Has the move to a private world gold money standard just started?

With the advent of GoldMoney.Com and other digital means of paying international debts with gold, Maturin Towers was very interested to note the following story:

=> Hedge fund to offer shares priced in gold

With so many wealthy people around the world piling up personal reserves of gold, to beat the upcoming G20 conference which will internationalize inflation as a means of prolonging the world dollar standard, hedge funds are beginning to price assets in gold.

Although you may know of other similar instances, this is the first time that Maturin Towers has noted anyone in the post-1971 world pricing their goods in gold rather than in a standard fiat currency, such as dollars, euros, yen, or the pound.

Is February 2009 the month history will say was the time the world started moving to a private world gold money standard, and to heck with the central banks and their G20 conferences? We shall see.

In the meantime, the Torygraph has created an interesting 'meta-page' on gold, which contains links to all of its ongoing articles referencing the barbarous relic. You might want to check it out:

=> Telegraph Gold Page

(The founder of GoldMoney.Com, James Turk, pops up in quite a few of the articles referenced.)

The danger, of course, with gold, is that it too could build up its own asset bubble. So you have to make your own mind up about it, and decide whether it's worth investing in. On this week's Peter Schiff podcast (Feb 25), Der SchiffMeister reckoned that gold will be going to $5,000 dollars an ounce before such bubble territory is approached, in perhaps three to five years' time, after the dollar has collapsed.

For a gold bug like me, and with M4 at 17.5%, it's a no-brainer; I agree with every word. It's actually good that so few believe Mr Schiff, however, because it keeps the price down for the rest of us while everyone else piles into the dollar.

This does of course build up a great post-G20 conference competition between the Keynesians and the Austrians. Because if the Keynesians are right, then all of us Austrians are going to be wiped out with our gold reserves. Whereas if we Austrians are right, all the Keynesians currently holding dollars are going to be wiped out.

What an interesting world we live in. I would personally like to thank all of the politicians out there who have made this excitement possible.

No doubt when we Austrians are proved right and the Keynesians then try to scape-goat us and steal our gold from us, things will get even more interesting.

Deification update

It's becoming harder to find photos of the God-head Obama without his precious halo, these days. I thought it might be fun to try to catalogue the best ones:

The standard press release version

Dear Lord, may we truly be thankful

Beam me up, Scotty

Halo to the Chief

I have a Dream

Praise the Lord

In the Name of All that is Holy

Hello...Is it Me you're looking for?

And I shall walk into the Valley of Death and I shall Wreak my Vengeance

Once upon a Time in America

Light out of Darkness

Regrets? I've had a few...

Hello, I must be going

The 'Photographer trying too hard' look

Just plain silly

Whoops! Contrived background is good, but where's the halo folks?

Ah, that's much better!

The new 'Schiff Report' video blog

For some obscure reason, Mr Schiff has made it a bit fiddly to see his new video blog. However, if you're interested, subscribe here:

=> http://www.europac.net/videoblog/signup.asp?s=euroweb

You should then receive an email with a fantastic password to then access the video blog pages. If that's all just too much fiddle, then check out one of the numerous Peter Schiff fan pages on Google. I picked up scans of the first three video blogs from one of them.

Despite the technical quality, for which Der Schiffmeister apologises, the third video is the best one because it is a reaction to the Kenyan Cock's state of the rancid onion speech:

Video 1:


Video 2:


Video 3:

Is the EU financial system close to collapse?

Ambrose thinks it might be.

Maturin Towers Advice: If you have any Euros stashed in the Club Med countries (plus Ireland), get it all into a German bank sehr schnell, before it becomes revalued into worthless drachma, lira, or pesetas.

Dear Lord, what a busy week!

Mervyn King: Regulators unable to stop City banks taking risks due to Government

Ka-boom! Another torpedo hits the Bismarck.

It looks like Mervyn King has realised that this government is finished and is trying to roll his tenure at the Bank of England into David Cameron's forthcoming premiership, by turning against his master.

We can only wonder at the size of Mervyn King's own pension pot by the time he is through with this subtle manipulation of the Whitehall headless chickens.

BTW, take a look at one quote at the bottom of the Torygraph's piece:

"I do think public debt matters. We get to this crisis with levels of public borrowing which were too high and that made it difficult," he said. But, he added, that was a "million miles" away from the idea that Britain in any way resembled somewhere like Zimbabwe.

Now why did he say that?

Perhaps he has fallen foul of Maturin's First Law of Politics. The unconscious human mind is very poor at dealing with negatives, and if you ever clear away negatives from what is produced by the conscious mind, you often reveal exactly what the unconscious mind is dwelling upon. (Derek Draper, eat your heart out.)

So let's translate that last bit again, into what King's unconscious mind was really thinking:

...But, he added, unless things change soon and I'm allowed to impose Draconian interest rate rises which could cause the people of Britain to finally pour upon the streets with pitch-forks in their hands, Britain is soon going to resemble Zimbabwe.

Yes, that's much better.

UK government disintegrating

Or so says Iain Martin.

Lloyds reports HBOS loss of £10.8 billion

Ho hum. It's only other people's money. At least, it is now.

(This article is worth reading if you want to know the reason why the government told us all about Sir Fred Goodwin's pension. Yes, Mandelson's fingerprints are all over this successful attempt to shuffle out bad news under the bait-and-switch cover of misplaced rage.)

Brown ready to use entire state apparatus to attack one man

There will be lots of anti-capitalists out there delighted with Gordon Brown's announcement that he is going to use the entire apparatus of government to attack Sir Fred Goodwin and 'claw' back some of his pension, that government ministers previously signed-off on.

Although I agree it is breathtakingly incompetent that a government minister approved of this pay-off for Sir Fred, presumably so that he would keep his mouth shut while the government took over RBS, there are three ramifications we need to be really careful of here:

1) The use of state power to target and then try to destroy a single individual

2) The reneging on and failure to back up in law the voluntary joint agreement of a signed contract

3) The use of retro-active law to achieve a desired governmental aim to attack a single individual

Any of the three measures above are bad for liberty and good for tyranny, therefore we must oppose the government on this plan to attack one man.

