Back to Basics – Complex Systems – Can Growth Return? –Global Britain? – PCE Corruption – Which Inflation? – Climate Lockdown – Dead Masks – Good News – Letter from Great Britain – [12-17-22]

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

PROTECT & SURVIVE

CHRISTMAS IS COMING: But for how long?  Reports recently catalogue the demise of Christianity in Britain as our nation becomes ever more infected with secular ‘Wokeness’.  Thus we have the ensuing destruction of traditional family units.  Our standards of behaviour which were generally accepted and expected back in the day, and the abandonment of our responsibility to the elderly in what were extended family units, (there are 3.2 million lonely and uncared-for pensioners in England and Wales), are gradually being eroded.

This crazy ‘diversity’ agenda, ‘genderism’ (whatever that is), males claiming to be females otherwise described as ‘trans’ (whatever that is), and dysfunctional minorities shouting out their demands for their toxic aberrant behaviours, to be not only accepted by regular adults and even children, but promoted as a ‘kinda ‘normal’.

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According to the latest exposure of an Advertising Agency, who promoted S&D activities to defenceless little ones under 3 years old, merely gave a pathetic insincere retraction.   How can this be allowed in what is supposed to be a ‘civilised’ caring and healthy nation?

It is beyond time to call a halt to all this damaging nonsense and rediscover our social sanity, cleanse the zeitgeist and re-establish our spiritual hygiene. Neil Oliver does an excellent job of calling out those among us who have succumbed to what only can be described as evil beyond rational imagination:

THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK:  Do we understand ourselves – the human beast?  This video of a mere 9 minutes is the most amazing wisdom IMHO.  A ‘Thinker’ named “minivanjack” describing complex systems is something close to my heart having spent fifty years examining and dissecting complex adaptive systems and corporate systems of all kinds. In these days of crumbling services and infrastructure presaging the demise of our comfortable past and decades of plenty, perhaps we should reflect that mankind is not the omnipotent being he thinks he is:

BREAKING NEWS:  Britain is leading the world into the Great Depression II and here is the irrefutable evidence. First, have a look at this short video of our delusional WEF puppet Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, manically grimacing as he delivers his Christmas message of doom dictated by his Bankster friends:

Hunt claims: “it’s likely to get worse’ before it gets better”, really – I wonder what he’s been smoking?  Apparently we are assured that Britain will “grow its way out of this economic morass”.   Someone ‘independent’ needs to tell him that economic real growth stopped around 2000 and has been declining ever since, which is why we are all feeling poorer.  To illustrate this effect a recent American (independent) reporter visited Morecambe in NW England where it’s often pretty miserable and cold, being not too far from the Arctic Circle!

“A dire and potentially deadly humanitarian emergency is endangering millions across Britain.  It is playing out as the seats of politics and power are reeling from months of chaos, farce and opulent pageantry. The ruling Conservative Party has busied itself with internecine political warfare, cycling through the scandal-plagued Boris Johnson and the historically brief Liz Truss before settling on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, an ex-Goldman Sachs banker worth $800 million.  Amidst it all was the gold-plated week-long mourning period for the United Kingdom’s longest-reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth II.

Britain is the world’s sixth-largest economy, a top-tier industrialized power that still sees itself as a cradle of the postwar welfare state. But its stagnant economy has likely just entered what the Bank of England says could be the longest recession [aka Depression] and sharpest drop in living standards on record. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/britain-poverty-cost-of-living-food-crisis-rcna57630   Britain in 2022 is a place where, for millions of people, everything feels like it’s broken — and is about to get worse this winter”

BUT ON A GLOBAL BASIS: Can Britain benefit from a new multipolar world order?  It will have to fix its debt load first which is linked to the debts of our failing unipolar world led by America.  The data are staggering. Globally, total private- and public-sector debt as a share of GDP rose from 200% in 1999 to 350% in 2021. The ratio is now 420% across advanced economies and 330% in China. In the United States, it is 420%, which is greater than during the Great Depression and later WW2.

Healthy debt can boost economic activity when borrowers invest in new productive projects that yield net returns enough to service the cost of borrowing and retain profits surplus after dividends.  However a lot of borrowing has financed speculation and consumption in excess of income and this is a recipe for bankruptcy.

Moreover, investments in capital can also be risky, whether the borrower is a household buying a home at an artificially inflated price, a corporation seeking to expand too quickly regardless of returns, or a government that is spending the money on “white elephants” such as extravagant but useless infrastructure projects like HS2, a Heathrow third runway, or wasteful Woke initiatives like the NHS spending £40million pa on 800 ‘diversity roles’ each of whom earn at least £47,000 pa.

Such over-borrowing has been going on for decades due to the democratization of finance encouraging income-strapped households to finance consumption with debt.  Governments have persistently cut taxes without also cutting spending, while centre-left governments have spent generously on social programs that aren’t fully funded.  Tax policies that favour debt over equity, abetted by central banks’ ultra-loose monetary and credit policies, have fuelled excess borrowing in both the private and public sectors.

