It's all someone else's fault

It's 2009, and still no politician (and precious few media commentators) seem to be aware of and properly acknowledging the fundamental effects of instantaneous global communication on every aspect of human endeavour.

Too much reference to historical economic precedents to look for pointers to solutions for the current shambles will be dangerously misleading. This is starting to look all too reminiscent of those "experienced" World War One generals sending in the cavalry to deal with tanks and machine guns. The 40/50 "somethings" in charge of politics and commerce generally don't fully understand technology and its implications - and the 20/30 somethings that understand technology have scant sense of political or commercial perspective. They have no concept of the rather more expansive and entrepreneurial scope and breadth of commercial life before the mountain of red tape and insidious political correctness dumbed us all down to where we are now. They probably also don't understand what it is like to have distinct choices in politics after the relatively sterile and homogeneous experience of the past 17 years or so.

There was once talk of the information superhighway providing a transparency in all things such that all markets would be level playing fields and there could never be any more big surprises arising from "obscured information". Ho ho...

Our Beloved Leader always makes reference to this being the first crisis of the "global era", but doesn't seem to understand what the words actually mean. His next remark is invariably to try and pin the blame on the USA (always failing to note that it was Clinton's Democrats and their market-bending political intervention to buy votes that lies at the root, although some go further back and suggest Nixon's cash printing to pay for the Vietnam war actually began the rot when the gold standard was abandoned). Broon's interview today with Andrew Marr was yet another tour de force of never answering the question - so why does the BBC bend over backwards to give the Auld Caledonian Fraud such a lavish and cosy a platform for his speeches?

Events like the motor car, telephone, radio and TV are all attributed with making structural changes to society and the way just about everything works. All those events were basically about "communication", and yet the most massive communication revolution of all time remains largely misrepresented and woefully misunderstood. Abuse of its possibilities has been used to good effect by slick bankers wrapping up toxic loans and then manipulating other dumber bankers using herd tactics - something that online instant communication driven by the fear of being a millisecond behind the market, supports extremely well.

The strength of the Internet always was (and will be) is ability to promote resilience through diversity - and to allow smaller and more agile operations a far more level playing field with the likes of BP and Tesco than could have been conceived of prior to its adoption. Hence the ongoing efforts of larger companies to try and crowd out and stifle competition when trying to remind government that it's simpler to manage a few huge relationships than try and manage the unruly mass of UK's smaller and more enterprising businesses. Gordon can pick up the phone to Sir Terry Leahy at Tesco and "do a deal" with the bloke running 25% of UK consumer spending; why would he want to have to try and work with 10,000 independent shopkeepers?

David Cameron is hinting at the potential for a redistribution of authority back to the people in many ways ranging from schools, to healthcare and councils. He needs to be encouraged, and commentators need to pursue him for detail, because herein lies possibly the one and only long term and viable route out of the present process-bound chaotic shambles. It is only through enabling and encouraging new small businesses that the unemployment tsunami currently gathering pace can be absorbed.

Pointless gestures like a 2.5% VAT cuts are complete smokescreen nonsense when the currency has been devalued 30-50% .

Telling bankers to lend money just after they took the biggest hit in all eternity from imprudent lending seems unlikely to get a favourable reception; especially since Broon himself is keen to absolve them of responsibility, forever blaming toxic US loans. If Broon properly attributed responsibility and tagged the many culpable UK bankers, then he would have to accept the blame as the ultimate regulator of the UK economy for the past 11 years.

We all know bankers have no imagination or capacity for analysis, so reminding them that the toxic loans were mostly not the result of mostly honest UK borrowers doesn't change their desire to protect their own jobs and pensions by clinging onto all the cash that they can. We should all be looking at paradigm-shifting ideas that operate at the core of the economy with ideas like the network-leverage of social lending schemes of Zopa.

Unless we can come up with some radical new ideas and leadership that understands where and how the world has changed, it's increasingly looking like the alternative is that we will find ourselves trapped ever more in Field Marshal Broon's grim version of WW1, and waiting for him to blow the next whistle to send more cannon fodder over the top.

It is not a cheery thought.

Tis the season to the hypocritical

The Guardian holds forth as the conscience of the nation, and wrings its hands over the way the Chinese have re-erected the Great Firewall now the Olympics blather has died down.