Yes, it is appalling that the unelected City minister, Lord Myners, agreed on Gordon Brown's behalf to award Sir Fred this pension. But we should lay the blame for this on Myner's boss, not Sir Fred, who as an individual simply signed an agreement in good faith, which then made it easier for the government to take over RBS.

It's no good Gordon Brown swapping five marbles for a hundred sweets, then scoffing all of the sweets, and then demanding his marbles back. Brown entered into a deal nobody forced him into and he should stick with it.

What we should be really focussing on here is the bait-and-switch case. That is, we should be prosecuting Gordon Brown for the theft of these five marbles from the rest of us, not worrying about how he disposed of them in his bid to live up to the fifth commandment in the Communist Manifesto, which tells all good communists everywhere to try to take over the banks.

I hope Sir Fred Goodwin shields himself successfully both from Gordon Brown and whatever sharp-edged knives our Greek tyrant tries to throw at him.

Thus is the cause of liberty always riding on the knife-edge of bad cases.

Pathfinder: Chris Clancy's Chinese adventure

While on a Chinese theme, and as this site is dedicated to all things combining England with Austrianism, I thought I ought to mention the following.

Lew Rockwell is currently posting a really interesting series of essays by Chris Clancy, an ex-pat Brit who has spent the last five years in China, where he is now an Associate Professor of Financial Accounting at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in Wuhan, Hubei Province, People's Republic of China.

Here are some of Chris's posts so far:

=> It’s Never Too Late (this describes Mr Clancy's discovery of Austrian economics, while he was in his second year in China)

=> It’s Really Never Too Late (this is a pre-amble to his description of life in China)

=> Walter Block Wins (on the evils of political correctness in the UK, and other places, and how this drove him to leave the sceptred isle)

=> Understanding Austrian Business Cycle Theory (an excellent road map on how to understand the ABCT)

=> Working in a Non-Welfare State: A Libertarian Would Love It – I Think! (the all-encompassing break from Blighty begins)

=> Getting On With It In China! (The first year in China)

I await the further postings of Mr. Clancy, with interest.

Jim Rogers: Teach your children Chinese

There comes a moment in every person's life when they realise that it really is becoming unlikely that they will ever appear in an Olympics, play football for their country, or receive a pass from Danny Cipriani in a Rugby World Cup Final.

Fortunately, I have yet to reach that age.

However, I do think that it is extremely unlikely that I will ever become fluent in Mandarin. But I'm trying Ringo, I'm trying real hard.

So why am I persevering? Because I believe that the 21st century is the century of China. If I can learn just a thousand Mandarin characters, and 4,000 words, then I will be able to pass on this hard-won knowledge to my children and encourage them to learn this wonderful language.

I'm up to about 350 characters, which I can recognise off the bat, but I'm finding the next 150 a bit tough. However, I will get there in the end despite the pain of trying to distinguish between 买and 卖, which is tricky, because one means 'buy' and the other one means 'sell'; this is something I am going to have to be careful of if I ever want to get that job in Singapore's financial markets!

So my advice is, if you want to do something for your children (if you have any), then help them to learn Chinese. But don't take my word for it. Listen to AngloAustrian hero Jim Rogers, instead:



While we're on the subject of Mr Rogers, anyone looking for investment advice really ought to take a look at the YouTube here, where Alabama's finest gives us a run-down of his latest plays. Essentially, go long commodities, short stocks, and get ready to dump the dollar at some point in the next 10 months.

The Victorian Bushfires: How Environmentalism Leads to Disaster

As predicted, eco-mentalists have tried to blame anthropogenic global warming for the Australian bush fires, without pointing out the usual elephant in the room; that environmental controls on removing dried-out scrub were largely responsible for the devastatingly rapid spread of the fires:

=> The Victorian Bushfires: How Environmentalism Leads to Disaster

You may also have seen some BBC reports recently where government-funded eco-mentalists have been banging on about how certain parts of Antarctica have been 'warming up'. What you will never see on the BBC, of course, are stories about how the Antarctic has been cooling down for the last 35 years.

I may also have missed the piece on the BBC which covered the fact that the recent British winter was one of the coldest for years.

Obviously none of this proves anything. It is the view of Maturin Towers that trying to predict future weather patterns on Earth is like trying to predict how many leaves will fall off a tree, with the sole exception being that we are currently within a volatile inter-glacial period and that the next Ice Age will eventually arrive at some point in the next 100,000 years.

There are just too many variables to worry about. We should therefore just get on with managing whatever weather cards are dealt to us by nature; which is best done by the self-adjusting free market, of course. (In the same way that the self-adjusting process of evolution works best at delivering the necessary species diversification required to cope with continuous environmental change.)

The biggest weather factor, of course, is the difficult-to-predict temperature oscillation of the Sun, and how this may be linked in to recurrent Ice Ages. Given the past, we will at some point almost inevitably head into another Ice Age, when the current inter-glacial period ends, hence my prediction above.

However, researching this area interests very few scientists, especially those of the eco-mentalist variety, because there's very little government money available to study it due to its lack of an end-result driver excuse to tax the rest of us. Though what little research there is on this subject, is very interesting:

=> Solar Resonant Diffusion Waves as a Driver of Terrestrial Climate Change

=> Sun's fickle heart may leave us cold

And don't give me any of that nonsense about how carbon dioxide levels have been linked with global temperature rises. The evidence for this is very patchy, and even if true, may have got it entirely the wrong way about.

