TIMELINE TO OBLIVION

7 October 2022

What are the effects of changing energy demand and supply?

CAUSES

*Looks like a 4th and new driver of inflation:

-Debt

-Covid

-War, WW3

-OPEC+ supply-side production cuts > price increases

EFFECTS

NOW & SHORT TERM

Duralex, its Picardie model featured in the James Bond movie “Skyfall”, but it is putting its oven on standby for 5 months even though the company’s order book is full and sales are growing, causing quite a stir.

>Transfer of wealth from consuming to producing countries, Saudis switch sides

>Inflation & shortages: fertiliser, food, energy, resources

>Wage demands

>Subsidise households (this is unsustainable borrowing from future taxpayers), cap wholesale energy prices to industry

>more debt, windfall & corporation taxes up, voluntary Energy saving programs (govt, industry, public)

>Release reserve stocks

>Buy Russian oil via China & LNG from America

>Industry buckles as core 25% of economy hit - metals, ceramics,  chemicals, paper...bakers!; move from gas to oil & coal; import not make; purchasing reductions; increased number of insolvencies and closures

>coercive Energy rationing programs, govt imposes price controls at home, but also govt price rises to dampen demand, govt backs employers with wage boards & employees take to the streets & strikes

>Rethink production processes for more efficiency and reduced CO2

>Alternative reserve currency for global south

LONGER TERM

>Social explosion-what form?

>Nuclear and renewables come online - energy independance, permanent energy price hikes

>But too late...Irreversible climate change

>America withdraws from Ukraine

>Repair & re-open pipelines

>WW3 ends

>New World Order

>Decline of Europe (America's only reliable ally?), production relocates to Asia & America

Europe suffers from a “structural disadvantage in energy costs” compared with the rest of the world because of the Ukraine war as well as a “structural lack of investment in energy over the past 25 years”.

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TRUSSONOMICS, PART II

4 October 2022

Anyway to return to this Trussonomics dash for growth Gambit. (See previous post.)

It is very surprising indeed that no one bothered to alert those two to the last time this trick was played 

The last time, The Barber Boom of 1972/3, the idea was that by dropping taxes, the money released into the pockets of business and people would create a demand, which would create a following investment boom and supply to match.

But unfortunately, what they overlooked was that although there was indeed a boom, it was quickly overtaken by inflation. For reasons all Economics101 students could explain, if asked.

Do you think we need more inflation at this point? And yes the energy price subsidy will lower inflation, but in just a few months time when that runs out - year on year - we will see the true inflation again for what it really is. And anyone banking on energy prices going down is unlucky.

It is written that the Yom Kippur war in 73 didn't help as it quadrupled the price of energy, but OPEC+ has just decided to reduce supply by a million barrel a day.... they (OPEC+) say it's to maintain the price of oil, but I reckon they know their history... and it tells us which side those countries are batting on. From the evidence of this war, America and its allies have made themselves a heap more enemies from formerly neutral or helpful friends.

And anyway the Barber Boom was killed off by a good old-fashioned UK currency crisis which saw Rolls-Royce nationalised and then privatised and my dear old mum - god bless her - bought those shares with her inheritance and subsequently made a lot of money ...good for her!!! well done Mum!!!

Then I borrowed her new wealth as a deposit on a house and that worked out very nicely and I repaid her with interest.

In 71, Barber passed some legislation which freed banks to lend more money, which they did and naturally it didn't get invested into productive assets, it went into a property market boom, that contributed to that banking crisis and NatWest Bank almost went down, I read.

What a bummer!... but that's only half the story... some sort of a currency crisis is another unintended consequence.

As remarked previously, it is well weird that we have BoE monetary policy tightening and raising interest rates at the same time as we have Government fiscal policy dropping taxes ...how can this in any way be logical and coherent?

We all remember or have read of Nixon taking America off the gold standard on August 15th, 1971. Before that, it was necessary to defend your currency as it was fixed against the dollar. These days, and with independent central banks, perhaps the value of the currency is not so important... you might think.

Perhaps the pound can fall below parity and the only consequence would be Truss would lose her job. Yes, there are benefits to a cheaper pound, but alas it is mainly costs.

When it comes to debt, it is the corporate sector and governments that borrow, and it is households and foreign lenders who lend.

Corporates are going to have really big problems rolling over their debts at the new interest rates, those with the biggest debt or the smallest credibility will have the biggest trouble and so one would imagine corporate borrowing will drop.

Households as lenders have spent all their v foolishly given covid loot, they have maxed out their credit cards and now they are facing huge inflation, so they won't be lending.

This leaves Truss, who has dropped taxes, wanting to borrow very substantially against a government lacking credibility... and how do you think foreign lenders will respond if it isn't by jacking up their prices (so raising market interest rates)?

