It reeks of storm!

Do you smell it?

I do not think I do: I really do. It rather stinks; it is going to be one of those storms described as perfect. Perfect because things are starting to fall into place that we expected to eventually fall but not all at once.

I could live with bad management, lousy and/or corrupt managers being punished like it finally seems to happen with RBS and HBOS’ so called former bosses. Whether in the end any of those heroes will ever really get punished - I doubt it. See the Libor scandal! What scandal you might ask? True: that law-breaking insolence is dealt with behind those thick curtains that protect today’s banksters’ offices from any light; just in case Deutsche Bank and others set up provisions, some hundred million Euro, measurements in return reducing their tax load and buying them off. But, that scam will end without further consequences except for them trying harder, next time.

That Offshore Leak might be a different story; for one there is not much about that in British media, yet * ; may be that is because there are many off-shore paradises, money wise in this case, that speak English, some very close, and many are somehow related to thee Queen, thee Commonwealth and thee City? Mind you, we are told it involved 170 countries and 120.000 letterbox-companies. Mind boggling that amount of data going back 30 years and as much as this needs to be dealt with ** – I am afraid this could be a financial and social tsunami. What if the Queen and the Camerons are part of this, or even Tony and George? What if Putin, Merkel, Hollande and Berlusconi plus Sarkozy needed to be arrested and put into the same jail cell? Well, guess somebody would notice and put Madame Merkel into the female block.

Watch the suicide and emigrant lists of those 170 countries … and do not believe a minute that any criminal or immoral aspect of all this will be put into any bankster's basket; evil to him who evil thinks and while all banks offer sophisticated off-shore services it is the stupid customer that gets caught, eventually.

Emigration will not really help anybody to avoid that global currency battle, now entering an unknown dimension with Japan going berserk. As a measurement of last resort they are printing vast, vast, vast sums of money – mind you, that’s hitting return after punching in 12 or 15 zeros behind a 1 or a two or actually any figure and that not only once but monthly from now on – fiat money the easiest way, ever - to buy back their own crap; recycling, snow-balling, ponzi-ing? Government bonds and then dump them in a bin, or the worst bank, if that’s the better name for it. That is the most daring monetary experiment of modern times as The Telegraph titled this flooding the market with YEN; the idea is to massively devalue the currency for exports (jobs!) to grow fast and furious, to force-inject inflation into what is a deflating economy and hope for nobody else following that pattern.

That’s hopeless, stupid! What BO and BSB do for the greenback in the US, why Merkel insists on a EURO agitated by the PIIGS’ and french stress to keep it soft, DC and GO want to do in the UK; strengthen UK exports by weakening the Pound or rather vice versa; woau! How much of that export strength is left? I believe proper schooling, training, apprenticeships worth the title, dual education plus on-going, extensive studies and education would do much better!  Want an example?

While discussing Passiv Haus Standard during this year’s ecobuild seminars and the installation of a MVHR, a mechanical ventilation system including heat recovery, UK experts explained coram publico that this would make things too complicated, too difficult a gadget for the average British tenant/owner to cope with.

Sorry? Hellooow!? Such a system includes a ventilator and a mechanical heat exchanger controlled by three or four buttons to press – basta.

Frightening; and insulting: why would the average middle-European be able to cope with that kind of high tech while the British … ? Or, this very likely is the early result of adding the word vitiosus to this circulus of cuts and savings into schools, training, education? Next step will be to forbid knife and fork endangering the hungry!

Apropos weak: how much does a weak Pound buy? We import more than 50% of our energy and, while you might like it cold, more than 50% of our food! Do you like strict diets? This year we might even have to import much more, or do you see UK potatoes growing with the coldest March on record?

Just for another record: in general terms importing means we have to pay in a foreign currency after swapping Pound into $, € or ¥ where, please note, the last stands for the YEN but also for the YUAN!

China is boosting its defence spending by almost 11% - this year! Obviously China has the funds, hardly any debts and something to prepare for or against? It is also growing its agriculture and pumping a lot of money into renewables. Funny, isn’t it? We are cutting any incentives, we are discussing silly bedroom taxes for the poorest and whether to install Casinos in Cyprus to save its economy, Merkel’s Euro and Schaeuble’s regime - while China prepares for its future. They might not value human life as high as we are rumoured to do, but then...

