The Alps have best snow conditions 'in a generation'

A very merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone. Especially anyone having a last fling in the Alps before all of the money runs out. And it should be a good one this year, even on the lower runs, because of all this extra snow and coldness we've been having due to global warming.

Thank goodness Al Gore is on the case, to ensure that when it gets really cold, next year, we'll have plenty of wind energy to keep ourselves warm in the chalets.

Marvellous.

In the meantime, for all the latest on how Al Gore and all of our other mighty rulers are managing energy policy in this snowy cold world (if they can get out from under the Canadian and US snow drifts, that is), who better to read than Christopher Booker:

=> 2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved

And BTW, please don't take offence, but if you should meet me on the street in the next couple of weeks, please do not offer me a mince pie. Mince pies sind verboten. Verstehen Sie? Danke schon. Mince pies, nein danke.

Pip pip!!

Will he or won't he?

Gordon Brown must be starting to move into his depressive phase again, after a couple of manic months. At least he ought to be, with a decision required on the Jaguar bailout.

Obviously, AngloAustria's position is to let them go bust, along with everyone else queueing up in the corporate welfare lounge. Those business people who indulged in long-term investments because they were fooled by artificial interest rates, so entered structures of production much longer than the market truly required, must be cleared out from the system to allow other more competent managers to get hold of their resources. This is the only route to the solution to this crisis, along with massive government spending cuts and tax reductions.

The pain for many will be immense (and don't worry, sports fans, as a self-employed person I'm expecting to bear my share), but the pain will be over relatively soon, within one or two years. In the longer term, we also need to move to a disciplined form of money, one which we can trust, and this means a move to a 100% reserve commodity currency, probably of either silver or gold. But I'll settle for tax and spending cuts, and no bailouts, if that's all I can get.

However, looking at this 'politically', we have a very interesting situation. After years of government interventions, we have a well-connected car company with several factories in Labour marginals employing thousands of Labour Party voters. We also have a petty Stalin in charge of the government, Gordon Brown, who wishes to stay in charge of the train set for the rest of his natural life.

Brown must know that if he fails to bailout Jaguar, then Tata will let it go bankrupt, and the Brown bounce will start deflating. Expect every Labour MP in the affected areas to immediately begin sharpening their knives for his back again.

However, Brown also knows that if he bails out Jaguar, then the Brown bounce may continue for a short time, but then every other monkey in the forest will be down from the trees with their begging bowls out.

First, it will be all those who engaged in long-term roundabout production processes, so expect airlines, property developers, and other car companies to come calling. Then it will be anyone else who has enough marginal voters on their payroll to command the government's attention. (So all small and medium-sized companies who will be forced to pay for all of this largesse will be wasting their time.)

The only way to avoid upsetting all of these corporate welfare monkeys will be to pay them all off, and the only way of doing that will be to crank up the printing press and push M4 up from 16.3% to something more like 163%!

As Brown keeps buying time by printing more money, his dilemmas are going to come sooner and swifter each time, until eventually his bubble of hubris will pop. The longer he survives, the louder will be the explosion when he is finally overcome.

You never know. He might hold the line. He can 'plausibly' protect his bank bailouts by simply toeing the orthodox line of banks being too big to fail. But if he starts bailing out 'ordinary' companies, then it really is all over. Even he may be able to see this, and then when the unions are screaming for his blood, he can adopt the 'Margaret Thatcher' stance of standing up to them.

Well, he can do that if he likes. That way he'll make a bigger target for all the Midlands and Merseyside Labour MPs coming at him from behind.

We really do live in interesting times.

So what does Maturin Towers think he will do? Well, your regular correspodent merely looks at the photograph above of Gordon Brown's own 4.2 litre armoured Jaguar to work out his opinion. For once, I'll let you guess what it is.

Pip pip!!

The death march goes on

How many more British troops are to be sacrificed upon the altar of American imperialism in Afghanistan? Did we Brits not learn the first time around, in the nineteenth century, that you cannot impose yourself upon the fiercely independent peoples of this remote land? You would have thought so.

Even the mighty British Empire couldn't subdue this land, even with the complete British domination of the Indian sub-continent. So what chance do we have now, after having become mere puppets to our Anglo-Saxon cousins in America?

However, the American Empire, the bastard offspring of the British one, thinks it needs to bring oil pipelines down from central Asia, to avoid being reliant upon the modern Russian Bear, so we jump to it like the good Roman auxiliaries we are, doing the dirty work for our imperial masters in the marbled halls of Washington DC.

Over 130 British troops have now been killed in Helmand province, with nearly a thousand others seriously injured. With the US satrap, Gordon Brown, promising to bring the troops home from Iraq, probably just in time for the next general election, expect all of these men to be shipped straight back out to Afghanistan the moment the election is over, with another hundred of them to be killed before Christmas 2009.

And for what? As Pat Buchanan has reported, the war is as good as lost. It would be far better for everyone involved if we just got out now. And stayed out.

