What ever happened to 'Bank of England' Independence?

With President Obama guaranteeing America's financial destruction with his promise of annual $1 trillion dollar deficits and Alistair Darling contemplating running the Bank of England's "independent" printing presses night and day, one wonders why nobody ever thought of this before.

If you're having a problem because of too much debt, then simply increase your debt and print tons and tons of extra money to provide a wealth stimulus. Paul Krugman has been telling us this for years.

You would have thought some of the people in Africa might have thought of this first, especially those ruling over really poor countries such as Zimbabwe?

Oh, and by the way, whatever happened to 'Bank of England' independence? I was watching an interview with Gordon Brown on a train the other day, while he was 'going somewhere dynamically' and talking about the forthcoming interest rate cut. The next day the Bank of England announced an interest rate cut. How did he know? And while we're on the subject, is there a train somewhere which just runs backwards and forwards on a side-track to give Brown somewhere 'dynamic' to sit while he's being interviewed about how independent the Bank of England is? I suppose he hates being seen sitting in the back of his Jaguar limousine, these days, or in a First Class seat on British Airways.

At least he knows more than those idiots Cameron and Osborne. Yes, a promised £4 billion tax cut for basic tax-rate payers is a minimally tiny step in the right direction, but does cutting government spending by half of one per cent really constitute anything other than a posture? If they were talking about a £100 billion or £200 billion, backed by real spending cuts, then it might amount to a hill of beans, but £4 billion is just noise. Pathetic.

Well, sorry if you've already read lots about this in the Daily Mail. I've been off-piste for a few weeks, and not been keeping up with the papers. I will also be wandering below broadcast depth sporadically for the next few months, too, as I struggle to keep my business alive.

But fear ye not, the Austrian fight goes on, whenever I'm not too busy trying to keep my business afloat.

Oh, and while I do this, isn't it nice to know all those well-paid £100 grand-a-year types in the public sector are actually pleased about the ongoing crash. They're getting lots of cheap prices and there's no chance of them losing their jobs or suffering a pay cut, plus all of those evil people in the private sector (whom they are supposed to serve and who are forced ultimately at gunpoint to pay their wages) are getting their comeuppance for their anti-socialist immorality.

Oh well. They'll get theirs in about 18 months when the bond bubble explodes and Gordon Brown finally runs out of cash. Hopefully I'll be in Singapore or Dubai by then, if I can swing it. I just saw another great Chinese word today, as I progress through my Pinyin character set, 一千万(yi qianwan), which means "ten million" or literally, "one thousand ten-thousands". One wonders how many "一千万" lumps of money Obama is going to be asking the Chinese government for to bail out his own Xanadu, over the next four years. (I'm back up to recognising 150 individual characters now - no words yet, alas, just characters - and I hope to get this up to 500 by the end of February - it's both an incredibly difficult and incredibly interesting script to learn, but once I have 500 characters under my belt I should be able to start learning enough words to string a sentence together - anything to avoid starting the tonal speech lessons!)

From an Austrian point of view, I'm particularly interested in words like 钱 (qian) which means "money". The radical on the left-hand side is the symbol for metal. Also, there are words like 贵(gui) for "expensive", which is a character in the traditional format based upon a shell radical, because before the Chinese used silver for money, in ancient times they also used shells. Thus validating Mises' theory that money must always originate from commodities rather than from government fiat.

And this should be the route out of our current mess. Here's my own impossible dream about how that will happen. (1) Ron Paul somehow becomes American president. (2) He appoints Peter Schiff to take over the US Treasury. (3) Paul also asks Jim Rogers to rescue the 'Mother Country' and rule over here. (4) All three men institute a gold or silver commodity money standard with a 100% reserve. Obviously, I usually then wake up from my splendid dream. However, until we get to commodity money this crisis is going to continue until it just becomes normal living or another Margaret Thatcher turns up, with Hayekian or Misesian radicalism at their heart, to shake things up.

Yes, government workers in Britain (and alas I do know quite a few, I'm afraid) hope that "something will turn up" before another Thatcher, hopefully before the government stops screwing me to pay their wages, but I'm afraid they are whistling in the wind this time. Keynesians never worried about the long run, back in the twentieth century - now we're living in their long run and no amount of bailouts or fiscal stimuli are going to get us out of this one.

I suppose a lot of people are hoping that China will somehow provide the world with a miracle. Alas, once again they are forgetting that the Chinese need to look after someone else first, before they look after us. Yes, themselves! Hence my pitiful attempts to learn their wonderful language. Plus, they 'only' have about $1.5 trillion US dollars in their reserves, which is only enough for 18 months of Obama government.

Though I do think the Chinese in particular, and Asia in general, including Japan, and probably including commodity-rich countries such as Australia and Canada, should come out of this well, especially if someone takes the plunge and introduces a commodity money.

Alas, the only thing I can probably help the Singaporean Chinese with are financial products, and they've just shelved thousands of financial products people in Singapore! Monkeys. Oh well, where there's a will, there's a way.

Pip pip!!