I have seen the face of God

As well as being a man who is going to make the American financial position much worse, through the deliberate instigation of trillion dollar deficits, I really have no idea why the Americans (and the BBC, The Grauniad, Channel4, ad nauseam) are getting so worked up about this one single man.

Is it because Obama has more skin melanin than previous incumbents? If so, why is this such a big deal these days? Nobody batted an eyelid when Morgan Freeman played a man with similar amounts of skin melanin, in Deep Impact:

For a long time after this film, I thought Morgan Freeman was the President of the United States! :-)

He was certainly a lot more believable than the preposterous George W. Bush.

Freeman was of course followed up by the even more believable Dennis Haysbert, as President David Palmer in 24, a man so full of moral goodness that even I would have voted for him:

Morgan Freeman and Dennis Haysbert made the idea of a black president entirely believable, and to my mind, even more plausible than the idea of the usual Old White Guy, although D.B.Woodside did almost spoil this effect with his rather emotive portrayal of President Wayne Palmer, in Series 6 of 24:

It's actually got to the point where any person of any race, creed, or colour, can play the President of the USA, except an Old White Guy.

For instance, in Series 7 of 24, the latest incarnation of the Sun God, President Alison Taylor, is being played delightfully by Cherry Jones, as an evil self-obsessed caricature of Hillary Clinton, the politician whom the script writers probably thought most likely to get the part when they wrote the original drafts:

Let's face it, the "part" of playing President of the United States, really is just a part. Whoever you are, you must be a certified member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a favoured disciple of the Rockefeller family. As long as you turn up, sound good, and read the lines, you can get the starring role. The payoff is enormous wealth, plus a golden ticket into the hallowed halls of the world elite for your entire family, for the rest of time.

Or at least until the revolution comes.

Oh well, I suppose we better let the Americans have their day. It's going to make zip all difference to their economic plight, which has a long way to go before it becomes fully unfolded. Don't worry though, sports fans. It will unfold. Set your alarms for when US Treasuries start collapsing.

If you want to get a picture of what that will be like, perhaps for the UK as well as for the US, the best dystopian prediction I have seen is Alongside Night, by J. Neil Schulman:

First written in 1979, this book is becoming more horribly true by the day.

All hail the God-King!

Oh yes, and it will all be George Bush's fault.

That Obama inauguration speech again in full

I have a dream my fellow Americans as we walk in the promised land and feel my fury. For I am His son and His begetter and His Chosen One. And here is the message that my Father, the Lord God, gave me this fine morning:

"It will all be George Bush’s fault."

Thank you, Amen, Hallelujah, I love you all of my brothers and sisters, please tip your waitresses, etc.

No cap on taxpayer risk over bank rescue plan, admits Gordon Brown

Dear God.

The rough guide to leaving in your socks

What we are seeing now in England is the full national socialist road to serfdom laid out before us by a hard core group of former Trots and other assorted Marxists, a.k.a. The British government. They have no idea what they are doing. They have no end game, no middle game, and barely a beginning game, except for the throwing of a lot of other people's wealth at problems of which they have no clue or even vague understanding.

The solution to this problem, however, is laid out for anyone with the wit to see it, in the 1912 book by Ludwig von Mises, "The Theory of Money and Credit":

=> http://www.mises.org/books/tmc.pdf

The solution for these "uncharted waters", fully mapped out by Mises a hundred years ago, is to do absolutely nothing, for the chips to fall, and for us then to pick up the pieces. If the government must do something, it must cut government spending and regulation. The absolute golden rule is that it must stop inflating.

So what do these fools in British government do, to preserve power, wealth, and privilege for themselves and their friends? They are going to inflate us into oblivion, and while they're at it, they are going to increase government spending and regulation.

They plan to pay for all of this monstrous stupidity with large future tax rises, which everyone knows is coming. Alas, when they get round to this, the only available targets for the taxman will either have left the country or will be broken upon the rocks of crass economic mis-management. What will be left are millions of other people dependent upon government taxation or regulation for their income.