And if the moving goalpost reason for us being there became to suppress the opium trade, then the best way of doing that would merely be to legalise the opium trade. And even if you disagree with that, all this war has done is to make the drugs warlords richer and more powerful than ever before, exporting even more opium, as the Afghans use this product to pay for their increasingly successful fight against the NATO invasion force (which seems to be operating a long way east of its North Atlantic mandate).

No doubt Gordon Brown will be paid off for his acquiescence in the usual way the Americans buy the British government's supplication, via a lucrative speaking engagement tour in the US once he is kicked out of office. I mean, come on, does anyone seriously believe that anyone in the US is interested in anything at all Tony Blair has to say on any subject, years after he has stopped being Prime Minister? Yet he still earns millions in payments for dull speeches in Nowheresville, Massachusetts, despite most people in Nowheresville, Massachusetts not even knowing where the UK is. Has it dawned on so few in Britain that this was just a way of laundering the payments to this traitor, for his signing up this country to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one based on lies, the other based upon the need of the US government to export oil from central Asia without the pipeline first going through the potentially throttling fingers of Putin's Russia?

Yes, you'll throw the words Al Qaeda at me, but the members of this shadowy terrorist group are now all living in Pakistan, London, and Paris, and are laughing at us for having painted ourselves into the quagmire of Iraq and Afghanistan while they plan their next outrage.

AngloAustrian prediction: When the final ignominious retreat is made, with our tails between our legs as we are kicked back down the Khyber Pass, we will have lost the best part of a thousand men and suffered perhaps ten thousand casualties for absolutely no reason whatsoever. The Taliban will be stronger than ever in Afghanistan, the opium trade will be flourishing, and the oil pipelines of central Asia will be flowing north into Mother Russia. Oh, and the small cost of hundreds of millions of pounds of wasted taxpayers cash will also need to be taken into account, though this is small beer against all of our dead soldiers, plus all of the other innocent people killed.

What on Earth are we doing there? How did we get into this mess? And how are we going to get out of this useless bloody war, whilst retaining even the merest scintilla of dignity? These are the questions Gordon Brown should be answering. Not whether his idiotic policies have saved the world. No doubt he will never answer these questions. Not while there are lucrative speaking engagements to fulfil in America, funded by who knows who, from who knows what source.

And if all that was a bit downbeat, a good way to cheer yourself up is to read Harry Flashman's splendid account of the first British retreat from Kabul, a hundred and sixty years ago.

Sterling suffering worst slide since UK exited the Gold standard in 1931

Whoops! :-)

It's nice however that the Torygraph is relating this story in terms of the gold standard. The hundreds of posters on their comment pages who regularly refer to the gold standard, including a certain mono-maniac from Maturin Towers, may be finally be having an effect, even on Edmund Conway, author of the piece. It is also nice to notice that our Keynesian friend is clearly puzzled about what is going on. The silver penny may finally be dropping for him, too.

Time for a large gin and tonic then to set up the weekend, while I can still afford to buy lemons, or any other commodity, with my increasingly worthless pounds.

Though I would sacrifice my drink if I could be a fly on the wall inside Downing Street, at the moment. Brown will be pacing up and down, Mandelson will be sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by newspapers and pleading for a February election, while on a 40-inch plasma screen in the corner Sky News will be broadcasting every 15 minutes how much further the pound has devalued in the last 15 minutes.

Outstanding.

(And remember, the Pound is falling against a basket of other fiat currencies, which are themselves falling against a true money, i.e. gold.)

If only I was a billionaire watching this for amusement, rather than a Middle Englander watching this in grim fascination, it would be funnier gallows humour than the last series of Blackadder, when Captain Rowan Atkinson seduced Nurse Miranda Richardson and then had her shot for treason.

So how low can the Pound go? With true inflation in this country accelerating to over 16% in the last month as part of Brown's deliberate plan to 'save the world', it could go very low indeed.

Suits made out of fifty pound notes, anyone?

God is an Austrian

St Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna
Catholocism has long been associated with Austrianism, which is a religion with a very deep streak of forgiveness and individual toleration, plus a wish for peace for mankind, combined with a moralistic bent about the rights of life, liberty, and property (and various other religious commandments).

But what about the long-schismed Church of England? Well, after last night it appears that the Archbishop of Canterbury too may also be a secret Austrian, when he accused Gordon Brown of behaving like a drug addict, when it comes to using debt to solve a crisis which came about because of the government's use of debt.

Fantastic! ;-)

Obviously the great childish brute of Downing Street couldn't take it like a man, and responded like a prickly spiteful child. But then, what's new, Pilgrim?

Spot the difference - UK inflation now over 16%

Check out the Bank of England's statistical release information from November, for the real UK monetary inflation rate in October (a.k.a. M4):

Now check the best figures I can find, released yesterday, covering November itself:
You'll notice that although the latest release is prettier, with a hint of colour, there is a lot less information - a very 'New Labour' arrangement!

Also, there are only 'seasonally adjusted' figures, and no raw figures. I don't know what heuristics they use in the Bank of England to 'seasonally adjust' such figures, but I'll guarantee that whatever they are, they have reduced the unpublished raw M4 figure.

There are several possible reasons behind this. The first is that I have once again been bamboozled by the horrendous statistics presentation pages which are seemingly set out by the Bank of England to create a sea of confusion.