As usual, the leftish press is exposed as shameless hypocrites, since there are numerous comments by readers that have been deleted from the meandering diatribes of resident commissars Polly Toynbee, Jackie Ashley (Mrs Andrew Marr), Andrew Rawnsley et al.

If they can't take the heat, don't leave them open to comment. We will understand that their faith is being shaken a lot recently - after all, it's a bit of shock to find you've been barking up the wrong trees for years. This increasingly disreputable band of left-wing cheer leaders need to remember that they write for a chip-wrapper that calls itself (somewhat presumptively) "the Guardian". The Guardian of what? Free speech or their own (frequently pricked) dignity?

We'll take your preaching on the subject of censorship seriously when you deal with the Great Firewall of the Graun. Meantime if you choose to take a leaf out of the book of a rather larger Communist operation, then please don't use it to try and cover your own immodesty.

Dare Cameron give Gordon all the good ideas, again?

Labour apparatchiks chortle that they want to hear about policies?

Well, there's a pleasant change, since all the banal and pointless chanting is actually coming from Labour's benches, who endlessly chortle "do nothing Tories" in a last-ditch effort to persuade the feeble minded that doing anything, no matter how crass, injurious, pointless and dangerous, is somehow a better strategy. Too bad the Germans called that bluff, eh?

More bad news for a Labour spinner follows, I fear, since the alternative policies recognise Jim Callaghan's words of angst and wisdom:-

"We used to think you could spend your way out of recession by boosting government spending." ...spoken at the 1976 Labour party conference

SuperBroon's complete lack of understanding of the real world (remembering he is hampered by an Aspergers issue) extends to the fact that the moment he wedged up the banks with our cash, the LAST thing the banks wanted to do was let any of it go again. Most of them would not pass on interest rates cuts until Darling banged their heads together. And in reality, all that has happened is that prudent savers have been right royally screwed, and the chancy property vultures are having a field day.

Santander's recent and staggeringly crass threats to get mortgage holders to boost their equity ratios reminds us just how completely challenged these folks can be.

The reality we need to address is that bankers are, on the whole, very stupid people, employed mostly because they are utterly incapable of that most scary unbankerly attribute - an ability for independent and creative thought. An abundance of this quality can be a problem, which is why a handful of over-creative "Ponzi sharks" and toxic mortgage dumpers have swum rings around dumb bankers for years, ending with this current meltdown.

Cameron started to show his hand yesterday, much to many government apologists' delight/horror, and his growing willingness to see stupid bankers trundling down Threadneedle Street in tumbrels seems to stem from a realisation that we have to start any root/branch overhaul of the system by improving the quality of our top financial thinkers. Probably starting with the uber unimpressive Mervyn "moral jeopardy" King and his coterie of clowns that have presided over the process that got us where we are today.

Huge, massive, MAJOR reforms are required in all aspects of banking, finance and taxation - and Broon - the unelected leader of an unelected party (as far as England is concerned) - simply does not have the depth and breadth of social skills required to achieve them, when he can't even drag the Germans this far, even after telling them that he saved them.

It's possible neither does Cameron; but God Knows, we have to try something. Leaving Gordon Brown to continue to embarrass himself and the country is truly the "do nothing" option.

Why is Polly Toynbee ..?

TMP doesn't usually bother to single out specific hacks for consideration, but every now and again a truly outstanding piece of nonsense compels us to reconsider.

TMP feels it must draw a bead on the Graun's "conscience in chief" and explore just how she manages to keep the vitriol in her pen from eating through the plastic and burning her hand. Is there a more shamelessly and determinedly bigoted, wilfully ignorant, and prejudiced scribe in the whole of this land?

We have sad news for David Cameron, he might as well give up now and go and do a spot of peasant thrashing, for nothing he can say or do seems to be able to persuade La Toynbee from using anything he says or does to demean and belittle his efforts. He was simply born to the wrong parents.

PT's latest piece of priceless advice on economic salvation is that the first thing we need to do to "build a German-style industrial base".

So we must lose a war to the US and UK, get all ancient industry bombed flat (oops, they're all been turned into housing estates by now, sorry...) and rebuild it with new? There's a small catch here: the Germans sunk into recession before anyone else - because there are no customers left able to buy their wonderful goods - not even with Gordon's limitless supplies of his "funny money". Gong!

