Workers: MIA? – PM Fight Club – No-Win for Brits – GBP on the Rack? – Davos Losing – MoneyPox Scam – [07-30-22]

MY BOOK, “The Financial Jigsaw”, is published at my academic network.  Scroll for full view:   https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358117070_THE_FINANCIAL_JIGSAW_-_PART_1_-_4th_Edition_2020    Email for a free PDF at: [email protected]

TIMELY QUOTE: from Benjamin Franklin, in a letter of 1768 to his printer in London of his: “On Civil War”. He concludes the letter with: “And is there not one wise and good man to be found in Britain, who can propose some conciliating measure that may prevent this terrible mischief? – I fear not one. For: “Quos Deus vult perdere, dementat prius!” And this week has revealed that there is not one honest broker among the whole gaggle of our supposed leaders.

THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK: What’s behind the labour shortage throughout the western economies? Charles Hugh Smith has an answer: “If you set out to design an economy that was optimized to protect insiders and reward the already-wealthy, you’d end up with the developed-world economy. This is equally true in every nation, from China to the EU to the U.S. to every developed nation.

Workers are awakening to the meager rewards of being a slave to their ambition to claw their way into the upper-middle class. In an economy optimized for rampant inequality, the ambitious must sacrifice everything for the essentially meaningless baubles of a high-stress upper-middle class existence.

So you sacrifice your health, family and life to claw your way to a high salary, and for what? Nobody notices or cares, it’s pointless. You’ll never be as rich or famous as some kid reviewing toys online, and you’re buying into scams that just enrich others.

The verboten truth is a lower-stress lifestyle is far more rewarding and enjoyable than a high-stress enslaved-to-ambition lifestyle. Stripped of advertising flim-flam, a $25,000 car is essentially the equal of cars that cost three times as much. Is it really worth sacrificing everything that’s truly meaningful in your life to have all those extra horsepower idling unused in a traffic jam, heated seats and an incomprehensibly complicated stereo system? No. A simple house you actually own is more satisfying than a bloated McMansion that enslaves you to stupidly high property taxes and crushing mortgage payments.

What are actually precious aren’t the baubles of a high-stress salary: I’d rather watch the sunset, is this end of ambition?  https://www.theguardian.com/money/2022/jul/19/a-bigger-paycheck-id-rather-watch-the-sunset-is-this-the-end-of-ambition Simply put, people are finding ways to survive without taking toxic low-pay jobs.  Insiders have hard-wired the system to protect and benefit themselves, and so the game of clawing one’s way into the higher rungs of tax-donkey / slave-to-ambition is for chumps. It’s getting hard to fill toxic low-pay jobs”:  https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2022/07/why-labor-shortage-isnt-going-away.html

BREAKING NEWS:  An asteroid could have hit in Britain this week and we would never have known, apart from the eternal football. All news was drowned out under the battle for PM.  “The first rule of Fight Club is not to talk about Fight Club.” At a series of hustings bun-fights this week, the rivals did not pull their punches, on the economy or China, as they kicked off a month of farcical debates. We have two diametrically opposed prize fighters both believing they have The Plan:

Rishis Sunak is in the dark blue corner punching low and resting on the old Thatcher formula of fiscal responsibility and steady as she goes down. But didn’t Shakespeare teach us something about his actions? If you are looking for the betrayer, the slayer, the plotter, for the person who fells the leader, always and everywhere look to the No. 2 in charge. Here is the real source of the problem; Et tu Brute? https://thenationalpulse.com/2022/07/16/company-founded-family-of-uk-prime-minister-frontrunner-is-wef-partner-advocating-for-china-style-digital-identities-currency/   WEF anyone?

Liz Truss is in the light blue corner, swinging high with her first move ‘hitting the ground running’, will be to end the green energy levy. She is risking all sorts of financial earthquakes if her tax and easy money plans get implemented, fuelling inflation. Sterling could take a hit causing grief for the BoE who will have to raise rates to protect GBP on the markets (there is talk of 7%!) thus impacting mortgage rates and the risk of crashing the housing market. This reminds me of the last time interest rates were out of control, and people were trapped in negative equity, or made homeless or often both. Wasn’t that also a Conservative government? https://www.yourmoney.com/mortgages/mortgage-misery-for-millions-if-liz-truss-pushes-tax-cut-plans/ Ouch, could rates push more than £2,000/mth?

And could this just be who they are, bringers of chaos, dressed in pinstripes? It’s actually quite an achievement, for one debate, to trash not just your own 12 years in government, but tarnish, or at least refresh, to the point of terror the reputation of Conservatism right back into the last century.

In summary Rishi Sunak is styling himself as a frugal Tory of the old school. Truss accused him of sounding like Gordon Brown, wedded to outmoded Treasury rules. She would “take on the orthodoxy” – an appeal to the Johnsonian maverick spirit. Sunak would get ‘tough’ on China (really – given his connections?).