Although this is the most likely reason, there is of course the other 'paranoid delusional' reason that the Bank of England is now releasing less information than previously to cover up its deliberate growth of inflation.

Whatever the case, unlike last month, I am forced to have to give you 'seasonally adjusted' figures, because I simply cannot get hold of the 'real' information. Whatever the case, and no matter how the civil servants in the Bank of England may have obfuscated the information, they cannot hide the fact that M4 has just gone over 16%. Expect this UK inflation figure to grow, as we head down towards zero per cent interest rates:



Link to October 2008 M4 Chart

Financial crisis: Free money coming your way!

The increasingly ridiculous Edmund Conway, argues that hyperinflation is good for us.

Maturin Towers Comment:

Jack Maturin on December 18, 2008 at 11:01 AM

Edmund, please stop reading Paul Krugman and start reading Peter Schiff instead. You will feel much better afterwards.

Alternatively, please let us know why these policies that you advocate have been so successful in Japan in the last two decades.

Is Gordon Brown frightened of elections?

Iain Martin of the Torygraph posits an interesting article which debates whether Gordon Brown has the cojones to call an election. Obviously, given such a red rag, Maturin Towers felt obliged to throw its two and half pence into the ring:

UPDATE: Alas, the Torygraph comment mediator didn't feel able to release my comment onto their web pages (it was posted well before the last comment shown). But here it is in its unpublished glory, anyway. BTW, I perfectly respect the right of the Torygraph to disbar any comments it doesn't approve of. Their web site is their property, and I claim no 'right' to 'have my voice heard'. Seems a terrible shame though that they do seem to operate a censorship programme. I suppose my calling Brown a Stalinist in the first line may have put them off. Or it may just be a computing error. Whatever the case, it's their web site, so if they either employ rubbish technology which loses comments or if just don't like certain comments or commenters, then that's their business.

UDATE II: For some strange reason, my comment finally appeared quite a number of hours after I posted it. Come on, Torygraph. Get with the program.

Maturin Towers comment:

Jack Maturin on December 18, 2008 at 11:39 AM

Being a petty Stalinist, it will never be Brown's inclination to hazard an election with more than one candidate in it, if there is any other choice on offer.

However, he must have an election within two years, to retain any form of legitimacy; so from his point of view, the sooner he goes to the country the better, because this is going to be the mother of all recessions, which is mainly because of the Keynesian stupidity of his bailout policies, which failed in the 1930s, which failed in the 1970s, and more recently, which failed in Japan.

Mandelson will therefore be imploring Brown to go in February, whereas Brown will be resisting, due to his definitive yellow-belly streak of pusillanimous cowardice.

However, in the last few days the Labour Party officially stated that an early election would not be in the public interest. Therefore, following the golden rule that you should always believe the exact opposite of what any politician says about anything at all, and combining this with the announcement yesterday that the troops are coming home from Iraq, the Tories are right to expect a February election.

It is Brown's only chance of winning. After this, even the client-state payroll vote may turn against him, in the style of 1979, once his arrogant actions at punishing the competent to bail out the incompetent, bring us first stagflation, then price and wage controls, and then shortages of goods and employment. When you have no money and no food, even if you live within the heart of Middlesbrough you will finally be tempted to vote against the Labour Party.

His only other chance of hanging on to power is to deliberately engineer such a disastrous financial meltdown that he is 'forced' to suspend elections, 'in the public interest', and declare martial law.

Obviously, with the short-termist headline-aware way he has handled the banking crisis, which defies belief, when instead of massively curtailing consumption spending he has massively increased it, this could be exactly what he has been up to.

I would put nothing past the self-delusional hubris and self-interested spite of this manic depressive tyrant.

Not that the Tories will be any better, of course. At least they won’t be foolish enough to waste another hundred billion pounds on ID cards, but aside from that, will it really make any difference which political party is in charge of the train set, if they’re all going to follow the same Keynesian policies of inflation, borrowing, and spending, to cure a crisis caused by inflation, borrowing, and spending?

How about we have an election where “None of the Above” is mandated on all ballot papers, and if “None of the Above” wins, we can sack the lot of them, and all of their client-state apparatchiks? Now that would be an election worth voting in.

Inflation is coming. Then controls. Then rationing.

A truly stunning article by Uncle Gary North:

=> Oldsmobile Nation

(For "Obama", read "Brown"; for "Citigroup", read "HBOS"; for "Dollar", read "Pound")

Weather: Coldest start to winter since 1976

Must be due to global warming. Or, errr..., precipitate hydride volatility, or, errr..., climate change, or summink. It won't be due to changes in the Sun's energy output, or anything cosmological, but will definitely be due to anthropogenic global warming. Oh yes.

See here for details, on Britain's coldest winter for over 30 years.

More accompanying cant, of course, from the EU today, where the Euro Parasites decided to reduce my energy expenditure by 20%, because enough voter morons are around who still believe in anthropogenic global warming.