Years of quantitative easing (QE) and credit easing kept borrowing costs near zero, and in some cases even negative (as in Europe and Japan until recently). By 2020, negative-yielding dollar-equivalent public debt was $17 trillion, and in some Nordic countries, even mortgages had negative nominal interest rates.

The explosion of unsustainable debt ratios implies that many borrowers – households, corporations, banks, shadow banks, governments, and even entire countries – are insolvent “zombies” that are being propped up by low interest rates which has kept debt-servicing costs manageable. During both the 2008 global financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis, many insolvent institutions that would have gone bankrupt were rescued by zero- or negative-interest-rate policies, (aka QE), and outright fiscal bailouts.

But inflation having been fed by the same ultra-loose fiscal, monetary, and credit policies has suddenly ended this financialised merry-go-round.  Central banks have chosen to increase interest rates in an effort to restore price stability and now zombies are experiencing difficulty to managing their debts.  Inflation and negative economic growth has lowered real household income and house values.

The same goes for fragile and over-leveraged corporations, financial institutions, and governments as they face concurrent sharply rising borrowing costs, falling incomes and revenues, and declining asset values.

These classic recession events are coinciding with the return of stagflation ; high inflation combined with economic de-growth. The last time advanced economies experienced such conditions was in the 1970s. But at least then, debt ratios were manageable.

Today, we are facing the worst aspects of the 1970s with stagflationary shocks alongside the worst aspects of the 2008 global financial crisis. Now central banks are trapped as they cannot simply cut interest rates to stimulate demand whilst the real economy needs disinflation – https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/disinflation.asp

The global economy is facing persistent negative supply shocks impacting growth whilst increasing prices and production costs; further exacerbated by Covid disruptions to the supply of labour and goods. The Russian SMO in Ukraine hasn’t helped but the rising economic engine, China, has aggravated supply chain failure through their increasingly disastrous zero-COVID policy.

Unlike during the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 lockdowns, simply bailing out private and public entities with waves of free money is not possible now – the can has been kicked into a roadblock. Bail-outs would pour more gasoline on to the inflationary fires which means a hard landing for economies across the board starting with a deep, and protracted recession combined with a severe global financial crisis.

As the asset bubbles burst, debt-servicing becomes impossible, and inflation-adjusted (real) incomes fall for households, corporations, and governments; the economic crisis and the financial crash will feed on each other.  Although developed economies that borrow in their own currency could use rising inflation to effectively reduce the real value of debt loads, the question remains: can they survive long enough?

Governments are unable to raise taxes or cut spending and reduce their deficits and Britain is leading the pack.  Will central-banks return to accommodation by QE once more?  If they do beware the inflation genie, which having escaped, will be almost impossible to return to manageable levels whilst avoiding a devastating economic recession. As the Chancellor opines: “It’ll get worse” – he’s right but for how long –”before it gets better”?

I think something fundamental has changed as the multipolar world emerges, and CHS agrees we can’t go back:  http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2021/06/post-pandemic-metamorphosis-never-going.html

CORRUPTION IN PLAIN SIGHT – following on from last week, the corruption is so embedded within the British Establishment, what chance do you think the perpetrators of this horrendous scam running into billions of GBP are going to be called to account?  Well, let’s keep up the pressure!

Rishi Sunak is facing calls from the main opposition parties to withdraw the Tory Whip from Michelle Mone in the House of Lords after the Guardian revealed she appeared to have gained millions from the profits of a PPE company, PPE MedPro Ltd, which I covered last week and has stood down from The House of Lords ‘to establish her innocence’; yeah – right.

Labour and the Liberal Democrats have criticised the PM’s “staggering” refusal to withdraw the Whip, claiming his pledge to lead a government that acts with “integrity and professionalism”, has now become an “empty promise”.  I wonder if Sunak has any idea of what ‘integrity’ means? A Conservative spokesperson in the Lords confirmed Mone would not have the whip suspended while the National Crime Agency was investigating the company, PPE MedPro.

And a Lords standards committee held an inquiry into the allegations. “The decision has been made that she will retain the whip,” they said.  However, Labour claimed that Sunak’s refusal to act, given the seriousness of the allegations, was another failure of integrity.  The party chair, Anneliese Dodds, said: “For the many people who lost loved ones during the pandemic, the idea that the Conservatives and their friends” profited from this “will be sickening”.

“It is staggering that Baroness Mone still has the Conservative whip. Rishi Sunak, the man who wrote off billions in Covid fraud, has his fingerprints all over this,” she added. “He lacks the backbone to withdraw the whip just as he was too weak to sack his home secretary or deputy prime minister for their behaviour. The British people will see this as yet another failure to stand up for integrity and accountability”.