Hence that recent crisis which caused market rates to spike sharply and left the backers of LDI insurers facing margin calls that forced them to flog their assets - notably Legal and General. And another £65 billion of QE goes in to pump up gilts. (It seems to have been successful for the exchange rate; but not for L&G share price; and the markets continue to slide so evidently they don't believe a word of it.)

So along comes Truss with an idea, no thought, no plan, “without even a semblance of an effort to make the public-finance numbers add up” in the caustic assessment of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), knowing nothing of economics and Consulting no-one not heard visors not even the office of Budget Responsibility.

The next year's public borrowing requirement will double from £100 billion and how do you think foreign lenders will respond? Well of course they will Jack up their rates - what? Another bummer? 

That is how this recent sterling crisis occurred; that is how the price of 10-year gilts has dropped by 40% in the last month; that is how the purchasing power of Sterling has dropped by 8% in the last month.

And finally, how will the Bank of England respond to all this? 

Of course they will talk tough and say they'll give it what it takes and will raise rates and buy up the gilts they just sold to keep up the value of the currency, but we know very well that the currency will slide, that when push comes to shove the bond vigilantes will cause a capitulation and we will slide into even higher inflation and another recession or some sort of repeat sterling / banking crisis.

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PIPELINE SABOTAGE

2 October 2022 further note 5 October see at end

We  can eliminate most states as responsible for the pipeline sabotage, but what evidence is there against America?

https://youtu.be/3tPAmjhMKHU

The Europeans especially the Germans are truly donkeys for not seeing how America has destroyed their economies their interests and their future.

While it's pretty obvious that Russia has no interest in blowing up its own pipelines it is interesting to note a bit of history...

There was a previous attempts - Brassova pipeline by Reagan in 1982; in 2015 when drone loaded with explosives approached the pipelines but was detected by Sweden and chased off Sweden has never said who sent these drones but has said that they are Western drones ie not Russian

The explosions took place near a little island which is absolutely loaded with submarine listening points and they're not Russian. They were put there on this Danish Island, which is on a strait that the Russians must use to hit the Atlantic from the Baltic  ( of course knowing this it's inconceivable that the Russians would choose to blow the pipeline up at this point.) We know from Tucker Carson that Biden said in January and Victoria Newland said prior to that,  that they would blow up these pipelines... they would have them

The American navy - you can read it in Sea Power - sent out an expedition to recky that area on the 10th of June

The Americans were conducting naval exercises at the time of the explosions above the pipelines, or within 30 and 50 km of them

The Americans were very much against these pipelines from the start and more recently they counselled Europe against NS2, whilst at the same time importing Russian oil and gas themselves. 

The Americans pushed Europe and Germany into the sanctions whilst promising a LNG replacement and then once the sanctions were passed, they annoumced that they don't have any LNG to sell! So already the Americans are withdrawing from the sanctions, leaving the Europeans trapped.

Another idiocy that the Europeans believed was that sanctions would cripple Russia - we were told that Russia is like Italy... except that Russia has no debt and can easily find customers to the east. And the stupid Europeans couldn't anticipate this and had made no preparations, not even for this year 2022!

It's also worth remembering that when sanctions were first imposed, for Crimea in 2014, the oil price was very low and so they caused considerable damage to the Russian economy. But today, the oil price is at its highest. Also, those 2014 sanctions affected all the gear you need to extract oil and so meantime the Russians have developed their own tool. So really, the sanctions this time, the Europeans took no notice whatsoever of the likely consequences - neither on themselves, nor on Russia.

It seems pretty obvious that the sabotage was aimed at Europe and Germany in particular, as Russia was, and is, already isolated; and the sabotage at ensuring Germany doesn't, can't, backtrack on its committment to sanctions. 

The Europeans say they're going to get to the bottom of this, but they are in far too weak a position to combat America and instead they blame Russia saying that it's Russia trying to show what it's capable of - how ridiculous is that? And the European public are suffering and will suffer even more and yet they continue to support the completely irrational sanctions and the European media stifle any news on public protests - for example all summer long Dutch farmers were protesting, but there's nothing in the news even though the police fired on them; or the shelling of the Donbas by Kiev for six+ years with the deaths of 14,000 ukrainians, or the Maidan coup, or the non-implementation of Minsk, or digging up dead soldiers and parading them as atrocities, or Boris forcing Zilensky to backtrack on his peace offer on 29 March, or the shelling of a queue of voters in the referendum this week. Why no reporting?

How could the politicians reverse direction after all their bitter attacks on Russia, without looking really stupid?

And why is it that the media are so insistent in its criminal or near-criminal attacks on Russia; the resulting blockage of all possible diplomacy and negotiations; and the growing racism and hatred the people - and the EU - have for Russia?