Check out this article which shocks us with the revelation that scientists think (no doubt using incredibly sophisticated models easily capable of predicting the future a hundred years out) that the world's sea level will rise by a whole two metres, by 2100. I wonder if residents will notice in the Severn Estuary area, where they regularly get tides over 15 metres deep. I actually wonder if anybody at all will notice, including the residents of Tuvalu or the Maldives, the world's lowest countries.

BTW, I love this quote from David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey (another parasite organisation sucking up another 400 useless salaries from the tax generator class):

"...If you're looking further ahead than 2100 - and many governments are, including the Netherlands and the UK which are thinking about infrastructure that would last more than 100 years - then that second century still looks quite scary." - My italics!

Come on, David. Gordon Brown is looking no further ahead than the day after the next election, and no civil servant is really thinking about anything at the moment except whether they will get their promised government pension in the next couple of decades, or whether the currency they might get paid in will be worth anything. To imagine that "the government" is seriously planning the next hundred years, when it can hardly stumble from one day to another without bouncing on the financial landmines of its own unintended consequences, really does let you into the pompous mindset of these arrogant people, who have the grandiose world view that they must inflict their superior guardianship over the proles of the next ten generations.

Obviously, if Aubrey de Grey is right, with his predictions that relatively soon we will all possess the opportunity to live forever, as Tolkienesque elves, then there might be some merit in discussing the next two hundred years, but really; these deranged people are growing beyond caricature. Fortunately, the coming storm of the depression will hopefully knock out a lot of their funding and give everyone more important things to think about, such as where the next meal or pay cheque is coming from, rather than what level the sea may be at in a hundred years.

Britain, as a governmental entity, won't even exist in 50 years, never mind a hundred. We'll either be slaves in a world government gulag ruled over by either Brussels, Washington, Moscow, Beijing, or Delhi (take your pick), or we'll be living in tiny independent city states, certainly no bigger than Scotland, and possibly as small as an Englishman's castle (which obviously, is the preferred option).

But whatever the case, anthropogenic global warming will have been long forgotten in a hundred years. Hopefully by then people will also have remembered what most of us were taught in the 1970s; that we are living in an inter-glacial period, and that the real weather terror of the next millennium will be the next ice age.

And no. That won't be our fault, either.

Karl Popper must be spinning in his unfalsifiable grave, at the thought of these legions of state-fed "scientists" who can only come to one conclusion, no matter what the evidence. Thank goodness then for the 31,072 real open-minded scientists who signed this petition declaring themselves against this ongoing slough of nonsense.

They should be commended for their willingness to suffer funding cuts from the orthodox marxist environmentalists in charge of most government research handout agencies.

Irish pork industry welcomes £158m rescue fund

I'm sorry, but this really is the corporate welfare state headline to end all other corporate welfare state headlines.

=> Irish pork industry welcomes £158m rescue fund

Absolutely marvellous.

For more on pork barrel politics, try Wikipedia.

Value of pound falls to 28-year low

The bloody fruits of the failure of Gordon Brown's bailout policies are beginning to become too noticeable to ignore. With the pound collapsing against the Euro, Alistair Darling, our woebegone Chancellor of the Exchequer, has gone from "puppet on a string" to "a rabbit frozen in the headlights".

He refuses to say where he thinks the pound will end up, because, let's face it, he doesn't even know what colour underpants he's wearing, so how would he know something as complicated as the terminal value of a fiat currency? Well, Alistair, I'll let you in on a secret; and it's not that complicated. The Pound will eventually possess the full value of a single Zimbabwean Dollar. It really is only a matter of time.

Poor Chancellor.

In 'normal' situations like this, a fall in the value of the Pound would lead the Bank of England to stoke up interest rates to shore up the Pound's strength. But these are not normal situations. If interest rates were increased, the full force of the recession would finally hit home and blast away the remaining crumbling debt-built edifice of the British economy. So we can't do that, because to embrace a recession just before an election, no matter how sensible from an Austrian point of view, would be electoral suicide for the short-term future of the Labour Party (though very good for the long-term future of the country).

On the other hand, if interest rates stay just where they are, or head even lower towards zero per cent, then the pound will crumble away to dust, just like Christopher Lee in one of those sixties Dracula films when he's hit by early morning sunlight.

Hence, a Chancellor struck dumb and blinking in the headlights.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. What is he going to do next? Unlike the Americans, this Downing Street lemming cannot hide behind the libation of a world reserve currency status (though as Peter Schiff has forecast, this will eventually fail for the Dollar too, when it implodes). And unlike the Europeans, Darling presides over a much more debt-ridden society, similar to the US, with a destroyed manufacturing base resting upon government spending and corporate welfare, fueled by debt and the Bank of England's printing press.

Because our economy is so analogous to the American one, we are basically experiencing a dress rehearsal for what the Americans will go through in a couple of years when the Dollar loses its world reserve currency status, and it too goes into free fall.

So what will Darling and Brown do? They will do what all socialists do when forced to face up to their own failures. They will blame everyone else and then clutch at straws.

Expect an emergency capitulation and switch to the Euro, 'which we have been forced to do due to global conditions originating in America'. No referendum. No debate. Just a force majeure overnight switch to the Euro.