Truss boasts of her toughness on Putin, risking WW3. I quoted her words in May: “What did Liz Truss expect of Russia’s reaction to her insane and outlandish claims of “weakening this nuclear state”?  “A recent Russian state TV program has stirred outrage and made headlines across the United Kingdom after a television presenter featured a simulated demonstration of how the Russian navy’s nuclear submarines would take out the UK with ease.” https://austrianpeter.substack.com/p/the-road-to-zero-leading-to-food?s=w

Sunak has rightly poured scorn on Truss’s claims to have endured a lowly education in a tough comprehensive school. Truss’s allies hit back at her rival’s posh grooming as an alumnus of Winchester school and his gilded employment at Goldman Sachs.

So the Brits have Hobson’s choice – a ‘Tale of Two Cities’. Die a slow Dickensian death under Sunak’s grinding austerity to save the City or go out in a blaze of glory under Truss as the government debt pile goes to the moon, mortgage rates follow and we all end up in air raid shelters.

POLITICAL CLASH HIGHLIGHTS BRITAIN’S FINANCIAL DILEMMA:  The UK’s rampant class anxiety is driving Tory leadership candidates who want to pretend we live in a meritocracy. One of the most bewildering things my South African wife came across as an adult immigrant to Britain was how people are so subtle when acknowledging our social class structure.  Britain is a country of enormous wealth, much of it inherited, but the wealth gap is enormous and growing.

Britain is also a place where the alumni of a small number of expensive schools and exclusive universities hold a wildly disproportionate share of the nation’s power, wealth and top jobs.  A recent study identified the “grandparent effect”, by which people from privileged backgrounds over-emphasised the working-class credentials of extended family members, even though they have little impact on an individual’s life chances. A contemporary example of this is unfolding in the Rishi Sunak v Liz Truss contest.

Rishi Sunak has to go all the way back to his immigrant grandmother to ground him in a rags-to-riches story. Liz Truss is at it as well. Contemporaries of her schooldays, which Truss has claimed “let children down” through low expectations, have criticised her for misrepresenting the quality of her schooling, and her false claims that she grew up in a ‘Red Wall’ seat. Her misrepresentation creates its own class mobility mythology – one in which she made it to Oxford and into top jobs at Shell and Cable & Wireless despite her early ‘deprivation’.

This normalised dishonesty about how much of your success is down to the stability, networks and affluence of your family is not just a national oddity. This is the obscure class structure which enables the myth of meritocracy and supports uncaring governors lost in their ivory towers.

Sunak begrudgingly offers crumbs from his table as far as it doesn’t impact the City. Whilst Truss believes that British workers are among the worst idlers in the world , and both enthusiastically supported a dishonourable prime minister. What choice of PM do the suffering public have?  Anyway, the decision will be made for us by the very people who fit the privileged set, so suck it up people – here we go again.

INFLATED PROPERTY PRICES: play a central role in supporting the illusion of prosperity in Britain. Dr Tim Morgan has penned a prescient review of where Britain is headed – this is my lightly edited précis:

“The harsh reality is that the British economy is a basket-case. Britain needs property price inflation, [like a fish needs water], to keep the listing ship of state afloat. The British economy depends on continuous credit expansion to produce the transactional activity, measured as GDP, which supports a simulacrum of ‘business as usual’. Inflated property prices play a critical role, providing both the collateral support and the consumer confidence required if credit expansion is to continue.

Fundamentally, Britain lives beyond its means, resulting in an intractable trade deficit. For a long time, this was bridged, at least in part, by income from exports of North Sea oil and gas. Once Britain became a net energy importer again, the emphasis switched with renewed force to asset sales.

Ultimately, though, this makes a bad situation worse, because each asset sale sets up a new outward flow of returns on overseas’ investors capital. These outflows are part of the broader current account deficit, which is dangerously high, and has become structural.

Former Bank chief Mark Carney warned about dependency on “the kindness of strangers”, but no realistic alternatives exist. Asset divestment – muddling through by “selling off the family silver” – is, by definition, a time-limited process.

The nightmare that must haunt the slumbers of British officials is a “Sterling crisis”. If the value of GBP were to slump, inflation would soar, vital imports could become unaffordable, and the local cost, not just of foreign currency debt but of servicing that debt as well, could soon become unsustainable – [à la Liz Truss].

Put simply, the BoE needs to show FX markets some resolve, even if that comes at the cost of some domestic economic pain. The BoE undoubtedly knows about – as some politicians seemingly do not – the price that could become payable for fiscal and monetary recklessness, if that recklessness were to trigger a currency crisis.

It’s a point seldom mentioned that, if a future leadership were to enact irresponsible tax cuts, the BoE might, as a compensatory measure, have no choice but to raise rates more briskly than would otherwise have been the case.

