Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Is the Looking Glass world arriving?

Who'd 'a thunk it? I speculated a couple of months back that it would be in the interests of either Russia or China (or both) to adopt a gold-backed currency.

And Lo, it appears to be coming to pass.

Yes, I know, if you make enough predictions eventually some of them are bound to come true purely on the Black Swan premises of the barbell strategist, Nassim Taleb, but this move of the Kremlin to return to a gold currency, if it is a move, makes an awful lot of sense.

They are currently ringed by aggressive attack-formation US military bases. What better way to send these Americans home other than by exposing the worthlessness of the dollar by adopting a hard gold rouble? Ok, it may not be a pure Rothbardian 100% reserve standard, but a 10% reserve gold standard proposal is certainly a good start.

The Chinese are going for a weaker gold yuan, with their Hayekian plan for a commodity-basket based currency, perhaps because they feel less militarily threatened by the US government. However, gold is certain to be one of these 30 commodities and will almost certainly become the dominant commodity very quickly, if this Chinese plan is adopted worldwide, due to all of the usual reasons of gold's fungibility, non-corrosion, high worth per unit weight, etc, etc.

Expect huge opposition to the flying of this financial kite from both Obama and his obsequious toady Brown. The credit-dependent Anglo-Saxons have the most to lose from the adoption of a hard world money, so will fight tooth and nail to avoid it.

Though at this point, I don't think the Russians and especially the Chinese need our permission to do anything at all they want. They hold all of the cards. They either have the gold, the commodity wealth, or the productive capacity. Their futures are therefore in their own hands.

All we have is debt. Though of course, the Anglo-Saxons do have the military bases and the hardware to go with it, paid for by much of this debt.

But what are the Americans going to do? Nuke the Russians and the Chinese for daring to have gold currency when for 50 years we derided them for not having a gold-backed currency? Even I don't think Obama is that stupid. (Though there will be some sabre-rattling proxy nonsense in Iran, before the US government realises it isn't in a position to dictate to anyone anymore. Hillary Clinton is going to be earning a lot of air miles before this one is put to bed.)

Expect there to be an enormous party in Auburn Alabama, and here in Maturin Towers, if the Russians do decide to unilaterally adopt a gold rouble. The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union really will have turned full circle to give us an incredible revolution; one in which the Russians bear the sword for gold currency and the Anglo-Saxons cower under the socialist paper confetti of fiat currency.

What a truly remarkable world we live in. I wonder if Richard Nixon thought this complete turnabout would happen in less than 40 years, after coming off the dollar gold standard in 1971, when he was faced by the paper tiger of the Warsaw Pact?

I won't say 'Marvellous' just yet, though.

I'll wait for the Gold Rouble to actually happen before I say that. However, I do think Maturin Towers can spare the following gold-coloured word:

Tremendous! :-)

(Thanks to Anonymous and not an economist for the tip)

Gordon's bubble reflation is finally working

Check out the following story:

=> Britain's housing market reignited

It would seem the near-zero percent interest rates and quantitative easing are finally starting to reflate the bubble of debt that got us all into this mess in the first place.

So Gordon in Downing Street will be overjoyed by this news.

Alas, the property market still has a long way to go down yet, and although nominal prices may remain steady or even increase, due to the sheer volume of currency being created, this re-inflation of the bubble will be temporary.

After having re-inflated one bubble after another for almost 30 years, the politicians have now gone a bubble too far. There is no expanding this one. The wolf is at the door, he needs feeding, and he will not be put off again.

This 'correction' still has some way to go.

Anyone for bonds or commercial property?

MPs to censor their own expenses

Crooks.

The nascent world state smashes freedom in ten more countries


Great.

Gordon Brown has forced ten more countries to hand over stolen pelf to socialists, so they can waste it on more government rubbish.

And he won't be satisfied until there is nowhere left you can hide your wealth to stop it being stolen by parasites.

How this will solve the depression, he doesn't bother to explain, of course.

Because governments getting their hands on more of other people's money is obviously such a 'good thing', that we don't need to question it.

How can we solve a problem caused by debt with more debt?

The excellent Liam Halligan gets stuck in to Jeremy Paxman, and the feeble-minded Ruth Kelly, on Newsnight, discussing the hobgoblin of 'deflation'.

Go from about:

=> 13:36 to 22:06

What's really sad about this discussion is the accusation by Ruth Kelly that Liam Halligan is the 'only' person who refuses to believe that we face a 'crisis' of deflation.

In a sense of course she is right. Aside from his colleagues on the Torygraph, such as Iain Martin and Jeff Randall, Liam Halligan is just about the only person in the 'British Establishment' who is opposed to Gordon's horrific bubble reflation attempt and the subsequent massive inflation it is going to create.

This lonely stand does of course make Mr Halligan a hero, in the mould of Der SchiffMeister, so if you're watching Liam, AngloAustria doffs its collective cap to you.

But as Liam himself says, there are plenty of people outside Britain, such as the gold markets, and the bond markets, who know exactly what happens when you run money supply growth rates at near 20% rates.

(Thanks to Tom H for the link.)

The Stig muscles in on Formula 1

Who's this?

Hmmmmm....

Is it the 'Everyman' character at the start of the BBC's new Formula 1 titles, representing every possible driver, in the manner of the blank-faced James Bond character at the start of Casino Royale representing all of the different Bond actors, or is it simply someone with whom we Top Gear fans are much more familiar?

To decide for yourself, check out the YouTube below:



I wonder whether the James Bond stunt driver, Ben Collins, last seen careering an Aston Martin around the Italian lakes outside Sienna, holds any opinion on the matter? Or indeed, whether he was also hired to be the stunt driver in the title sequence shown above?

Interesting, Miss Moneypenny.

Monday, March 30, 2009

Is the halo slipping?

Or did they just put the teleprompter in the wrong place?

More Daniel Hannan analysis...

English Austrian, Chinese professor, and Lew Rockwell blogger, Chris Clancy, examines the effects of Daniel Hannan's speech in terms of the underlying causes of fiat money and inflation:

=> That Speech By Daniel Hannan: Fiat Money and Inflation

Purely for reference, and just in case you missed it, here's Mr Hannan's speech again... :-)

How the US Treasury works

(Stolen from Obo but too good to miss.)

Southpark's Stan finally figures out how the US Treasury works:

Gordon Brown: 'Let Jacqui Smith get on with her job as Home Secretary'



So, the Home Secretary has been taking money from my wallet to give to her husband so he can watch porn films, so he can get turned on enough to 'sort her out' on a Friday night?

I can hardly be bothered to comment on this, except to ask the question, how embarrassed does a cabinet minister have to get these days before they finally do the decent thing and clear their desk (or have it cleared for them)?

As they are now virtually all career politicians, with no life outside of politics, I suppose we shouldn't be too surprised that they'll never resign. But, really. How BAD does it have to be before they are sacked?

