…..and reduce both shareholder returns and financial centre profits. So we won’t be doing that then.

The neocon business model is mad, globalist mercantilism is a crock, and permanently high unemployment in the West and elsewhere is not a social price worth paying so that institutions can get their returns and keep us all in savings growth and pensions…..not. Lest we forget, until the late 1950s virtually no big financial providers anywhere were even in the stock market: the stock market was there to finance business – which is what it should be for.

None of this is fluffy Leftie bollocks: it’s common sense and common decency. But the Mr Creosotes keep trotting out their feeble defences, getting away with it, and then laughing until they wet themselves. The size of the task faced by those who would like to make the world a better place without violence never looked bigger than it does in 2013.

Yesterday at The Slog: Japan, land of the rising Sum

Smoke signals

  Sally Bercow ‘expected to lose to McAlpine’ say legal sources. Overheard in various eateries, bars and chambers in recent days: that Mrs Bercow’s lawyers have made something of a cod’s arse of the libel suit being brought against her by Lord Alfred ‘Cousin? What cousin?’ McAlpine.

The consensus is that “she should have won, with better (and rather obvious) arguments being applied….as opposed to the ones that were”.

Sources think the verdict will come next week. We pray that the Forces of Darkness will not secure a victory.

‘Former Cabinet Minister to be arrested’. I shrink from posting this, but I’ve now had a threader, an emailer and an MSM hack tell me that an Elm House regular will have his collar felt in the next few days. Every time this rumour pops up, rising expectancy is cancelled out by yet another arrest of somebody aged 102 who groped a Beauty Queen in Skegness during the summer of 1967. So I’m not holding my breath. Except that this time, there does seem to be a consistency and conviction about the imminent arrest.

And talking of convictions, best not to expect one – even if the most likely candidate does wind up in a police station somewhere.

Rising tensions between the German Bundesbank and the ECB. Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann continues to contest every move made by Mario Draghi in terms of debtor nation loan commitments – stressing as he does so that last year’s Karlsruhe Court decision would consider much of it illegal under German law.

The normally unflappable Draghi is more than slightly irritated by all of this. Both sides, meanwhile, are leaking to the effect that they expect the relationship to worsen as the summer unfolds….always assuming we do actually get one.

Insiders at the ECB are muttering that the more fractious this gets, the more convinced they are that powerful forces within Germany (especially in Frankfurt) want out of the euro, and are looking for somebody to blame whose nationality is other than German. No change there then.

Earlier at The Slog: Why Japan is playing with fire that could burn the rest of us very badly

JAPAN: Why stimulate and inflate at this level is a crisis waiting to happen.

Fudging the growth curve will build one Fujiyama of a debt, and a full-on Asian depression

You often hear older hacks saying, “It’s a slow news day today”. As a blog-commentator, I long for slow news days. Slow news days are the ones where you actually stand a chance of getting to the bottom of something. Today is a very big and fast news day, so although it’s already 11.30 am here in France, I’ve got nothing of any value done at all.

Unfortunately, it’s a bad news day today, and that rhymes with J, and that stands for Japan.

You may recall some time ago I said I doubted the MoUs’ ability to control interest rates forever. With that in mind, there’s interesting stuff going on in Japan at the moment. The inability of the BoJ to ‘control’ Japanese interest rates (Japanese Government Bond rates spike crazily from day to day) has got that good ol’ banking system heading for trouble. As Tyler Durden points out at ZH, Nipponese banks appeared to initially ‘hedge’ their huge JGB positions, but the sheer unpredictability has now started a stampede out of the game altogether. Those left in it for too long will lose money on a massive scale. We therefore have the possibility of the all-time big need for a bank bailout….with no money to do the bailing out, as it were.

And there’s more, sadly. You may have spotted that the G7 didn’t have a lot to say about Japan last weekend, so busy was it coordinating the globalisation of grand larceny. The one thing we can see pretty clearly is that the weaker Yen has turbo-charged Japan’s economy into a whopping 3.5% growth curve in just one Quarter. But the radical BoJ approach forced on it by the new government in Tokyo always looked to me like a facile idea: beggar-thy-neighbour currency manipulation can only ever have one result: retaliation. As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard correctly observes in today’s Telegraph, ‘Stephanie Kretz from Lombard Odier said the falling yen looks like a replay of the mid-1990s before the onset of the East Asian crisis, when external funding dried up in a “sudden stop”….It poses a direct threat to Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Korea and others with a high trade gearing, as well as for China. She warned that the trade surpluses of these countries could evaporate, “silently planting the seeds for the next Asian crisis down the road”.’ In short, the retaliation will be whole-scale withdrawal of investment, given that the near-entire success factor for all those economies has been cheap cost of production…which Japan is now aping. And of course, recessions for all of them unless they exercise that retaliation soon.