Just as the west has prospered despite government growth over the last 200 years, rather than having prospered because of government growth, the following two cases may follow a similar pattern:

(1) World temperature goes up because carbon dioxide levels go up

(2) Levels of carbon dioxide go up because the world temperature goes up

Which is it? Virtually all eco-mentalists go for option (1). In fact, most eco-mentalists have never considered, even for a moment, that option (2) may be a distinct possibility and that the entire 'carbon dioxide' scare is nothing more than a complete cart-before-horse confusion.

The world's oceans hold more carbon dioxide when they are cooler. (Just think about shaking a coke can, straight from the fridge.) Therefore if the sun ever gets warmer in one of its known oscillation cycles, the world's oceans get warmer and release more carbon dioxide. When the sun cools down again, the oceans get cooler and soak up more carbon dioxide again. This is a known fact and the relationship could be as simple as that.

This relationship would also explain why some periods of the Earth's history, particularly in more volcanic times, grew cooler, despite massive increases in carbon dioxide. The explanation is that carbon dioxide has very little causal effect of global warming, however, it is a consequence of global warming caused by other sources (such as the temperature of the Sun increasing due to internal oscillation).

Please write in and tell me if you've ever seen a BBC documentary, from before about 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down, which has ever discussed this?

I won't hold my breath.

All the world's communists had to switch their religion on that fateful day. Fortunately, they could move straight across to environmentalism without really passing Go. How very co-incidental that the rise of environmentalism has been exponential since that point.

How very co-incidental indeed.

RBS posts record £40bn pre-tax loss

What a marvellous decision, on behalf of the tax payer, for Gordon Brown to step in and spend hundreds of billions of their pounds, on propping up this disastrous zombie bank. You see, RBS was too big to fail. And let's face it, just too Scottish for our one-eyed Scottish idiot to let go, along with that other zomboid monster, HBOS, a.k.a. Halifax Bank of Scotland.

(One wonders how Godalming Bank of Surrey would have fared?)

Gordon Brown's Scottish mate, Sir Fred Goodwin, is currently drawing down his £650,000 pounds annual pension, for having presided over RBS's gargantuan loss.

So all's well.

Gordon Brown helped fuel banking crisis - FSA head

The end must be close now for Brown, surely, when even his close support vessels are shelling him.

The Iron Chancellor style of Gordon Brown has always been one of Bismarckian intimidation, deliberately trying to overbear everyone else in a room with his banked rows of 16-inch guns. This worked well enough when his bombastic cunning allowed Brown to place himself in a pivotal position of power in relation to all of his rivals, servants, and enemies. However, despite this former ability to sink everyone else in British politics, including the biggest hood of all, Tony Blair, some are now taking their revenge upon Brown for the endless shellings he lumbered them with in the past.

Let us hope that this rudder damage inflicted by the head of the FSA now persuades more of his former creatures to crawl out from the woodwork to do the same, to finally hole this wrecker below the waterline.

Although Maturin Towers believes that the Labour Party possesses such little shame that they would then be prepared to foist a second unelected prime minister upon us, this should only wash for a few weeks, in which time they would leave the market alone to correct itself while this new Admiral Dönitz secured a feeble political base.

Once this next lightweight is tumbled, we can then start working on the blue socialists, to ensure that they too are brow-beaten enough to stop interfering with the necessary recession, to allow it to happen, and to allow all of the malinvestments of the last ten years to be corrected.

Then, at last, we may be able to see some light ahead. At least, that's the plan.

In the meantime, to give us some entertainment in these dark days, we can continue to enjoy the spectacle of this ongoing torpedoing of Reichsführer SS Gordon Brown.

In the name of everything that's holy, let us hope that he cracks soon and that we can then drop this dreadful pilot of fiscal insanity.

David Cameron spent night before his son Ivan died making pancakes in rare night off

The thoughts of Maturin Towers, this morning, are with David Cameron and his family after the tragic loss of their son. No father or mother should ever live to see the death of a child.

A scholar and a gentleman

Crikey! Obo appears to be becoming an Austrian. (Or certainly a Bastiatian.)

(You may recognise the booklist one of his commenters sent him.)

How would you condense the whole of Austrianism into two minutes?

Would it be as good as this?:


Ron Paul lays it on the line to Bernanke

Determined Obama vows to renew US

The Kenyan Cock tells Americans that everything's going to be just great:

Look into my eyes, not around the eyes, look into my eyes. [click] You're under! We will rebuild! We will recover! Now is the time to act boldly and wisely! [click] Now you're back in the room!

The people say they'll keep calm and carry on... but for how long?

Mr Heffer has an interesting article in the Torygraph, this morning.

Here's the comment I left with the moderators:

Jack Maturin on February 25, 2009 at 03:30 PM (only three hours after posting! :-)

I agree with virtually everything you say, Simon, but have you considered who a large minority, or even a majority, of these middle class people are? They are the placemen and the placewomen of the client state itself.

They can afford large houses, private schools, and expensive foreign holidays because they have large salaries from Gordon, with gold-plated pensions coming later from the taxes of as-yet-unborn children.

(Or at least they think they do - repudiation of these 'debts' to these people, is an idea whose time will come.)

This then makes two divisions of middle class people, in this country. The tax payer class who are forced to pay all of these client state salaries and pensions, and the tax consumer class who benefit from this coercive largesse.

I suppose you could brand them as the 'Telegraph' class and the rival 'Guardian' class.

I agree with you that taxes and real public spending must be slashed, with warm bodies out of the door in every single state organisation, with perhaps an exception for people whom we all consider genuinely useful, such as doctors and nurses.

The mood of the tax payer class may get ugly if the tax consumers are not sacked. However, the tax consumers are going to get very angry indeed, when they are sacked, leading to strikes and all sorts of other related problems, unless we can change the way that they think, and persuade them that they too will be better off under a new system.

We need more of a solution than just saying that government spending should be cut, because the current democratic system will never allow this, when almost half of the electorate are members of Gordon Brown's client state.

This is where the BNP is getting its growing support from, via this disillusionment in the entire democratic process.