Do they have to be caught with their clothes off behind a tree in Hyde Park, wearing nothing but stockings and sniffing amyl nitrate fumes from a silver dish stolen from a reception at Buckingham Palace? Or would even that not be bad enough? I suspect it wouldn't. In fact, I can almost see the BBC report now, claiming how overwork and stress has taken a terrible undeserving toll on one of our otherwise heroic masters.

Well, at least this news item further diminishes any remaining sliver of respect anybody had for politicians. So at least we can claim that furtive silver thread from this sordid dark cloud of sleazy immoral corruption.

G20: Our leaders must ensure we don't take the road to a repeat of the 1990s

Roger Bootle comes out with more of his usual unfalsifiable Keynesian flim-flam. Fortunately, a guy called 'Patrick' said everything I wanted to say in one of the comments. But I thought I would add something anyway, especially as we are close to sending these Keynesians over the edge! :-)

Jack Maturin on March 30, 2009 at 01:00 PM

Agreeing with everything Patrick said, I can only add the following question; why do none of these Keynesians ever read the works of Rothbard of Mises? If they did, they would realise how wrong they are to still follow Keynes and Galbraith, and why Keynesian policies turned the panic of 1929 into the Depression of the 1930s, why Keynesian policies created the stagflation of the 1970s, and why Keynesianism has helped keep Japan mired in recession for almost 20 years.

Roger Bootle, however, paints a picture which will make it possible for him to claim 'success' for his prognostications, whatever happens.

Either what the politicians will do will be too much, or will not be enough. Therefore, there is no way to test whether Mr Bootle will be right or wrong. His claims are therefore unfalsifiable, as is always the way with notable Keynesians, particularly Paul Krugman, of course.

If we continue on this course of government intervention, with all of its false interest rates and mass counterfeiting, we are heading into a storm of stagflation or even depressive hyperinflation, and this may continue for some time, directly due to politicians following the government-loving positions of the Keynesians.

The solution is for governments to do absolutely nothing. We must rip this plaster off quickly, rather than dragging it off slowly.

If governments must do anything, they must drastically cut their wasteful spending and pass through the money saved as tax cuts, where it can be properly used rather than wasted on pointless government rubbish.

They must particularly concentrate on removing all taxes on saving, investment, and company profits, to encourage everyone to make real savings, to increase real production, rather than create the false savings of counterfeiting which have created the false feelings of prosperity which led to this crash in the first place.

We cannot stop this recession.

It was caused by the waste created in the central-bank-induced boom, fed by false interest rates set way below where the free market would have set them, to enable 'in situ' governments to claim ongoing 'economic success'.

The recession is a necessary bust to clear out this malinvested waste. The only real question is how long the recession will be. We can either embrace it and get through it quickly, or we can continue trying to push it off into the long grass, usually beyond an inconvenient election date, but we will then never be rid of it.

If we accept it, and work through it, we will then have one or two really hard years, in which all of the malinvestments of the last 15 will be rapidly cleared out, and then we will be able to build again. (Hopefully this time without crass government central bank interference and false interest rates.)

If we keep going with this government nonsense, of counterfeiting and increasing debt, we will recreate another depression which will make the recent Japanese experience look like an economic wonderland.

We will then only get out of this mess when the government runs out of taxes, cannot borrow any more, and we are faced by a population close to revolution who will tolerate no more inflation or who simply start using another black-market currency, such as gold or silver.

Do we really have to get to that, before the Keynesians finally admit that they are now, have always been, and will always be; Wrong. On every single matter of substance.

Here are the books you need to read, Roger. (Please throw away the Keynes and the Galbraith. It's really not doing you any good.) If you Google carefully, you'll find all of these books free and online either at ScribD or as beautifully prepared PDFs at Mises.org.

All of the following are by Murray Rothbard:

The Mystery of Banking

America's Great Depression

Man, Economy, and State (with Power and Market)

The Case Against the Fed

The Austrian Theory of Money

The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar

What Has the Government Done to Our Money?

Other books to read include:

Economics in One Lesson (Hazlitt)

Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle and Other Essays (Mises et al)

The Causes of the Economic Crisis (Mises)

The Theory of Money and Credit (Mises)

Prices and Production, and Other Works (Hayek)

Understanding the Dollar Crisis, (Percy Greaves)

Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles (Jesus Huerta de Soto)

Banking and the Business Cycle (C.A. Phillips)

When it comes to Keynes, Galbraith, and Krugman, we've all got to learn to 'Just Say No'.

Sunday, March 29, 2009

It's time to admit inflation is going to be a major problem

Liam Halligan. Bang on, again. As usual.

The Keynesians may be cracking...

The most intelligent Keynesian in this country, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who blends much of his crass Keynesian/Galbraithian idiocy with extremely penetrating insight, is beginning to crack under the onslaught of all of his 'hard-money' commenters.

In a shrill and tetchy think piece in The Sunday Torygraph, he claims heroism for the Bank of England in the way it 'saved' the credit system and that our only saviour is the printing press.

With many a back-handed swipe at the 'hard-money' crowd, many of whom pay his wages by buying The Torygraph, he paints a picture in which the one-eyed Scottish idiot is a hero, and people such as yours truly are attempting to destroy the world.

Well, taking this personally, I felt I was forced to retort (though it is highly amusing that even Ambrose, that most eloquent of the enemy, is so obviously cracking). He and his ilk no longer live on Mount Olympus. And we will keep dragging them down from their palaces until they live on the plains with us, the common people, who are being forced to pay for all of their arrant counterfeiting nonsense.

(Ambrose's article is particularly worth reading for all of the commenters who suggest he has been kidnapped and replaced by Gordon Brown.)

Jack Maturin on March 29, 2009 at 05:11 PM

Oh come on, Ambrose, can't you drop this Keynesian nonsense about what created the Depression in the 1930s? It's only when you become capable of doing that, that you'll be able to see what a mess the Keynesians are making of this situation now, in the current central-bank-created Depression.

You don't even have to spend any money. All you have to do is read the beautifully-produced online version of "America's Great Depression" at ScribD. Read it here:

=> http://www.scribd.com/doc/7507475/Americas-Great-Depression-by-Murray-Rothbard


UPDATE: It's good to see that not only do we have 'M.Rothbard' commenting on Torygraph pieces, but on Ambrose's we also have 'Ludvig Von Mises' and 'von Mises Jr'. Splendid work! Keep it up, chaps and chapesses, and soon we will have Ambrose running to the lunatic asylum for sanctuary, as Gordon Brown's chief economist. That, or he might actually read some Austrian books and finally realise why he has been wrong all of these years. What is it about senior politicians and journalists? Why are they so incapable of reading anything, longer than a think piece essay, beyond the age of 21?