Perhaps they should just increase the taxes on well-paid government sector workers?

To think about that even for a second is to realise the trickery behind the fabrication that any government worker pays taxes, which fools even most government workers, no matter how highly intelligent they believe themselves to be.

The only answer to the government's financing problem, especially when the bond bubble bursts, will be the time-honoured printing press solution favoured by other socialists in times past, in France, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, the USA, and Zimbabwe.

When that solution fails, there are two follow-up answers. The first is usually military dictatorship. The French revolution created enormous inflation; the answer? Why, Monsieur Napoleon. The German Weimar republic created enormous inflation; the answer? Why, Herr Schicklgruber.

The other follow-up answer is usually one of long-term punitive interest rates. The breakdown of the Bretton-Woods agreement in 1971 created enormous inflation in the USA; the answer? The 20% interest rates of Mr Paul Volcker, a man recently appointed by His Godliness Barack Obama, to head Obama's Economic Advisory Board. The Harold Wilson and Edward Heath governments of the 1970s created enormous inflation here in the UK; the answer? The brutal rate-rising government of Mrs Margaret Thatcher, which love her or loathe her, created an earthquake within British society which is still reverberating to this day.

So we have two choices in this country, when the inevitable destructive inflation hits. We can either go for the military dictator solution or the punitive interest rate solution. My bet is on the first one, despite the usual preference for English-speaking people to loathe being told what to do; I just don't think this country is capable of accepting punitive interest rates any more, not with so many people owning so many large mortgages. With a 20% interest rate, someone with a half million mortgage will be asked to pay out £100,000 pounds a year, for 25 years, just for the interest. Most such people will prefer a hyper-inflationary state managed by the Army, where they will get their houses for free, at the expense of having all of their liberties stolen.

Whatever happens, I would rather be elsewhere when the choice takes place, if I can manage it.

Have I advised you to try to leave yet? If you can't leave, at least get liquid. Become as prepared as possible to get on the first available plane out of here in your socks, with as few financial regrets as possible. Get your debts pared down or even cleared to zero. Have enough gold laid aside to buy tickets on a plane to the destination of your choice. This will be a country with several of the following Anglo-spheric characteristics: small, low-debt, low-tax, low-regulation, commodity-rich, English as a business language, business-friendly, defendable, and discerning as to who they let in. Targets include, Dubai, Singapore, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Canada, and God Forbid, possibly South Africa (at a very tight squeeze and probably only acceptable if you've lived there before).

The main former British Empire target to avoid is the USA (which is going to crack up much worse than the UK, if that's possible, despite having a God as their President-Elect).

Right, must get on with my own tortuous plans. Why is life so complicated?

The Great Escape

I'm not saying that I may be in talks with a serious person who is looking to offer me a sizeable contract in Dubai, but if anyone knows any really good books on "how to learn Arabic real quick", then I'm all ears.

Ich bin nicht ein nummer

I tried to spend a weekend in the Prisoner's house in Portmeirion once, but unfortunately I was told it was the "Prisoner Shop", so I spent the weekend in one of the other "Village" cottages instead.

It truly was surreal walking around the Portmeirion village, especially for such a big fan of The Prisoner.

It was therefore with great sadness today that I learned of the death of that great Irishman, Patrick McGoohan. May he rest in peace.

The master speaks

Having worked through the entire Peter Schiff podcast back-catalog and with Lew Rockwell only broadcasting sporadically, I was getting a bit short of things to listen to down at my local gym. Fortunately, Mises.org managed to ride to the rescue; it now provides audio books.

I listened to the first of them today, 'The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle'. Despite already being fully steeped in Austrianism, I was simply blown away by the accuracy of the descriptions of what a boom and bust cycle is, and how to cure one, from Uncle Murray Rothbard, amongst others.