When will they do it? Well they don't know themselves, though they'll be toying with it in committee rooms, so it's hard to call it. I would suspect that when the miserable peasants are beating on the iron gates of Downing Street with their torches and their pitchforks, which at our current rate of decline could be in a few weeks!

I wonder if Mandelson is working on the slogans now? A New Labour Currency for a New Labour Year.

The question remains, however, will the strong Eurozone countries want to let us in? With Greece imploding, will they want another economic basket case on their hands? That may be the final irony. Brown will have wrecked the economy enough to finally get the British people to grudgingly accept the Euro as our only lifeline, and then the French and the Germans don't let us in!

Now that really would be something, even for this appalling Stalinist megalomaniac and immodest saviour of the world.

Oh, and none of it will be his fault. Oh no.

Revealed - Gordon Brown has saved the world

In an earlier piece, I speculated that the manic depressive Gordon Brown may have thought that he was the reincarnation of 'Flash Gordon'. It appears he does in fact think that he is Superman.



Yes, it's expensive living in his socialist utopia, but at least we can all still laugh at him from time to time. For how much longer I do not know. But let's enjoy his grandiloquent self-obsessed lunacy while he can.

Sark votes in first-ever election

Shame on the Barclay brothers, owners of the Torygraph, for selfishly causing this disaster.

But then, democracy always is about selfishness. Which is why it always eventually collapses, when the mob of have-nots have no more wealth to steal from the minority group of haves.

For brave investors only: 10 ways to tell that you are touching bottom

Jeff Randall speculates on where the bottom of the recession might be.

My endless quest to propagandize Austrianism in the Torygraph, perhaps the most fertile UK area for such a project, therefore continues mercilessly too:

Maturin comments:

Jack Maturin on December 10, 2008 at 12:29 PM

The bottom will be wherever Peter Schiff and Jim Rogers say it is. In "Bull Moves in Bear Markets", Schiff reckons it might be when gold hits about $5,000 dollars an ounce, and when commodities trading companies start using private gold currency, such as that offered by goldmoney.com, rather than any government fiat currency.

Alas, we've got a long way to go down yet, and with both Obama in the White House and Brown in Downing Street both planning to do exactly the wrong things, to prop up their collapsing fiat currency bubbles, it could take quite some time to get there.

Plus a second comment, which rather strangely appeared on the Torygraph site before the first one:

Jack Maturin on December 10, 2008 at 12:28 PM

Sorry, I've forgotten the most obvious indicator.

When Roger Bootle, Edmund Conway, and Ambrose Pritchard-Evans all renounce Keynesianism and recommend that we switch to a 100% reserve gold standard with immediate effect.

That will be the day that marks the true bottom.

Deleveraging Pushes Up the Dollar

John Browne, Peter Schiff's literary partner, explains why the dollar is having one last tango.

Financial medicine of lower interest rates will only make us all sicker

Liam Halligan pens another excellent article in the Torygraph.

It's interesting to see that so many of the commenters agree with the basic Austrian analysis that we should embrace the recession to clear out the malinvestments of the past decade. Also, I couldn't resist adding my own comment, because Mr Halligan makes it fairly clear that he's feeling rather alone in the media financial community. We need all the writers like Mr Halligan that we can get our hands on.

Maturin comment:

Jack Maturin on December 07, 2008 at 08:57 AM

You may be alone in the financial press, Liam, but you're not alone out here. Please keep up the excellent work at pointing out the absurdities of what the Bank of England is up to. Murray Rothbard, the late Dean of the Austrian School of Economics, would be proud of you.

With the M4 broad money supply figure currently at an inflation rate of 15.6% per annum, it is laughable that the same organisation which has presided over the deliberate creation in the last year of £255 billion pounds from out of fresh air, is the same organisation which is trying to scare the UK's population with the preposterous hobgoblin of price 'deflation'.

So please keep going. Expose the cant of the Bank of England's loose monetary policies, and don't let their court economists, such as Paul Krugman, try to keep pulling the Keynesian wool over the rest of our aggregated eyes.

The Bank of England, under the direction of their short-term minded political masters, who are desperate to re-inflate this bubble to try to win the next election, and to heck with the long-term consequences, are deliberately trying to drag us into the same deep dark hole the Japanese have spent the last two decades buried in.

It is only with the work of people such as yourself, and perhaps Peter Schiff, that we will escape such a horror. You must therefore keep going, despite all of the orthodox Keynesian pressure that you are no doubt being subjected to by your colleagues on the Telegraph, all of whom seem to have been deeply dipped into the ink of John Maynard Keynes, despite all of the theories of that charismatic gentleman having been totally destroyed in the stagflation of the 1970s.

So keep going. Carl Menger, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, and Ludwig von Mises would also be proud of you. Good luck!

What's the REAL inflation rate in the UK?

This is tricky. I would prefer a value such as the TMS (True Money Supply), as calculated by Mises.org to reflect the true monetary inflation rate in the United States. However, there is no such thing available over here in the UK so I will use M4, the 'traditional' way of measuring 'broad' money. OK, so it ain't perfect, but at least it's a whole truck load of gin better than the heavily massaged CPI figures.

