Fire Ships! – Mini-Budget Redux – Market Reaction – Inflation Clues – Who is to Blame? – PayPal? – Ukraine Update – Letter from Great Britain [10-01-22

“If I don’t know – I can’t act” – Knowledge of The Word is Spiritual Power

PROTECT & SURVIVE

2 hr ago

AP’s ANSWER TO ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION:  ‘OPERATION LUCID’ – “Sparked by the Directorate of Military Intelligence and MI6 rumours that Britain had set fire to the English Channel to defeat a German invasion in 1940 quickly spread around the world. Highly popular in America, the incendiary ‘Big Lie’ became Britain’s first significant propaganda victory of the Second World War.

Yet the unlikely deception was founded in fact. Dead German soldiers were washed ashore on British beaches, a secret Petroleum Warfare Department tested lethal flame barrages on land and sea, and fire ships were hastily dispatched to enemy ports as part of ‘Operation Lucid’. https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/publication/burn-the-sea/9780750965989/

THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK:  What is BoJo’s legacy? Here is a review by Nigel Farage at GB News a month ago.  Whatever else Nigel might be, he got these predictions right on the button.  Sunak and then Liz Truss did exactly as Nigel forecasted:

I know this is an old and well publicised, 4 minute video but this week I thought I would remind you that: “It’s a BIG CLUB, and you ain’t in it”:

It can’t be said enough, it can’t be publicised enough and we can’t be reminded enough, as the world descends into a dark abyss to emerge better built in the name of “We the People” and “In God We Trust”

However, what is not always readily known is “Who is George Carlin?” So this 10 minute video follows the one above, if you have time; it tells us the story of George and his satirical magic (spoiler: I am a sucker for satire. John Cleese is my own comic messiah):

BREAKING NEWS:  Before we get to the meat: here’s the hors d’oeuvre: Who blew up the Baltic gas pipeline?

‘Harris’ on Kier Starmer – Labour Party Conference this week: “Based on the international reaction to the Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng’s, mini-Budget this week, there is very little the opposition needs to do in order to be given the keys to Number 10,” wrote Tom Harris in The Telegraph. Yet while the Labour conference this week “has looked and sounded like a party whose priority is allocating positions in government and measuring for new curtains” for Downing Street, “radical and attention-grabbing policies” have been in short supply.

Where, asks Harris, are the policies needed to get the apathetic voter to raise “his or her head from their newspaper, phone, breakfast cereal or whatever is currently grabbing their attention” and take note of Labour?   Tony Blair won power after delivering the “bold” and “unexpected” by ditching his party’s commitment to nationalisation. But “what will Starmer’s team surprise us with? How does he intend to make Red Wall spurn their corn flakes while making Islington Guardian readers swoon in disgust over their avocado toast?”

Starmer will “be happy with becoming prime minister”, says Harris, but “he and any government he leads, will prove a longer-term prospect if it is enthusiasm for something new, not simply a resigned admission that “the other lot deserve a chance”, that puts him into Number 10.”

THE TRUSS MINI-BUDGET – POST MORTEM.  Her Budget was not accepted kindly by just about everyone, even the markets, with the FTSE and GBP falling back last week.. ‘Going for Growth’ is the general theme – but this is yet to be seen. Some say it’s the ‘Politics of Envy’ and others that it’s ‘Casino Economics’. There are mixed metaphors racing around the City at speed as all sorts of angles are being headlined. Anne Widecombe at GB news said Sunday night that she was happy with the budget but is very disappointed by the approach to Northern Ireland?  What? – maybe our dear and popular Anne could be on the right track?  Time will tell.

Is this a PR win for Labour? Has Liz f**ked up?  The markets think so, so let’s look at the realpolitik behind Tory thinking (if you can call it that). Liz is playing the ‘long game’ and is happy to be unpopular for the time being as she thinks she will be vindicated in the end.

Truss can claim that she is returning to the Manifesto but the optics is not good because the concept of ‘Trickle Down’ has never worked.  It’s the way the Rich justify their looting of Joe Public whilst inferring that the crumbs will fall to them from the high table of the privileged elite.  When will this BS be finally called out and the ‘Doers’ and ‘Producers’ get their just desserts?

BUT IF THE MARKETS DON’T LIKE IT – where will this go?   Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng are facing an early test of nerve after their radical tax-cutting policies prompted huge market uncertainty, a crash in sterling and the prospect of further interest rate hikes to deal with spiralling inflation.

