Song Of Summers

According to The Slog, quoting allegedly Nikkei and Reuters, Larry Summers is about to be named as the new Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of the USA.  According to some critical sources there are matters in his past record to raise questions.

A Wikipedia modern version of the Medieval English song "Sumer Is I'cumen In" is as follows:

Quote:

Summer has arrived,
Sing loudly, cuckoo!
The seed is growing
And the meadow is blooming,
And the wood is coming into leaf now,
Sing, cuckoo!

The ewe is bleating after her lamb,
The cow is lowing after her calf;
The bullock is prancing,
The billy-goat farting,

Sing merrily, cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo,
You sing well, cuckoo,
Never stop now.

Sing, cuckoo, now; sing, cuckoo;
Sing, cuckoo; sing, cuckoo, now!

Unquote.

So will it be an early winter this year?

Abandon Ship?

The New York Times (hat tip family again) today suggests that in Britain the times they are a'changing and from being a confident major power prepared to use military might in order to assert our will we are now more prone to worry and look the other way.  The idea is that a great tanker of history is changing course.

The article also picks up on George Monbiot's, see the Guardian or his blog, thesis that The Lakes in England's furthest North West is not worth the status of a world heritage location because it is effectively a sheep wreck, as in the wool and mutton producing munchers of grass and anything else it can chew to the detriment of the both plant and wild life.

William Wordsworth, the poet once taught in every school but now in very few, is cited as being partly to blame.  But he may have been writing when there was a degree of tree cover still there as opposed to our Forestry Commission pine stacks planted to serve as coal mine pit props.

We do not have the figures to work out when the sheep boom actually peaked, but as he died in 1850 it might have been just before then.  But much later one effect of agricultural subsidy may well have been to give the sheep almost free rein.

A good many men from The Lakes went elsewhere, some to New Zealand and some to Australia taking their sheep and skills with them.  One of the poet's grandsons was one, marrying into the family of one of these sheep farming families.

The New York Times seems to have realised that our politicians and government may now just be beginning to realise that all our pretensions and posturing now will no longer work.  This has been the case for some time but there has been a reluctance in the media and political bubble to admit it.

For my money it goes back a lot longer.  In fact for some time Britain has been more like a Torrey Canyon that hapless vessel than a large ship simply changing course.

I think I have that sinking feeling.

Cutting Corners With The Budget

Among the many and various political commentators, one Douglas Carswell, is said to be of the Right.  A while back I challenged him with the allegation that his economics seemed more redolent of Gladstonian Liberalism to which he replied, more or less "banged to rights, Guv."

He has made another foray into Economic History telling us to look out for the future in the past with reference to  Beware the Barber Boom reminding us of past errors.  This takes us back forty years, ancient history to many but not to some.

This is a time that I recall vividly, just having done yet another job move to try to keep ahead of all the manic reorganisations that were going on in which many of the unwary found out they were superfluous to requirements.

The upshot of this was that we moved into a four bed, fair sized well equipped detached house with a decent garden, overlooking fields yet with bus, rail and motorway services. 

All for £6,750 and we could run a car, feed three children etc. and have decent holidays on around £2,500 a year and without much if any use of credit cards.

It was after Anthony Barber, Chancellor to Edward Heath one of the big spender Prime Ministers had given the economy a badly timed and ill considered boost that kicked off near hyper inflation.

It was also the time that the Bretton Woods international agreements on international capital and money ended and some economists were cheerfully recommending a spending free for all to do wonders and to help politicians be re-elected.

In some ways we are still living with the consequences in that the government now controls more of our money and yet inflation continues unabated.  We are told that higher prices means that we are more prosperous when this does not seem to be the case.

The trouble is that we still buy into the fiction.  One of the nastier consequences of past improvidence is that some of schemes of the past have caught up with us, notably the Ponzi deal of state pensions.

Politicians of the past used to giggle in private when they admitted that National Insurance was not insurance and the pensions were unfunded. 

Now the laughing has to stop as the ageing population wants what was promised believing that because it paid in the money should be there when it isn't.  It has to come either from current taxation or borrowing and we are already over borrowed.

It was around then that we also bought into the fiction that any spending that allegedly created jobs was good.  So any big project that would never ever yield a real return on investment was good especially if big enough to get the media excited.

Some of these schemes would never even yield eventually any return on revenue costs all of which loaded future obligations onto tax payers in immense sums. 

Add to that in recent years the amounts taken out by financial firms handling the money side and contractors guaranteed profits or protected from cost over runs it has all added to the burdens.

If Carswell is correct and Cameron and Osborne have done another Barber, we will all get a short back and sides if not a head shave.  

Savings Are A Girl's Best Friend

In all the media and other debate about the economy and the rest it is remarkable how little is said about savings, that is real saving, and its function in making economies work.

Picked up from Frances Coppola is a link to a web site Save Our Savers that tries to redress this imbalance.  A recent post tells us that suppressing savings is bad and a key cause of many of the problems we face.

It is not a long read but worth the time because how any of our media and governing structures can be persuaded to look very hard at all the damage and risks that ignoring, or even destroying savings can entail seems to be almost impossible.

As we seem almost to be heading for a society where saving is no longer a part of ordinary life in handling money but high levels of debt are and we are urged to spend spend spend regardless of whether we are buying rubbish or value it could be a very unhappy future for many.

This is compounded to the degree which pension funding, once a key form of saving is being radically changed and many now face a future of lower pensions if any. 

Add to that policies that are inflationary allied to statistics that understate it and it is possible to see that collapsing the savings could lead to contributing to the collapse of economies.