So where has M4 been going recently? Go on. Guess.

I'm going to use the simple non-seasonally-adjusted M4 figure, to give us something nice and straightforward which we can get a long-term handle on, rather than any of the Bank of England's many other petty-fogging obfuscations.

Notice the steep rise in the inflation rate in October, to deliver an annual M4 inflation rate of 15.6%. This is the harbinger of much worse to come as the artificially-low Bank of England base rate takes effect, and as they start buying up UK Treasury bonds directly from the Debt Management Office, in what they will euphemistically call "quantitative easing" - counterfeiters call this process "a good day in the office".

You may also want to notice that at one point the UK central bank almost managed to get inflation under 10%, squeezing it all the way down to 10.1% in May this year. Such discipline!

But despite this heroic effort, in one year, the Bank of England managed to deliberately create £255 billion more pounds than had existed twelve months earlier, approximately £4,000 pounds for every man, woman, and child, in the country. This is fine work, especially if you want to generate a Weimar-style republic. Expect much worse to come, though even I will admit that increasing the UK monetary base from £1.64 trillion pounds, to £1.9 trillion pounds, is hardly slacking.

I'll try to keep you posted, though as both Guido and Obnoxio have noted, the UK government is beginning to restrict what they want the Bank of England to tell the rest of us, so this may become increasingly difficult.

PS> If you want to drown yourself in a whole myriad of meaningless nonsense, you can check out the M4 figures here. Good luck!

Why did nobody tell me about Scribd?

Crazy. After hearing about it on a Jeffrey Tucker MP3, I've just discovered Scribd. Flippin' marvellous. I thought I would christen my discovery with the following set of books to cure us from the insanity of the world's hyper-inflating governments:

The Mystery of Banking, by Murray Rothbard

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Economics Business banking rothbard

America's Great Depression, by Murray Rothbard

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Economics Business depression great depression

The Ethics of Money Production

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Economics Business ethics ethical

This is probably the best technology in the world, ever. I think it even outdoes YouTube! ;-)

Weimar republic, here we come...

The edge of the precipice is near:

=> Bank of England mulls "nuclear option" of cash injection

=> Interest rates cut: Bank of England cuts rates from 3 per cent to 2 per cent

=> Gordon Brown promises to push banks on interest rate cut

The lemmings in Downing Street must be getting really scared by now. Having used CPI inflation figures for years, which do not take any input from housing costs, and then having deliberately inflated a bubble in the housing market to steal government income from the masses to take advantage of this lack of reflection in the CPI figures, the comeuppance is going to be truly outstanding.

Expect the "nuclear option" to be taken. This government has so much debt, and has client-state supporters with so much debt that the only way out that they will be able to see, is to monetize the entire amount via the printing press.

And not just via the usual obfuscation of the open market operations division of the Bank of England, but via the front-door purchase of government bonds directly from one department of the Treasury (the Debt Management Office) by another department of the Treasury (the Bank of England), with bills of credit created out of fresh air. It will be called "prudence". It will result in chaotic hyper-inflation and the possible long-term breakdown of society.

It's time to break out the whisky. Drink it while you can still afford it. Drink it to avoid staying sober in an unpleasant land. Drink it while the streets aren't filled with desperate gangs robbing it from you at will.

There is another solution of course. That is for the government to drastically cut back its spending (and I mean by at least half), to drastically cut taxes (at least in half), and to drastically cut wealth-restricting regulations (i.e. virtually all of them). With all of the recent bailouts reversed too, the recession can then be embraced, worked through, and then put behind us, in merely a year or two. The hundreds of thousands of sacked government 'workers' will find themselves something useful to do (or starve), and we will have a country worth living in again.

Obviously, as an anarchist, I would rather the government disappeared entirely, but I'll take a halving for now! :-)

Will they do this? Of course they won't. Because in their short-term greed for themselves and their clients they would rather give us the Weimar republic and the associated political horrors that always follow such economic castrations, rather than suffer any government spending cuts of any kind whatsoever.

And isn't it nice to know that even in these times of financial toughness that the European Space Agency are cock-a-hoop over their recent increase in government funding, to over £5 billion of your taxpayer pounds! Such a splendid use of your donations to the cause of continued government spending.

It makes me feel proud to be an Englishman.

Pip pip!!

Gordon Mugabe - "I love AngloAustria"

Well, he must do. Because every time I predict what this monumental fool is going to do next, he goes and does it virtually the very next day. Check out these two articles:

=> The top ten mistakes Brown will make next
=> Get a UK home for virtually free

Then check out what Mugabe does a few days later:

=> Mortgage help plan brings interest payments relief for people facing repossession

Remarkable.

Peter Schiff vs. Arthur Laffer

OK, I'm a sad person. I admit it. But I do occasionally like to have a laugh. And the following two videos are perhaps the funniest I have seen in a long time.