Having effectively gone ‘galactic’ in pursuit of GDP growth as the panacea for all UK’s economic woes, and by insisting they will not comment on market movements and let the turbulence play out by itself, the PM and Chancellor “are limited in what they can do to contain the fallout”, said the iNews political editor Hugo Gye.

Liam Halligan on GBNews said fiscal strategy will be explained but not until November.  There is an ideological battle being fought between the markets view and the Treasury’s traditional stance that the BoE will have to raise rates to support ‘cable’ (the market’s name for GBP) going forward  which resulted in a GBP sell-off, with sterling down near 5% to 1.03 and recovering to around – 1.11 at time of writing.

Fears mounted early in the week that cable might reach parity with the dollar.  Rumours speak of a possible rise of interest rates into the 6% arena, but the more grounded financial pundits think that 3% is the rational peak. We now live at a time when the stakes are as high as to whether Britain’s ship of state will make it through an economic hurricane not seen since the 1970s.

The GBP initially fell to 1.03 when trading opened in Asia on Monday, a low not seen since 1971. While it recovered well during the week, the tax cuts announced in Friday’s Mini-Budget continue to send shockwaves through the economy as Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng announced a slew of tax cutting measures in his mini Budget “to solve the riddle of growth”, putting more money in Brits’ pockets to spend in the economy (i.e. the Rich).

For now, GBP’s weakness in reaction to last week’s tax cuts “will have a profound impact on everything”, from the cost of filling up the car, supermarket prices to debt repayments and the value of our savings.  When it comes to investing, the impact depends on your holdings and where those companies make their money. https://www.yourmoney.com/saving-banking/one-in-seven-adults-has-no-savings-while-260bn-earns-no-interest/

The FTSE 100 tends to benefit from a weak pound as most of the big companies listed in London earn most of their money overseas. So, once profits are converted back into British pounds, they are worth more.

The financial website, ‘REAL VISION’, have launched their ‘Make or Break‘ programme. It will run for at least the next 3 months and will cover everything that you NEED to know about this pivotal moment in global markets.  Yes, ‘Make or Break’ is a scary name. But that’s because the next 3 months will define what happens over the next 3 years in terms of the global economy. This is much more than a one-off show — this is an ongoing story that Real Vision will be covering in-depth for as long as it takes to prepare our community for this era-defining point in history: https://www.realvision.com/

Over the next three months, four market drivers will shape the coming years, Inflation, Energy, Geopolitics, and China.  So, what’s the psychology behind this programming?  The whole financial landscape is about to change, and unless you understand the role of these four aforementioned key market drivers, you could be burned badly — and you’ll miss out on significant opportunities: https://www.realvision.com/shows/make-or-break/videos/why-is-this-major-new-series-so-important

More than anything, I want you to understand that these are serious times, and understanding the evolving global economic landscape will help you be better prepared for the future which is what my books are all about:  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358117070_THE_FINANCIAL_JIGSAW_-_PART_1_-_4th_Edition_2020

As the surging dollar decimates foreign currencies, bonds, and equities alike, all eyes are on the Fed and its quantitative tightening program – will it ‘go boldly’ back to QE under the pressure of the market or will it cringe and insincerely stick to its tightening regime? Only time will tell. The battle is biogenetic, economic, and electronic; it is a war of Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars: https://lawfulpath.com/ref/sw4qw/index.shtml

BUT DAVID STOCKMAN has some valid observations of the policies of the ‘Empire of Lies’:  What in the hell were those bloody-minded Washington/NATO NeoCons thinking? At any time in the last nine months they could have had a diplomatic settlement with Russia that would have avoided/ended the war in Ukraine, thereby saving tens of thousands of Ukrainian & Russian lives and hundreds of billions of economic cost and destruction; it would have:

·         Allowed the Russian speaking population of the Donbas a substantial degree of self-governance and autonomy from the hostile government in Kiev;

·         Permitted the historic Russian territory of Crimea to remain under Russian control per the wishes of the overwhelming share of its Russian-speaking population;

·         Kept NATO out of Ukraine and its missiles away from Russia’s doorstep;

·         Removed NATO missile bases from the the old Warsaw Pact countries, where NATO had expanded in breach of Washington’s solemn promise made at the time of the German reunification to not extend NATO “one inch to the east” https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/09/26/what-in-the-hell-was-washington-thinking/#more-280612