The curse of AngloAustria

Well, it would appear I was right to be worried about Sebastian Vettel. With my man Kubica about to take second at the Australian Grand Prix and challenge Button for first, with three laps to go and on much better tyres, the young German took Kubica off.

I'm sure they'll be serious Deutsche Sprache words from Mario Theissen, BMW's team principal, to his former apprentice driver, Vettel! :-)

Still, once they get the diffuser sorted out (which may be no mean job), and reel Brawn GP back in, we'll soon see BMW back on the podium.

It looks like it's going to be a great season.

And congratulations to Jenson Button for his superb victory, against all the odds and in the best tradition of plucky underdog Englishmen everywhere, acknowledging his triumph as only a gentleman could.

Marvellous.

UPDATE: For UK viewers, you may be able to see Herr Theissen's reaction after the race on this BBC video, when he states that Kubica had the race in the bag due to the tyre situation. Notice the tongue lashing he gives to Vettel at the start of the video! :-)

The above 'debate' is enhanced by all sorts of nuances, including Vettel's first F1 drive having been for Theissen after Kubica had hit the wall in Canada, and Vettel's strong links with the BMW team, where I guess he'll be ending up again if and when Red Bull's funding drains away due to the current world recession. It's certainly not a conversation I would like to be having with Herr Theissen, who is perhaps one of the meanest and toughest Germans on the planet, and who is charged with winning the F1 championship this year for BMW, after hitting every other target in his four-year plan to take BMW to the top. Ouch!

Has Tuvalu disappeared yet?

No. And it's not likely to, either.

Christopher Booker with more on the hobgoblin lies of the ecomentalist human hater crowd.

Chris Clancy's Chinese adventure - Part 9

Lew Rockwell blogger and English Austrian, Chris Clancy, relates to the former joys of travelling across China:

=> Spring Festival

(Link to previous episodes)

Nigel Farage speaks truth to power

Is this an even better speech than Daniel Hannan's?



Although it's horrific that we have to start the video with a clip of Gordon Brown, doing that weird thing with his left hand (cupping one of his former gay lover's bumping equipment pieces perhaps?), this speech, although less polished than the Prince of Light's earlier Swordfish torpedo run, and more emotional, makes Kriegsmarine Kapitan Brown squirm even more under its direct assault upon his mendacious evil and utter incompetence. Watch out for the usual 'child molester' grin of Brown, as he wriggles pathetically under the withering barrage.

Bravo, Lord Admiral Nigel Farage, for this further heavy-cruiser shelling of the Bismarck.

(Thanks to ukipwebmaster for putting AngloAustria onto this.)

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Kubica comes in fourth, in qualifying

Ok, so after my prediction that Robert Kubica would win this year's F1 championship, his fourth placed position on the starting grid would seem to belie that confidence.

However, he is ahead of Alonso, Hamilton, Raikkonnen, Massa, Kovaleinen, and Heidfeld, the other principal drivers from last year.

Once BMW sort out their diffuser, in Hinwil, Zurich Canton, I am still confident Kubica will steam towards the front.

There is a rather large crate of Belgian Kriek beer riding on this, so I am taking it rather seriously.

My only real fear is Vettel, the former BMW replacement driver, who stood in for Kubica when the Pole hit the wall in Canada. My feeling is that Vettel will come back to BMW and replace Heidfeld, probably next year, if Heidfeld fails to get it together again this year. We shall see.

However, at least Heidfeld came up with the line, "Humour is a very serious business in Germany", so I want him to stay with BMW just for that! :-)

Finally, I think that all hats must be doffed towards Ross Brawn and his incredible effort with the former Honda team. To lock out the front row on your first outing, is a sterling effort, and it is also good to see Jenson Button doing so well after so many years in the doldrums.

Good 'ol Bernie Ecclestone. He really does know how to mix it up. Shame about his £1 million pound contribution towards the Labour Party, and his insistence that governments around the world should subsidise F1. But he is a businessman and this is the water in which he swims so I can forgive him.

Especially if Kubica is the next world champion.

Go Robert, go!

Daniel Hannan faces the tax eaters on Channel 4



The Prince of Light, Daniel Hannan, faces the Guardianistas on Channel 4 with humour, pathos, and stolidity.

Alas, the grinning monkey Dolly Draper makes one of his usual under-the-skin appearances, but it's good to see that Mr Hannan is both incapable of being irritated by this nasty little man and more importantly, speaks to us from Godalming, in England, rather than from Strasbourg in France.

Don't go back, Daniel! Your country needs you here.

Though it would appear, a lot of American Republicans want him in America, too. Check out this Glenn Beck show for proof of that, where Mr Beck begs the Prince of Light to defect to the United States. (I particularly like Mr Hannan's comment about Zimbabwe! :-)

Schiff: Pound to disappear and merge into Euro

In his radio program this week (March 25th), Der SchiffMeister makes a couple of predictions:

=> The Pound will soon disappear and merge into the Euro

=> The Euro will prove more resilient than many people think (including AngloAustria) and may become the new world reserve currency

=> The Euro will ultimately collapse, but this is still a very long way off

Interesting.

While you're thinking about that, here's all of Mr Schiff's Video logs created since the last one we posted:









Disloyalty. Humiliation. The week that Brown's grand vision was brutally shattered

Excellent article by Peter Oborne, about the pathologically incapable monocular mentalist.

BTW, while you're reading it, check out the second piece underneath entitled, 'A sinister plot to protect the pension pot?'. This details how the Bank of England positioned its own pension fund, two years ago, to avoid the current slump.

The big question is, of course, if along with Peter Schiff they knew that the current slump was coming (for which the move in pension funds would otherwise have made absolutely no sense), then why didn't they say anything to anyone else?

Why indeed!

Friday, March 27, 2009

Gordon Brown wants to end 'discrimination' against women and Catholics over throne

You gotta hand it to Gordon Brown.

Despite spending 23 hours a day working out how to destroy the finances of an entire nation in the upcoming G20 conference, he still has time left over to keep his finger on the pulse of the nation.

Yes, we all really care that the future King can't marry a Catholic.

This has been keeping me up at night, for some time.

(And yes, there will be some pathetic hidden story behind this. Is he trying to kick the Queen in the teeth for daring to see Mervyn King? Perhaps it will be about appeasing some beetling group of Scottish catholics in a marginal central belt constituency? Perhaps this may even be the Prime Minister's own constituency, which we're all hoping he will lose at the next election if he can't fake a crisis first, to avoid an election. However, it's getting too late on a Friday afternoon to really give a flying monkeys about the internal demons scrabbling around the inside of this sad demented lunatic's mind. But this kind of thing really does show you his overweening micro-management style of wanting to tell everyone else what to do, all of the time - Is it time for a large G&T yet, or is the Sun still above the yard arm?)

UPDATE: And here's the reason. Dear Lord, how God must hate Gordon Brown.

