A Story For The Season

Noises off in the night, so perhaps it was time to check the fridge to see if anything urgently needed consuming.  In the lounge nearly fell over a large, obese man in brown overalls and working boots flat out on the floor.  "Just doing the yoga to relax" he told me.  "What...." I began.

"Seasonal deliveries" he waved a hand to a stack of well wrapped items by the window, "EU personal distribution regulations say that after a certain number of items a work break is compulsory, it just happened to be here."

"But who are you, this time of year it is Santa Claus alias Father Christmas?"  He rubbed the fashionable stubble on the chin where the beard should have been".  "Ah, as I've been caught napping, so to say, I had better tell you."

"The Santa Claus and all that is now simply a brand image retained by the conglomerate that it was merged into following a general  shake out in world distribution services.  Publicity was out because of potential adverse media coverage."

"So who are you?"  He coughed, "TDS Delivery Services".  "Who are they?"  He coughed twice, "Trident, but I am not employed, I am a self employed contractor on zero hour contract working under stipulated conditions."  "Trident?"

"When defence missile management systems were out sourced the commercial potential for subsidiary profit return activity was realised.  Financial consultants and advisers created a network by taking over various online retail and delivery systems."

"I see, what about the reindeer?"  "Most of them are in packets on cheap offer at Lidl".  "Including Rudolph?"  He hesitated, "Ah, bad business that."  I stared, "What?"  "Shot down over Stornoway by nationalist Free Presbyterians.  They thought he was canvassing for the Liberal Democrats.  The nose is now on a harbour warning buoy".

"OK", it was not going well.  "Just how did you get in?"  He hitched up his jeans, "Our associate affiliates, commercial offshoots from the CIA and GCHQ sell us the enabling technology."  "And how do you know what to give?"  "Easy, simple profiling and info searching, then goods are ordered, priced and you pay for them."

This annoyed me, "I don't shop online, I don't use credit, I don't order anything except from shops.  I keep accounts."  He smiled as though I was stupid.  "There is a shadow you, we operate the shadow.  Nobody knows but that all have shadow personages out there."

"Well, I am not going to pay a penny."  "Suit yourself, most people don't know what they are doing so we just merge the shadow into the actual.  In the awkward cases they are treated as bad debt, no problem."  "So who really pays?"

"The shadow purchasers are on shadow credit.  These are accounts with controlled banks who carry the bad debt.  This is covered by government or related financing of the banks with other credit.  This comes from Central Banks in the form of quantatitive easing or bond purchases.  Some of goes into other forms of credit and just keeps going round the system."

"This can't work."  "Yes it does, what do you think economic growth really is, or rising consumer confidence or the rest?"  I shook my head.  "Look, Santa Claus economics can't work."  He sniffed, "Well, it's my job along with others to see that it does."

"But what about all the elves and others up at the North Pole, what is happening to them?"  "Global warming, squire, they are signed up for a bottled water franchise and an experimental new floating city.  They are quite happy, EU conditions of service apply and all that."

"Must go," he said, "when this lot is done we have a contract for moving footballers around during the transfer window.  When we have worked out where to send them and who pays."

He climbed out of the window and into a large whirring drone.  There was a bright flash and a puff of smoke and he was gone.  Out of curiosity, I began to open the parcels.  Then is all became clear.

There was nothing in them.

Welcome To The Party

There is always someone at the party or table who likes to have a debate or argue about something serious.  Very often, it is a subject that everyone else prefers to avoid.

There have been one or two articles in the last few days saying that contrary to received opinion, Ebenezer Scrooge was an informed person with insights superior to others in financial matters.

Having Ebenezer's in the family history, a good old Scottish name that was once common in Ayrshire, I might be inclined to agree but then I might not.

So just to spoil the party here is an article from the Mises Institute by Ryan McMaken titled "Correcting Scrooge's Economics" that while recognising  Ebenezer's talents points out the weaknesses in his ideas on economic theory.

Enjoy.

Brains For Hire

We humans are becoming largely redundant and it may be that the pace of replacement is becoming faster.

This example from (e)Science News is one.  How well it works is an interesting question.

But it does not take long lunch hours in the pub and then go on to forget what needs to be done.