We need to tackle this too, because if we are to be subjected to a takeover by these national socialists, some of whom seem keen to post their thoughts on your articles, then we really will be in a terrible mess - perhaps a new dark age.

It is also no good blaming David Cameron for being a weak-willed lily-livered coward. Half of the people he is trying to appeal to read the Guardian. He is afraid of angering them. It is not his fault that he is unable to see beyond this problem, because he is a fish and the water he swims in is the fluid of democracy.

I am not suggesting that I have any answers. I look to men of your calibre to provide these. But there is more to this than just cutting government spending.

We need an entire change of moral, ethical, and political thinking.

Democracy is a God that has failed. What we need to do is find a person who is capable of re-generating a cataclysmic change in political thinking. Margaret Thatcher would have been up to this. David Cameron, clearly, is not.

We need to find the person who is actually capable of tackling this major failure of democracy. Otherwise we are either looking into the abyss of international socialism or the chasm of national socialism.

The solution could be that nobody who works for the state is allowed to vote or it could be that you get a vote proportional to the taxes you pay minus the salary and benefits you extract from the state?

As an anarchist myself, I don't think either of the above solutions would work, but that is the kind of change somebody needs to be able to come up with and make stick.

I am carrying on and I am keeping calm. But unless we can figure out how to unlock this Gordian knot of the failure of democracy, the time for carrying on and calmness will soon be coming to an end.

Bank of England gives clearest indication of zero interest rates

Why don't they just do it and get this stupid charade over with?

Jack Straw bans release of Iraq invasion minutes

Move along citizens, nothing to see here.

Jack Straw believes that he cannot release the Cabinet records of why Britain went to war with Iraq, because it would cause too much "damage" to democracy.

We can't have the plebs knowing too much, you know. It might frighten the horses.

Ha! Because in a shock leak, Maturin Towers has obtained the said documents. Rather surprisingly, the main decisions were taken in a small annexe just off the main Cabinet office, rather than in the Cabinet office itself. Here is the transcript:

CIA: Mr Blair, we need you to support our invasion of Iraq to give us political cover.

Blair: What's in it for me?

CIA: When the war's over, we'll make sure you get paid off appropriately.

Blair: How much?

CIA: Will £30 million do?

Blair: But how are you going to pay me, without arousing all sorts of terrible repercussions to me personally?

CIA: Here's the deal. When you retire from the Presidency...

Blair: Premiership

CIA: ...Whatever. When you retire, we've got a few front organisations over here in the States who can stump up the money as laundered fees for speaking, payable over about five years. Later on, we can wind that down and just get a few world bodies to hire you on as a 'roving ambassador' or some such rubbish, until you want to stop working as our agent, no questions asked.

Blair: Nice one.

CIA: Do we have a deal?

Blair: Au certainment, monsieur.

CIA: Aren't you worried about the total fabrication involved here?

Blair: Any beardies cross me, Pilgrim, and I'll get MI5 to 'suicide' them.

CIA: What about the hundreds of inevitable British casualties in your armed forces?

Blair: They all knew what they were getting into when they took the Queen's shilling. Sod 'em.

CIA: You know Mr Blair, you really are a lot different in the flesh than you are on the boob tube.

Blair: Thank you.

CIA: Don't mention it. Can I get up off the sofa now?

Blair: Yes, I'll go through and tell the Cabinet what they've decided.

CIA: Excellent. The cheque's in the post.

Blair: (standing)...I do worry about one thing, though.

CIA: What's that?

Blair: Well, I've just sold out a thousand years of British independence for thousands of filthy silver coins. Will Jesus ever forgive me?

CIA: You think you're the first British President we've bought off like this?

Blair: Well, aren't I?

CIA: You're also either a lot stupider than you appear on the boob tube, Mr President, or you're a hell of an actor.

Blair: Thank you again.

CIA: For being stupid or for being an actor?

Blair: Whatever. I'll just convert to Catholicism after I give up the Presidency. That should wash my hands clean.

CIA: There you go. You really are one helluva guy, Mr President.

Blair: You better believe it, Pilgrim.

BTW, if I disappear in the next few days, you'll know why.

Long on China, Short on the United States

I've just discovered a fantastic article by Tim Swanson, about China.

Marvellous.

Why does anyone vote Labour?

With perhaps the worst government in history, thousands losing their jobs every day, ministers up to their eyeballs in tax-thieving sleaze, and as much bad news for the government as you can shake a backhanded twenty pound note at, why is the British Labour Party still getting 28% support? Surely it should just be down to the thieving Labour MPs by now?

Obo has the answers, over at his place, which links in to an article by Alastair Campbell. You will note the superb second comment on Obo's piece, which has also been posted in a modified form onto Campbell's site, where it is most unlikely to ever see the light of day. But at least it makes me happy knowing one of Campbell's 'expenses' minions has read it! :-)

UPDATE: Hey, one of Campbell's minions posted both mine and Obo's posts. Let's hope I spurred them into it with with my faux challenge. No doubt I'll get accused of being a racist and then they won't publish my response. Though we shall see. What fun! :-)

Obama pledges to slash deficit

Errr...Say What!?!?

Just what part of a $2 trillion dollar bailout is cutting a deficit?

This only leads me to wonder whether Rockefeller's man in the White House has been on the George Orwell again:

Doublethink

The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them....To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.

Will someone please pinch me to check I'm not dreaming in a padded cell somewhere? Never mind the Orwell; this President is becoming more like a cheap character from an Ayn Rand novel, with every passing day.

UPDATE: And here's one American, Alan Keyes, who agrees with me:



Fantastic!

Gordon's bank bailouts: Round three

Despite having saved the world twice already, Gordon Brown has once again had to don the red cape to save us again for a third time.

With this latest £500 billion UK bank bailout, only five weeks after his already-failed second one, it's now just becoming a laughable game for the Blessed One.

Spending £1.3 trillion pounds on his friends in the City is such a hoot, that I expect Gordon will top the £2 trillion pound mark within just a few more weeks.