It's only by talking that we will end this conflict and so the Europeans must agree to talk and to be perfectly honest they will have to look reality in the face and see the hand of America behind all this trouble.

5 October 2022

Further info has reached me...

I didn't realise, but Sweden buys electricity from Russia and Ukraine and the electricity  cable, the massive cable, passes alongside the oil pipeline and nearby to it. The curious coincidence is that although it is extremely costly and dangerous to turn off and restart this massive electricity supply, just two days before the sabotage explosion Sweden turned it off to avoid the risk of electrifying and destroying its power supply.

The pipeline itself is designed and built to withstand almost any terrorist attack ... well any, meaning any act of sabotage requires special knowledge, planning, equipping and financing. The pipeline is 4 cm thick steel, covered with a further 15 cm of of plating, buried 90 metres down in the briny.

There were four explosions: just before the valve assemblies and just after the assemblies; at this strategically significant Bornholm island situared near Sweden, an area under 100% NATO surveillance. There were American submarine exercises nearby last 10th June.

According to the protocol from the pipeline insurers, in the event of a leak, the pipeline must be kept full at high pressure with gas to keep the water out. However, the cost of this is absolutely astronomical and after a week the Russians stopped that. So presumably the pipeline is now full up with seawater.

The upshot is that it would quite possibly cost less to rebuild the entire pipeline than to try and repair it, so we are told.

And Germany is starting to get really hopping mad at America.

Worth noting that the Swedes turned off that electricity just at the approach to their winter So someone must have tipped them off.

Also worth noting that there is no country in the world - including America - that could rationally have an interest in blowing up that pipeline, including America. America with its fracking is destroying its own water table in order to extract a very dirty gas of very poor quality; and furthermore it has said that it doesn't have enough anyway to sell to Europe. (No need to build that expensive infrastructure for re-gasifying the LNG from America.)

The plain fact of the matter is that Europe has no alternative to Russian gas and without Russian gas there will be no or little fertiliser, no food, no industry, no heating homes in Winter. At what point will Europe tell America to shove off? And what would America do - because a Europe linked to Russia, with Russian resources and European capital and technology, would be more than a match for America ... and this is America's greatest fear.

For those who enjoy the-end-of-the-world is nigh stories, this is it, this is the big one.

What difference throwing in a few nuclear?

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THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS

25 September 2022

There's an expression that says the road to hell is paved with good intentions:

Abandoning fossil fuels to halt climate change was one, but the coal mines are being reopened, the EU is shutting its nuclear power stations and there'll be fracking in the UK within six months.

The West thought it could collapse the Russian economy with sanctions within weeks, in fact Russia's revenues and the rouble have soared.

We've given up cheap energy, grain, fertiliser and metals to buy Russian oil off the Saudis and Indians and dirty gas at five times the price off the States and Russia is permanently switching its cheap supplies to competitor industries in Asia.

The EU says it is defending our Western values, but it goes begging Azerbaijan for energy, when Azerbaijan is flattening Armenia. 

The EU is a socialist project that is preparing rationing for its people and huge and unnecessary bungs from future taxpayers, to bail out the budgets of industry and ordinary people.

Europe - which includes the UK - has ceded sovereignty over its foreign and energy policies to America, whose principal IR goal is to weaken Europe as a competitor - which includes Russia.

The peoples of Europe are facing hyper-inflation and still paying VAT, while energy companies are making unprecedented profits.

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THE MANAGEMENT OF DISSENT

23 September 2022

I don't know about you, but I find that everywhere, current affairs gets a more and more insistent pro-western gov.ts swing.

What used to be my preferred channels are dishing up gov.t slops, whereas I used to find them interesting. Even the data is just wrong!

We are being pushed into an opposition anti-Western camp, where I become cynical, but this is not at all where I want to be. I have big interests in proper order and progress in the West, where I live. I want a democratic government which is focused on its existing people - not on the next election, not on the rich, not on other global players, not on outsiders. A government with a vision and a convincing strategy for getting there and not just governments full of crisis managers going for double or bust with absurd foreign policies like integrating Ukraine into Nato and the EU, or defeating Russia if necessary with nuclear.

What's all this about Truss' "dash for growth" and Kwarteng threatening a (nominally) independent Bank of England, and at the expense of the environment and net zero too? You can reduce taxes and regulations and for a time prolong the aire of prosperity, but the only way to get authentic growth is through productivity and there's no plan I've seen for that.

To cover their policy failures and true intentions, they dice us into numerous identity camps and distract us by then setting us against each other with the politics of  division.

This all seems to ultimately to go back to the American elite and their ideas that we in Europe have adopted, perhaps forced to adopt, of attempting to postpone the end of its cycle and using antagonistic methods, from outright war to cancelling, and its war against adverseries like Trump and criticising those whom he represents, the castouts. What do you expect from such provocation if not to trigger retaliation?