Interest rates could increase 'with vigour', warns chief economist

Who does Spencer Dale, of the Bank of England, thinks he's kidding when he says they're going to be increasing interest rates with 'vigour' when the time comes?

Pull the other one, Spencer.

This is like a fat man who is piling away cakes threatening to go on a diet next month, but in the meanwhile he's bought all these cakes so he's got to eat them.

Just like all overweight slobs, the diet is always next month, never today.

Interest rates don't need to go up in the future. They need to go up RIGHT NOW. Or even better, the Bank of England should get out of the interest-rate-setting counterfeiting business, get out of the open market counterfeiting business, and get out of the quantitative easing counterfeiting business.

It could then sit back and see what the free market sets as a proper interest rate. Who knows what it might be, but I would reckon somewhere between 6%-10% for one year LIBOR.

This would be the free market's way of restricting capital to those who:

a). Need it most
b). Are most likely to pay it back

It would also be the free market's way of creatively destroying inefficient companies and businesses who are only surviving due to artificially cheap credit, and thereby re-allocating all of their now freed resources to more successful entrepreneurs. (As opposed to taking capital from successful entrepreneurs, to waste it still further on these failed businesses.) It would also force the government to stop borrowing so much, because the taxpayers would simply revolt at the thought of paying the enormous coupons necessary to service the debt.

But could the people of Britain stand by and watch a large interest rate hike, without using the tool of democracy to prevent the pain? Of course they couldn't, unless persuaded by a Colossus to accept this necessary pain. Are there any Colossi currently occupying the halls of power? Not from where I'm standing.

So am I just heartless then? No. I want this pain over with as quickly as possible.

To use Peter Schiff's analogy, what we need to do is rip the plaster off as quickly as possible. Instead, the government is using every tool at its disposal, including all of their tools at the Bank of England, to drag the plaster off as slowly as possible, in the most agonising way that can be devised.

Gordon Brown will never allow the Bank of England to set interest rates to 10% or 15%, as will probably be needed in a few years. Neither will the Dave, George, and Ken Rainbow coalition in the blue jumper club. The political will to do this will simply not exist.

So the minions and sinecured tax eaters in the Bank of England may dream they can do what they want, but they can dream on. It just ain't going to happen.

Unless of course a Colossus, of the stature of Margaret Thatcher, can enter the scene.

Hmmmm......

I ain't saying nothing yet, but if Daniel Hannan should give up his EU post, I would advise everyone reading this to get as long-term a fixed rate mortgage deal as they can lay their hands on.

He may be the only British politician alive who has the moral strength to do what needs to be done, which is to clear the economic underbrush of Great Britain with punitive interest rates to clear out the dead wood and to create clear ground all round for the successful British entrepreneurs of the future.

You have been warned.

In fact, just as a hedge, it might be worth getting that very-long-term fixed rate mortgage right now, before the rush to the exit pushes those fixed rates up to horrific levels.

But who knows what to do? Should you stick with paying your mortgage on a very low rate tracker, and hope that no politician has the strength to put interest rates up to necessary levels, or should you go for a long-term fixed, take a hit now, in the expectation that a strong enough politician can come in and do the right thing.

This is the horror of modern democratic government. It turns everyone into speculators who have to constantly observe politicians to make the best guesses on their life, who if they get this speculation wrong, can be ruined.

What we should have instead is a life in which politicians are absolutely irrelevant, and things like interest rates which move with the natural flows of the market, are therefore predictable, and with a gold standard, which as civilisation progresses, drives towards ever-lower interest rates as time preferences decrease slowly over time.

But no. Democracy gives us the horrific ups and downs of the boom and bust world of career politicians running amok, constantly destroying everything they touch.

Daniel Hannan, please come in. Your country needs you.

Harriet Harperson: Your time is up

The Jeffster writes a splendid spoof piece on Harriet Harperson and how her socialist cronies have taken this country to the brink of bankruptcy.

Ecomentalist wants to wipe out half the population of Britain

In case you missed it, Jonathan Porritt, the rent-seeking ecomentalist extraordinaire, who has become a rich man by feasting upon the trough of taxpayer largesse, recently made the extraordinary assertion that Britain's population must be halved.

How does he presume that this will happen? Will the socialist/fascist overlordship of Britain be benign, and merely adopt the Chinese solution of one-child families lorded over by a horrendous bureaucracy? Or will we go for a more dramatic final solution?

A British Gulag might do it, I suppose, over 30 years, killing off a million a year in the death slave camps. Or perhaps we should just go for some gas chambers and some ovens to get it over with quickly?

Whichever way you look at it, however, I think it goes to show that if you prick the skin of any ecomentalist, what you will find beneath is a human hater who wants people to die so that slugs can dominate the Earth.

Well, I think you will find no finer example of a human slug than Jonathan Porritt. My only request is that to help reduce the population by one tax eater, Mr Porritt puts himself on a boat with a one-way ticket to Sweden, or some other socialist nirvana, so that we can be free of both his opinions and his depradations on our wallets.

For all you need need to know about environmentalism and the environmentalists, all you need to do is read the following splendid articles by George Reisman, the former sparring partner of Uncle Murray Rothbard, and fellow key attendee of the Mises forum in New York:

=> Environmentalism Refuted
=> Global Warming: Environmentalism’s Threat of Hell on Earth
=> Environmentalism Is Recycled Communism and Nazism

The last of those is particularly good.

Forget PM, Daniel Hannan should be made King!



In a remarkable video with Fox News, Daniel Hannan reveals himself to the wider world.

What I want to know though, is why Mr Hannan is not wearing his Mises.org tie? Judging from his comments made in the Fox video above, including his support for Ron Paul at 2:30 to go, he really ought to go about badged as a fully-fledged Austrian.

Which is absolutely splendid! :-)

Thanks to Anonymous and Guido, for putting me onto this interview.

More from Guido here:

=> Hannan Breaks the Million Views Barrier

As Guido reports in that piece, the Downing Street web site has posted a video of Brown's own European Parliament speech on YouTube, but they have turned off the comments to avoid the otherwise hundreds of links they would have received pointing everyone to Mr Hannan's reply. It has done Downing Street little good though, because guess what video turns up as number one on the 'Related Videos' panel? I'll relieve you from the suspense:

Even more splendid! ;-)

And notice the viewing figures. Number one is Daniel Hannan's epic speech, with over a million views; next comes in the less-than-epic Gordon Brown giving his wooden and perfunctory opinion on the EU Council, with a humiliating total of just 304 views.

Hilarious.

What's even more hilarious, of course, is that there are apparently 304 people in the world with such sad lives that they're prepared to watch such bilge. No doubt most of these will have had some angle of attack on the taxpayer's wallet, in choosing to do so. That, or they all need a brain transplant.

Though monitoring the view count on Mr Hannan's riposte to Gordon is almost as good as sitting up to watch those Ron Paul fund-raising totals, last year. Can Mr Hannan top two million?