In the first one, dated August 2006, Peter Schiff correctly predicts the current recession and what will cause it. Arthur Laffer, an appropriately named man, laughs out loud at Schiff's thoughts and then challenges Schiff to a bet, after stating that the American economy is in the best shape it has ever been, that there will not be a recession in 2007 or 2008, and that he wants Schiff to grovel at his feet in supplication when Schiff is proved wrong. Schiff, of course, accepts the bet, saying he would like it to be a lot more than one penny:



In the second video, dated October 2008, an incredibly nasty and stupid little man gracelessly tries to pretend he is not the same Arthur Laffer as in the video above. Bill Maher gently quizzes him on the bet with Peter Schiff. An ugly toad-like impression settles upon Laffer's screwed up face, as this evil little grunt of a man, who was so quick to pour loud public scorn upon Peter Schiff, quickly tries to shut down the conversation by talking about a nine month statute of limitations on economic predictions (which doesn't appear to have stopped Schiff making multi-year predictions, of course, or being right). As well as being the funniest economic thing I have seen in years, this second video is also toe-wincingly embarrassing after watching the first one, so be careful before you click play:



AngloAustrian conclusion: Nobody should ever listen to another word Arthur Laffer ever says about anything ever again, except perhaps "I was wrong, I admit it, I am an arrogant fool. Peter Schiff was right. Everybody should stop hiring me and start hiring him instead." They should also take all of his Laffer curves, designed to maximise government income, and shred the lot of them, returning the proceeds to the taxpayers of this world. The title of Laffer's new book, "The End of Prosperity", is also rather appropriate. Let's hope it comes true for him in his personal fortunes, when offering economic advice to anyone. Presumably the book took at least a couple of months to think about, then a couple of months to write. It probably also took a couple of months to publish, and then a couple of months to set up the publicity tour. Therefore, given Laffer's nine month statute of limitations, it only has a shelf life of 1 month before it's completely out of date. So don't buy it while you can.

No doubt, however, it will also be Laffer to whom governments are right now turning, to quiz him on what to do next, rather than Schiff, despite Laffer having proven himself to be an incompetent mistaken idiot and despite Schiff having proven himself, in the face of incredible scorn, to be an incredible bang-on hero.

Funny that.

It reminds me of the S.E.P. concept in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is generally impossible for normal human beings to see Someone Else's Problem. It would also appear that due to an A.E. concept, it is impossible for government people to see Austrian Economists, despite their having predicted everything correctly, despite their possession of the only full working model of the business cycle, despite their having solutions ready to run out of the box, and despite their having supporters, such as myself, much better looking than other people. (OK, I lied about that last bit.)

Do you think this inability to see Austrian Economists has anything to do with the hard Rothbardian stipulations that governments should drastically cut back spending, taxes, and central bank powers, if we are to get through this recession in any kind of shape? Hmmm.... I wonder.

Also, can I make a request to any AngloAustrian readers? If the dreadful rat man Arthur Laffer ever does pay Schiff his penny, which I rather doubt after watching the second incredibly graceless video, can you please send me the link to the YouTube video? Immediately! :-)

Though it might be fun if Laffer doesn't pay Schiff, because like a bad MacBethian character Laffer will have to spend the rest of his life trying to avoid his nemesis.

Marvellous.

Pip pip!!

(Praise must be due to Stephen Carson, at LewRockwell.Com, for unearthing these videos)

Ignore the excuses, here are the signals showing disaster on the way

The closest character we have to a "British" Peter Schiff, here in the UK, is Jeff Randall, Editor-At-Large of the Daily Torygraph. Mr Randall is required reading here in Maturin Towers, of a morning, and he rarely disappoints with his anti-government diatribes. This morning he takes Gordon Mugabe to task for failing to spot the oncoming crash, what with all of Mugabe's previous pompous talk of having abolished boom and bust.

Intriguingly, Mr Randall also promised a Bottle of Bubbly to whichever Torygraph reader sent in the best example of any other such sign of oncoming recession. Well, being one partial to the odd glass or three of chilled fizz, how could I resist such a Sisyphusian offer? I wrote something in haste, perhaps over-stimulated by the thought of the bottle on offer. It's perhaps my worst ever Torygraph comment, coming across as trying too hard and sounding a bit whiney. Whoops! Oh well. It may fail to be the winner of the shampoo, because I was trying too hard to win the shampoo, but at least it gets a dig in against the ecomentalists:

Jack Maturin on December 03, 2008 at 09:01 AM

It might seem a bit off the wall, but I think the total non-reaction to Lord Turner's ecomentalist plans to double, triple, or even to quadruple energy costs, in a bid to satisfy all of our Mother Earth religious desires to flagellate ourselves, may stand out as a sign of oncoming economic madness.

To have initially gone along with these idiotic nostrums, indicates that we all felt that wealth would keep increasing exponentially enough, with absolutely no chance of downside, to magically offset this nonsense on stilts.

I think we will now see the government quietly shelve Turner's plans, because to deliberately inflate energy costs in the teeth of the worst recession since the 1930s really would be a classic symptom of Whitehall buffoonery.

Sorry, let me retract that.

With Gordon Mugabe's rainbow client state being partially built on the back of the environmentalist movement, expect "Mr Hair-Shirt" to accelerate these plans, to "solve" the non-existent problem of anthropogenic global warming, and "to save the world for our children".