The Guardian has the detail and it’s worth reading because this goes to the root of corruption in Great Britain – the most manipulated and secretive country in the world.  Get wise and please follow this potentially criminal case: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news calls-for-sunak-to-withdraw-tory-whip-from-michelle-mone-in-lords

INFLATION WATCH:  Inflation isn’t what you think it is.  This revealing essay, by my good friend Dr Tim Morgan, lays it on the line with the reality of what is actually happening and why we are not only feeling poorer, we actually are much poorer and it’s getting worse.

“… Something fundamental has happened to returns on capital. Income returns – in the form of bankable cash – have been crushed, [low wages and higher interest rates], and have been replaced by non-bankable capital gains which, in the aggregate, can’t be monetized.

We know how this has happened, and we can be pretty sure about where it ends, which is in falls of varying (but generally severe) magnitude across the gamut of asset classes.

But why has the financial system behaved in this way?  The view set out here is that an economy characterised by cosmetic “growth” has been forced to resort to replacing bankable investment returns with cosmetic, non-monetizable “returns” on capital.

What follows is not, in any sense ‘sympathetic’ to investors, still less a defence of the paper beneficiaries of the divergence between incomes and asset prices. Rather, the aim is to examine the abandonment of market and capitalist principles in the face of unacknowledged economic contraction.”  https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2022/12/12/244-in-search-of-illusory-value/

SURVIVAL MONITOR:  Here it comes – the Climate Lockdown.  Yes really, I couldn’t believe what I was reading!   “Oxfordshire County Council yesterday approved plans to lock residents into one of six zones to ‘save the planet’ from global warming. The latest stage in the ’15 minute city’ agenda is to place electronic gates on key roads in and out of the city, confining residents to their own neighbourhoods.

Oxfordshire County Council, which is run by Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party, secretly decided to divide-up the city of Oxford into six ‘15 minute’ districts in 2021 soon after they were elected to office. No councillors declared their intention of imprisoning local residents in their manifestos, just vague claims about how they will ‘improve the environment’ instead.”  https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/12/04/oxfordshire-council-to-trial-a-climate-lockdown-starting-2024/

The answer is of course to move out of cities, which I have never found attractive anyway and avoided all my life, then join us deep in the rural countryside where the evangelical apparatchiks can’t get to you.  And if they try, I have an enthusiastic group of anti-lockdowners and our Plan ‘B’: https://austrianpeter.substack.com/p/progressing-plan-b-a-quarterly-review?s=w

NARRATIVE BATTLE:  Indisputable evidence has now emerged that MASKS DON’T WORK!  Of course, those of us awake enough have known this for years, even N95 masks are ineffective.  We now have observational evidence through population-level comparisons that masks do not prevent the spread of COVID.  We also now have multiple randomized controlled trials confirming that masks do not prevent the spread of COVID.

And we have extremely well done comparisons of neighbouring jurisdictions confirming it.  The entire mask fanatics have only politically motivated wishful thinking, desperate advocacy from disproven CDC ‘studies’, and a commitment to avoiding reality. And yet, when I visited my local surgery the other day – they insisted on wearing masks – It doesn’t inspire confidence.

Fauci and his health authority allies have lied to the public repeatedly about masking. The obsession with credentials and appeals to authority within the media has resulted in tremendous, unjustified harm.

You’d hope that results like these would finally end their ridiculous posturing, but it’s abundantly clear they’re too dug in to ever relent.  But thankfully those paying attention now have even more ammunition in the fight for the inarguable scientific reality that masks do not work.”  https://brownstone.org/articles/not-even-n95-masks-work-to-stop-covid/

FINALLY some GOOD NEWS: This is a crucial court win in South Africa against the government’s ruling on Covid lockdowns and associated police-state conditions. https://expose-news.com/2022/12/02/court-orders-sa-government-to-release-records/  I trust Rishi Sunak is noting this after his cosy chat with Ramaphosa?

AND MORE Good News: This excellent new law from Russia proves to me that Mr Putin has his head on the right way.  “As if the West needed more reason to hate Vladimir Putin, the Russian president on Monday signed into law updated legislation which expands the current ban on the prohibition of what it dubs LGBT propaganda to children, shrugging off widespread Western human rights criticisms levelled at Moscow.  The new law now expands to banning anything that promotes LGBT propaganda before the entire population, regardless of age or demographic, which makes it much more sweeping and broad. The law also aggressively targets transgender ideology.  Snowflakes please note – time to line up and get unWoke: https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/12/06/i-am-done-with-this-sht/

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.  For a  free PDF copy e-Books, Parts 1 & 2,  email; [email protected]

AUSTRIAN’S NEWSLETTER ARCHIVE: https://www.theburningplatform.com/author/austrian-peter/

COVID & FINANCE LINKS: [I will not be commenting specifically on Covid in future because my colleague covers daily updates at his websites]:  YOUR DAILY COVID NEWS (cmnnews.org) and BOOM Finance & Economics (boomfinanceandeconomics.com) plus BOOM Finance and Economics | Designed for Critical Thinkers — UPDATED WEEKLY (wordpress.com)

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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