If you think things might be looking black at this point, you might want to reach for the Imodium before reading this next bit. You see, on our wonderfully, logically and apparently irreversibly globalised econo-fiscal planet Earth, every dramatic policy switch gets exported sooner or later. In the dash for stimulation alongside currency devluation, the BOJ is quantitatively easing on a scale to make Bernanke’s efforts look like a tickling contest: the central bank has mopped up $1.4 trillion of bonds – more than the US, in an economy roughly 30% of the American one. The spectre of what AEP calls a “wall of money” flooding global markets, with up to $1 trillion leaking out in a revival of the yen “carry trade”, is now back in play bigtime.

And don’t put the bum-concrete away just yet: no major Sovereign has ever before run up such a high public debt in such a short time. As we saw earlier, the bond spikes are heart-stoppingly fast, but they’re also high. Yields on 10-year JGBs have doubled, at one point spiking over 0.9% last week. Now, the plummeting cost of CDSs used to insure against Japanese sovereign default suggests that the shovers and makers in the Bond markets think things are still hunky-dory. But then, they did in ClubMed at first as well. And look where that got us, Stanley. The problem for the Japanese is going to come if events in, say, Europe continue to turn global sentiment away from bonds. For if you have neighbours who don’t like being buggered sorry beggared (so they take their ball back home) and you have debt-capital generally becoming more and more expensive, you suddenly find yourself with a full-grown Everest of debt that’s impossible to service.

I do have some exposure to Japanese shares which have done very nicely thank you – up 55-60% since the policy started – but this may not be the time to get greedy. It won’t be a healthy place to be if, a year from now, internal banks are insolvent, the country’s on the verge of default, an alliance of neighbours stand ready to invade, and the G7 is hopping up and down because yet more of their lenders have piled in with too much too quickly.

I do realise I’ve been banging on about this for years now, but what we’re seeing once again here is just how insane it is to have a globalised banking system, and a wealth-creation model based on global mercantilist trade. At best the result is bound to be banking domino effects and trade wars; at worst, a complete banking collapse and nuclear war.

Japan is making a terrible mistake that is exactly the same as everyone else’s terrible mistake: applying worn old ideas invented in the pre-globalist world to the world we have today…which is sorely in need of a new idea. This will end in tears.

One final point: I did mention two weeks ago that when Fred Carney’s Circus takes over in Threadneedle Street next month, the new Governor intends to do exactly with Sterling what Tokyo has done with the Yen. Let’s hope this burgeoning mess in Asia alters his outlook. Either way, stay long in Imodium, Effexor, and Valium.

Large hat-tip to Butch in New Mexico for drawing the ZH piece to my attention.

Last night at The Slog: Time for the neocons to put a sock in it

At the End of the Day

You know that feeling when you just put a wash in the machine, and then you walk into the hall and see one sock lying on the floor? It’s not a disaster, but it is a nuisance. There is no point at all in washing one sock. There’s no alternative to simply building up another wash of that colour, and then whacking the odd dirty sock back in, while the odd clean sock snuggles down to lose itself totally in the sock drawer. Previously, however, that one sock in the machine will have been belting round to no purpose whatsoever, taking up valuable space that could’ve been gainfully used by a pair of knickers. It’s all what you might call mildly irritating.

If only I could say the same for the macro world at large. That, I think, I would dub wildly infuriating. For whereas a naughty sock that drops from one’s grip while hawking a huge amount of washing downstairs to the machine à laver is not up there with the Hwang Ho flood of 1931 as a human tragedy, the eurozone’s pestilent insistence that it exists for the benefit of Man most assuredly is. The eurozone may well exist for the benefit of one man – Mario Draghi – but he is not capitalised in my account here, on the grounds of being a mortal citizen as opposed to an allegedly immortal species. The same cannot be said of the Spanish banking system, which is (as I have reported many times before) woefully undercapitalised.

A senior German government source last night grumbled that Spain has not done enough to recapitalise its banking sector. He was particularly critical of the fact that Spain had only applied for of €40bn of relief, whereas its real problem is much larger than that. I could’ve told him that last September, but once again we are in the land of agenda on this one: why is this senior government source choosing now to moan about it?