Well - the Euro! Really, I wanted to avoid that criminal rubbish; it is still alive; rather, it is not disconnected, yet, from life supporting but until lately utterly illegal instruments such as bad banks, bail-outs and bail-ins, and the on-going … here we are again: money printing.

A pity they cannot print jobs. Unemployment in the EU rates are soaring, even the official ones, the ones that lack continuity and belief:

Spain 26.3%, Portugal 17.5% Italy 11.6%, Greece 26.4%; that’s the overall one.

But our future even looks more difficult and much darker:

Spain 55.7%, Portugal 38.2%, Italy 37.8%, Greece 58.4%, France 26.2%; the official figures for those between 18 and 24 years old. Official! And what kind of jobs does the rest have? Low-paid ones, un-trained ones, picking tomatoes or serving beer to poor tourists? How many of them all have gone through any decent apprenticeship and can base their lives on the founds of a sustainable education?

Source: www.querschuesse.de

Shows unemployment of the 18-24 in countries…

Please see Greece, Griechenland!

30% when it entered EURO-Casino!

You could call it the Euro’s unemployment bomb - until it explodes; no wonder DC and GO think, why should they put any money and effort into a dying market of people needing training and education?

Guess what, at least car sales show some sympathy:

Spain minus 13.9%, France minus 16.4%, Austria minus 19.9%, Finland minus 58.6%, Germany minus 17.1, Netherlands minus 31.4, and in addition Japan minus 16.7, Brazil minus 4.7%. So, really, how long can we be happy and proud on headlines like UK car sale rise for 12^th consecutive month? And what is the base of this rise, how are they paid for, those cars, and how long do they or does this last?

Is it a coincidence that VW is creating new jobs, outside the EU?

It becomes apparent that Mr Neo and Mrs. Lib have not only allowed all those jobs to be exported to – mainly – China; any kind of job machine has been given up for nothing, for free. This is the third time I add this video… I think it should now read 2020, not 2030:

My respect, China. Age must help in becoming wiser.

While Gobi Dessert is growing steadily, 28% of Chinese landmass is dessert-like area, anyway, and China buying all kinds of land worldwide, we are all in for increasingly bad weathers; if you thought that cold lately would tell us Global Warming has had it then I would recommend to come to senses and title the problem Climate Change. And that’s what it is.

http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/

http://climatecrocks.com/

http://tamino.wordpress.com/

The rate of changes multiplied by the level of ignorance in solving any of our problems is unbelievable; we are presented with scientific results by crowds of scientists from all over the world, they describe the problems we face, we see and in many cases feel those; we do understand most of them but we are unwilling or incapable of addressing and solving them; or, even worse, we wilfully ignore them all for all kinds of stupid, bad and criminal reasons; that makes it easy for the storm to become that perfect storm.

I can smell it.

Carpe diem!

 

* … might be that they all need time; similar to the big fish on Cyprus when Putin took two days to decide whether he would support Cyprus or rather give his friends and soon-to-be-friends time to visit those London branches of the Cyprus banks to sort out their accounts just in time…

** ... we will see capital control mechanisms installed like we had them before 1985, no question.

 

Euro! Stop here!

Any day longer will make it worse!

Much worse!

Prior to have to live through an explosion of this Unified European Currency and see the European Union become a battlefield I demand this stupid adventure to be stopped here and now!

At the moment we might have a smallish chance left to settle this suicidal experiment in a controlled and organized way. Any day longer this "Einheitswährung" as it is called in Germany, the "Unity-Currency" of something that is far from being a Unity, is strangling those totally unequal economies and peoples it will become worse; worse than any cut could be today!

Unemployment rates in the South soar with young people under 25 reaching 55% in places, overall a >25% rate of unemployment in Greece, Spain, Portugal, soon Italy are only what we will see next in other states and France, The Netherlands, even the UK once the bread and games are over with. And shortly thereafter in Germany! Combined with severe cuts into training and education all this is the recipe for extreme social pressure and economical depression of unseen dimensions; industrial output shrinks at record rates all over Europe and that is not machinery and production slowing down but complete plants shut off and people send to hell; that hell of trying to find a job in an environment that does not create labour but exported and exports any job possible for the sake of boosting wholesale markups until retail collapses along with purchase power.