BUT NOW MORTGAGES ARE IN FOCUS: with the increase in interest rates last week the worst effects will be felt by those on variable rate mortgages.  https://www.yourmoney.com/mortgages/bill-shock-for-millions-as-base-rate-hiked-to-2-25/

INFLATION MONITOR:  From last week, I asked: “What caused inflation to suddenly rise from April 2021?” And I promised an answer this week. Google says: “In early 2021, a worldwide increase in inflation began to occur. It has been attributed to various causes, including pandemic-related fiscal and monetary stimulus, supply shortages (including chip shortages and energy shortages), price gouging and as of 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine.”  https://www.yourmoney.com/household-bills/food-price-inflation-hits-double-figures/

Well, that gives us a few choices, or maybe it was, in part, all of them?  But Google insists that: “there are three main causes of inflation: demand-pull inflation, cost-push inflation, and built-in inflation.”  I’m not sure what they mean by ‘built-in’ – I assume they mean ‘structural‘ but that is pretty meaningless too – it still tells us nothing about the causes of inflation.

I see where Google got their ‘quick quote’; it was from: Investopedia – which I have found to be very informative, if not always accurate: Investopedia – All about Inflation  “Theoretically, monetarism is a popular theory that explains the relation between inflation and the money supply of an economy. For example, following the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires, massive amounts of gold and especially silver flowed into the Spanish and other European economies.  Since the money supply rapidly increased, the value of money fell, contributing to rapidly rising prices.”

“Monetarism is closely associated with economist, Milton Friedman, who argued that the government should keep the money supply fairly steady, expanding it slightly each year, mainly to allow for the natural growth of the economy”. My ‘financial brother-in-arms’, Gerry at BOOM Economics, likens this to a garden needing water to grow. “Although most modern economists reject the emphasis on money growth that monetarists purported in the past, some core tenets of the theory have become a mainstay in non-monetarist analysis.”

I know this is getting deep, but stick with me, because the answer to my question goes to the very root of the economic storm’ we are facing today.  “Ben Bernanke, former Fed Chairman, cited the work of Friedman in his decision to lower interest rates, which increases the U.S. money supply, in order to boost the economy during the global recession that began in 2007 in the United States.” From which most of our troubles stem.  In my book, ‘Chapter 8 – Financial Engineering’ I explain the process.

In 1979, when Paul Volcker became the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, he made combatting inflation the primary goal of the central bank. In keeping with Friedman and Schwartz’s recommendations, Volcker restricted the money supply in order to do this. He raised the federal funds rate to 20% in 1980.

At this time, this strategy for fighting stagflation (high inflation combined with high unemployment and stagnant demand) was successful. Volcker’s policies drastically reduced the money supply, consumers stopped purchasing as much, and businesses stopped raising prices. However, while this caused inflation to greatly decline, it resulted in the 1980-82 deep recession.

During the same time, Britain was also struggling with severe inflation. When Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979, she also implemented a set of monetarist policies to combat the rising prices in the country. By 1983, inflation in Britain had been halved, from 10% to 5%. However, the popularity of monetarism was relatively brief. In the 1980s and 1990s, the link between the money supply and nominal GDP broke down.

HERE’S THE CRUNCHER:  The Austrian School believes any increase in the money supply, not supported by an increase in the production of goods and services, leads to an increase in prices, but the prices of all goods do not increase simultaneously.  This is why my moniker is “Austrian Peter” – I favour the ‘Austrian School of Economics’ which is explained in ‘Chapter 11 – Macroeconomics 101’ in my book: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358117070_THE_FINANCIAL_JIGSAW_-_PART_1_-_4th_Edition_2020

“If you carry the popular impression that data-hungry economists are always busy with complex formulae and not with ‘outside-the-box thinking’, then you should take a look at the Austrian School. Just like monks living in their monasteries, the economists of this school strive to solve complex issues—economic ones—by conducting “thought experiments.”

The Austrian School believes it is possible to discover the truth simply by thinking aloud – think ‘Brain-storming’. Interestingly, this group does have unique insights into some of the most important economic issues of our times. Read on to find out how the ‘Austrian School of Economics’ has evolved:  https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/09/austrian-school-of-economics.asp  Albert Einstein solved many of the problems of his day using ‘thought experiments’ some of which I have demonstrated in my book.