I certainly hope so.

Let us also hope that this speech marks some kind of watershed, here in Britain, back down the hill towards the road to sanity.

UPDATE: After the story went around the world seventeen times, and was broadcast on several American mainstream news channels, the BBC finally relented and told the UK about Daniel Hannan in the following tiny clip on a largely unwatched program:

=> The Daily Politics

Well done Auntie Beeb! (BTW, you've just got to love the 'Berkeley' T-shirt Guido is wearing in the clip. Superb.)

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Once more, for luck...

Daniel Hannan's speech is so good, I thought we should have it again! :-)

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

The ugly rise of a new world order paper currency

One of the ugly children that could be inflicted upon the world by the upcoming disastrous G20 conference, is a single world paper currency.

There are calls for this, below. The first is an appalling article written by an idiot, but it shows you where the Mafia underbosses want to take us:

=> China weighs paper gold against dollar as reserve currency

The second highlights how this call is coming from the world's leading communist bureaucrats:

=> China calls for new reserve currency

The third shows how this inter-connected worldwide Mafia are going to use this economic crisis to railroad through a plan that was first mooted at Bretton-Woods:

=> Geithner about-turn on dollar status shocks currency markets

Of course, if you really want to know what's going on, and how a new world order paper fiat currency will be the first plank in the construction of an even more appalling world socialist/fascist government, then you need read no further than Der HoppeMeister himself, writing a number of years ago:

=> The Prophetic Dr. Hoppe on the Rise of the Phoenix

What all of this indicates, of course, is that the dollar is about to collapse. The Mafia's solution? To replace the paper dollar with a Super paper dollar.

These people really will never learn. The only real solution is the only real world currency; gold. But gold will destroy the power of the new world order, so it will never be contemplated by 'the powers that be'.

It's coming though. Because even if these Bozoes manage to foist a world paper currency on us, it will fail even quicker than the paper dollar did. That lasted from 1971 to 2009. This new 'Phoenix' or whatever dreadful name they give this unlovely beast - I like 'The Zimbabwe' - will collapse far quicker, because there will be no discipline of competing paper currencies to keep the authorities controlling it less dishonest.

These people imagine that all of their problems will be solved if the whole world can inflate together, and pesky semi-stronger currencies such as the Swiss Franc don't keep preventing them from doing so.

But once again, these numskulls are wrong. Once the relatively weak discipline of slightly harder paper currencies disappears, we really will all be needing wheelbarrows to carry our cash about in. It won't be so much like a 'paper gold', but a worldwide Zimbabwean dollar with no South Africa or Mozambique to escape to.

Welcome to the Bilderberg group's new world order.

Alarm as government debt auction fails

How much longer can the Bismarck stay afloat, when even The Grauniad is pitching in with a few shells?

Plenty of Schadenfreude, this end! :-)

Daniel Hannan - You have run out of our money



Slam! Another GIGANTIC torpedo drills into the disintegrating hull of the Bismarck.

As Margaret Thatcher always used to say, the problem with socialism is that eventually they always run out of other people's money.

In case you missed it, you must watch Daniel Hannan telling that same message to Gordon Brown's face, in the European Parliament.

I think this may be the best speech I have ever heard. It really is essential viewing.

Text of speech from Sharpe's Opinion:

Prime Minister, I see you’ve already mastered the essential craft of this Parliament – that being to say one thing in this chamber, and a very different thing to your home electorate. You’ve spoken here about free trade, and amen to that; who would have guessed, listening to you just now, that you were the author of the phrase ‘British Jobs for British Workers’, and that you have subsidised – where you have not nationalised outright – swathes of our economy, including the car industry and many of the banks.

Perhaps you would have more moral authority in this house if your actions matched your words. Perhaps you would have more legitimacy in the councils of the world if the United Kingdom were not going into this recession in the worst condition of any G20 country.

The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now in negative equity. Every British child is born owing around £20,000. Servicing the interest on that debt is going to cost more than educating the child.

Now once again today you tried to spread the blame around, you spoke about an international recession; an international crisis. Well, it is true that we are all sailing together into the squall – but not every vessel in the convoy is in the same dilapidated condition. Other ships used the good years to caulk their hulls and clear up their rigging – in other words, to pay off debt – but you used the good years to raise borrowing yet further. As a consequence, under your captaincy, our hull is pressed deep into the water line, under the accumulated weight of your debt. We are now running a deficit that touches almost 10% of GDP – an unbelievable figure. More than Pakistan, more than Hungary – countries where the IMF has already been called in.

Now, it’s not that you’re not apologising – like everyone else, I’ve long accepted that you’re pathologically incapable of accepting responsibility for these things – it’s that you’re carrying on, wilfully worsening the situation, wantonly spending what little we have left. Last year, in the last twelve months, 125,000 private sector jobs have been lost – and yet you’ve created 30,000 public sector jobs. Prime Minister you cannot go on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorging of the unproductive bit.

You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we’re well place to weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev-era Apparatchik giving the party line. You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it’s nonsense. Everyone knows that Britain is the worst placed to go into these hard times. The IMF has said so. The European Commission has said so. The markets have said so, which is why our currency has devalued by 30% – and soon the voters, too, will get their chance to say so.

They can see what the markets have already seen: that you are a devalued Prime Minister, of a devalued Government.
I wish I could have written this. I wish I could have said it directly into Gordon's flaccid face. What an absolutely brilliant effort. Let us hope we will now be seeing a lot more of Mr Hannan.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Mervyn King - The money has run out


Slam! Another torpedo crashes into the Bismarck, as HMS Mervyn King, who now has the ear of the Queen, tells Kriegsmarine Kapitan Gordon Brown that the drinks have run out and that it is now time for all of the socialist freeloaders clogging the kitchen to start making their way home.

Hilarious.

Mainstream economists shocked! - The flywheel of monetary inflation begins to spin up price inflation

The English language is a beautiful free flowing thing and the meanings of words within it are constantly changing. For instance, here is the old generally accepted meaning of the word 'inflation':

INFLATION

A general increase in the money supply - sometimes known as monetary inflation.
But here is the new generally accepted meaning:

INFLATION

A general increase in the price level - sometimes known as price inflation.
Obviously, as an Austrian, along with all the other Austrians, including most notably Peter Schiff, I believe that INFLATION should still be defined in the old way (monetary inflation) rather than in the new way (price inflation), which the government-loving Keynesians and Monetarists inflicted upon us.

However, accepting that word usage does change over time, which one of the two definitions is driving the other one? Well, the first one of course.

Yes, there are other forces acting on price inflation, as well as monetary inflation. However, in the end the flywheel of monetary inflation will always trump these other forces, which are usually self-eliminating, except perhaps the improvement of technology and entrepreneurial methods over time found within capitalist economies.