I’m not entirely sure, but one thing I can tell you is that he alleges “the stress tests in Spain were manipulated politically”.

You don’t say? What, like you mean in France under Lagarde, and in Germany as regards the Landesbanks? Well, he does say: “French and German banks still have many toxic assets on their books, which have not yet been properly accounted for”. Hold the front page, I think we need the banner headline typeface.

In other ‘news’ today, Greece’s economic output fell by 5.3% in the first quarter of 2013, a disastrous drop described by the Troikanauts as “expected”. Can you imagine what the American reaction would be if George W Bush had said the swamping of New Orleans was expected? No, neither can I – but a similar madness was in play when UK High Court Judge Andrew Nicol dismissed a claim by UK Uncut that HMRC’s tax settlement with the bank in 2010 was an unlawful “sweetheart deal”.

Andrew did criticise the way HMRC had decided how much tax Goldman Sachs should pay, saying “the settlement with Goldman Sachs was not a glorious episode in the history of the Revenue.” But adopting that sociopathic stance of the Judiciary these days, Judge Nicol concluded that “maladministration and illegality are separate issues”. They are indeed sweetie, and at some point you need to explain to us when – if indeed ever – the line between the two might be redefined for those of us being screwed for lack of definition.

Meanwhile, the Thin Blue Line tackling child sexual exploitation – inexplicably known as Greater Manchester Police – put its special undercover Spin Force on the job of hard-selling to the media how child buggery is now a bigger priority than gun crime up there. All things are, of course, relative: GMP has indeed reduced gun crime in recent years. But in the 1990s, it grew almost unchecked at 35% per annum….while Plod was busily denying there was a problem.

And finally, the now shamed ex Procurator Fiscal Stuart MacFarlane escaped prosecution by the Crown Office in 2006, which claimed at the time “it was not in the public interest” to prosecute MacFarlane……who has now admitted to being a paedophile. MacFarlane, 45, from Glasgow, was caught with almost 15,000 unpleasant infant images at his former family home in Eaglesham, East Renfrewshire, on 28 December 2012.

Somehow, it seemed important tonight to put the issue of mislaid socks into perspective. I think we should all apply a similar judgement hierarchy to The News from here on.

Earlier at The Slog: Zero threat to multinational business interests from David Cameron

CAMERON & THE MANIPULATORS: Why a whore never turns on his pimps.

Last night, UK Prime Minister David Cameron “threatened” to prosecute the four oil giants who stand accused (along with intermediary price reporter Platts) of manipulating the oil price for their own advantage – if they’re found guilty. Why is he only threatening to do so? And why did he only threaten to do so after the EC had already caught them at it?

Let me give you a simple answer to each question. Cameron can only threaten, because energy providers – like bankers – are more equal before the law than the rest of us. And he has only made the threat after the EC went ahead with their raids because there is no way any British government would risk evoking the ire of these criminal sociopaths. Mr Cameron, and most politicians at his level, are nothing more than ordures on the shoes of oilmen.

Consider where the trail leads on this oily little racket. Platts is a wholly owned subsidiary of McGraw Hill. McGraw Hill also owns, um, Standard & Poors. S&P has within its gift the ability to say Britain is doing well (gilt yields fall) or Britain is heading down the sh*tter (gilt yields rise → Britain goes bankrupt → D Cameron out of a job). Stand by for an intervention from Boris Johnson along the lines of this being a deliberate EC plot to destroy Old Blighty by increasing its borrowing costs.

Let me also suggest another fix-scam to which Dave will give the very widest berth possible: ICAP. Bloomberg revealed three weeks ago that US regulators are investigating the ICAP interest-rate swap desk…..as part of a price-manipulation probe. Well blow me: another bunch of cheats under the cosh. According to the men in Bloomers, ICAP paid its brokers as much as $7 million a year at the market’s peak – earning the group the nickname “Treasure Island”. ICAP is supposed to be an onscreen record book for swap dealers. It is supposed to be beyond reproach. But ICAP brokers in London passed on requests from dealers asking Libor-setters at rival banks to make favourable submissions, e-mails released as part of the European probe show. UBS AG, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and Barclays Plc (BARC) have since paid $2.6 billion in fines for rigging Libor rates.