Why not? It's only other people who will have to pick up his tab. Or more likely the printing press.

With £1.3 trillion being approximately the entire annual output of the United Kingdom, even Gordon might be starting to get nervous right now. But like any gambler in a casino down on his luck, once you're in up to your eyeballs, you may as well keep going until your luck changes, especially when you can pass on what would be the equivalent of a full year's salary on a credit card bill, to other people's unborn children. (If they don't repudiate it first.)

You see, men must be governed. It's for their own good.

Which brings us to the strange case of LDV. The government did the right thing when it said there would be no bailouts for this struggling British van-maker. After all, why should I as a self-employed member of the tax-payer class, who is struggling to make his own business ends meet, be forced to shell out for another private company, so that they can continue making vans nobody wants, to rust in vast rented car parks? It is far better to let this company liquidate, to then release its resources to a better economic outcome.

But when a British government bleeds taxpayers to bail out banks to the tune of £1.3 trillion, but then refuses to bail out a major manufacturing plant to the tune of a measly £30 million, do they think that the hundreds of thousands of manufacturing workers still left in this country haven't noticed a slight discrepancy? Six thousand of them are about to be sacked by LDV. Another six hundred thousand of them could be sacked by the end of the year. And because all of the available capital in this country is being wasted on propping up zombie banks, rather than being available to invest in new manufacturing plants, all of these people could be unemployed for years.

So just what is Gordon up to? With the Labour party set to be wiped off the map in the next General Election, with many of its natural core vote switching to the BNP, what is going on? Bailing out banks so they will continue buying up government bonds is one thing, but alienating your entire core vote to do so, is entirely another.

There's something going on here that we're not yet aware of, which must be more than Gordon simply trying to engineer his own future as the Financial Dictator of a new world order Global Government, in some asinine Bilderberg conspiracy.

What is it?

No doubt we will figure it out eventually. Let us hope that this is before the situation of this country becomes unrecoverable.

PS> Apparently Guido has uncovered evidence of Gordon Brown also helping himself to taxpayer's cash in another sleazy 'expenses' fiddle. Yes, they're really all at it.

Another government power grab

Yes, our caring sharing friends in the Bilderberg group would like to impose draconian restrictions on those few people left who have managed to evade their financial control.

You see, this financial crisis is nothing to do with the world's governments, their central banks, or their financial regulators; it is all down to Mrs Miggins, of 4 Dusseldorf Strasse, Münster, Germany, who has dared to hold a few gold coins on a Caribbean island.

This is why we need an unelected World Government Police, with no mandate from anyone, anywhere, to go around the world stealing such gold coins from their owners. This will cure all of the world's current financial problems. Apparently.

And after the upcoming G20 conference is held, what's the betting on who will be appointed to become the unelected World Government policeman in charge of this mob, tyrannising anyone who dares to stay out of his clutches? Why yes, Herr Brown. Au naturellement. Because none of this mess has anything to do with him. Oh no.

So instead of being an unelected British Prime Minister, with no mandate, he can become an unelected world financial dictator instead, with even less mandate, and the first man who the history books could possibly call the Earth's first ever "total ruler", above every law, everywhere. Not bad for an effeminate teenager from Fife.

Alistair Darling: Northern Rock to resume new mortgage lending

Gordon, Jacqui, Harriet, and Alistair
Oh dear Lord, Alistair Darling (pictured above, on the right) is still pining on a reflated bubble to help Labour win another term in office. To do this, he's going to create a British version of Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac, the two organisations that got the world into this mess in the first place.

Fortunately, his plan won't work. Like Napoleon, Keynesianism has come to the end of the road. The Crash of 2008 was its Waterloo. Well, actually, no, I suppose that was more like a Battle of Toulouse. Because the much bigger Crash of 2009, which we haven't even had yet, and which will come after the stupid decisions yet to be made at the upcoming G20 conference, will be more like a Waterloo.

St. Helena is too good for Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown, for the enormous debt-fuelled destruction they are currently wreaking upon Britain. I would suggest that Tristan da Cuhna would be a better bet, the world's most remote inhabited island archipelago.

Actually, any watery spot in the South Atlantic will do.

How long before Germany leaves the Euro?

Not long, possibly. At least according to Ambrose:

=> Will Germany deliver on the Faustian bargain that created monetary union?

In the meantime, do what all sensible Germans do*. Only accept Euro cash marked as originating in Germany. Or get out into gold**, before we see the re-emergence of the Deutschmark.

Just in case! :-)

Uncle Gary has an even more disturbing*** report than Ambrose, here:

=> The Looming Collapse of European Banking

*German citizens are told by the German government that this is stupid behaviour. Following Maturin Tower's First Law of politics, what's the betting that if the German government does back out of the Euro, that's its first act will be to declare that it will only accept German-denominated Euros in exchange for the new Deutschmark? The odds on this are so low as to be laughable; hence, why sensible Germans, of whom there are many, only accept German Euros.

**Wouldn't it be nice if we saw the emergence of a Gold Deutschmark, as a mark of civilisation from the culture which gave us Mozart, Mises, Hoppe, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

***God bless Uncle Gary North. He's the only man alive who makes me look cheery and optimistic! :-)

Gordon Brown: We will put people first, not bankers

Gordon Brown has written an article in The Grauniad (well, a civil servant will have written it for him because our one-eyed Scottish idiot can hardly see to type).

If you feel like reading it, or even better, leaving a comment, then here you go:

=> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/22/gordon-brown-comment-banks?commentpage=1

Personally, I was too astonished by the vitriolic poison left there by Lefties to find it within myself to comment. But, if you really feel like you need to express yourself, to at least have your comment read by a Downing Street flunkey who will then be totally mortified to report to the Boss what was actually said, then go for it.

This has got to be the best thing the Grauniad has published in years.