And if these plans can also be "further stimulated" with spiralling energy taxes, to fill the gaping maw of the ravenous client state, all to the better.

If we continue to let this tinpot Stalin rule over us, Gordon Brown really will let his failed socialist ideology try to drag us back into the dark ages!

Damian Green arrest: Michael Martin must live up to office of Speaker

Andrew Gimson writes a splendid side-swipe article to attack our useless speaker of the house of commons, a man who one suspects didn't even know that we once had a miserable scottish king who we beheaded, who thinks the dragging of the speaker to his chair is a tradition acquired from 1970s rock concerts, and who thought that the entire job of speaker was merely a cunning excuse to forge even more taxi receipt expenses.

Maturin article comment:

Posted by Jack Maturin on December 2, 2008 9:27 AM

The man is a disgrace. He should be dragged from his chair by MPs of all parties and thrown into the street. No, into the gutter. For that is where this oaf truly belongs.

And then when he's lying there, hapless and feeble, they can all shower him with blank taxi receipt slips, which they take from the blank pads they've all bought from friendly taxi drivers.

They are all a disgrace. But in dragging this man into the gutter, they can at least pay us back a little for some of the expenses they have stolen from us all, over the years.

UK climate change targets will push up fuel bills, warns Government advisor

Great; just what we need as the economy collapses about our ears, a self-inflicted wound of increased energy prices to satisfy a non-existent problem brought on by old communists who wanted a new anti-market religion to follow now that the Berlin Wall has come down.

Excellent.

Get a UK home for virtually free

With an immediate sign that the new chief executive of the government-owned Royal Bank of Scotland is merely a civil servant directly under the thumb of HM Treasury, Stephen Hester has announced that he will give mortgage defaulters six months of non-payment of debt before he calls in the bailiffs.

Alistair Darling, the puppet-on-a-string Chancellor, only asked for three months, but in a good impression of an ambitious civil servant asking "How high do you want me to jump, minister?", Hester has responded with a very pleasing six months.

Obviously, what this really means is that if you live in a house funded by an RBS loan, you will never be thrown out of it, except under the most extreme of circumstances. The government never likes upsetting voters or allowing newspaper reporters to take photographs of these upset voters being thrown out of 'their' homes, particularly in marginal constituencies. So here's the AngloAustrian guide to how you can get a virtually free new home:

1). Leave your current rental property. Get a mortgage from the taxpayer, via RBS, and buy 'your' new dream home in a marginal constituency.

2). Don't make any payments for five months.

3). Put the saved money you would have otherwise paid in rent on your old house, into gold and ignore any RBS letters that may drop onto your doormat.

4). After five months, make a single payment. This should stop the letters for a while.

5). This time, sit on your old rent money for at least a year and put it into gold. (By now it should be worth around $2,000 dollars an ounce.)

6). Ignore all of the increasingly frequent RBS letters that drop onto the doormat, though do at least open them and look for the Queen's coat of arms. Wait until you see such a letter, stamped with a court appearance date, which will probably take about a year to arrive. (It will have taken this long because the government will have instructed the courts to be lenient on mortgage defaulters - and if you don't think the British government can order the British courts around, just examine the recent record of court judgements when people have been defending themselves against the Inland Revenue, sorry, Revenue and Customs.)

7). As soon you see the court order, make another single payment.

8). Now wait at least two years, continuing to funnel your old rent money into gold. By now gold should be worth about $8,000 dollars an ounce. (Or approximately £4,000 pounds - Bretton Woods II will have pegged the pound to being worth two dollars, with the Federal Reserve becoming the sole world central bank issuing all currencies.)

9). Around three or four years should have gone by, and you will only have had to make two mortgage payments. The fairly cheap house you 'bought' at today's prices, will have also collapsed even further in price to approximately half of what you, or rather the taxpayer via the Royal Bank of Scotland, paid for it, despite the new flood of pounds mysteriously entering the world economy. A new government law will have also come into being, to help marginal constituency voters such as yourself. I don't know the exact wording of it, because it hasn't been written yet or even thought of, by the clowns in Whitehall, but it will go something like this: "Anyone in mortgage arrears will have their debt dropped to whatever their property is currently worth, should this be lower than the original price."

10). To now stop all of these annoying letters, take some of the gold you have accumulated, probably about a quarter of it as the pound will have collapsed in value against gold, and buy your house outright, at its new very low price. Also, make sure all of the gold you have left is held as physical gold and is hidden from all view, and especially is not held in a safety deposit box. At this point the increasingly fascist government will be considering confiscating all gold, 'in order to save your standard of living.' At some distant point in the future, should we not have all died in a Gulag, it will become legal to hold gold again. At that point, buy a castle or something with it; gold might be worth so much by now, that the Queen, or one of her other figurehead descendants, might let you have Windsor.

Fantastic!

So, for making two payments, and waiting around four years, you will now own lock, stock, and barrel, the dream home of your choice, and after twenty years or so, when the government allows you to legally hold gold again, a castle.

Welcome to Gordon Mugabe's modern Britain, a land built for hard-working families to hand over their wealth to feckless non-producing layabouts and other government non-job regulating buffoons.