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.

 

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!

 

Oh Lord, won't you buy me ...

a Greek sack for free?

No, this bail-out package for Greece is not meant to heal Greek or any other nations' problems but is round two of the bank-bailout series where following the too-big-to-fail philosophy is the less worse of the bad choices - for the immediate moment and the financial system, the banks.

We all have to admit that the available options from sacking Greece to lending vast sums of third parties' new € debts to Greece seem of little attraction. Alone, whoever installed the EURO is responsible for these catastrophic choices we face today but were all warned off 10 and 12 years ago, already. So much for the competence of the politicians and the influence of the lobbies, then; and today?

Sacking Greece (and others) is the only way out; this path will also be hard, expensive and even disastrous, but at least it will be a decision with a defined reset date while trying to cover up the incompatibility of the EUROzone is not going to work at all; it will destroy the last remains of what once each were pretty strong European economies; the ongoing global fight for the weakest currency and the lowest costs is not going to help either.

"A long and hard disease causes certain death": I am sure this is also an old Chinese saying and very true.

Carpe diem.

Greece, Portugal, but...

quo vadis Pound?

Telegraph: Portugal downgrade knocks Euro as Merkel imposes IMF solution for Greece

Well, nothing new under the EURO sun, things go to plan.

The EURO, as installed, will not survive. The downgrading of Portugal is opening the shooting range; Portugal is wounded, blood stains everywhere; Spain, Ireland, Italy and others are holding their breath.

A report by UBS entitled "How to Break up a Monetary Union" has been circulating like wildfire in financial centres. "It is relatively clear that the euro does not work. That is to say, parts of the Euro area would have been better off (economically) if they had never joined," it said.

With Merkel's suicidal stubbornness following the Maastricht doctrines which in fact forbids any bail-out of any member EURO-Europe will break apart, currency-wise; don't forget this just follows its cause, as economy-wise the EURO members couldn't be any more different.

So what will it be like?

The allegedly "weak" ones will become ugly competitors to the ones that gave the strong ones. The weaks' cost of labour will be most competitive, their tourism will boom, whatever they can export will be inexpensive; their EURO debts will have to be written off, protectionism will come back.

How good will that be for our Pound?

Carpe diem!