End of rant. What do you think? At least we are permitted certain channels like Alexander Mercouris for example, or Jordan Peterson, or Mearsheimer or even that awful Piers Morgan

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WHY DID AMERICA START THIS WAR?

19 September 2022

...as told through the war in Ukraine. Or better still, as told by Putin himself.

https://youtu.be/rm5icaLbUMA

PROBLEMS

It looks to me as if the real problem is the end of the American Order, as precisely described by Ray Dalio. The goal is to assure continued American hegemony - this is pretty obvious, it is about security and survival, nothing more important.

Another reading is that the suffering the Jews endured during the last war due to the failure of the Western powers to protect them has produced a philosophy where they seek to be the hammer rather than the anvil by sheltering in a dictatorship that will protect them because this dictatorship runs the world. "Better to be Hitler than Hitler's victim."

STRATEGY

However you explain the goal of world hegemony, the strategy seems to be for America to continue taking advantage of its reserve currency for borrowing, while sowing disorder in the other trade blocks so as to nip potential rivals in the bud. 

It is only now, very late in the cycle of the rise and decline of empires, that Jerome Powell at the Fed is seriously dealing with the problem consequent on America's massive debt. This debt is 130% of GDP, which is similar to the figures for Italy, Greece and Lebanon. However, the US Dollar is for the moment the world's trading currency and safest haven, allowing it to borrow and print as it likes, with little thought for tomorrow.

But the risk with excessive debt - ie expansion of the money supply M1 - is that it will eventually produce high inflation. If left unmanaged, runaway inflation will lead to a run on the dollar and collapse of the currency. Managing inflation, on the other hand, ie bringing it back to the two to three percent range, requires overarching interest rates, which can push an economy into recession. 

So with a failing economy, America seeks to prolong its empire by, let's call it, asymmetric means.

INITIATIVES

We've seen these asymmetric initiatives before, going back to the Dulles brothers in S. America, passing by Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and now finally the script is being run on Russia, it is Russia's turn to bleed, along with the peoples of The Ukraine. 

To better understand the history Russophobia, read "A brief history of the Roman Church".

The idea is to create chaos that will divide and reduce a people to poverty, disenchant them with their govt, weaken the state in a low-intensity civil war or proxy war, so that the people rise up and overthrow and install a regime or several regimes through dismemberment, favourable to American interests.

This makes it easy for America to divide and rule rival states.

The new Western-oriented regime in Ukraine was promised a place in NATO and by implication the EU (even though in 1991 Gorbachev was promised by Secretary of State James Baker, that Russia's near abroad would remain neutral) if it provoked Russia to attack, with the guarantee that sanctions would quickly bring the Putin regime to its knees. 

Then the process of dismemberment was sure to follow, as practised on the Yugoslavian communist regime, could run its course. The CIA / DoD produced maps and strategies (RAND-RR3063, and the second RAND report) authentic or not doesn't matter because I have to say these presentations seem highly accurate.

The one thing America definitely did not want to happen was the symbiotic relationship Russia-Germany to be strengthened into treaties such as Russia joing the EU or NATO! Imagine the strength and output of a German power house, feeding on Russian inputs - this is the nation responsible for three major wars and the holocaust and now rebuilding a super army, albeit buying American equipment and supplies.

Maidan, and then the shelling by Kiev, was supposed to have been resolved in the Minsk agreements, but when these were not implemented, Russia took Crimea and in retaliation the EU first imposed sanctions (from which experience it learnt nothing).  This "annexation" was the reason given by America for arming Ukraine, back in 2014.

 So as I read it, the American strategy to avoid the end of the American Order - or call it Empire - has not been, until very recently at least, to deal upfront with the foreseeable problems created by its mountain of debt - because let's remember QE raises the value of assets, making the rich richer; but also as the poor get poorer in a democracy, money has to be thrown at them to keep them off the streets - to sow mayhem and murder amongst larger nation states in other trade blocks, incite ethno-religious groupings to demand their independence, divide and rule, and re-draw the maps in the interests of America's govt-industrial-military complex.

So QE at home, chaos abroad.

RISKS

However!!!...various risks were overlooked!!!! 

Perhaps Europe failed to realise how much greater was its dependence on Russia than Russia's on Europe, particulary for energy the basic resource that turns all wheels in an economy. 

Perhaps Ukraine believed the American plan (where we know American plans always lead to disaster, each greater than the last) and seriously expected the Putin regime to collapse and so it was not ready for war.

Whatever, each is happy with this low-level war of attrition and is re-arming and expecting the other to throw in the towel first. 

Ha ha, what dolts they the leaderships everywhere are, (though we-the-people everywhere get the pain). 

Are the Europeans blind, stupid or simply corrupted by American soft power?

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