Inflation is the greatest danger to the British economy

No, I haven't been writing for the Torygraph again under the pen-name of Liam Halligan; this is a real article by a real journalist, who is a proud member of that mighty circumscribed triumvirate at the paper (along with Jeff Randall and Iain Martin), who want to save this sceptred isle from the Keynesian shilling of their half-witted colleagues.

More power to Mr Halligan's elbow, even if his plan is a little bit wishy-washy.

Come on, Liam, let's see a spot more lead in your pencil! Here's a real plan for red-blooded men who eat red-blooded meat. (Though even this plan has been watered down to make it just about tolerable for the next Margaret Thatcher, whoever he or she is.)

Stone the crows, maybe it's Jeff Randall, with Liam Halligan as Chancellor and Iain Martin as general hatchet man!? Now that would be a government worth voting for, even for an anarchist.

Maturin Towers Comment:

Jack Maturin on February 22, 2009 at 02:45 PM

I don't know how you stand working with all of the other Keynesian shills at the Telegraph, Liam, but please do keep up the good work.

Your plan is excellent. But is it radical enough? I have one of my own I thought you might like to contemplate, here:

=> http://angloaustria.blogspot.com/2009/02/britain-at-risk-of-10-year-recession.html

But please keep going. You, Jeff Randall, and Iain Martin, are all we have between total financial meltdown and the lunatics in Whitehall who would rather give us that than give up an ounce of their ill-gotten power.

More, please.

Gold dips under a thousand

As of writing, gold has dipped once again below the magic $1,000 dollars an ounce resistance barrier. This will have been because of central bank intervention, trying to hide the extent of their fiat currency lunacy.

Central banks and their representatives, if they ever speak of it, refer to gold as an irrelevant barbarous relic. Don't believe a word of it. If anything keeps them up at night, it is the price of gold.

Expect them to keep trying to hold the price under a thousand dollars for some time to come, until they reach a point where they just have to let it go. I suspect that on Friday, when it did nip over the barrier for a moment, a lot of central bankers must have been taking a long pre-weekend lunch (at taxpayers' expense, obviously).

I remember once being on an Army run where I had to get three miles done in 27 minutes, with full kit on. One guy I was with started struggling at one mile, so I and a colleague did what we could to hold him up. We did so for a mile and half, but it became excruciating holding this man up. The PT Sergeant jogged back and told us that all three of us would fail to make the mark unless we let the man go, and we would all have to do it again. He further told us that the regiment needed two men at the target on time rather than two heroes who failed to make it. Rather cunningly he left the final human action choice to us. It pains me to admit it, but we dropped the 'Sack of Spuds' we were holding, who to his good grace did ask us to let him go. I will never forget the shame. However, I and my colleague did cross the line with about three seconds to spare.

The gold price is currently in this position, as the 'Sack of Spuds'. The central banks are holding the dollar up against it as much as they dare. But eventually, they will have to let it go either when they run out of metal or when they stop trusting the other central banks aiding them in this price manipulation collusion.

AngloAustrian advice: Buy as much of this cheap gold as can, or other related hard assets, before the central banks stop subsidising it. Make sure you hold the gold in such a way that your central bank's government isn't then able to steal it back from you when they have run out. When the gold price does finally take off, when the central banks drop their man, it is going to rocket. Make sure you are well-positioned before it does, otherwise your entire economic life is going to be in the hands of the socialists. Don't go there, whatever you do.

Ron Paul: God or merely Higher Being?

I know the above YouTube is on Lew Rockwell, and I could have just placed a link to it there and left it at that. However, this video is so good that I wanted it to appear on the Maturin Towers diary, as a matter of record.

For a hard-core Misesian/Rothbardian/Hoppeian like me, Ron Paul's incredible performance, in the face of a studio full of socialists, is truly emotional. Check it out (and let's hope millions of Bill Maher fans, mostly Democrats, checked it out too).

Why, oh why, oh why, did the Republicans allow themselves to be represented by the idiot, John McCain, when they had this Intellectual Giant standing by? Obama may still have beaten Ron Paul, as Austrianism is a stretch even for a land which labours under the misconception that it is the Home of the Free, but Paul's candidacy would have so undermined Obama as to ensure his power would have been over before the completion of his first term, with a Ron Paul/Peter Schiff ticket ready to take over in 2012 to sort out Obama's gargantuan socialist mess.

With this video, Ron Paul officially moves up to the status of AngloAustrian living hero Nummer Eins. (Es tut mir leid, Herr Professor Hoppe.) Let us hope that this Austrian Giant stays in good enough long-term health to contest the 2012 Presidential nomination, once it all goes so horribly and visibly wrong for Obama (whose 2012 campaign will be based entirely upon the slogan that, "It was all George Bush's fault").

It may not seem much to non-Austrians, but it is performances like this which inspire the rest of us to keep going with our seemingly pointless dedication to the life-long causes of Von Mises; freedom and the complete destruction of tyrannical socialist evil.

Gold rises above $1,000

It's still very cheap.

The central banks will be doing everything they can to get the price below a thousand dollars by leasing/flogging off everything they still have left. (What's surprising is that they have allowed it to climb above the psychological barrier of $1,000 dollars - is this just a 'Friday' thing or have they finally run out of 'surplus' gold?)

The unspoken part of the general plan to keep the gold price low by flogging off reserves is that the British government will steal it all back again when the central banks run out, just as the Stuart kings used to do with all of the goldsmiths who used to occupy the current site of the Bank of England.

So buy gold. But keep it safe. Hold it abroad or take physical delivery and hide it somewhere you feel confident it will not be discovered by Inland Revenue agents, foxes, or roaming gangs of thieves (all pretty much the same thing). Do not on any account store it in a safe deposit box or hold it in commercial storage in this country. That will be easy for the government to steal back from you, once the Bank of England runs out. It's also probably best to hold it outside of the EU, just in case.