The problems run far deeper than giving Gordon another 5 years to "finish the job" by squeezing a few pips. And let's once again remember, this whole toxic loan fiasco started when Clinton's democrats (aka the USA's very own NuLabour party) forced US financial institutions to support democrat voters with just the sort improbable loans Broon wants to see British banks doing. Slippery US bankers then gift-wrapped these fairy money loans and dumped them on gullible investors around the world.

This whole mess is directly attributable to socialists meddling with long understood rules of financial probity in order to buy votes. But don't worry, TMP is not expecting even a Smith-like apology from Ms Toynbee, nor any promise to mend her misguided ways.

FYI - here is the background to this tireless class warrior...

Polly Toynbee (born Mary Louisa Toynbee on December 27, 1946) was born on the Isle of Wight. After attending Badminton School, a girls' independent school in Bristol, followed by the Holland Park School, a state comprehensive school in London (she had failed the Eleven Plus examination), she read history at St Anne's College, Oxford... Toynbee was the second daughter of the literary critic Philip Toynbee (by his first wife Anne), granddaughter of the historian Arnold J. Toynbee and great-great niece of philanthropist and economic historian Arnold Toynbee after whom Toynbee Hall in the East End of London is named'

(Wikipedia)

We should add that Polly was also once the BBC Social Affairs Editor. So then, pretty much your average champagne socialist; maybe we should be more understanding of her increasingly irrational ranting at the sight of her beloved Labour Party going down in so many flames?

TMP saves the UK, and the world...

The recent elections on Sark have drawn the attention of sections of the world's press (especially the sanctimonious "we know better than you" Guardianistas and their ilk) to the morality of tax havens, a large number of which are UK protectorates of one sort or another - despite the fact that tiny Sark is barely involved any longer in what was always a device of Guernsey accountants anyway - or so m'learned friend advises us.

Tax havens are undoubtedly used to shelter funds from activities such as drugs and extortion (the stock in trade of most banana republic despots) , so this seems to be a handy hook upon which to hang a noble crusade; but the absolute inescapable truth is that no government spends any money a fraction as wisely as those that earned it in the first place, It never ever - in the history of history - has ever happened even once. Not even slightly.

So here's an idea. Broon has seen to it that the UK is financially fooked for a generation or two (please don't anyone with the intelligence to work out how to post here kid me that they believe an iota of his present blather - he's lying his - sorry - our socks off. Goebbels would have been immensely proud of such a massive show of brass neck).

We need a really bold and massive agenda to sort this out. We have to start from the position of "put on your oxygen mask first before you start worrying about the rest of the passengers"; and that means not worrying about the EU, and especially the sanctimonious (but depressingly correct) Germans.

So we re-engineer the decaying London City as the biggest "business haven" on planet on the basis that we charge 10% flat rate across the board on all taxable profits - income or capital - with a vast range of write-offs to encourage innovation and proper risk taking, then - after careful preparation on a "Mission Impossible" scale of cunningness - we will move in and shut down all the offshore havens, and compensate the natives to enable them to adjust their economies to tourism, call centres - whatever.

If there is indeed $25 trillion sloshing around in these havens, it will come here and be put to good use. What is found to be the proceeds of international crime will be "frozen", and we will "look after it" on behalf of the democratically elected governments of the territories of origin. If there are no democratically elected governments, we will let the population be aware that $x trillion is waiting in their name, the moment they manage to get an elected government in place (and keep it there for at least 2 years?)

Mostly though, we can let those that earned it keep most of it and use it - whether it goes back into the economy as investment in green technologies, employing households of butlers and gardeners or to purchase mink-plated stretched limos, isn't the business of government.

It's plain we have to devise employment for the 5m or so not otherwise gainfully employed in saviour Broon's fairyland. These people are never going to get work in the anal corporations/councils of process-crazed utopia, and there are plenty of less fulfilling ways to eke out an existence than doing the gardening for some delightful stately home, or cooking for some rich bastards that can't be bothered to microwave a ready meal. Instead, our present regime has condemned all such folks to the margins of daytime TV and other forms of zero self-esteem.

If other governments found themselves forced to follow suit and compete with our business-friendly environment, wouldn't it be terrible that countries like the US and Russia would no longer be able to afford colossally costly military exploits and over-bloated governments?

discuss...