(11-03-11)*3

14:46: Earthquake: Tsunami: Fukushima

In magnu lucto sum!

UK in real terms...

bursting into tears

Once you boil down mainstream there is not much left that enables you to see light at the end of the tunnel; numbers are hard to find, it needs a German website querschuesse.de to help out; UK mainstream rather discusses more bread and game like topics:

source

Above UK production since January 1985; January 2012 sees us back on the level of 1993, that are those brilliant 20 years of progress and growth, of securing and intensifying the industrial base? It is rather like somebody wants to de-industrialise the country on the fast lane.

Here is the UK oil & gas output:

source

The chart starts in January 1977, the output in January 2012 is the same like in October 1978. Shamed be he who thinks this is past peak UK oil and gas, only.

We are living in a bubble economy where the City is sanctimoniously defended because financial services seem to be our only answer on the question on how the UK will feed a population of +62m people in the (near) future. Financial Services that in their majority today are totally focused on betting against the masses and their economies per se by speculating, gambling, on energy and food, all kinds of past-peak resources, debts and bonds.

The UK, we all, are more and more depending on imports of energy and food of all kinds which we will have to pay for with a hard currency; so help us if the Pound should drown in these heavy European waters where no matter what, a collapse or a prolonged artificial life of this brain-dead but at any cost defended Euro will enhance the depression.

Already there are more than 50% among young black men with no job (The Telegraph); yes, in the UK; at the same time the unemployment of the <25 year old in Greece soared to 50.5%, in Spain it is 49.9%, a figure just below 50% very likely for saving the statistics from bursting into tears.

Average unemployment rate in the Eurozone hits 10.7% with the rate for the <25 year old now above 20% that`s 2 out of 10 with no job; and probably another 4 or more in jobs that are simple or financial service, interim or trainee like jobs. and do not forget, these all are official numbers; official as in doctored and faked.

It might comfort us that production output all over Europe is eroding - but we all know the reason; no need to wake up, though, with deep cuts into education, R&D, training and lecturing it is too late, anyway!

Carpe diem

CPHC, not certified...

but qualified!

Even if you live in this country for ten years now, you speak and understand the language fairly well, you are still not immune from being laughed at and from people with a question mark plus at least two exclamation marks in their eyes while they are congesting what you just said.

So happened when I explained to a friend (lucky me?) that I now was certified.

Mind you, for a one-dimensional German brain it is not really easy to understand that you hold your hard-earned Certificate in your hand but then you should not declare yourself certified. 

The German translation of "to certify" does not offer any hint that this could mean anything other than what one has learned in school and only way further down it mentions certified sick as something like krankgeschrieben, i.e. signed off ill which for my understanding is still far from the British imagination seeing the men in white jackets arrive taking away what my gom*-friend would call a certifiable, anyway!

Carpe diem!

p.s. In case you find or found any other similar two and three dimensional bemusement in these pages please, please let me know and save me from having to go through all this for another ten years!

* grumpy old man!

Relax!

The Flood



Katie Melua - The Flood from Dramatico on Vimeo.

Broken people get recycled
And I hope that I will sometimes be thrown off the pathways...

Carpe diem!

unemploystream

(ment-main)

It is almost like one must sympathise with Mr Obama in his fight for his second term. But while his fight in the end might help to not see one of those reactionary Republicans named Romney or even worse Santorum, latest rumours even threat us with Palin's comeback, to move into White House it is still pure bullshit Obama is giving us; most likely not only in reference to the unemployment situation in the US. Fair enough, it is election time and mainstream just follows the flag:

theguardian: Obama boosted by US job growth

In a boost to president Barack Obama's pledge to keep cutting unemployment a priority, the US enjoyed the longest stretch of solid jobs growth in almost a year. Government data showed 227,000 non-farm jobs were added last month, ahead of the 210,000 rise forecast by economists.

... but in the same article ...

The unemployment rate, however, remained at 8.3% as expected as more people came back into the labour market after not previously seeking work.

Pure nonsense, nothing changed to the good. Karl Denninger, a US blogger, calls it the Bureau of Lies and Scams when referring to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics and says:

We have not added a single job, adjusted for population, since 2006 -- and even then going all the way back to 2000 the "gains" were tiny and fleeting.  Until and unless we stop sending jobs overseas there will be no durable economic improvement.

Indeed, the jobs [labour] and the greenbacks [money] are both meeting up somewhere overseas.

Could it be China!


Carpe diem!

China

 BBC2
This world
The fastest changing place on earth.

wallpaper

Again, like that letter from PRC, China, to the indebted nations of Europe here is something that helps to understand the dramatic changes China is going through. It is most probably more than one fifth of the world's population, so we should at least try to understand; you have six days to watch...

BBC iplayer

Carpe diem!

PH for Standard!

passiv(e) but fast...

A HH PH (HANSE HAUS PassivHaus) going up...

An interesting article to read.

Call for Passivhaus standard to beat fuel poverty and climate change


And here a wee reminder...

Carpe diem!

Austerity...

and Growth?

An article in German paper Badische Zeitung headlined "EU-summit wants Austerity and Growth" refers to Germany urging all EU Partners to follow the German example and become stronger "on the global markets". That refers to that successful export industry and bonanza Germany is experiencing all those years, now, to be the one and only model to follow.