If you really want to understand what this current depression is, and why all western governments are doing all of the exact wrong things to prolong it and worsen it, with their increasingly panicky and stupid interventions, download the entire audio book and listen to it at your leisure. The full audio book page is here:

=> http://mises.org/media.aspx?action=category&ID=112

To download it to your iPod's podcast directory, simply subscribe via the iTunes advanced menu to:

=> http://mises.org/Feeds/media.ashx?CategoryId=112

If you just want to listen to the killer chapter of this book, simply download:

=> http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/audiobooks/ATTC/ATTC_4_Rothbard.mp3

Let me give you a textual highlight from this one particular MP3 file. This quote is from the essay 'Economic Depressions: Their Cause and Cure', by Uncle Murray, first written in 1969, which is the third chapter of the audio book:

Mises, then, pinpoints the blame for the cycle on inflationary bank credit expansion propelled by the intervention of government and its central bank. What does Mises say should be done, say by government, once the depression arrives? What is the governmental role in the cure of depression? In the first place, government must cease inflating as soon as possible. It is true that this will, inevitably, bring the inflationary boom abruptly to an end, and commence the inevitable recession or depression. But the longer the government waits for this, the worse the necessary readjustments will have to be. The sooner the depression-readjustment is gotten over with, the better. This means, also, that the government must never try to prop up unsound business situations; it must never bail out or lend money to business firms in trouble. Doing this will simply prolong the agony and convert a sharp and quick depression phase into a lingering and chronic disease. The government must never try to prop up wage rates or prices of producers' goods; doing so will prolong and delay indefinitely the completion of the depression-adjustment process; it will cause indefinite and prolonged depression and mass unemployment in the vital capital goods industries. The government must not try to inflate again, in order to get out of the depression. For even if this reinflation succeeds, it will only sow greater trouble later on. The government must do nothing to encourage consumption, and it must not increase its own expenditures, for this will further increase the social consumption/investment ratio. In fact, cutting the government budget will improve the ratio. What the economy needs is not more consumption spending but more saving, in order to validate some of the excessive investments of the boom.

Which is, of course, the exact opposite of what the idiots Mandelson and Brown are currently trying to achieve in their Keynesian super-bout of utter madness.

'Uncharted territory', my derriere, to misquote Peter Mandelson. Murray Rothbard knew exactly what would happen nearly forty years before the event, exactly why it would happen, and exactly what fools such Peter Mandelson and Gordon Mugabe would do about it, in complete contravention of what they should be doing about it, which is absolutely nothing except perhaps the real cutting of government taxation, red tape, and spending.

You can read the full text of Uncle Murray's piece, here:

=> http://mises.org/story/3127

There will be no excuses when this crisis finally concludes, whenever it does, and for whatever reason. All of this knowledge is public and all of it is online. All you have to do is to listen to it or to read it. Oh yes, and give up the addictive drug of believing that socialism is anything other than evil, maligned, wrong, stupid, and dangerous.

Yes, we really are ruled by morons

The British Labour Party is living proof that morons really can succeed. Witness the evidence:

=> Dyslexia is a wicked myth created by bad teachers, MP says

=> Green shoots: Shriti Vadera's economic optimism sparks outrage

The first story concerns Labour MP Graham Stringer who believes that dyslexia is a figment of everyone's imagination. Fortunately, I'm sure most dyslexics will forgive him for his stupidity. Dyslexics tend to be more successful in life than non-Dyslexics, mainly because their difficulties with reading and writing tend to enable them to see "the bigger picture" more clearly. This is certainly the case with the several dyslexics I know, all of whom seem to be a lot more sorted out in their lives than I am in mine, especially in terms of location and lifestyle.

Yes, Mr Stringer has a certain point in that the rights-driven society which he has helped create, has led to lots of people jumping on the dyslexia bandwagon to gain longer times in exams and to get preferential treatment in their jobs, plus it has given state schools a pathetic excuse for bad teaching. However, to deny the existence of dyslexia purely because of this rights-driven agenda is to let you know the level of intelligence of the typical Labour backbench MP.