Building Bridges

Amid talk of austerity, belt tightening, reduction, economies and the rest the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, having cried "Phwoar" at the idea of Joanna Lumley, now proposes to spend £170 million on a Garden Bridge linking the lawyers of The Temple to the leading actors of the National Theatre, a marriage that reflects our present governance.

Inevitably, that is just the starting bid.  If it is built you can be sure it will cost a great deal more.  There are one or two other minor passing issues.  For example who will pay the maintenance and upkeep and what added charges may accrue in the overall financing.

The lawyers of The Temple do not want it.  They are fussing about matters such as wrecking one of the ancient sites of London.  The National Theatre may like the idea but as its finances are being squeezed they might prefer the money to go on culture rather than horticulture.

Joanna is an attractive lady of great charm and positive ideas.  She had a lot to do with the charities for providing for the Gurkhas and their Nepalese families and the politicians buckled.  But for some who sold up their ancestral patch in Nepal for social housing in Aldershot it has not been so happy.

Quite why the Garden Bridge is her latest pet project does not matter.  What does matter is this kind of effort on the part of celebrities usually ends up with others paying a large bill to create an open ended major financial commitment.

The cable car installation, Emirates Air Line, down at Greenwich by the Millennium Dome, which came in at £60 million, courtesy of The Emirates, is not used anything like as much as was claimed likely.  Certainly, it looks nice but these days we can do without large loss makers however pretty they are.

If we are looking for bridges across the Thames that might be more useful it might be better to look at other locations away from the centre which badly need traffic relief.  There are several stretches where an ordinary new bridge could make a real difference and the traffic flows would justify it.

Perhaps, Boris should pull up his trousers and pull down the curtains on this particular performance.                                                             

Water Water Not Everywhere

A happy solstice to all and may all your troubles be able to be delegated to others, dumped, delayed indefinitely or distanced by virtue of an unforeseen computer glitch.  This may not be the case in one part of the globe.

This grim tale which is bad enough to satisfy any real Scrooge has had some attention but little coverage as a whole and without much in the way of analysis as to the potential.  But the basic story has been coming a long while and it was always the case of where it might happen and who would suffer.

This matters not only to those immediately concerned but all those who either trade or are economically involved with them.  The Wikipedia article on Sao Paulo, in particular the introductory section tells the story of the city.

It is calculated to be the 12th largest City on the planet and so a full  scale example of the urbanisation that has occurred in the last century.  It is the kind of human and economic entity that many of the world and EU leaders and in UK politics and government see as the model for all our futures.

The worst may be avoided in this case, if the rains come and/or the authorities work together to put in place the systems, reforms and investment needed to ensure water supplies.  Their basic problem is how much increase will be needed and its costs.

For many the obvious answer might be the apparently easy one of desalination.  But this is costly and while possible in some cases may not be either enough or affordable for mega cities such as Sao Paulo.  Given the rate of expansion it would command a high proportion of social investment.

Sao Paulo cannot stand still and have a pause for recovery.  If it continues to grow it is going to take major efforts to enable it to do so and beyond the experience of other places.

If it does not grow and contracts, then it depends on what sort of contraction and how it is managed.  A slow, gentle decline would be one thing, but it means decanting expansion to other places.  A fast one would be difficult to control with serious problems.

So the risk could be a major collapse.  It would be bigger, nastier and more unstable than the recent Detroit and other experiences and its influence could be greater in that it would have global effects because an urbanised entity of this extent has a world "footprint".

Whether it would trigger other such collapses is an interesting question.  There was a time when England went from being Roman, with an essentially urban structure at the centre of its economy and governance, to being a warring tribal set of local fiefs.  We call it the Dark Ages.

Certainly, there were communities with their skills and cultures that developed over the centuries following so it was not quite as dark as we once thought.  But it could be nasty, brutish and short.

Historically, there have been other collapses down the millennia in many places and for many reasons.  In some cases there was a recovery, greater or lesser but often in another form, in others it did not happen.  Prediction is not possible.

Here we go again?

Power To The People

As this blog is near to being six years old and with an election coming up in May 2015, perhaps some retrospective looks at past items might be of interest.