You might want to think of it this way. Monetary inflation is the male partner leading a dance, while price inflation is his female partner spinning around him. She may speed up, she may slow down, seemingly independent of her man, but overall she will tend to be where he leads her.

So what are these other forces affecting price inflation? Well, Jim Rogers would describe them as deleveraging. As we enter an economic shock wave, many investors and businesses are hit and either need to sell everything they have to cover short positions and margin calls, or sell inventory to clear debt. This creates a downward pressure on prices, hence prices fall, which can temporarily even offset the opposite force of massive monetary inflation. We can even move briefly into a period of price deflation, as the man goes one way, and his lady shoots back past him.

But it would appear, though nothing is ever certain in this predictive business, that the forces of deleveraging have reached their maximum. The Bank of England can no longer cut interest rates, therefore the monthly mortgage payments of most people on tracker mortgages can go no lower. The once powerful forces of deleveraging will also be fading away, in their own self-limiting processes.

The shorts must eventually get covered, the margin calls must eventually be filled, and the businesses must either close down or survive at a new lower price level. How long before we reach that fully deleveraged point?

Once we do hit it, this will leave monetary inflation as the only significant force driving price inflation. The male lead will then get his formerly free-floating partner firmly by the waist, and then start moving her across the dance floor in the direction of his choosing.

But how soon is soon? It's hard to say. The deleveraging and price slashing process may continue for a little longer to keep fighting the forces of monetary inflation, but deleveraging is self-limiting. Eventually, everyone is deleveraged.

However monetary inflation has nothing to hold it back except the whim of politicians. Having successfully escaped from the bondage of gold, in 1971, all the world's governments can print as much money as they want. It used to be that the only way to increase the money supply was to mine more gold. This was hazardous, difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Therefore the money supply only grew slowly, whereas the increases in technology brought about by entrepreneurial capitalism offset this so much that prices gradually dropped over time, even though the money supply was constantly increasing.

Now all politicians have to do is take a column of zeroes in a specially guarded computer within the heart of the Bank of England, 0000000000000, and change the first of those zeroes to a one, to give us: 1000000000000. Thus, we have just created £1 trillion pounds out of thin air. Actually, what they done in the last four months is create the following amounts of money from thin air, each month:

23100000000
27100000000
47300000000
28800000000

This gives us a total of:

126300000000

Or:

£126.3 billion pounds

Or an average of:

£31.6 billion pounds a month

It's amazing what computers can do for you. As the Bank of England has announced that it will create approximately £75 billion new pounds, out of thin air, over three months, in the additional process of quantitative easing, let's add £25 billion to that calculated figure, to arrive at how much they are going to be increasing the money supply, per month, over the next few months:

£56.6 billion pounds month (or approximately £942 pounds per person, per month)

As unemployment has 'officially' gone over 2 million, in this country, for the first time since 1997, Gordon Brown will be becoming increasingly desperate to reflate his bubble, to fool enough of the people over the next year or so that the problems are over. I think that figure of £942 pounds will actually be a conservative one. I reckon by the time he is through, it will be more like £3,000 pounds per person, per month. As we have gone exactly nowhere in 12 years of Zanu Labour, in terms of unemployment, and have also been sleepwalked into a depression, he will start taking enormous gambles, in the steps of his mentor Robert Mugabe, and pray that the Keynesian economists advising him know what they're talking about.

Even if he 'restricts' himself to just a grand a month, per person, he is playing a very dangerous game. If he times it exactly right, it could even 'work', at least from the viewpoint of maintaining personal power. He could balance the forces of deleveraging and monetary inflation just enough to fool this country into believing that the worst is over. He will then hold a snap election to take advantage of that happy feeling, before the underlying monetary inflation really begins to destroy this mirage, and all of that new credit feeds through the price system to push up real prices rather than imagined feelings of wealth.

This is what the useless blue socialists in the Tory Party must be terrified of; that Gordon gets his timing exactly right, and that he gets enough of what he wants in the forthcoming G20 conference to pull this timing rabbit out of the hat. Hence, their stupid pronouncements recently on increasing taxes and spending in the teeth of a depression.

But have no fear. The great 'Price Inflation' is coming. With M4 at 18.8% before they even began quantitative easing, what Brown is deliberately stoking up is the mother of all price inflations.

It is now only a matter of timing as to when this monster will finally rear its destructive head. Gordon is hoping that it will be just after he wins the next snap election.

But then, the economists who are advising on this skulduggery have been surprised how quickly price inflation is catching up with monetary inflation, so expect him to be wrong once again, on a matter of national importance.

When the IMF start selling their gold, temporarily pushing the gold price down a few dollars, then buy it. If the Austrians are right, then you do not want to be left holding paper currency when the great 'Price Inflation' finally hits these shores.

You want to be left holding something which has value in and of itself, whether this is gold, silver, or any other hard asset.

Or do you trust your government to do its best for you, rather than its constituent members doing their best for themselves?

Is Starbuck a Cylon?


Tonight is the very last episode of Battlestar Galactica (until the sequel). Of the numberless questions they need to clear up tonight, in a single episode, there is only one I need the answer to. Is Starbuck a Cylon?

I certainly hope so. Then I'll be able to add her to my trio below.


Personally though, I don't know what I see in the program.

UK inflation rate rises to 18.8%

Before quantitative easing officially kicked off in March, the Bank of England actually had a fairly quiet month in February.

It only allowed the creation of £480 pounds per person, of brand new money out of thin air, rather than the creation of £808 pounds per person, the previous month. Therefore my prediction of a new inflation rate of 20%+, was dashed.

They're still doing quite well, however. Mervyn King did still manage to raise the inflation rate to a provisional rate of 18.8% from a confirmed rate of 17.4%. So his people over there are still working night and day, to destroy the value of the pound in your pocket.

It's for your own good, you know. So I want no complaining.

The new provisional inflation rate of 18.8% combined with a Bank of England base rate of 0.5% also now gives us a real interest rate of MINUS 18.21%.

So what will happen to the March figures, next month, when they are released on April 19th? Will the quantitative easing introduced this month, combined with the usual backhanded counterfeiting, do the trick and make my 20%+ prediction come true?

Well, if you look at the graph above, it certainly seems to be the trend. And although banks may still be hoarding this new cash from out of thin air, some of it is bound to leak out as traders buy up government bonds so they can flip them to the Bank of England for a handy profit. So I'll stick on 20%, for the moment, because the entire British government is doing its damnedest to get the banks to release this brand new paper cash.

With increasing government control of the banking industry, this may be the month where it finally gets its wish.

Though having said that, the British government is always useless at everything it does, except killing people, so maybe they won't even be able to get this new money out into the open to increase the M4 figure, despite their direct control of RBS, HBOS, and Lloyds, and their practical control of all the rest.

Let us wait and see.

The provisional figures for March will be available here on the 19th of April, at 9:30am.