Now, here’s a key fact to hold onto: London-based ICAP, the biggest broker of interest-rate swaps between banks, is run by Michael Spencer. Spencer is a former Conservative Party treasurer. He is also close to Michael Fallon, a member of the Cameron Cabinet and key man on the Treasury Select Committee that grilled Bob Diamond a few months back. At the time of the Libor scandal, Fallon was…..oh dear, a Libor broker. In the same reshuffle that promoted the appallingly ghastly incompetent Jeremy Hunt, Fallon too was promoted to the post of Minister for Business and Enterprise in September 2012. One of Fallon’s first acts as Minister was to give an unpleasant speech rubbishing LibDem business minister Vince Cable….the first man to nail Murdoch’s little game, and a man at least brave enough to call Fallon’s flock “spivs”.

So that’s why David Cameron isn’t going to prosecute ICAP troughers…..or Libor troughers…..or oilco troughers, or indeed any of the pigs swilling about in the trough. You see, David Cameron is their bumboy fag. He is their creature: they give him a yard of it up the backside 24/7. They insist on Hunt being promoted, on Boris’s brother invading Number Ten, on Boris being allowed to make Rupert Murdoch his guest of honour at the Olympic Games – without even the hint of a reprimand from Britain’s Prime Minister, on Fallon getting a key job when he shouldn’t even be on the TSC in the first place, on Andy Coulson becoming Cameron’s communications director, on Hunt guiding the BSkyB bid, and (if they feel like it) on the Barclay twins’ son Aidan telling the Leveson Committee members to go f*ck themselves.

These people can order the police to stop investigations into paedophile networks, threaten exposure of marital infidelity by Labour MPs investigating hitech corruption, and get senior cops fired off City probes getting too close to them. These people control David Cameron, and George Osborne. They use blackmail, falsified evidence, high-profile clubs, CCTV footage and bribes to ensure that secrets remain secret, certain MPs abstain, other MPs introduce embarrassing Bills, and Party donation irregularities remain private…..until this country’s internal and external political options are honed to suit their selfish agendas.

The entire Camerlot cabal is surrounded by media, judicial, sexual, banking, security, bureaucratic and geopolitical interests which, from Day One, have been determined to see it fail. I hold no brief for that clique of public-school twerps – and lest there be any doubt – let me make it clear that their tormentors would in turn swat the Ed Miller Band as if it might be a badly disabled fly….should the electorate conspire to vote them into power. But it’s time the British wised up. Kenneth More is dead, television is crap, commercial ethics have disappeared, One Nation Toryism has gone forever, the senior ranks of the police are bent, most MPs are greedy chancers, Labour is peopled by clueless fluffies, any old crook is allowed to own a newspaper, and those in charge would rather take the money of sadists than protect their citizens’ children.

This is not a financial, economic, social or political issue, it is a cultural slump. The Prime Minister – and all those who would like his job – are products of that diluted, sick, mefirst culture. It won’t stop being like this until they’ve all been kicked out and our citizen vows have been renewed by enough leaders to make a real difference.

David Cameron prosecute an oil company? Don’t make me laugh.

Earlier and closely related: Why this latest orchestrated Tory revolt is more serious

TORY LEADERSHIP: Why Cameron will come back to face serious trouble this time

“Calm down, calm down…”

The Tory Right senses that its hour has come

The campaign to hoof David Cameron out of Number Ten is gathering pace. Eight days ago I posted to suggest where all this was leading:

‘Mr Cameron cannot win this one. The MSM titles are a tad short on precisely where this pressure for an early referendum is coming from – perhaps because it’s coming from at least two well-known media owners…..At the weekend, a Conservative source remarked to me that “the Right wants the referendum to turn into a giant vote of no-confidence in Cameron”. I think he’s almost certainly right, and I think it probably would.’

Yesterday, Ben Brogan at the Telegraph wrote this in his regular column:

‘No10 says the party is united on policy, when what its critics allege is that it is divided on Dave. This episode has been about his effectiveness as a leader and his ability to command those below him, and what that means for the party’s prospects in 2015. I still hold that up until a fortnight or so ago Mr Cameron was advancing on vote-winning fronts…..But [when] Cabinet ministers are willing to announce that they won’t defend the Government’s programme, things are more serious than the glib optimism from No10 acknowledges.’