If there is any intelligence left in Europe it should, it must act now; neither a bank-union, bank banks, ultra low or even negative interest rates nor any of these stunningly ignorant and all the same money-printing-Ponzi-bonanzas will solve the disaster that one currency pulled over what was an unprepared, inhomogeneous Europe, not unified economically, not legally, not socially, has caused.

As to Pound Sterling people will say it is good where it is, strong and an independent alternative, so why call for the Euro to be ended? The Pound is only so strong like the Euro is weak, independence is history and UK is still part of the Eurasian continent.

The Euro must end here! Der Euro muß weg!

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!

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!

 

Red Herrings' Summit

"You have ten days to save the Euro"

 

That was the headline before last week's euro-saver-summit. And now? The magic bullet is to be an old hat called Fiscal Union and one more silver bullet was left to make David Cameron come across this brilliant idea of walking away from Europe in order to save his respectively the banksters' City?!

Great!

Fiscal discipline, the focus on strengthening competitiveness and penalties for those who are too deep in debts will actually have to sort out the Greek economy and that of all the other PIIGS and friends; together with iron German austerity concepts and French red but too short herrings this is the latest Wunderwaffe to save the Euro - in just ten days. Merkozy should write two thick books about it and use those to stand on; at least that will make them taller.

I bet Italian bonds will be creeping back up above 7%, the ECB will buy more bond crap and not call it Eurobonds and soon it will be very irrelevant how few diplomacy lectures DavidC ever had for breakfast at Oxford; and his teammate needed a day or two to understand the implications and now tries the splits.

It just makes very clear if you did not know before that none of those in charge of the problem have any plan to sort things out. Red herrings in dark waters.

Carpe diem!

the €-bomb

here in slow motion...

to understand why I have repeatedly claimed: the Euro is dead:

Querschuesse

The industrial output of Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece - month by month since January 2000; a lot of growth in this gap with great potential.

Pure coincidence? It started slowly with the € coming in and it will only be stopped with the € going out. Any other result would see us witness Germany give away permanently e.g. Volkswagen to Greece, BMW plus a couple of its suppliers to Spain, a number of globally leading industrial members and Mercedes to Italy and even a pretty heavy load of successful German exporters to France - all for free just to even out the gap you see on the chart and rescue that marvelous European Single Currency. A really veritable European act of German heroism; the circle closes where Europa was an important and heroic gestalt in Greek mythology.

Now, what would we need to drink to believe in something like that? That's pure phantasy! Fellow Germans will think I am nuts; well, I won't dispute that, calm down. But, we all are watching the patient's mortal agony which the above chart suggests will end in a harsh finale of what was pure bloody nonsense in the first place.

While the € came in putatively friendly and smooth its explosion will rather feel rough and hostile. It will trigger protectionism and isolationism, it will toss Europe far back and make it totally depending on the rest of the world with the only exception being the USA; it will loose the fight to make its green paper the weakest currency. Welcome in the dark ages, boys and girls.

More debts and exchanging the figures in Italy, Greece or anywhere else will not alter the outcome.

And then: what about our beloved Pound?

Carpe diem!

In Pound we trust?!

Miserere!

Some more details on the UK economy that are worthwhile sharing and noting - you can't do much more than note and watch the further development as this economy is obviously run by intelligence that tells us every day they knew what they are doing. A specific proof you can watch here. But for inflation see here. For DC's new economy see here.

These graphs below show our strength in imports and dependency. And strong we are:

The above shows the monthly trade deficit of the UK, the next one the same in reference to food, only.

more; all graphs are in English ink! Querschuesse

Should you make out some kind of trend over the 30 years: don't worry!

Once the Euro is history not only logically (that's the case since 1998) but also in the reality of such intelligence that came up with that crap in the first place and their naive heirs like Merkel and Sarkozy we will have to bury the Pound instantly; that is it will need dumping over night!

Let us hope our intelligence will understand that this burial must happen in an instant manner not being dragged over weeks, months or years really. The latter would destroy the last remains of any kind of UK (export) economy we have and would see us people starve and/or freeze to death despite a global climate change: many!

miserere: [lat] have mercy!

Carpe diem!