A Chinese Junk Economy

In New Providence in the Commonwealth of The Bahamas by Nassau is Paradise Island. It is where the Atlantis complex is situated and is now an over built and under resourced tourist development that occasionally makes the headlines when this or that celebrity does something to attract the media.

Nassau is a place where there are a lot of casinos and offices of a great many banks. These days it can be difficult to tell which is which. At least in the casino you might have a chance of winning, not much perhaps, but better than your chances with any of the banks.

It is about a hundred miles from the coast of Florida and there are flights to Miami, Fort Lauderdale and other places described as regular. However, nothing is regular at Nassau airport, unless you know the right porter. A good many of the big cruise ships call for people to wander about looking for expensive souvenirs and places to lose money quickly and easily.

On Channel 4 TV is a short fiction series “Any Human Heart” which in the next episode may be the part where the major figure, Logan Mountstewart, is there working in intelligence and keeping tabs on the erratic and unwise Duke and Duchess of Windsor who were there during the War. It suggests a corrupt and near criminal society bent on personal gain.

That was a long time ago and things have changed, one way or another. Basically, it became an American playground and despite being a former British colony latterly has based its currency on the dollar and in independence has been an off shore tax haven largely linked to American interests.

According to an article in the Nassau Guardian times have changed again. The Chinese have arrived big time as a consequence of complicated deals and have begun to call the shots through a major new development.

http://www.thenassauguardian.com/China-putting-the-squeeze-on-The-Bahamas

The Baha Mar project for several hotels and casinos on Paradise Island has a number of items on the web for added information.

Back in 1962 when Soviet Russia tried to establish itself in Cuba it provoked a major crisis which might have led to World War Three had it all gone wrong. Today with China holding a great deal of the USA’s international debt there has been no complaint about their arrival in the Caribbean. Their interest is unlikely to stop at Paradise Island.

Whether this is the first time the Chinese have been on the American East Coast is the subject of a lively debate over the claims about an expedition of 1421 by the Chinese navy. There is www dot 1421 dot tv on the one hand and www dot 1421exposed dot com on the other. By the 18th century it had become a base for extensive pirate activity.

More recently it is the arrival of large numbers of Haitians that have changed the shape of the Bahamas and this is likely to continue. It has impacted on the labour market and might explain why the Bahamas government need to grasp at any form of new employment. The interest of the Chinese government could literally be a life saver in many respects.

In the time of the British, the island was called Hog Island and the name was changed to Paradise Island to make it more tourist friendly.

Perhaps the ghosts of the hogs and pirates of old have not really gone away.

Back To Square One

If you want to do some serious brain stretching the Oil Drum has just posted a selection of its choicer items between 2005 and 2010.

There are a lot of them covering a great deal of ground. Those that deal with Collapse Dynamics and such are amongst my favourites.

The link to the full list is:

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7091

But amongst the many interesting items one that caught my eye was from February 2008 by Louis de Sousa titled “Olduvai revisited 2008” and is about the Olduvai Gorge Theory.

Ever one to try a new theory I took a look and it was the sort of inspiring cheery item to make my day.

The specific link is:

http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3565

It suggests that as humanity seems to have originated somewhere around the Olduvai Gorge a very long while ago it is possible we are all headed back there but possibly quite soon.

So what shall we sing around the camp fire? “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”?

Ireland, The Old Old Story

The news that George (or Gideon) Osborne hopes to contribute a large figure to the Irish bailout prompted one Wikipedia using journalist to discover that he is the heir to the Baronetcies of Ballintaylor and Ballylemon in Ireland. The Irish Ascendancy is an obscure area of study now, left to genealogists who have given up hope.

But I like to play “Hunt The Nesbitt”. It is amazing how often one turns up related to the most unexpected connections. But as our urban fox knows from chasing the squirrels they can be hard to find. You just have to chase here and there.

So rooting around George’s ancestry and its wider connections I was seeing all the familiar names of Irish politicians, lawyers and military men of the 18th Century and the bell went ping when the name of Frederick Trench turned up. This meant the Eyre’s as well as others and he was the man who knew and was related to Nesbitt’s.

He was executor to the large will of Cairncross Nesbitt of Aughamore in County Longford, a man whose Nesbitt connections were extensive. They include Arnold Nesbitt, a man I have written about before, who was central to the financial and economic collapse of 1772 and after.

So Irish bailouts and financial disasters are in George’s genes.

One news feature on the BBC has been a presenter interviewing plaintive students about their job prospects outside Trinity College, Dublin. They talk vaguely of going to places where jobs are even fewer than they are in Dublin. Perhaps they might have read economics and management but not history.