The second story concerns one of Gordon Mugabe's closest confidantes, Baroness Shriti Vadera, who has claimed to be able to see 'green shoots' in the economy. Yes, she's another one of the New Labour ruling class that lords it over the rest of us, and once again I suppose in some way she has a point. I foresee green shoots in the British economy, too. Except that the green shoots I see are the blades of grass that some of us will soon be forced to eat if the Labour Party's economic mismanagement of this country continues into the medium term.

We have two choices in this country. We can either embrace this recession and get it over with, or we can try to push it off and make a subsequent crisis even worse - though as we now living in the Keynesian long-run, pushing this crisis off to create an ever larger one in the future, may be the equivalent of a 30 stone man pushing off exercise, to prevent a heart attack. What Baroness Vadera probably sees is that some of the money-pumping of the Bank of England has led to a little quantitative easing in the financial system, plus five or six businesses closing down has led to a little more sales success for the only one left in the same arena. But this is hardly the beginning of a 'recovery'. Unless stemmed with appallingly high interest rates, which really will kill us all off, this quantitative easing is simply the grand central route to hyperinflation hell.

Also, in embracing the recession, Britain as a nation needs to become more competitive, to make itself an attractive place for foreign investors to place their long-term capital savings. This means shredding taxes and burning regulations. With a huge monkey sitting on our backs, the British government, which intends to do neither of these two things (unless funded by borrowing or inflation, both of which are just future tax rises in disguise), we will never be able to attract long-term foreign investment. Let's be generous and assume that inane government regulation doubles the price of goods production in this country and that taxes also, in and of themselves, double the price of goods production in this country. This leads to the inevitable result that everything produced in this country costs approximately four times more than the same product produced in a low tax, low regulation economy (e.g. China). And yes, I really am being generous. I would actually imagine that regulation and tax increases a final price to a finished good to more than ten times what it would be without them.

Do they wonder why nobody invests here, but prefers to spend their money on building factories in China instead? What strange perversion of history was it that led to an ostensibly communist country being so much more capitalist than an ostensibly capitalist one?

The only reason any British manufacturing company has survived this tsunami of socialist taxes and regulations in the last ten years has been through the availability of easy credit. And now that this cornucopia of pound notes has ended, as it was always going to, we are having to price things accurately in a world market filled with much cheaper manufactures. The solution, apparently, is to really ramp up the printing presses, but once again the short-sightedness of our 'leaders', like the good Baroness, is clearly visible to us all, because although in the very short run this will make British goods cheaper on the world stage, once manufacturers have to start re-stocking their commodities, they are going to start finding them astronomically expensive in terms of pounds, with Asian firms easily able to outbid them.

The solution to this crisis is to get the great fat monkey of government off our backs and to stop printing money. We need to sack government regulators by the million and we need to start removing taxes by the shed load. Halving the size of government and halving the volume of regulation would be a good start, though not really enough (especially as I am an anarchist! :-)

Getting back to the government, there is no greater and fatter fool in this country, than Baroness Shriti Vadera, as she proved yesterday. I think she has clearly nominated herself for the prize of who should be sacked first, though no doubt Peter Mandelson will be giving her lessons this morning on when to keep your mouth shut.

Ambrose catching up

It would appear that Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has been sneakily listening to a pre-Christmas Peter Schiff podcast, in which Der SchiffMeister predicted a sovereign bond bubble collapse:

=> The bond bubble is an accident waiting to happen

Peter Schiff debates this in several of his pre-Christmas blogs, if you want to listen to them, but here's the crux of it:

=> The major Asian economies will continue to buy US Treasuries (and UK Gilts) for some time, escaping from the fear of stock price crashes

=> The Fed will also continue buying US Treasuries, with money out of thin air, as will the Bank of England with UK Gilts

=> Traders will continue buying US Treasuries (and Gilts), so they can flip them to the Fed (and the Bank of England) when they think the bubble is about to burst