Try to hold it in a country which you think would always want to keep its reputation as a safe-haven for mining products and precious metals. That means Australia, Switzerland et al.

Yes, it's all risky. But not as risky as holding the pound sterling. That is the riskiest play of all. In fact, it's not even risky. With M4 at 17.5% and rocketing upwards, it's a damn-near certainty that the pound will keep collapsing.

Britain at risk of 10 year recession

Sir John Gieve, the outgoing former deputy of the Bank of England, warns that Britain is at serious risk of entering a ten year Japanese-style recession.

So far, so good, you might think. But don't go getting all excited about figuring out whether he's been reading the Murray Rothbard or not. He breaks that happy illusion with the next comment:

However, he added that such a prolonged decline was not inevitable because interest rates had been cut sharply.

To once again re-use my favourite words from Miss Hermione Granger, "What an Idiot".

What is it with these people? They seem to be rational all the way up to the point where they think wealth can be created on a printing press. They ignore the Mississippi Bubble, the Weimar Republic, and the happy land of Zimbabwe.

Sir John is even prescient enough to realise that our most likely outcome has already been modelled for us in Japan, in the most clear-cut failure of Keynesian economics ever to be tried out in an experimental test-tube.

And yet the blind spot in his brain misses the fact that the Japanese had effective zero percent interest rates for a decade, and this did not help even them, one of the most productive, thrifty, and hardest working societies in the world.

Somehow, because many Britons in our Chav Nation are fat, lazy, unproductive, addicted to welfare, and spend borrowed money like water, we will be immune from the same failed catharsis of easy money which plunged the Japanese into ten years of Keynesian-induced hell.

Ten years? At the rate we are going with the printing press, make it more like twenty.

So I'll say it again, in case Sir John is reading, and just to avoid being labelled as nothing but a doom and gloom merchant.

There is a way out of this. Because we are so late in the game it will probably take five years, rather than the two years it would have taken if we had let HBOS and RBS go to the wall. But five years is way better than ten.

Before I start, I must point out that I am an anarchist and that I want the entire government abolished. However, I recognise that this is ...ahem... a minority position. Therefore the following plan has 'sensibleness' built into it. That is, it is a program which a radical British government could follow, in the mould of Her Blessedness, Margaret Thatcher, without privatising the NHS, the police, or schools, and without drastically altering welfare benefits.

=> We must stop inflating. Immediately.

=> No bailouts. If companies fail, including banks, they fail. End of story. Liquidators can assign their assets to the best outcomes.

=> We must stop borrowing. Immediately.

=> We must aggressively start cutting government spending with radical surgery. We should start particularly with all state non-jobs linked to wealth-restricting regulation, but keep the axe rolling across every government department and local council until the cancer of waste is removed. These people are supposed to be there to serve us. Unless there is a clear case that they do serve us, such as being a doctor, a nurse, or something obviously useful, we should sack them.

=> No more state posts should be advertised in the Guardian. There should be a complete cessation of hiring any more state workers in any non-frontline service. Exceptions to be made to genuinely useful people, such as doctors, nurses, etc, but only on a replacement basis of one in, one out. For every other department, it is one out, one out.

=> We should cancel all forthcoming government projects to expand the state and spend untold billions, such as the ID card project.

=> We should cancel the NHS IT project immediately and just carry on with what we have in place.

=> We should give the Olympics back to the IOC and tell them we are sorry. The Olympics are not a sacrosanct sacred cow which must keep going forever. They are a sporting event subject to market forces. If nobody else wants to pick them up, tough. (Though Beijing II would be the obvious destination.) The world survived without the Olympics for 2,000 years. I'm sure it can survive an eight-year gap, if the Chinese refuse to run a replay.

=> We should start shredding government regulations, particularly any which restrict the ability of entrepreneurs to generate wealth or which decrease the desirability of Britain as a place to build factories in.

=> We should abolish all investment taxes, and pay for these cuts with real government spending cuts. For example, interest received taxes, inheritance taxes, capital gains taxes, stamp duty taxes, corporation taxes, etc. We should sack all Inland Revenue staff associated with collecting these taxes.

=> We should abolish the tax credit system and give everybody a simple tax cut instead. The tens of thousands of Inland Revenue staff involved with tax credits should be sacked immediately.

=> We should aim to make Britain as attractive a place to invest in as Hong Kong, Singapore, or Dubai. For cripes sake, Dubai is a desert with massive humidity and massive heat, little attractive land, and still it's a more attractive proposition than a cool sunlit green fertile island. This is madness.

=> All government final salary pension schemes to be frozen with immediate effect. All remaining government workers to build up any ongoing pension rights with defined contribution pensions, like the rest of us. As well as saving the tax paying class an absolute fortune to invest more wisely, this will at a stroke give everyone in the country the same motivation to build a prosperous economy.

=> Anything which can be privatised, should be privatised, and privatised properly, not left with stupid government legacy hangovers, such as the appalling mess created in the railway industry. The rail industry should be fully freed and shall henceforward receive no subsidy. The BBC should be privatised. Northern Rock, Bradford and Bingley, RBS, HBOS, and any other nationalised bank, should be sold off for whatever the government can get, even if it's one penny. The proceeds to be fed directly into the welfare fund to help people survive this recession, and not into expanding other government programs.

=> We should cease all government aid programs with immediate effect. (Why I am taxed so that Gordon Brown can then send the money to Indian billionaires to build more factories in India to out-compete British ones, is a mystery which has yet to be explained to me.) The money saved to be fed into the welfare fund to keep British people going through this enormous re-adjustment.

=> We should modify the terms of our engagement with the EU to the same status as Norway. That is, none of the governmental nonsense, but with all of the free trade benefits.

=> We should allow the unfettered circulation of tax-free gold and silver coinage from whichever private institutions wish to circulate them and allow people to sign legally-binding contracts based upon these gold and silver monies.