The Dr. Jeremy Taylor at the head of this blog was Chancellor of Trinity in the 1660’s after the Restoration and the aphorism quoted could apply to bankers as much as princes or modern politicians. He had a sharp eye for human frailty and hubris. There had been enough to witness in the previous thirty years to 1660.

Ireland was broke at the time. King Charles I had been a financial disaster and the Commonwealth had failed to do better. Matters did not improve much over the next three decades and more after 1660, the Atlantic Isles generally staggering from one financial crisis to the next with the monarchy propped up initially by French subsidies.

It was only after the cousin and her husband of Taylor’s son-in-law, Archbishop Francis Marsh of Dublin, that is Queen Mary II and King William III brought in European financial experts in the shape of the Dutch, Huguenots, Flemings and Sephardic Jews to sort out the city and the Exchequer with the help of a few Scots that some sort of order began to be established.

The 18th Century had its ups and downs and the Scots-Irish and others found their way to London to join the fun. Population began to increase rapidly and a basis for wealth increase beyond slavery was founded. From then on it was London and not Europe that had the job of avoiding total economic collapse.

It was a very near thing at times until the 1840’s, as that famous Irishman Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, observed in 1825, they were three days away from barter. But in the 1840’s a major collapse occurred in which a spiral of famine, the collapse of credit, hunger and death led to another direction in economic affairs.

Between then and 1922 the Agricultural Depression that began in the 1870’s combined with the serial bungling of London governments too concerned with The City and too ignorant of the developing needs led to the Irish breakaway.

This may have been independence of a sort, but it was never financial or economic because the Irish punt was tied to the pound until 1979. The UK crash of 1976 and after was one too many. In the 1950’s and 1960’s I saw that much of Ireland was still desperately poor.

This meant that all the ups and downs of sterling, errors and miscalculations of London governments between 1922 and 1979 impacted on the Irish economy both directly and indirectly. In my view Ireland should have broken the link at least in September 1949 when the UK devalued the pound against the dollar by 30%.

For twenty years after 1979 to 1999, managing its own currency and benefiting from European subsidies together with general economic growth and with oil now cheap, Ireland began to prosper. It was uneven but they were going in the right direction.

Then in 1999, leaned on heavily by the Brussels mafia they entered the Euro system and surrendered control of their monetary and financial policies. To compound the errors the government allowed Ireland to become entangled with the web of tax havens centred on the Wall Street-City of London nexus that allowed credit to run totally out of control.

The two did not mix. At first Ireland more than others had a runaway boom and then a runaway disaster. It has meant a surrender to Europe almost taking it back to the 1660’s. What must be worse is a smiling son of the Ascendancy now based in London offering to help, with conditions, of course.

May I recommend reading Dr. Jeremy Taylor? In his “Holy Dying” Chapter 1 he discusses how Man is a Bubble and in “Holy Living” Chapter 2 he deals with fancies of vanity, sudden advancement and great fortunes but the need for humility.

The earlier Osborne’s would have had copies on their bookshelves.

The Young One Returns Then Retreats

The Lord Young fiasco had my hackles rising. It may be that Dave had to put up with this person or that person for the sake of having them under supervision inside rather than causing trouble outside (see Lyndon Johnson’s famous analogy).

It may be an error of judgement to appoint him made to pay off old favours. Some of us remember Lord Young in the 1980’s. The memories are the stuff of nightmares. Indeed he brought solutions to Mrs. Thatcher rather than problems. The trouble is that they were the wrong ones and often disastrously costly at that.

There have been politicians down the ages who have made policy on the hoof if only to keep the critics and rebellious peasants quiet. The consequences were rarely good. Young came up with populist wheezes that looked good in the media and could be used to bury or at least disguise bad news.

He certainly made a place and a name for himself by doing so. But he created a template for later governments that turned almost the whole business into one unending media stunt. His way of working led to all the introverted secretive spin doctor short termism and slapdash legislation and financing of the present.

I have not forgotten that “wonder scheme” that gave our region £15,000 a year for a special whizz bang project as an offer none could refuse. The on costs around the region to sort and apply it came to £100,000+ a year that continued after the five year period of the scheme ended.

In several authorities his solutions seriously disrupted existing plans for reorganisation and efficiency improvements. When similar schemes were inflicted on the NHS they really did distort the patterns of medical treatment. Zeus knows how many lives were lost. Never mind the opportunities for real progress.