=> The bond bubble will burst

=> What will cause the burst? Who knows. The best guess will be a smaller Asian nation (eg. Thailand, Korea, heck Vietnam!) selling out sovereign bonds at the top of the market, to flip a profit

=> At that point all of the traders will also flip their sovvies to make a huge profit

> At this point, China will finally be forced to also flip its sovvies, to prevent the situation of holding nearly $2 trillion dollars worth of firelighters

=> Just like Wile E. Coyote, US and UK sovvie bonds will miraculously stay floating in mid-air for a short while, due to 'mystery' buyers soaking them up - ie. The Fed and the Bank of England, who will continue buying bonds with money out of thin air

=> The dollar (and probably the pound, its closest sibling currency) will then Utterly collapse, with the dollar catching the worst of it, once economic reality intrudes and everyone realises that the dollar (and the pound) are literally not worth the paper they are printed on

=> It gets better - at this point, there will be no more bailouts, because all of the bailouts are being funded by sovereign bond sales

=> With no income, the US and UK governments will Really start running the printing presses

=> Then we're all screwed - unless our investment wealth is tied up in gold, silver, commodities, and other hard liquid assets (such as the shares of commodity-producing companies most isolated from the dollar and the pound - eg. Australian gold mining companies)

=> Robert Mugabe will then start Really laughing at Gordon Brown, who engineered this entire British crisis, through his policies of social engineering funded through credit expansion

=> Thanks, Gordon

=> We will then stand at a crossroads, where the government will want to choose national socialism to entrench its power - whether we let them will then be up to us

=> I rather fear that our state-educated masses will cling to Nursie, as they have been taught to do their entire lives by the state education system and the state-licensed media

But at least Ambrose E-P, while still quoting the appalling Keynes, is starting to catch up with what's really going on, so let's not begrudge him that.

Message: If you're in bonds and you're not a trader who's ready to flip them, while these Wile E. Coyote bonds stay suspended for a short interregnum, when the mass rush for the exits begins, then get out of them now and get into gold or other hard liquid assets. PS. Leave Britain while you still can.

Exodus

The news continues to get worse each day, as we steamroller down the national socialist slope towards a fully government-owned economy:

=> Taxpayers to own part of small businesses

My own small business is struggling, so I will understand the temptation of other self-employed people to let the dead hand of government into their businesses, just as I can understand why private schools would let an encroaching government voucher system into their schools, but this creeping national socialism, starting with the banks, is beginning to become dangerous, as the dead hand of the poverty-inducing central state reaches out to strangle us all.

While we're at it, check out this 1993 quote from Hans-Hermann Hoppe, in his seminal book, "The Economics and Ethics of Private Property":

Economically, this coalition between the state—as the dominant partner—and the banking system—as its affiliate—leads to permanent inflation (constrained only by the imperative of not overdoing it and causing a breakdown of the entire monetary system), to credit expansion and steadily recurring boom-bust cycles, and to a smooth uninterrupted income and wealth redistribution in the state’s and the banks’ favor.

Still more important, however, are the sociological implications of this alliance: With its formation a ruling class whose interests are tied in closely with those of the state is established within civil society. Through its cooperation the state can now extend its coercive power to practically every area of society.

Then check out these stories from today's Torygraph:

=> Banker to join Government as Trade Minister
=> Treasury mulls bad bank for toxic debt

As Hoppe says in his book, before the alliance between the banks and the state, it was clear to see who in society were the parasites and who in society were the producers. As Mises also warned, once the bankers and the state created a counterfeiting coalition, a veil was drawn over the differences between parasites and producers, and a dangerous ongoing trend was established towards creeping national socialism.

That is the road on which we are now running, at full tilt, into the abyss of serfdom.