This one comes from May 2009 under the title of Cameron And Power To The People.  The picture of John Lennon, above left was used then, but added, right,  is one of the character Wolfie in the TV Series "Citizen Smith" that ran from 1977 to 1980 that was very popular.

Quote:

In 1980 David Cameron was a callow teenager hanging around with the guys at Eton, softly singing to himself “The Winner Takes It All”, the Abba hit of the year.  Doubtless, as teenagers fixated on celebrities are, he would have been affected by the tragic death of John Lennon.

John, a lower middle class and grammar school boy grew up in a nice home on Menlove Avenue in Liverpool, a large comfortable semi-detached property.  At least it was in comparison with the accommodation available to the great majority of working class people at the time.

Its inhabitants were said to be a snobby lot who had special toilet paper and not the ripped up Daily Mirrors and Sunday Pictorials we used. Life in Menlove Avenue was both warmer and better equipped than at Eton I suspect.  Inevitably, marketing considerations required The Beatles to create the myth of worker solidarity to help them become very rich and buy properties in tax havens.

John famously said that “I might have been born in Liverpool, but I grew up in Hamburg”, referring to his life changing experiences in the Red Light district of that town, where so many British Soldiers had surrendered to one or other Reeperbahn Rash in the years after the war.

Hamburg originally had surrendered to a water truck driven by a Lance Corporal in 1945, but the next day repeated it to a coterie of more camera friendly troops with tanks and stuff.  But Hamburg had its revenge, because in the next decade or so the ladies of the Reeperbahn inflicted an over ninety percent casualty rate on the British troops. This information probably is still classified, so you read it here first.

When both David and John were born, a generation apart, there was still a structure and form of government system in the United Kingdom which could be understood by the general population, and a legal system that had relative clarity and purpose.  There was also coverage in national and the then extensive local press.

It began to go bad in the early 1970’s with the badly botched Heath reforms of local government and the health service.  The disruption to management and the finance of services played a part in the severe inflation of the period and inevitably led to the decades of tinkering, shuffling, and fiddle.

The commitment to the EU added to the mess, as did the creation of a raft of extra government bodies, and the never ending reorganisation of central government departments in the search for media coverage and to keep John Prescott out of mischief.

Mrs. Thatcher made an attempt to prune the Quango’s, but like vines and roses only to create the extensive growth of the last fifteen years.  We all know what Blair and Brown have done.  So we have a huge mess.

After sixty years of interest and study on government and politics, I now have no working knowledge of either the law or just who administers what to what effect, or why.

The documents I read are verbal sludge, and the intellectual structures on which law is based and decisions are made are roughly at the level of the playground of the old All Age Elementary Schools.

So David, my advice is, if I were you I wouldn’t start from here.  The trouble is that if you do wish to give power to the people, they must have information, a media that is balanced, and an immediacy of access.  This is not the way the media works at present and restoring local control will be harder to achieve than you imagine.

The organisational challenge is immense, and you are not going to have either spare cash, or real growth to provide it.  Worse still, you might have a rate of inflation that has to be firmly controlled to avoid a 1970’s problem or greater.  As for the public relations, as things get difficult it may be nasty.

The pop and celebrity culture might suddenly see a market in pretending to be just very ordinary, especially if the tax man catches up with some of them and the screens will be filled with middle and lower middle class media poseurs waving their arms about demanding the return of Harriet, Jacqui, Hazel, Yvette and Caroline.

The men will not be available.  They will all be in Brussels, or Moscow, or with any luck in Walton Gaol.

Unquote.

Brussels it was and for Cameron read Wolfie.

The Fire Next Time

Just what money is floating around is a good question at this time of year when many people are spending money they do not have to pretend to a lifestyle that is beyond their means.

But the problem may be bigger according to this article in Zero Hedge claiming that around a couple of hundred trillion, yes trillion, dollars are knocking around the system in terms of outstanding debts of one sort or another.

The information comes from Phoenix Capital and there is a free link claiming to offer a way of avoiding it all.  Perhaps more in hope than anything.

The Phoenix is a creature in Greek Mythology who dies by fire and is then reborn out of the ashes.  There are a number of variations of the myth.  One aspect is that the time between demise and rebirth can be quite long.

So do not bet on it.