The essential problem was, as always, London centrism of the media and some urban areas. It meant the issues that arose there amongst the chattering classes and the wild lefties led to bad lurches in policy. After the rebalancing of the earlier part of the 1980’s it was a long hard slog to sort things out and put in place real needed development.

Across much of the country, this is what was being attempted but time after time was side swiped and damaged by the budgetary impact of these stunts. Most of the spending was in virtually fixed commitments. Efficiency, progress and improvement depended on relentless attention to detail and grinding the work out to direct better the part that was left. So the impact of Young driven disasters was all the greater.

What is utterly barmy about Young’s blathering is that he is saying to the electorate that in effect the Gordon Brown regime was progressive and good for us all. If indeed we have never had it so good then it is to Brown we owe it all to and not these new clever LibDem chaps or for that matter Major or Thatcher.

Quite which economy he is living in I cannot be sure but it is not the same one as my neighbours, the town I am in, my family and most of my connections. Again that is another problem of our times, a cocooned media financial elite utterly clueless about the damage they are doing.

Yet again, who need enemies with friends like this?

Peak Of The Week

Perhaps I ought to have a regular feature “Peak of the Week” in which yet another tipping point in the human consumption of primary resources may have been reached.

The latest one would be the matter of coal production and consumption in China. One of the critical factors in the growth of the Chinese economy in recent decades has been the rapid increase in coal production to fuel power, chemicals and the general economy.

China is now one of the major producers of goods and equipment in the world. With its financial policy of manipulating the currency exchanges to maintain an advantage in the terms of trade it has run a large balance of payments surplus for some time.

It is this surplus that has enabled it to prop up the finances of the USA by buying in so much of its debt and giving it a grip on US policy making and economic management.

The article in question, also quoting the Wall Street Journal is:

http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/7123#more

It is long, complicated and packed with diagrams and figures. But the baseline is that if China cannot continue to produce ever more coal and if to maintain production will mean both running down reserves and much higher costs then what?

What may mean is that it becomes impossible either to sustain the past rates of growth or the relevant economic and financial policies or much else. This could emerge sooner than most people think.

I see the weather is turning cold next week.

The Irish Question

As “Burning Our Money” has used a picture from the past for his comment today, I have followed his example, although possibly with less taste.

For those with a sharp eye the hills in the picture are likely to be those of the Wicklow Hills where so many of the more splendid residences of the rich and powerful of Ireland are to be found.

If you were to replace the “Doctors” in the picture with the word “Bankers”, I wonder what the answer of the elderly lady might be?

This may be an Irish joke, but I fear the laugh may be on us and not them.

It Is Not All Bad News

As a relief to all the ongoing troubles of the world, at last there is some good news. It seems that one of the great issues of our time, that many people have bother when drinking wine has been addressed.

It should boost the happiness index, but will the reduction in GDP arising from a fall in the demand for tissues and medications have an adverse effect on the economy?

Who cares?

Quote:

Physorg, November 17, 2010

Low-allergenic wines could stifle sniffles and sneezes in millions of wine drinkers

Scientists have identified a mysterious culprit that threatens headaches, stuffy noses, skin rash and other allergy symptoms when more than 500 million people worldwide drink wine.

The discovery could help winemakers in developing the first low allergenic vintages, reds and whites with less potential to trigger allergy symptoms, they say. The new study appears in ACS' monthly Journal of Proteome Research.

Giuseppe Palmisano and colleagues note growing concern about the potential of certain ingredients in red and white to cause allergy-like symptoms that range from stuffed up noses to headaches to difficulty breathing.

So-called wine allergies occur in an estimated 8 percent of people worldwide. Only 1 percent of those involve sulfites, sulfur-containing substances that winemakers add to wine to prevent spoilage and also occur naturally.

But the wine components that trigger allergies in the remaining 7 percent are unclear. Studies suggest that glycoproteins, proteins coated with sugars produced naturally as grapes ferment, may be a culprit.

However, scientists knew little about the structure and function of these substances in wine.

Their analysis of Italian Chardonnay uncovered 28 glycoproteins, some identified for the first time.

The scientists found that many of the grape glycoproteins had structures similar to known allergens, including proteins that trigger allergic reactions to ragweed and latex.

The discovery opens to door to development of wine-making processes that minimize formation of the culprit glycoproteins and offer consumers low-allergenic wines.

More information: "Glycoproteomic profile in wine: a 'sweet' molecular renaissance",

Journal of Proteome Research.

Provided by American Chemical Society (news : web)

Unquote.

The question now is should these wines have a cork, a plastic bung or a metal screw cap. The debate begins.