CRASH 2: a gathering storm, episode 4.

Multiple can-kicking: the metal fights back

As Blockbuster strode robotically into insolvency earlier this week, the German economic march became stuck in the mud resulting from ClubMed and global downpours. Blockbuster Video was a retail outlet squashed between the rise and rise of internet shopping, and technological changes in streamed entertainment. Germany is in turn being squeezed between Euuropean hubris, American debt, and Asian overheating: the country’s key forecaster slashed its outlook by a whopping 60%.

Britain’s retail dinosaurs in particular are falling like flies (as I predicted they would) but now we can see the first signs of social cover breaking down in the face of economic obduracy: over 100,000 disabled people are having their home care reduced or removed, and the Leonard Cheshire organisation describes the system as “on the verge of breakdown”.

The yen languished after a forceful selloff in anticipation of the Bank of Japan taking radical action to tackle deflation. Under pressure from newish Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the BoJ looks set to buy assets nonstop until 2% inflation is reached.

Japan has been flouncing about trying to escape from its hybrid problems for nearly a decade. This move is yet another turnaround for a central bank that appears cluelessly frozen in the headlights, but is being egged on by political desperation.

The Japanese represent yet another case of multiple problems colliding in a staggeringly pernicious manner: age demography, nuclear accidents, world trade crises, fiscal confusion, and the rise of China. The wages of sleepy can-kicking are death by a dozen boomerangs. Winner, 2013 mixed metaphor perhaps – so here’s something clearer from Mark J. Grant,  of Out of the Box fame.

‘….it is the inescapable conclusion that we have backed ourselves into a corner of our own making and that to escape this dark and dangerous place will be a painful experience….When the economies of Spain, Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and France are in decline and yet their sovereign yields fall as supported by a conditional promise from the ECB, then trouble is in the making.When America spends money like it is without end because the Fed hands out the byproducts of the forest as if it was an unlimited supply, then the valuation of paper overtakes the use to which it is put. We are sitting with our little round plastic toys and blowing bubbles into the sky and when the turn comes, when the bubble is pricked, scant few will be able to run fast enough or get through the door quickly enough when the madding crowd is rushing in a collective push to get out of the burning theatre.’

I endorse every word, and repeat one of The Slog’s more consistent mantras: there is no such thing as a gradual panic. Those ahead of the panic are openly opting for the last place left offering financial long-term and physical short-term safety: top-end property.

Others still obsessed by the attraction of manipulation to gain their end-game money are also, however, at work. Some of the signs on this dirt-road are clearer than they were. I’ll be posting about this later today.

Stay tuned.

Last night at The Slog: Self-demonising Islamism

 

 

 

At the End of the Day

History is not a straight line. What goes around, comes around.

On 16th November 2011, Volker Kauder, a close ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, warned Britain that it would not “get away with” looking after its own interests at the expense of Europe. He said European nations “are now speaking German in that they are backing Chancellor Merkel”.

1930′s fascists Hitler and Mosley had “Europe A Nation” as their slogan. Hitler’s 1942 “Europäische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft” translates to “European Economic Community”. Foreign Minister Carl Clodius said at the time there would be a currency and customs union across Europe.

I don’t  write this to join in the chorus of anti-German feeling about at the minute, but rather to make a much more intriguing point. There follow two news items from today:

Angry relatives of missing mine workers in South Africa complained that the authorities had failed to produce a central register of the 34 people shot dead last Thursday.

On 21 March 1960 at least 180 black Africans were injured and 69 killed when South African police opened fire on approximately 300 demonstrators.

How many people aged under 25 today, I wonder, would know the significance of the Sharpeville Massacre?

And….

Japanese politicians today set sail for a group of disputed islands, in the teeth of protests by China, which claims them for its own.

Over the past forty-five years, China and other countries have allowed Japanese war crimes to be forgotten. In fact, the only constant reminders of the victims of World War II in Asia were the events commemorating the Japanese who were killed by atomic bombs dropped by the United States. The young generations, Chinese and Japanese alike, are not kept informed about the consequences of imperialist militarism.

Those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to make the same mistakes. German commentators like Wolfgang Munchau affect being disgusted by comparisons between the EU and the Nazi Grossdeutscherreich, but they have no right to be. Black South African politicians would no doubt regard comparisons between recent events there and Sharpeville as unaccaeptable Bwana racism, but they have no right to be so arrogant – or unconcerned by the comparison. And while the Japanese people have shown admirable self-restraint during a decade of unparalleled economic hardship, they have only ever grudgingly apologised for heinous war crimes committed with a barbarous disregard for human life.

As with the ludicrous feminist concept of a complete change in gender role within forty years (and without reference to hormonal instincts) so too those globalists who would deny cultural difference and nationalism are heading for a fall.

Cultural flaws should be honestly recognised where they occur. They should be closely observed and, under certain circumstances, feared. Europe is about to be tossed into an anarchic re-alignment. The original Asian tiger faces an uncertain future alongside the new bigger tiger on the block. And one day very soon, the father of the Rainbow Country is going to die.

We ignore these realities at our peril.