For more on how banks and the state coalesced to steal our wealth and how they took our wealth and freedoms along the way, check out chapter three of Hoppe's master work:

=> http://mises.org/books/economicsethics.pdf

It is now time to start leaving the country. Do it in any way that you can. I understand that you may have difficulties doing this. I have similar difficulties myself. But get out. And take as much gold with you as you can, and other liquid hard assets.

If you a still a 'British' patriot, then leaving will be the best thing you can do. Because you will be taking your wealth and skills with you and leaving the parasites here less to steal from. This means they will die quicker and the next Margaret Thatcher will find it easier to arise, come in, and then sort this mess out. That might be the time to come back, though possibly you may find your pool, air conditioning, and low tax lifestyle a little too hard to give up.

And forget Cameron and Osborne, and all of their blue rinse cronies. They are part of the same shooting match. Getting out of this mess is going to take a stronger revolution than perhaps even the one we had in 1979, and it will take much more than the frizzy hair of a Sir Keith Joseph to get it started.

Help them, whoever it is, by getting out. If you can. Alas, I may still be here when you get back, a greatly impoverished husk of a man, but to save this country we all need to try to leave it before capital controls and other exodus-reducing measures are also brought in to stop us.

The Gulag is on its way, one bailout at a time. You have, as they say, been warned.

The Backlog Ends

I have finally caught up with all of the back-catalog tapes from Peter Schiff's weekly broadcasts, discussing the current economic crisis.

The usual style is that The SchiffMeister sets off talking about something, takes a single breath, and then half an hour later stops talking about it. Phenomenal! Then he takes calls which he despatches remarkably well, seemingly with almost perfect omniscience, taking on any question and making his Austrian-based answers make absolutely irrefutable straightforward sense. Remarkable.

Each performance is simply outstanding, though he has had to let his brother and other key staff do one or two of his shows, because of the inumerable numbers of TV appearances he is now making throughout the world. Just where does he get the energy?

In one of the recent talks he alludes to a group of people who are trying to persuade him to stand as US Senator for Connecticutt. Let's hope he agrees to do this, as the New Ron Paul.

In the meantime, if you want to know what's really going on, then do yourself a favour and work through Peter Schiff's back catalog of weekly podcasts:

=> http://www.europac.net/radioshow_archives.asp

While you're at it, buy his two recent books, the first of which predicted the hows, the whys, and the whats, of this entire crisis, over a year before it started gathering pace:

=> http://www.europac.net/books.asp

Let's also hope that Mr Schiff ends up in the Warren Buffett league of billionaire entrepreneurs and that he then bankrolls the Ludwig von Mises Institute, with no strings attached.

The only remaining question is what am I going to listen to now, down at the gym? Lew Rockwell seems to have stopped broadcasting, so it looks like I'm down to Colin Hay again. Oh well, could be worse.

In the meantime, all power to The SchiffMeister.

The John Redwood Blog Site

I've only recently discovered the John Redwood blog site. It's amazing that a man this intelligent should have so much time to run such a good blog site when he should be shadow chancellor of the exchequer, tossing the rag doll of Alistair Darling around the commons, unlike that light-weight sniveller Osborne.

Alas, Mr Redwood doesn't seem to have seen the Austrian light yet, though he's close. One would hope he's at least read Margaret Thatcher's favourite book, "The Constitution for Liberty" (Hayek). Although only written by a student of Mises, and watered-down with all sorts of lily-livered socialism, it's still a pretty good read.

But John, if you're reading, you need the real McCoy. Try "Human Action" (Mises) or "Man, Economy, and State" (Rothbard), if you want the real hard stuff. I have the links to the PDFs right here:

=> http://mises.org/Books/HumanActionScholars.pdf

=> http://mises.org/rothbard/mespm.PDF

Pip pip!!

UPDATE: Mr Redwood's site is so good I felt compelled to comment on the following articles:

Ladders and greasy poles
Do nothing or do the wrong thing - please don’t let that be the question
There can be two Presidents at a time after all

What ever happened to 'Bank of England' Independence?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pip pip!!

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! ;-)