This headline in MarketWatch this afternoon has got to be one of the most fatuous in financial history. NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — U.S. stocks soared on Thursday after a surprising fall in jobless claims curbed worries about the economy. I’m really supposed to believe that because the US jobless claims decreased by a whole 7000, …
Here’s a question for you. Why have we heard nothing in the media or parliament about A People’s or a Sovereign Debt Jubilee? Is it because a People’s Debt Jubilee is simply a nice but unworkable fantasy dreamt up by crackpot bloggers like me? This is what I have been wondering. And then in response to the …
There seem to be to be two broad narratives of our present situation. The dominant, official narrative, is that there was a technical crisis of money flow, precipitated by a bolus of bad debts which then caused a collapse of confidence in the value of several large asset classes. What was required was to show that …
A squib from Bloomberg, quoting the German Newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, “Munich prosecutors plan to file embezzlement charges against all members of Bayerische Landesbank’s former board….” Having the words “all former members” and “embezzlement charges” in the same sentence just makes my day. Ever since the worlds’ banks told us they were suddenly short of liquidity, …
A peek into one of the deepest little cesspits in Europe Read More »
Well here we are in a second successive year of Zeno’s Recovery. The recovery that never ends but never gets anywhere either. In accordance with Zeno’s rules of paradox, no news will be allowed that is not positive: Thus good news will be exaggerated and bad news will be treated as if it were good …
Zeno’s Recovery – Looking forward with fury to 2011 Read More »
Chapter one – The Debt train. Today the Irish will to hear what further humiliations their political and financial classes are going to heap upon them. So naturally everyone is looking at the line of dominoes in Western Europe. Ireland, knocking confidence in Portugal, knocking on to the big kahuna of ‘too big to save’, …
Headline in the FT this morning, “Europe signs up to Irish rescue.” That is how the financial class would like you to see it. A more accurate description is “Europe signs up to use Ireland as a conduit for bailing out its own banks and gets Irish tax payers to foot the bill.” Less catchy …
Now across Europe the great blame game will rumble back into play. Our banks, your banks, their banks, or is it your feckless householders or ours, certainly can’t be theirs, they’re still doing well in Germany. Expect lots more national stereotypes to be wheeled out for ritual defamation. So let’s ask who it was took …
The citizens of Ireland have been forced over the last two years to give the bond holders of Anglo Irish bank 20 billion euros. WHY? The Irish government recently told its people the 20 billion was not enough and they MUST give the same bond holders another 10 to 20 billion euros. WHO are these …