Link to January 2009 M4 Chart.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Trusting the police

Although I tried to avoid watching British TV or reading British newspapers while I was in the much better place of Dubai, I did feel compelled to respond to one think piece in the Torygraph. When I re-read my own piece before pressing the 'send' button, I did think I had got a little 'extreme', even for me. But, what the hell, I thought, tell it like it is.

Fortunately, contrasted with the other comments, my own opinion comes out as mild!

Virtually the entire thread is dominated by either tax generators who are sick of the police, or tax consuming police telling us how grateful we should be for their monopoly 'service' and how we should all stop complaining.

I'll remember that, next time I'm stuck in a long queue of traffic doing twenty five miles an hour past a speed camera in the middle of an empty countryside, on a road that used to recently be demarcated at sixty miles an hour, or lashed by the angry impolite tongue of one of these Gestapoid cretins for daring to leave my vehicle for ten seconds on a yellow line, because the Gestapo have closed all the roads in an area and left it otherwise impossible to stop anywhere near the event they are supposed to be helping to manage.

Sack the lot of them. Hand all of the money saved back to the public. Then let the current police re-apply for private police jobs funded by this private money. Then we'll see how rude, arrogant, and useless they become.

Jack Maturin on March 18, 2009 at 08:22 AM

The British police are nothing but an overpaid gang of licensed highwaymen.

The reason they harass ordinary members of the public is because they are incapable or afraid of tackling real criminals.

As they now secure larger salaries, pensions, and expenses, by crawling to politicians, they also no longer care what the public think or feel about them.

I would personally feel safer if there were no tax-parasite police in this country. I would feel much safer if there were a lot more private police, and people were allowed to defend themselves.

The British police have allowed themselves to become nothing more than an impolite and aggressive bunch of nascent Gestapo or Stasi wannabes.

They weren't wanted by the public when Sir Robert Peel introduced them.

They are no longer wanted by this member of the public.

Sack all of them. Get them to re-apply for jobs as private police, paid for directly by security service consumers on an estate-by-estate basis.

We would all be much better protected if the police had to respond directly to those who paid their wages.

Has the copper who arrested a man for laughing in Liverpool been sacked yet? Of course he hasn't.

He'll probably end up as the Chief Constable of Merseyside.

How much worse will British police have to get before anyone dares to sort these useless people out?

It's not so much the odd rotten apple these days, as the odd decent policeman. And that's mostly by luck rather than by planning.

Oh, and by the way, if you're a copper reading this, go ahead and resign if you feel offended. See if I care. You'll be doing the rest of us a favour.

It'll be one less licensed highwayman stealing from the rest of us.

Tories should be 'honest and straight' with the public sector

Janet Daley does her usual Torygraph line on hoping that the Tories will give up on millions of public sector votes, to bring in sensible state-shrinking policies. I thought her efforts deserved a rejoinder:

(I must also be in a moderator's good books, because my comment appeared in minutes rather than the usual hours! :-)

Jack Maturin on March 23, 2009 at 09:08 AM

The conservative party has no point. It is merely a socialist party which wears blue jumpers rather than red jumpers.

This dancing on the head of a pin about taxation policy is simply pathetic. Margaret Thatcher, if she was dead, would be rolling in her grave.

The clue lies in the title of these people who think they are our masters. 'Public Servants' are meant to be there to serve the public.

When the public can no longer afford the luxury of having so many servants, many of whom serve no greater purpose other than being government vote fodder, then these servants should be 'given the opportunity to serve elsewhere', that is, sacked.

Will I notice if a legion of NHS smoking counsellors in Sunderland are sacked? Only if I get a tax rebate on the savings, and perhaps later if I find cheaper goods on the market, because these people are doing something useful instead, that people are voluntarily willing to pay for out of their own private incomes.

As a self-employed man who is finding work increasingly difficult to come by, I will simply not make greater sacrifices so that 'public servants' don't have to and so that feckless weak-willed smokers in Sunderland can have as many 'free' services as they want.

Because 'public servants' are allowed to vote, we have now reached a country in which figurehead governments of all colours have been captured by the voting power of these 'public servants'.

Because the tax consuming beneficiaries of the public payroll now control the law-making, inflating, and tax-gathering machine, the supposed tax generating masters have become nothing but defacto slaves.

Such is always the inevitable road to the serfdom of democracy. But I will not pay 45% taxes or hand over 45% of my children's inheritance to help these people stay in their cushy numbers, while my business withers and dies under a policy of borrowing, taxing, spending, and inflating.

I will not allow my children to be burdened by paying ever-greater tithes to these useless parasitical 'servants' for the rest of their lives.

The shores of Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vancouver, Sydney, and Auckland beckon. And what a relief it will be, once I have managed to figure out a way to escape there.

The tax consumers in this country may think they can hold the tax generators down to the ground to bleed them dry, but if this process is continued by both the blue jumper socialists as well as the red jumper socialists, then the brain drain of the 1970s will seem like a trickle compared to an oncoming tsunami, as wealth generators flood out of the country, to be replaced by nothing but a tide of ever more rent seekers.

What will all the tax consumers do when all the tax generators have left? Send threatening memos to each other? Confiscate pencils from each other? Eat tax demands?

Yes, they could impose an iron curtain to stop us leaving, but if they leave me nothing but my shirt to leave in, then I'm still going anyway. And what will they do once they have eaten my frozen bank accounts?

And if they prevent me from even physically leaving, why do they think I'll then get out of bed in the morning to continue facing an old age with a destroyed pension, so I can work hard all day to feather their index-linked nests?

No, we have reached an impasse in this country.

The state must either roll itself back, or it will rolled back on a sea of tax generator emigration. If it does attempt to chain us in, we will simply withdraw our labour, as our fellow-travellers did in Russia, and merely do enough to personally survive, without generating any extra roubles to keep the useless nomenklatura class going, in the style to which it has become accustomed.

Let us go or keep us chained in? Either way, they lose.

The gravy train is over, boys and girls. Get used to it. The most sensible thing those of you at the higher end of it can do, to keep yourselves in gravy, is let the bottom half go.

If you don't, you're all going to get turfed out.

The problem with socialism, of course, is that eventually they always run out of other people's money.

Well, now they have run out. Again.

The game is up. And for the conservative party to revert to type and to join their red jumper friends in threatening to bleed the tax generators dry to fund tax consuming voters, marks the bitter end.

There is now simply no point in voting for anyone in this country. It doesn't even matter if Gordon Brown fakes an emergency, to avoid going to the polls.

It makes no difference who is in power, because they have all just proven themselves to be in thrall to the client state.

Democracy is dead.

It is a God that has failed.

Though I am actually afraid of going to Dubai. You see, they don't have NHS smoking counsellors, over there. They consider them a bit of a waste of money.

I know; it's terribly uncivilised. They expect you to take personal responsibility for your own actions and apply personal willpower. They even expect you buy your own nicorette patches if you want to give up smoking! Fancy that?