News And No News

In a way spoiled for choice by some news items to begin the week.  The first was that the London Metropolitan Police seem to have taken the view that the best way to tackle security at Buckingham Palace is to arrest and bang up the Royal Family.  This should clear the way for members of the lower income groups to have easy access to movable assets.

But they first tried it with Prince Andrew, the veteran of the Falklands Campaign, who is a man of both volatile temperament and firm views on the subject of civil liberties, notably his own.  They might have been better off with Charles, Prince of Wales, his older brother.  Charle's mother might have been happy to let him stew in the Hammersmith nick for a few days.

Another exercise in inclusivity was at the Last Night of the Proms when the audience, promised Vivienne Westwood gowns were disappointed when fiddler Nigel Kennedy, born into the UK musical elite but gone native, turned up in an Aston Villa FC shirt with the name of Agbonlahor, their striker, on it.

The following day, Sunday, in a charity match, Agbonlahor returned the compliment in his own way, by clattering Louis Tomlinson, of the boy band, One Direction, hard enough to give him knee knack and make him violently ill.  Classical music may need all the help it can get in the modern music market, but this was less than inclusive.  

Having done a post on water one of my family reminded me that the internal conflict in Syria is owed to drought conditions in an article on the NPR (National Public Radio USA) web site.  Soon someone somewhere may be getting more water than they want because Tropical Storm Humberto is up and running in the South Atlantic.

In the meantime the Tax Justice Network has sought legal opinion on the issue of the company fiduciary duty to pay tax as opposed to avoiding it.  This has been sent to a raft of leading companies to ensure they are aware of it and their responses could be interesting.

At around the same time our Chancellor was doing a speech in the City of London about the UK alleged economic recovery.  As much of this is probably large scale funny money sloshing round the accounts it was perhaps the best place to do it.  Unluckily behind him was a grim mist of pouring rain.

Yet another major project has been proposed, this one a new Gatwick sized or bigger airport for Wales.  Quite where is another matter, Wales has a lot of hills and narrow valleys so it seems that some coastal area may be best.  Perhaps the idea that Bojo Johnson, Mayor of London, had of an estuary airport could be translated there.

One good place, lots of mud flats, is Carmarthen Bay.  It has existing rail lines that could be developed for the links to London Heathrow and Gatwick and to the Midlands and The North.  It could serve also as an ancillary hub for Ireland.

As the area has not many people to disturb, little industry and its agriculture enduring hard times, there will be fewer protests and more people interested in compensation. 

To show due respect for the local culture it could be called Llareggub Airport to become one of the very few with a literary provenance.

This one could actually work.

Water Water Not Everywhere

A day or two ago, I put on a link to the Dr. Strangelove film which had the US general who launched the missiles depicted as a person who had gone noisily mad.  His prime obsession was that the Commies by promoting the fluoridisation of water were destroying the American people.

This coincided with one or two items elsewhere about chemicals and water.  Another was an article pointing out that the world could face a severe water shortage for its populations very soon.  There is a lot less fresh water to be had, mostly contained in ice fields and sea water has its limitation.

Along with this was a comment on the Sub Rosa blog doing a re-run of the DHMO spoof, allegedly dihydrogen monoxide, which suggests that anyone raising questions about the extent and nature of chemical use are the sort of people who would call water dangerous.

Allowing for the fact that drowning can occur and that too much water too quickly as in major floods or tsunamis may have adverse effects there is the breezy assumption in much of the developed and Western World that fresh water is safe.

Our British and Irish ancestors did not think so and were often reluctant to drink it raw because it was so often contaminated and a carrier of diseases and other substances.  It was safer to drink beer or almost anything else.

In recent decades there have been moves to not just treat water to decontaminate it but to add chemicals in order to deal with other problems, notably fluoride to avoid the effect on the teeth of eating too many sugars.

Now that we have had a few decades of this the case is being made that we might be a lot better off without all the sugars and for that matter the fluoride.  Necessarily, this involves major companies, lobbying, politics and all the clatter that follows.

In the USA there is now a row developing over the apparent tactic by the companies involved to ban attempts to end fluoride treatment by law and the long run consequences of this form of using the water supply to deal with other problems.  This link to the Dr. Mercola site gives a longish discussion of the issue.

This one will run and run or at least until the water supply runs out.

Cameron Fails His Viva Voce

Oh dearie me, poor old Cammers our duffer of a Prime Minister was baited by Vlad The Teaser over grubbers and rose to the bait faster than a tickled trout in the Cherwell.

As ever he went blathering on about all the politically correct cabbage that Gove the Guff had given him in the National Curriculum Anti History umpteenth version.

So where exactly was he when Putin poked him in the ribs?  Look it up quickly on the web and it was St. Petersburg.  This is in Russia and where the G20 had convened for their latest mutual slagging match version of the Eton balls game.

So what?  You may ask.  But who founded it?  Tsar Peter The Great, said by many to be the Founding Father of All The Russias.  Why?  Because it was by the Baltic Sea and allowing maritime access to the West and much of Europe.

Why would he want to do that?  Because he wanted Russia to move on from being a disorderly religion bound society to become a modern trading rationalist progressive society and a full part of Europe.

Where on earth did he get that idea from?  Well, he went to Holland and in particular England to learn a great deal about many things being entertained by King William III and those who dealt with the Royal Navy, philosophy, science and the arts.

The rest as they say is History, and Cameron failed the viva voce. 

Back to The Remove Cammers to do a lot more swotting.