The last 50 years tell us that all those EU partners never really succeeded that much export-wise compared to the German strength even at times when those EU-Partners had the sovereignty, hence the tool in hand to devalue their own currencies in order to compete with world-market prices. Those times also benefited from the fact that there was no Chinese Moloch sucking up labour for in return flooding the markets with inexpensive, not to say cheap products of all kinds. So why should anything like trying to increase export (of what kind of products, by the way?) be a successful route today when everybody follows the same aim with most markets being saturated and new industries and products being more than scarce?

With unemployment and energy prices rocketing, resources peaking, lots of given up industries, sold out labour, governments with no money to spend and their mainstreams' only and unisono answer on the crisis being the call for austerity there is not much hope to see new wheels being invented for starting any successful export business. Meanwhile established exporters struggle to cope with extreme competitiveness, in parts unfair practises, and Germany's strength is taking advantage of a relatively weak Euro, an established and trained workforce that only very slowly is waking up cautiously asking for higher wages.

Worshipping so-called free markets and those tin gods called growth and austerity will be coming to an end; once those LTROx, y and z are pumped out it will soon become clear that in reality it is not "money", neither virtual nor even real money, that creates jobs, innovation, income or that beloved growth; the real world out there, the one beyond that European plate's edge will be showing its own face with China dominating the world's decisions, holding the majority of resources and a very well trained and eager labour force in its fist while the US are playing silly dollar and costly war games; only then we will suddenly wake up and ask, what's the time?

Yes, late; very likely too late mainstream will recognise, probably never acknowledge, that while good old Europe played the generous, successful wanna-be-business know-it-all dandy others will have seized the opportunity in its completeness: allowed to give themselves their own rules, to manage their own non-floating currency, to grow with double digit figures, to  invest billions on land, energy and all kinds of other resources and all this detached from any non-essential democratic crap was the fast forward for China into the 21 century!

To cut this short: should we not see an immediate turnaround of the majority of the European economies for good, now after that LTRO trillion and all the other QEs in place, we will be doomed.

Carpe diem!

Idiots!

Do not forgive them,

for they know what they do!

spiegel

BBC

Does this not mirror that planet of ours...


Carpe diem!

Merkel's Finale!

Good Luck, Madame!

source

I had not blogged during January and February this year - too busy with everything related to PassivHaus, my PH Consultant Certification and clients that definitly know what they want and learn faster than the British industry and the stolid regulators can follow.

Not much was happening in the world that really would have been worth discussing; in relation to the EURO, which for me is now in a state that in human medicine you call brain-dead the choice of measurements is getting really weird; the term LTRO = Long Term Re-financing Operation is not really hiding the purpose.

In what one calls preemptive obedience we saw LTRO2, €530bn, outpoured over 800 banks - they tell us; RBS and Lloyds amidst them; 1% interest against no security is a very convincing argument whether you need to fill up equity capital accounts, suck up bonds and other goody-goody promises or want to secure investment banksters' bonuses. "No, not for that" they scream... alone, it is believing or not...

The Telegraph tells us it was a total of £22bn what UK banks borrowed from LTRO, which it calls "an emergency programme to prevent the region's financial system from collapsing". So UK banks are part of that system, that rergion? I thought so but did David Cameron not walk away offended from that same table?

LTRO was just the latest invention amongst the dubious instruments to keep the currency alive. It started with Bad Banks, something that most of us would like to have one of and if only to bank the bad decisions one makes through the years; ECB then eased up on all kinds of regulations and started accepting ever more rotten collateral in exchange for cheaper and cheaper loans; it bought any junk causing any kind of disruption and in parallel allowed e.g. TARGET2 balances to go berserk.

accounts receivable of Deutsche Bundesbank versus ECB

querschuesse.de

January 2012: €498.131bn

There is not much more one can do to safeguard a currency that left to the markets would have seized existence about seven years ago or rather would have never ever made it on stage.

That is why I admit there is not much more that could really stop that EURO for the time being. Mind you it is brain-dead, but its virtual brain, Madame Merkel, repeated her "without the Euro there will be no Europe" as if a nuclear bomb would erase that part of the Eurasian continent and also stressed that the crisis ain't over yet, but whatever she referred to, Greece leaving Euroland, to the banksters's existing or future problems or simply to the fact that the remaining PII(G)S + Be +F will undoubtedly need to be bailed out, soon, it ain't any problem: after LTRO2 LTRO3 or LTRO4... the Euro shall live!

As long as any insolvency is avoided by throwing real amounts of virtual money in the bottomless pot it will be "Let's carry on!".

Meanwhile we will loose the rests! Not only to China and its new generation of writers which we magnanimously but rather silly ignore to remark and take consequences from but we will give up our status and we will backstab our next generations; it is already happening as described.

This process will now go into "fast forward". Remember the G20 meeting the week before last? A €2trillion rescue package was called for by the G20 to secure the strength of the Euro. Meanwhile it is pretty academic whether the Feds of this world press "return" after typing in 2, 4 or 12 billions or trillions, fine, but why would the Euro want to be strong and hard when the vast majority of the remaining currencies seek their salvation in becoming soft and softer to be able to export any goods and import inflation: finally. 

With a hard EURO Germany's export bonanza will come to a rather abrupt hold; transferring Euros within Euroland will become an even more hollow game; does neo-liberal Europe under that wonderful umbrella of repetitively return-generated money see it coming?

I doubt it.

With all old and any new or revived currencies being pure numbers backed by trust into the currency's economic background, only, its relative and absolute degree of know-how and knowledge, education and training the currency per se, its name, paper, colour, design and history will never again be of any relevance. Even backed by gold it would only be the gold.

The most important currency might very likely be called Yuan.


Carpe diem!