NOW, I HAVE GIVEN YOU THE CLUES you will need to do the work to discover what is happening today in 2022 and why the economic solutions being used by our economic gurus are likely mistaken, and could result in a Great Depression II for the rest of this decade, and what the likely outcome will be, when combined with the confusing geopolitical shifts and the key energy dilemma, EROEI. Here is my paper about this issue:

If you have been curious and interested enough to get this far, congratulations! I know it’s been heavy going but the reward will be your understanding of why central banks across the globe are working now to introduce ‘Central Bank Digital Currencies’ (CBDCs) and follow China’s example of total social control through ‘Social Credit Scores’ all of which is published at the UN Agenda 2021 and 2030. Here’s a short video of how it works in the current Chinese pilot scheme:

COLLAPSE MONITOR:  HOWEVER, I REMAIN UNCERTAIN as to who or what is really driving these crazy viral narratives. A fellow TBP blogger may not have an answer but he definitely has some good pointers.  You may also find the comments here give alternative perspectives: https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/08/22/crazyland-3/

As a colleague of mine noted, during one of our many brain-storming sessions; there is likely a combination of four very human features to be factored in:

·         A conspiracy of oligarchs coordinated by a network of global corporations, banks, media and institutions such as the WEF, UN and many others all published on the Internet for anyone to easily find under The Great Reset, Fourth Industrial Revolution and New World Order.

·         A BigPharma black propaganda initiative, funded by entities such as Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street, and the likes of Bill Gates coordinated by most western governments, but mainly by US/NATO and the Five Eyes countries.

·         The usual SNAFU propagated by typical military FUBARs where careful planning collapses on first contact with the enemy (us)

·         A Marxist/Extreme Left political plot to destroy what remains of the western ‘capitalist dream’ of yesteryear exemplified by the Democrats in the US and quietly supported by the GOP.

CENSORSHIP UPDATES:  The Woke Capitalist PayPal organisation is on the warpath censoring a wide range of people and companies who are speaking out against the Globalist agenda. This week was an eye-opener for the hubris exposed by PayPal which has been ‘cancelling’ people and companies in bulk.  Not The BEEB – GB News interview  AND a video at:

THE NARRATIVE BATTLE: You should stop believing the propaganda and lies from the media on demographics.  The numbers don’t add up. Of course, figures never lie, but liars do figure, as the old saw goes.

Have you ever watched TV, streamed Netflix, paged through a magazine or viewed a commercial advertisement and thought something seemed out of whack?   Why everything is portrayed as so, well: gay, lesbian, black, etc as if America had instantly and forever, completely changed. Why have these demographic misperceptions been used to fuel media and political hate mongering?

A recent YouGov poll asked people to look in the mirror, asking how they envision the country.  https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/09/22/the-numbers-please/

FINALLY:  We, in the West, are led to believe that US/NATO is fighting Russia, by proxy, in Ukraine to save ‘freedom, liberty, and democracy’. THINK AGAIN.

“It is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, and political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That’s the way to soften up a democracy.”― J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit

The U.S. government has become a master of deceit. It’s all documented, too.  This is a government that lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn; treats its citizens like faceless statistics and economic units to be bought, sold, bartered, traded, Vaxxed and tracked; and wages wars for profit, jails its own people for profit, and has no qualms about spreading its reign of terror abroad.

Worse, this is a government that has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity. https://www.globalresearch.ca/masters-deceit-government-propaganda-fear-mind-control-brain-warfare/5794214

THUS the question remains: Who are you supporting – the wonderful American people who are enacting their Constitution or the liars and cheats who claim to represent them in a mockery of a democratic process that has been high-jacked and corrupted for decades? Biden is the living (or dead) example of this stinking pit of evil corruption worthy of the highest accolades from Satan and his Demons.

“Nations can succumb to pride and a wrong view of wealth​—and so can individuals. Jesus gave a parable that showed how subtle this snare can be. He spoke of a rich man whose fields produced very well. Delighted, the man planned to build larger storehouses for his produce and happily looked forward to a long life of comfort. But this did not happen. God said to him: “Unreasonable one, this night they are demanding your soul from you. Who, then, is to have the things you stored up?” Yes, the man died, and his wealth availed him nothing.​—Luke 12:16-20.

UNTIL NEXT WEEK:  FOR MORE, READ: “The Financial Jigsaw”: Scroll:   https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358117070_THE_FINANCIAL_JIGSAW_-_PART_1_-_4th_Edition_2020   including regular updates.  Archive & Finance articles are HERE   For free PDF copy e-Books, Parts 1 & 2,  email; [email protected]

PLEASE NOTE: I will not be commenting specifically on Covid in future because my colleague covers daily updates at his aggregator website:  

https://cmnnews.org/

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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