Debt Rattle March 4 2018
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James McNeill Whistler Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea 1871 • Global Bond Markets Have Become Grotesquely Distorted – Jim Grant (ZH) • From
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle March 4 2018]Never a good idea for a party that losses big in elections to be in government; what are elections for?
Erm, an excellent question.
For which I have seen no answer.
Is good governance an oxymoron?
I’ve come to think that is so.Piping in while Oxymorons are popular.
The disappearing wildlife thing got me…. After so much homesteading distress I have started to get a taste for murder. I have started to detest thing I always loved. For example – Kookaburras – since my earliest of memories they have always been one of my favourite friends but now…Oh for god’s sake it’s carnage out there. Kookaburra’s are mating and eating every single one of my last crayfish in my dams. Almost every bird is eating my fruit, if not a bird then a rat, if not a rat then grass hoppers. Kangaroos and Wallabies come in every night consuming everything and now since it hasn’t rained for 6 weeks and there is no grass anywhere we are at a new order of magnitude. They are eating grape leaves, plum leaves the whole Pomme family – apples, pears, quinces, loquat etc… It’s pure carnage!
I give up. I’m going back to getting my food through the military industry-controlled oil and fossil fuel farming system! I’m gonna spend more hours making cash money and less getting my heart broken and just – you know – chill out. I’m over it.
Permaculture is a dirty word to me right now and I’m thinking poison and guns and dogs and fences and netting and ground water pumping and all that stuff that kills wildlife so that I can eat.
No wonder we are losing species – it’s us or them people. Not joking.
Angry faceI am sorry oxymoron to hear about your travails. Australia is a very tough place for people to survive in and that is why the aborigines never made much progress. They had the added problem of no goats, no sheep, no horses, no donkeys, no camels and no cows.
I used to go with my kids picking blueberries in Victoria. The plantation had nets to stop the birds and bats from eating the fruit. I don’t know what they did about the rats and so on.
Some while back, I thought to myself that some effort should be made into developing self-driving scarecrow machines. Here is something along those lines:
Meet robocrow: Machines shooting long-range laser beams to scare birds away replace scarecrows
Here is a picture that you will never see in the MSM.
Must really upset the Israelis, Brits, French, Turks, Saudis, Qataris, Emiratis and Americans. 🙂
oxymoron I totally hear you on issues related to wildlife eating fruit etc. Our mixed orchard is in a hay field surrounded by forest home to all manner of wildlife. We have gotten some yield off our plants but wildlife has a significant impact. We continue to experiment but have not yet resorted to lethal means. One thing I have looked at is a gidjet that makes ultrasonic noise that apparently animals hate. I am just waiting to hear that it causes brain cancer or some other awful thing.
The article by James Rickards was a good read. Needless to say, currency manipulation and tariffs alone won’t bring about economic prosperity and stability.
A balance between all sectors of the economy–raw material extractors, manufacturers, creditors, and consumers (mostly wage earners)–with an adequate supply of currency, and an economic border (proper trade measures, including tariffs) is what brings about that elusive prosperity and stability. All cylinders need to be functioning, or the economic “engine” won’t run as it should. You can’t simply pay attention to one while ignoring the others. We know that.
It has been an interesting week, listening to all the “economic experts” spout on about tariffs. The discussion about the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act causing the Great Depression caught my eye. Pundits such as Mark Levin and Glenn Beck proclaimed such a “fact” from their pulpits.
A little history lesson is in order. International bankers, including some in the United States, lent billions of dollars to European countries to fight World War I. One of the big ways Europe paid those loans back was to export goods to the United States, including food and manufactured products. That influx, or flooding, of imports hurt our farmers and industry. Herbert Hoover saw what was happening, and put a moratorium on the collection of war debts.
Unfortunately, there was something Hoover missed. European countries had roughly $3.5 billion of credits in U.S. banks at that time. That credit was subject to draft. The U.S. couldn’t spare $3.5 billion worth of gold and still keep a legal gold reserve. When the gold was depleted, the U.S. banks had to reduce their deposits. The banks couldn’t do that without making collections from customers to whom the depositors’ money had been loaned. But their customers couldn’t raise the funds to pay. Therefore, the banks had to unload stocks and bonds which were held as security against the loans. Thus came the stock market crash in October, 1929.
Now, where does Smoot-Hawley fit in? The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was signed by Hoover on June 17, 1930. Take note of that date. Yes, it came after the crash. The implementation of the act came as a response to conditions already in force that were contributing to the depression. The tariff act intended to help the economy, but it couldn’t stop the deflationary drop in prices caused by a lack of purchasing power, which resulted in a decline of imports and exports the world over.
What Hoover and his economic advisors didn’t understand was that all cylinders in the “engine” needed to be running.
Last thing, obvious to us all. War and debt don’t bring about economic prosperity and stability…and perhaps the most obvious thing of all…they don’t bring about peace.
” International bankers, including some in the United States, lent billions of dollars to European countries to fight World War I. One of the big ways Europe paid those loans back was to export goods to the United States, including food and manufactured products.”