What was a week ago ‘a rebellion on Referendum’ is now ‘a Cabinet crisis’. Dan Hannan – who has a toenail in Camerlot and his heart in Borisshunt Fallongove  – spent most of yesterday frantically tweeting that the ‘split’ was being overplayed. Dan’s big problem (and it will cost him dear one day) is that he has verbal diaorrhea, and very poor judgement about when to take some Imodium. It came across as protesting too much.

The Sarkists meanwhile are jumping on Dave’s head at every opportunity. Looking at the Torygraph website this morning, we have ‘The Prime Minister has appeared to be following his party rather than leading it, and has adopted tactics over the Europe referendum that have verged on the naive’ (Telegraph view), ‘The Tory party’s gone crazy over Europe, and it’s Cameron’s fault’ (Brogan), and ‘Cameron and his party conspire to create a European shambles’ (Iain Martin).

But read carefully between some of the lines, and you can see where that Sarkastic preference lies: whereas we have yet another article on BoJo (‘…it fell to Boris Johnson, writing on these pages yesterday, to make one significant point: that not all of our problems can be laid at Europe’s door’) positioning  him as solid, straightforward, and statesmanlike, Michael Gove got ‘Michael Gove has said he wants to be “the heir to Blair” amid renewed speculation that he could succeed David Cameron as Conservative leader’, adding a damning quote (“If you’re saying I’m the heir to Blair or a disciple of David Blunkett (Labour’s former education secretary) then I plead guilty to both.”) and faint praise (‘Mr Cameron was said to have described himself as “the heir to Blair”…..Mr Gove has repeatedly ruled out standing for the Conservative leadership, insisting that he lacks the essential qualities necessary for the job….Michael Portillo, the former Tory defence secretary, has previously said Mr Gove would be “a serious candidate for the future” leadership of the party.)

Blair, Blunkett, Cameron, Portillo and shrinking violets are all pet hates for the Conservative BARMY* tendency, so I think Mr Gove can consider himself stabbed in the front re that one. Boris is the twins’ man – the Sarkist support for him is more formal than many would care to admit – but that’s fine, because the Education Secretary is a dyed in the wool Newscorper who, despite a mountain range of evidence to the contrary, continues to see Muppet Rudeshock as A Great Man – and the feeling is reciprocated.

What we must all remember of course is that, to date, the No Turning Backers in the Party have been one part piss, one part wind, and one part mouth. The missing element appears to be a spine: they loathe Cameron, emit spittle when using the word Coalition, and abominate the strategic ideas of Oliver Letwin. They did manage a major coup in getting Cameron to sideline the bungling Old Etonian, replacing him with Boris Johnson’s brother, but this was not exactly a direct hit amidships heading down to the munitions hold: it’s going to take more than that to dislodge a Prime Minister….even one as directionally brainless as David Cameron.

One thing above all has changed in recent weeks: the UKip triumph, and what any halfway decent psephologist can discern from it: unless it does a deal with Farage – or gets those votes back sharpish – the Conservative Party cannot win in 2015. Before the local elections, the calculation among the Tory rank and file was that, when push came to shove, not many people would stick a cross next to Ed Miliband in the polling booth. There was a general mood of biding time, waiting for the economy to turn, and then dumping Cameron after the election. I must say it always struck me as a profoundly flawed plan, but the sense one gets now is that the Right really does realise it’s sh*t or bust: the timing has changed, and the urgency has increased.

We have two years to go until the next election – almost to the day. Two years to bed in a new leader and Chancellor, spin some bollocks about signs of recovery, wind the Nation up with a clear policy on Europe, and romp home to victory. There is a sense of ‘now or never’ in the air.

To dump Cameron and go full on ‘EU-out’ as a Party would mean losing LibDem support…and being defeated on a confidence issue. Cleggie doesn’t want to call that (he’s smart enough to know his Party would be annihilated in any ensuing Election) and there’s a lot of legislation at stake for the Tories. Losing half the programme – and either going into a forced election or struggling on as a minority Government – does tend to take the wind out of puffed-up sails. Instinctively, it feels like a risk too far.

But the alternative is, for many of the BARMIES, too ghastly to contemplate. A lame-duck Cameron in 2015 – atop a failing economic policy and divided Party as the eurozone implodes – isn’t a great prospect for even the most visceral Shires sociopath. A split electoral Right producing an emphatic Labour majority would be the ultimate nightmare.

Fortune favours the brave. We are about to see what Borishunt Fallongove is made of.