=> The government to issue an unfettered tax-free gold pound and silver pound to both sit alongside the paper pound, to compete with it freely in the legally-bound contracts marketplace. We will let the market decide which pound it prefers, over time. In ten years time, we abolish whichever of these three pounds is the least popular. (No prizes for guessing which one I think it will be!)

All of the above will be a good start, although I may have missed a few things off. Essentially, we need to get the government off our backs, stop inflating, and stop wasting money on unproductive junk. Once we have done so and we can create factories making world-class goods at world-competitive prices, then we shall be able to progress forward again.

Although possibly on the outer edges of what the Westminster Village would consider 'extreme', the above plan is just about possible, given a politician of sufficient stature.

Now all we need is that politician to step forward with the vision, the charisma, and the sheer bloody-minded toughness to pull it off.

Will the next Margaret Thatcher or English Ron Paul please stand up! We really need you.

Brown blesses the Pope with his presence

More from Gerald Warner on Brown's shameless bid to spin the Pope in order to prop up Labour's crumbling Catholic vote:

=> Gordon Brown tries to spin the Pope - Vatican response: 'Spin on this!'

UPDATE: Guido Fawkes is using the same photograph for his usual Friday caption competition; 323 alternative caption ideas at last viewing. (Warning: Some of them are slightly rude.)

Fox News Strategy Room with Judge Napolitano, Ron Paul, Peter Schiff, and Lew Rockwell

Ron Paul, Peter Schiff, and Judge Napolitano in one full house video? You betcha. Alas, Jim Rogers was unavailable for a royal flush. But Lew Rockwell pops up in the third video, for a straight flush.

Okay, yes this is a bit 'American', but I still believe that Austrian hope for the world will still spring from the US, especially from Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, and Peter Schiff, so we need to keep tabs on what they're saying about Obama, Geithner, and the rest of the DC looters. Get the beers in and cameras roll...

1:


2:


Congressman Paul drops out halfway through the third YouTube, but Lew Rockwell pops up a bit later in the same one. Steve Moore also talks on the US car bailout.

3:


This fourth video gets a bit dull to non-American people after 3:40 but picks up again at 4:40.

4:


5:


6:


Kudos to marcaeld for producing these YouTube videos.

Government stakes in RBS and Lloyds could add £1.5 trillion to UK national debt

Cripes. Nice one, Gordon.

UPDATE: There's a great post on this over at Obo's place, featuring our friends from the BBC.

UK inflation rate rises to 17.5%

Dear Lord, it's worse than I thought. I had reckoned that Mervyn King would be very nervous about breaking through the 17% resistance ceiling, but it would appear that he possessed no such illusions. UK inflation is now at a whopping 17.5% and I predict that next month it will break through the 20% barrier once the effects of 'quantitative easing' kick in.

This now gives us an effective UK interest rate of -16.34% (with base rates at 1%).

Last month, the Bank of England also presided over the creation of £808 pounds per person, here in the UK, with a staggering growth in the money supply of £48.5 billion pounds. And the bugblatter beast mandarins over at HM Treasury say they wonder why the pound is collapsing!

Why don't they ask their employees over at the Bank of England?

Figures here: Provisional estimates of broad money (M4) and credit (M4 lending) January 2009

The next provisional release for February 2009 will appear here on the 19th of March, at 9:30am.

Link to December 2008 M4 Chart.

Welcome to Brown's Billions: a farce remade as a tragedy

£Billions per annum

Another excellent article by Iain Martin. However, does Mr Martin go far enough with his proposed £50 billion pounds government spending cut? The UK government is annually burning through, in real terms, about £219 billion pounds more a year than it did back in 1993 - an increase of 77% on its former budget of £283 billion - so why not an annual cut of £219 billion?

Gordon Brown could save half a million of that straightaway just by sacking tax thief Jacqui Smith. He could replace her with a cardboard cut-out, plus a looping tape from an answerphone; who would know the difference? Add to that the policing costs of guarding two homes, with extra police now to be posted outside of her "main home" even on days when she's back with her husband and kids in her "second home", to give the impression that she's in two places at once, and the saving could be a cool £5 million.

In fact, why not sack the entire cabinet? Even when Gordon Brown doesn't do their jobs for them, the rest of these socialist tax munchers do nothing that any of us would notice if they stopped. And then while he's at it, Gordon Brown can sack himself.

Here is more on Bankrupt Britain, the report Iain Martin refers to in his piece:

=> Who will be the first politician to tell the truth about Britain's public finances?

Here is the PDF of the report itself:

=> Bankrupt Britain

The report is sobering reading. One key section is this:

There are basically three levers a government can pull to try to return national debt as a percentage of GDP back to 40%:
• Increase taxes;
• Cut public spending; and/or
• Debase sterling (again) by allowing inflation to rise.

All governments have two constituencies. The first is the tax payer class, who demand that the government cut taxes. The second is the tax consumer class, who demand that the government raise taxes. To burn both ends against the middle and to retain support from both camps, governments generally turn to the magic of inflation to raise spending on the tax consumer class without raising taxes on the tax payer class. This is why governments are inherently inflationary. This is why the Maturin Towers prediction is that Gordon Brown will deliberately turn to inflation to stay in power.

The author of the report, Malcolm Offord, suggests instead that the government combines steps one and two to create a "balanced" solution; a top-rate tax rate of 50% combined with a government expenditure cut of £100 billion pounds, within the next few years.

Maturin Towers predicts that neither step is feasible for Gordon Brown. If he raises taxes any more, he will need a one-way ticket to the IMF to avoid being lynched in the street by the tax payer class. If he cuts public spending in any way, he will need a one-way ticket to the IMF to avoid being lynched in the street by the tax consumer class.

Inflation is therefore the only game in town. More people, particularly in the tax consumer class, will then be dragged up into the 40% higher rate, which will be an effective and silent way of both raising taxes and cutting public spending. Government debt will also become easier to service as the pound becomes more worthless. Inflation is a real winner!

Expect lots of it.