Some in Britain have dreamed, unrealistically, of turning the country into ‘Singapore on Thames’. The real and present danger is of turning into ‘Sri Lanka on Thames’, where a weak currency makes vital imports prohibitively expensive. The prevention of a currency crisis has to be the overriding priority of responsible decision-makers. The balance of risk – no less than the balance of pain – has to be tied to the demonstration of sufficient resolve to stave off any such crisis.  https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2022/07/25/236-the-monetary-conundrum/

ARE THE GLOBALISTS LOSING CONTROL?  The silver lining of the scamdemic is that it has acted as a catalyst, pulling forward decades of creeping totalitarianism and compressing it into eighteen months, and has resulted in a quickening of this transition. The Liberal World Order’s manipulations to manage Covid and to control a wider transition are simply accelerating it, into something foreign to legacy institutions and beyond their control.

These machinations include incessant and frantic rebranding exercises. The aspiration behind all of these labels is that they are trying to condition into your psyche, as if it were objective fact, that the natural order of things is that they get to set the rules and we get to follow them.  However the growing perception among the public, is that with every policy failure and each rebranding iteration, these elites are conceding that they are, in fact, losing control, frightened of losing relevance.

Each renaming emphasises their aloofness, showing how their obsessions with models and nomenclature in their minds trump results and reality. By enacting draconian, one-sided arbitrary dicta that have backfired catastrophically, they’ve produced untold misery and destruction. Now they want to double down and keep running the show.

The biggest difference between the shift half a millennia ago and this one is the speed with which it is happening. Where entire generations were born, lived and died without ever experiencing any noticeable change in the order of things, today we see it changing in real-time.  https://www.dollarcollapse.com/mark-jeftovic-rebranding-elitism

COLLAPSE MONITOR: The sooner these globalist cretins realise that they have no control over global events as the Great Depression 2 looms on the horizon.  All they can do is to manage the economy as it proceeds into a no-growth/negative growth mode and make it as comfortable as possible for our young ones; for it is these generations who will have to adapt to effective ‘wartime’ conditions.  Would you rather take notice of an experienced actuary than a bumbling politician?

“With less energy supply available, the whole world economy that we know today seems likely to start falling apart. Fewer goods will be available through international trade. It is cheap energy that has allowed today’s economy to function. Once this cheap energy is depleted, the world economy will need to shrink back in many ways, all at once.  We don’t know precisely what lies ahead:  https://ourfiniteworld.com/2022/07/05/why-raising-interest-rates-to-reduce-inflation-may-work-out-very-badly/

INFLATION WATCH: Could this be rare good news? Mike Shedlock identifies some prices trending downward: https://mishtalk.com/economics/unleaded-gasoline-futures-declined-26-percent-has-inflation-peaked-this-economic-cycle

Sorry, but bad news cannot be avoided, try as I may: “British households face being told shortly before Christmas to brace for annual energy bills of £3,850, three times they were paying at the start of 2022, after Russia further squeezed Europe’s gas supplies. Consumers were also warned that annual charges of more than £3,500 a year, or £300 a month, could become the norm “well into 2024”. https://www.theguardian.com/money/2022/jul/27/uk-energy-bills-forecast-to-hit-3850-pounds

THE NARRATIVE BATTLE:  People’s memories are short.  It might be worth reminding ourselves with this 9 minute clip from Neil Oliver last month: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmziW3E3k38

As an aside, are some people this uninformed?  If America is anything to go by it is easily illustrated by watching Mark Dice. He goes into the streets, talks to perfectly normal, intelligent-looking Americans, and shows them an American flag. He asks them how many stars and stripes are on the flag and what they represent. Some people can’t even answer questions as basic as that but surprisingly non-Americans can, why is that do you suppose? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykDxdXJwdAg

The world is being told that Monkeypox is on the rise in countries such as the USA, the UK, Australia, Canada, and most of Europe.  The obnoxious criminal, Dr Tedros, the Director-General of the WHO, has overruled their committee’s decision and single-handedly declared Covid-19 vaccine-induced shingles (aka Monkeypox) a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” meaning we are most likely about to witness the next ‘Covid’ wave this autumn as the BBC & friends take up the baton.

But incontrovertible evidence suggests this is a lie, and it is actually a cover-up of the adverse consequences of Covid-19 vaccination. Even the WHO’s Emergency Committee knows this, because they have now met twice in one month, and both times voted against declaring “Monkeypox” a ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern’; (Source).  But how can we be sure Monkeypox is a cover-up for Covid-19 vaccine-induced shingles and other ailments?

Here’s the detailed evidence: https://expose-news.com/2022/07/24/tedros-covid-vaccine-shingles-emergency/  If we want to end multiple crazy attacks upon us we need to remove these unelected tyrants by any means before they kill us all – more examples here:  https://expose-news.com/2022/07/24/monkeypox-hep-sads-covid-vaccine-injury-coverup/

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Author: Austrian Peter

Peter J. Underwood is a retired international accountant and qualified humanistic counsellor living in Bruton, UK, with his wife, Yvonne. He pursued a career as an entrepreneur and business consultant, having founded several successful businesses in the UK and South Africa His latest Substack blog describes the African concept of Ubuntu - a system of localised community support using a gift economy model. View all posts by Austrian Peter