Later yesterday at The Slog: Gold drops again as oil barons caught fiddling

*BARMY – ‘Barclays and Rupert Murdoch Yes’

GOLD PRICE: Another caning for the shiny metal, only 1,394 theories as to why.

In case you haven’t been following it, gold fell off a cliff when the FTSE opened this morning, from $1427 to $1409. It then flatlined at that price, until the NYSE opened….at which point it dropped another $17. Not that I’m suggesting any conspiracy here – but then the time zones are implicated. And The Slog did say last week that Friday falls in the past had been followed by further attacks the following week.

Who knows what this means, presages or secretes. However, earlier today I did post a Smoke Signals on the subject of oil-price manipulation. And I did end that piece as follows: ‘So then, that’s the stock markets, the gold price, the Libor rate, and the price of oil being fixed against us….as The Slog suggested quite some time ago.‘

A gold fall in nine hours of $35 isn’t just counter-intuitive in the current global context, it is the equivalent of Manchester United shares halving in price as a result of winning a record 20th Premiership League title.

Our socio-economic lives – and financial resources – are being shafted by a rich minority so tiny, with a minimum of organisation we could round up the lot of them in half an hour….and shoot them all in ten minutes. But on the whole, we’d rather watch Eastenders in the UK. Or Koh-Lanta in France, How To Live With Your Parents (For the Rest of Your Life) in the US, and perhaps even Salvados in Spain.

So it really is our fault after all. Allegedly.

Earlier at The Slog: Not necessarily the end of the Irish bailout

Smoke Signals

Americans recognise our paedo-problem, even if Plod doesn’t. Word reaches me that the US state department is asking very searching questions about the UK’s role in multinational child-buggery. As with the FBI’s generally accurate information on London as a money-laundering hub, the bureau’s latest people trafficking report categorically fingers Britain as ‘an endpoint country for the international trafficking rings which exist in Europe.’ If this has been on the US radar for a while – and the American authorities have made the situation known to the current government, which they have BTW – then we’re left pondering why Camerlot-on-Cleggie flatly denies it. I mean, what possible motive could they have?

Our American cousins seem to be remarkably well informed. The news only broke yesterday about Islamic kid-pimping in Oxford, but a leaker reports, ‘Many of the girls in Oxford and elsewhere are deliberately trafficked to a different area to hide activity from police. If the kids report the crimes, these generally go to different regions making it hard for CPS to bring cases.’ Oddly enough, only last night I was debating with someone on the phone why the Islamic ring that hailed from Yorkshire was operating in Oxford.

I wonder, do we need a separate detective force in the UK along the lines of the group formed under the FBI’s greatest hero, Eliot Ness? Although to be honest, calling it The Untouchables could be sensitive for reasons of religion, depravity, police corruption and so forth.

Nothing very refined about the oil business. Following Monday’s revelation that the EC is closing in on unnamed oil giants (with a view to charging them on several counts of price-fixing and illegal profit manipulation via false crude price reporting) the boys and girls on the Naughty Step have been named. It turns out that the EC special plods raided Royal Dutch Shell, BP and Statoil. But in a highly significant move, the London offices of Platts, the world’s leading price reporting agency, were raided yesterday.

Step forward one whistle-blower: Total Oil’s French company snitched to the EC’s regulators last August, reporting that “several times a year, estimates of market prices on key [energy] indices … are out of line with our experience of the day”.

So then, that’s the stock markets, the gold price, the Libor rate, and the price of oil being fixed against us….as The Slog suggested quite some time ago.

The next illegal privacy invasion scandal to break? Some time ago, the diminutive Labour stalwart Tom Watson asserted that the next big scam re spying on us would be ISPs, the social networking sites, and hacks turning to pcs as opposed to phones. Tom has since retreated to the Batcave, but his prediction is looking good. I hear from some bloggers, for instance, that certain suits and frocks in the Desmond media empire have perfected a means of hacking Twitter in order to obtain addresses and phone numbers. Bragging is never a good idea Ducky, especially when you’re pissed.

Further to this and closely related, now that Microshit owns Skype, German giant Heise Security recently sent two test HTTPS URLs, one containing login information and one pointing to a private cloud-based file-sharing service. A few hours after their Skype messages, they observed the following in the server log:

65.52.100.214 – – [30/Apr/2013:19:28:32 +0200]
“HEAD /…/login.html?user=tbtest&password=geheim HTTP/1.1″

They received visits to each of the HTTPS URLs transmitted over Skype from an IP address registered to Microsoft in Redmond. URLs pointing to encrypted web pages frequently contain unique session data or other confidential information. HTTP URLs, by contrast, were not accessed. In visiting these pages, Microsoft made use of both the login information and the specially created URL for a private cloud-based file-sharing service. Which is, um, against the law.

