BARVENNON.COM
AUSTRALIAN DIARY
JANUARY 2010. First year of the "TENNIES" Decade.
THE CRASH
Just been reading Steve
Keenes blog. He might be right about the "Debt
Trap". I am also a reader of evans-pritchard
and news
from1930
which all uniformly predict that things will get worse. On the
other
hand, the mass media and most economists (Keynesians, post K and the
rest) are uniformly upbeat. The Dow is going sideways, and future
interest rates are equivocal. Who to believe?
Some economists are looking at patterns (aka chartists) some at
theories of money
dynamics. The Chartists are a bit flummoxed because our "1930's
style" recession/depression seems to be halted in it's tracks.
The money dynamicists are having to change their ground frequently,
because every time they identify a "crucial" number (employment
statistic, housing sales, etc) that is a sure fire
predictor of the depression getting worse, lo and behold, it gets
changed.
What we are seeing might well be a truckload of treasury economists who
are
reading and spending money to change all those indicators.
Because those
chartists and
dynamicists are reading entrails. So the guys with the money
power
(treasury economists) are maybe turning taps and providing
data
(entrails) that seem to predict a rosy future. They are possibly
doing it in the hope that the reverse of the psychology that causes a
run on a bank, or the panic when someone calls "FIRE!" will cause the
recession to end.
But there is a thread of economists who explain that increasing debt
has been providing that growth. And that debt binge is planned to
stop in 2010. The question now is:
Is the current (debt
fueled) growth going to sustain itself, or will it need more
government debt?
PARABLE
Let us make a parable. The world economy is a motor car.
The economic engine stalled October 2008 (the crash). The
governments of the world cranked the engine (using cash
injections). We (the innocents) hear the engine turning over, and
assume everything is OK again (2009). However the drivers have
not yet stopped utilizing the crank. (Cash injections stop early in
2010). The engine is not yet running smoothly and may again stall.
Of course if the engine splutters to a stop again, the drivers can
crank again. However the battery is flattening (cash is running
out).
CONSIDERATIONS
Barvennon speculates that the cause of the recession is the psychology
of bubble. The
3% of people who
are clever about money things (Bankers, money managers, captains of
industry) are firmly fastened on the teat of
treasury. They rely on the bubble optimism (and blindness) of
those less
gifted in monetary matters (like most financial journalists) for their
schemes to function, and on the
bounty of scared (or perhaps scheming?) politicians manipulating the
various instruments of government to "make it happen" so that minority
interests make huge profits.
For instance the "homes bubble" in Australia results from the state
governments' "milking" of housing development companies for political
slush funds. Banking profits derive from defective government
legislation that allowed monopoly managers of currency to make risky
loans using demand deposits (otherwise M1 money,
exchequer
accounts, savings accounts) as source of funds. The 97% buy those
bubble
houses, re-elect those corrupt politicians, demand their M1 accounts be
protected. Unionists make obscene amounts of money in
legislatively protected jobs for driving a truck. (Just try and
get a job as a union miner.)
This manipulation could continue for some time. While the debt
trap continues to expand, the issue will not go away. We are
heading for inflation,
or maybe into the "Japanese Trap" or national bankruptcy.
Barvennon believes that the only final cure for the debt trap is the
pain of a recession. That will help
the mass of people to understand that there are no short cuts to
wealth. Our legislators must be reined in. We probably need
direct democracy.
WHALING
Something that I remember about the Serb war when I was blogging
it. An English academic said words to the effect that "Liberals
think it is OK to tell lies as long as it's in a good cause".
The media is in a frenzy today (7 January) because a whaling protest
boat was in a collision with part of the Japanese whaling fleet.
The protesters are claiming it was a deliberate ramming, and that their
vessel was stationary in the water, refueling. Oh.
HaHa. Good one.
The protest boat was a smallish trimaran, about 20 feet long. The
whale fleet boat massed at least 100 tons (about 120 feet long).
Probably less than 1% of people have not got any sort of boat license,
but the rules are, small boats have to keep out of the way of big
boats. Big boats are just not able to stop or maneuver with
anything like the facility of small boats. Some of the really
large boats take 20 kilometers to stop.
The story is in the newspaper. The promised investigations by NZ
and Australia will almost certainly exonerate the Japanese, and (if
honest) will condemn the skipper of the protest boat, possibly even
fine him. Of course that will be labeled a "conspiracy" by the
protest organizers, who are making a very nice income thank you very
much for all this publicity, the donations are pouring in.
And a few minutes after repeating that news item favoring the
protesters, the ABC had an expose' of some complicated politico scheme
with the explanation "people are much cleverer than the media credit
them with being".
Oh. Really?
CLIMATE CHANGE ALARMISTS
Back in 2005
I
wrote
predictions on Climate change. I then
speculated that many of the things that have happened since then would
happen
(e.g. that the weather patterns would move towards the poles. I
predicted that weather patterns would become more energetic.)
Doesn't that make me an alarmist? Well not to my thinking.
Alarmists take the additional step that all good populist politicians
(like Hitler) and
alarmist fundamentalist preachers (like John Wesley) take, which is to
preach the "doom of hell" if we do not
immediately rectify the disastrous situation they so vividly describe.
Then in 2007 I reviewed
the
various
instrumentalities that have made the climate
predictions. Even then the IPCC was being accused of rigging the
outcomes by not allowing eminent scientists who opposed the global
warming scenario to have their say in the final documents. Stern
also had his detractors. Stern's critics claimed that Stern had
selected the worst possible scenarios, and then not been peer reviewed.
Last year the Copenhagen conference was preceded by a scandal when
emails from the East
Anglia
university
server were outed. East Anglia is an
important node of the IPCC data collection network. It appears
that those in charge have been actively promoting the cause of the
alarmists, and actively suppressing the flow of vital climate data to
those that they call "climate change deniers". That scandal may
have been responsible for the failure of Copenhagen.
Now it appears that this sickness in the IPCC is widespread.
Previously confirmed tales of "melting glaciers" in the Himalayas have
been found to be false, or at least wildly exaggerated. Other
cracks are appearing in the mosaic of disaster predictions that the
alarmists have been promulgating.
The last line of my comment on the East Anglia
scandal was I fear
that our western culture is in decline, and that an important
indication of this is that social issues are considered of more
importance than scientific integrity.
The recently reported events have reduced those fears.
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