Still, at least with a zero-rated income tax scheme, I'll be able to afford them.

Back from Dubai

Approximately the view from my hotel - though now the 'Burj Dubai' is almost full height!

For those of you who have already been, of course, you will know what I am about to say next.

Dubai? What a place! Unbelievable. The twenty second century has arrived. Marvellous. Incredible. Simply unbelievable. Have I said that already? Mind blowing. Fabulous. Fantastic. Simply indescribable.

If you are single and sick of socialism, get on the first plane out there for a holiday. While you are out there, figure out how you can stay there permanently, to get away from the encroaching fascism/socialism of our rapidly disintegrating western world.

Someone said to me recently that he thought the world would shortly form several new first rank hubs and relegate New York and London to the second rank. One of the most important of these newer hubs will be Dubai, he said. I didn't used to believe him. I do now.

(Just follow the Formula One program, if you want to see where these hubs will be.)

As someone who has been very lucky in his life so far, I have managed to visit Vancouver, New York, Sydney, San Francisco, and Vienna, plus other wonderful and beautiful cities, so I feel I am qualified to pass the opinion that Dubai blows all of them away.

As a Hoppeian, it was also very strange to be in a land held together by tight-knit social organisations, in an absolute minimal state ruled by an almost absolute monarch, who is able to rule in such a way through close cooperation with these tight-knit social organisations, based upon strong family values and the absolute intolerance of crime where the property crime commandments of the Christian bible are rigidly adhered to by the Muslim religion.

Add to this negligible tax levels, incredible entrepreneurship fed by these negligible tax levels, and a society built upon the voluntary personal relations of independent clans, tribes, and families, and you are almost entering a Hoppeian WunderLand. (Though realising of course that the Professor is an anarcho-capitalist, and sees Monarchism only as a route back to freedom, not an end in itself.)

You might have also figured that I was simply blown away. I may also have said that already.

Alas, I can reveal no personal photos, because that would give the game away on who my clients are, who are very private people. Suffice it to say, that when I got back to Britain I became extremely depressed and wanted to get on the very next plane back out again, without going through passport control.

We are living here in Britain in a deep dark hole. You only realise how deep and how dark this hole is when you go somewhere like Dubai and come back again to face the dreary government officialdom of Heathrow and the newspaper headlines of the Daily Mail.

I cannot wait to go back. I look forward to the day when this will be a one-way trip. The sooner the better.

Absolutely marvellous.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Jim Rogers - If the IMF unloads its gold, then buy it

Lord Rogers of Alabama continues his denunciation of the fools in government, in the second video in this series:

The gold rush: Is it too late to jump on the bandwagon?

Paul Farrow and Richard Evans believe there may be a bubble in the gold market. They also question why the gold price seems to be staying so low, despite massive paper money printing going on all around the world?

Obviously, central banks will be having nothing to do with this.

But it is selfishly annoying for us gold bugs that Bell Hops and Taxi Drivers are now buying gold.

So all of you Bell Hops and Taxi Drivers out there, listen to Paul and Richard. Stop buying gold. Start buying stocks again. They're cheap. And quantitative easing will bring about a recovery, and make stockholders billionaires again. Yes, really, it will.

Just leave that gold stuff alone.

Gordon Brown and Bernard Madoff are separated by a single detail – Bernie's pleading guilty

No prizes for guessing the first link of the day will be to the Jeffster, at the Torygraph:

=> The Jeffster's Friday Think Piece

Splendid, splendid, splendid.

I really couldn't have put it better myself.

"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value; zero."

Voltaire (1694-1778)

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Chris Clancy's Chinese adventure - Part 8

Estranged English Austrian, Chris Clancy, rediscovers his passion for teaching in a frozen Chinese classroom:

=> Living In China – Not Many Drop-Outs Here?

(Link to previous episodes)

The History of Economic Thought

Jeff Tucker at Mises.org has just announced the full release of the online version of Uncle Murray's astounding two-volume set on the history of economic thought. Read them and weep:

=> Economic Thought: Before Adam Smith - An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Volume I

=> Classical Economics: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Volume II

All Jeff has to do now, is to get Tom Woods to volunteer to write the unstarted third volume; 'The Twentieth Century and the Madness of the Keynesians'.

In the meantime, you can get the beautifully produced hard-copy versions, here.

Gordon Brown broke Lloyds, and it should break him

Iain Martin speaks truth to power.

Bank plan to 'print money' begins


Major Neuheim waddles back to base after stuffing his uniform with half a million counterfeit pounds


Let this day be marked as the day when all madness broke loose in Britain and the British government decided to really let rip with fraudulent theft.

Let's check out the key quote:

In what economists deemed a success, the Bank received £10.5bn worth of offers for gilts - more than five times what it sought.
Obviously, they're talking about Keynesian economists. No doubt, when this madness fails, as it surely will, these same Keynesian economists will proclaim that it wasn't done quickly or hard enough, in the usual unfalsifiable way.

Yes, it will probably appear to 'work' in the short-term, in the same way that a heroin addict going through cold turkey is assuaged by an injection of diamorphine. The poll ratings for Gordon Brown may even go up again, as this green curtain magician appears to have pulled a rabbit out of a hat.

But let us be in no doubt that the medium-term and long-term results of this will be absolutely disastrous for the British economy, once the counterfeit effects of this paper confetti dissipate and people realise they are not richer and have no more real resources backing their plans, but they're just holding more paper tickets chasing after the same amount of stuff.

All you have to do, to see through this trick, is to imagine that a private criminal gang is doing exactly the same thing, printing up this undetectable confetti in a basement and then going out and spending it on whatever they fancy. If that makes it clearer, the reason people are fooled is generally to do with the formative years of their lives being spent in government brainwashing institutions, where the lesson is hammered into us that government can only do right.

Even now I notice this myself with news stories about terrible faraway places. I find myself unconsciously rooting for 'government forces' in conflicts in Africa and Asia, as opposed to 'rebel forces'. Despite being a hard-core anarcho-capitalist, I still have to consciously shake my head to break this spell of burned-in government magnificence.

You may ask, if 'quantitative easing' is such a terrible thing, then why are these gilt purchases so over-subscribed? Well, all you have to do is get hold of the Private Schulz video, and witness Major Neuheim stuffing his uniform full of perfect five pound notes, to figure that one out.

Whoever gets to spend this new money first benefits tremendously, at the cost of everyone else down the spending chain. Whoever gets it last, usually pensioners on fixed incomes, is ultimately robbed by these first spenders.

Yes, our friends in a socialist government are robbing pensioners through wealth redistribution to hedge funds.

The effects of such fraud have been known since Richard Cantillon, the cunning anti-hero of the Austrian School, who used this knowledge to make himself a millionaire in the Mississippi Bubble crisis.

The British government really are a despicable band of robbers writ large.