Oh baby baby it’s a wild world….

Earlier at The Slog: Join the stampede to get your money out of Ireland

GLOBAL LOOTING: Irish banking system ‘about to go bang’

 Behind the scenes at the Dublin FinMin bail-in bunfight

“Together – with our debt and your money – we can work this thing out”

Renowned infamist Reggie Middleton has been banging on about the basket case that is the Irish banking system for some time now. I have to confess that I had my eye taken off this ball by a continuing fascination with Plod’s blind spot about systemic child buggery; but in its own cataclysmic way, bank depositor buggery is an equally serious issue. A valued eye in Dublin sent me some data on this yesterday (big hat tip for that, Christopher) and afterwards I contacted two further people there – one a hack, the other a banker of sorts. Their feedback was intriguing.

In case you didn’t catch onto it yet, the Truthspeak for stealing from depositors has moved on from ‘Open bank reconciliation’ to the preferred mendacity of ‘Positive Depositor Preference’. So if you think your Sovereign State is about to rip you off for a hundred grand, watch out for somebody putting on the orange glove, because then you know when you’ve been Cyprused. (With apologies to the old Tango campaign)

The EU FinMins were fortuitously meeting in Dublin over the last two days, which appears to have served two purposes: making the ship look unsinkable, and facilitating frantic negotiation away from the Big Table. In recent weeks, Troika visits have been downplayed, and Ireland has been referred to as ‘nearing the end of its bailout’. ‘But the simple truth,’ wrote the Irish Times three days ago, ‘is that Irish banks need more capital’. Politely, the IT reiterated a Slog chestnut of long-standing: without capital, there can be no growth. The problem, if I understand my sources correctly, isn’t that the Irish banks need more capital to help economic growth: they need it, right now, to avoid collapse.

German Bundestag leaks from anti-euro MPs suggest that a Troika team has already stress-tested Ireland’s Banks, and sent an explanatory note to Jeroen René Victor Anton Dijsselbloem along the lines of “Every man for himself”. Or more accurately, “Everyone else’s money for us”. So to employ a Jeremy Warnerism, “If you have money in an Irish bank, get it TF out now”.

I’m reliably informed that the Irish presidency of the European Council tabled a blatant depositor ‘preference’ scheme six days before last weekend’s G7 meeting near London. It then flew from G7 to FinMin, onto a menu under the table, and got itself debated via some suitably restrained yelling away from the table. Later, back at the table, the scheme was approved by “almost all” of the FinMins present, so clearly the idea to crash your cash isn’t off the table, it’s just not being released to the media, who were anyway busy getting pie-eyed at the adjacent table.

Around mid-afternoon yesterday, Dijsselbloem had this to say: “I’m very reluctant to allow for a lot of flexibility for the euro-zone countries. The pressure will be enormous from financial markets, from your parliaments, not to go too hard on the bail-in, to take more risks on the public account once again.” Putting those remarks into words, what Jeroen means to say there is that we have two ways of doing this guys: keep printing money, or just cut out the bureaucracy involved and steal it off the citizenry, like we did in Cyprus. But his intention in putting all the right words in the wrong order was to suggest that everyone who’s been reading Reggie Middleton’s column should calm down.

This is because the Dutchman knows via Mario and Wolfie that money is flying out of the eurozone so quickly now, teams are working 24/7 on bank carpets to clean off the scorch-marks. So he has to say he’s reluctant. He has to suggest that – as he did later in the same press session – there will only be “very restricted exemptions to proposed European Union rules on how to assign losses when banks fail.” But either because he’s a mealy-mouthed sh*thead, or just muddled as a person, Dissisgoinboom left the impression that stealing would be the exception, not the rule. In fact, the rule as approved by most of the Funny-money Finmins yesterday was, um, stealing. My money’s on Jeroen being an MMS, but you must make your own minds up on that one.

Despite the playful tone of this piece, I should like to ask for something I think to be fairly reasonable from Britain’s mainstream media:

↓

↓

↓

 

WAKE UP

I feel a little better now.

Related yesterday at The Slog: Rochdale’s Murphia closes ranks on kid-buggery

 

At the End of the Day

The boy v girl friendship thing

Perhaps the most crushing offer a girlie ever gives to a bloke is “Can’t we just be friends?”….a line I can only be grateful for not having been handed for over fifty years now, although the elation-to-deflation plummet associated with it lives on in my psyche as if it was yesterday.

It has been one of the relative oddities of my life that I have, on the whole, greatly preferred the company of women to men. I don’t mean by that ‘the company of women in a group’, because to be honest they’re awful in hen-party mode. Rather, I’m talking about the far greater ability to be frank with female friends about one’s doubts, demons, feelings about ongoing sex relationships and, well, just being open about it.

That said – and think about it, there is no contradiction here – the truly close male friends I have are the best friends I have. The reason is simple: they’re far more willing to accept criticism from time to time – and far more constructive in the way they criticise me. So while my female chums are seen quite a bit – and able to offer invaluable insights into their own interminably mysterious gender -  it is the bloke-mates to whom I feel closest. You see, with blokes after a certain point there is no defensiveness…otherwise I gently drop them. With the bumpy-front friends, there will always be the Mars-Venus thing: you know -  the “you’re a bloke so WTF would you know” knee-jerk in the groin.

I know lots of blokes I would call passing acquaintances and valued former colleagues. Sometimes they become ‘cronies’: for example, when ghastly (but mercifully rare) occasions have to be borne with the help of irascible male companionship and rather too much alcohol. But they fail to become confidantes because the blokey dick complex creeps in….that inability to resist nudge-nudge-wink-wank remarks about waitresses and previous secretaries. Women don’t indulge in that with male friends, and so the blessed relief from having to listen to tedious fantasies is worth its weight in saffron. I wonder, by the way, if the saffron sector is manipulated as well these days. How one’s mind divagates around after sixty.

I have one female friend for whom I have infinite affection, because at a time when others passed on the other side of the road, she took me out of myself and devoted selfless time to helping me back on my feet. But she is as daft as a brush about cultural issues, and her fluffiness is at least 95% related to an upbringing that combined liberal bollocks with an outrageous level of privilege. However, when I try to tell my chumette that some of her observations are so socially ignorant as to cause dental roots to shake in their stanchions, she bristles like a daft brush for whom bristling has been her inalienable right since birth. There’s nowt so queer as folk, as they say in Yorkshire.

Another lady mate has a serious downer on Men. I use the capital letter there because (a) it reflects the emphatic tone she affects when talking about my gender and (b) capital punishment is (not too deep down) what she claims we chaps should face sooner rather than later. The only friction in her outlook is that she keeps on falling for the sort of psychopathic blokes I would happily kill given the freedom from prosecution to do so. But when I so much as raise this tectonic tension – dare I say contradiction – she turns grumpy and goes off the air for several weeks. When she comes back on again, she’s met yet another disastrous twerp…and so the circus continues. Except for one vital talent she has, I’d avoid her like the plague. But I am here to tell you that, shove one’s new girlfriend in front of her, and she will predict the outcome with clinical accuracy. Go figure.

Yet another has an image of herself which is wildly at variance with reality. When I try to get a word in edgeways to explain why she is in fact Hillary Clinton and not Florence Nightingale, a predictable Tsunami of ruffled rationality heads my way. The odd thing here is that it’s the Hillary thing I find so likeable (and valuable) about her. She is in that sense the almost identical twin of a lady from an entirely different continent: she tells me of her utter rejection of all materialist considerations in favour of an undiluted return to nature….and then sends me an email recounting her latest foray into the restaurants of Knightsbridge.

The only real saving grace of men (if you too are a man) is that they do retain an engaging ability to see how completely bloody silly they are about most things to do with hypocrisy. You can, at the end of the day, poke fun at a bloke about his double standards: on the whole – in my experience, he added carefully – you can’t with a girlie. When George and Ringo took the piss out of John Lennon about his ownership of endless New York condos while promoting the song Imagine, Lennon replied “For f**k’s sake fellas, it’s only a pop song”. I don’t like to think about how Yoko Ono would react if you tried the same shtick with her.

The Gender War has been going on uninterrupted for more than 850,000 years. This is the bizarre conclusion I’ve reached: men think everything is funny, but some things are worth dying for. Women think nothing of any importance is funny, but nothing is worth dying for. I am beset by an insatiable need for the advice of the latter, and the clubbable company of the former.

Discuss.

Earlier at The Slog: Why the CBI has problems with arse and elbow