The other big way was in the US acquiring assets from foreigners – e.g the British – on a monumental scale. Before WW1, South America was very much a British zone. After, it became American. A good read is “The House of Morgan” which describes what a huge financial operation it was.
The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance
I just cannot imagine today’s wealthy in the UK handing over their shares on such a massive scale to save their country. The people have changed.
Nassim,
Good call. J.P. Morgan was one of those banks that lent a lot of money to Europe.
The media at the time proclaimed how Europe needed to pay US back. What the media didn’t say was who the US was. The citizens thought that the US was the U.S., or them. The US was really the banks.
Media being in the propaganda business surely isn’t anything new.
“… currency manipulation and tariffs alone won’t bring about economic prosperity and stability….”
The pie is only so big. The pie does not grow.
Your piece of pie can only get bigger if someone else gets a smaller piece of pie.Austerity will happen at the same rate of 3-4% rise in population.
That is called zerosum.
The reverse of austerity can result if population is reduced by 3-4%.
@ aximoron
“Permaculture is a dirty word to me right now and I’m thinking poison and guns and dogs and fences and netting and ground water pumping and all that stuff that kills wildlife so that I can eat”.A pack of wolf need to kill a deer per week to survive. That requires a herd of +52 deer.
If they don’t get deer then they’ll get your domesticated animals and you will do without.
There is not enough for both.“… it’s us or them…”
Here is something interesting
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html
COUNTRY COMPARISON :: GDP – PER CAPITA (PPP)
Example:
USA $59,500
Canada $48,100This has to be adjusted by cost of living.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/comparison.jspexample:
You would need around 4,502.82$ (5,802.08C$) in Toronto to maintain the same standard of life that you can have with 7,400.00$ in New York, NY (assuming you rent in both cities). This calculation uses our Cost of Living Plus Rent Index to compare cost of living. This assumes net earnings (after income tax). You can change the amount in this calculation.Average Monthly Net Salary (After Tax)
New York 4,168.93 $
(5,371.86 C$)
Toronto 2,535.56 $
(3,267.18 C$)If your take home pay is less than what is shown, then you are in trouble if you live in those two cities.
If your income is less than the GDP (USA $59,500 Canada $48,100) then you are in trouble.
Geeee!
The majority of people are in trouble.
It’s zerosum.
It’s not news for the readers that are here.
Some people are getting a lot more than most people.Nassim – right you are about the Aboriginal people here – they certainly didn’t have pecan and walnut raining down on them from above like the Americans did. And when the Europeans arrived it just wasn’t that hard except maybe in Wyoming or the few other harsh areas which remain similarly under populated to this day.
sumac.carol – we are in a similar situation though not a hayfield but a township. I think this is our main problem – the wildlife refuge and survive in the forest – Our place and the 35 thousand acres behind us to the south – but nightly and daily come in to the town past our place for whatever picking they can get. Our chickens live in an absolute fortress which, idealistically, is all made with recycled local hardwood. And again I have had huge issue with termites eating the hardwood and have had to paint it in diesel sump oil (toxic) so it doesn’t get consumed. All the fertility we import or create here gets exported into the forest as excrement and feathers. But hey this is a finance blog and I should just get back into monetised debt based income and not bother.
I tell myself at least we have a system set up for when the shit hits the fan. But if it does I reckon I’ll be eating a lot of Kangaroo and Wallaby meat. I’ll probably set some night light grasshopper traps like they do in Africa as well for extra protein.
Crazy but Nicole and Raul have always maintained to reduce or eliminate debt and I think I should just head that way and smash out the last 30 thousand we owe and then garden after that…..Yes oxymoron we have joked about harvesting grape-fed wild turkeys. At least we know the quality of the inputs. I just read a meta study concluding that none of the scare tactics work long term including ultrasonic because the animals eventually habituate. My next thought is solar powered electric fencing that we would have to move around the orchard as various types of fruit are ripening. We did not plant in a totally mixed fruit configuration in some areas and these are really the only areas we can protect. We are in Canada and so far water issues have not been as severe for us in our region.
Certainly is a challenge. Maybe you can talk to the internet boards about how everyone is going to go farm, throw some seeds down, then sit on the porch and watch the llamas all summer. As Zimbabwe knows and South Africa is about to find out, farming is very hard, and has extreme deep knowledge skills that can only be transmitted with time. Basically, you can’t import people in to be farmer, or train them in any reasonable amount of time. Britain can’t even stop the existing farmers from getting more stupid, as they pulled out the hedgerows any 12th century peasant would know are needed, to make way for larger machinery that makes the island more dependent on imported fossil fuels. #Winning
I don’t know your predators, but we put a simple ring of 6′ wire around the tree. Problem is, grown trees need two rings of a small tree. There is a very good solar-electrified chicken mesh, a type of portable sheep fence, but gridded smaller. This has been effective against ground animals in garden and coop, but not flyers. Strangely, a single electric wire, stretched thin with few poles will stop deer, as apparently they cannot see the wire (at night) and run into it, spooking them.
For large costs, but possibly large solutions, you could try an English walled garden. More than a predator deterrent (unlike 8′ chain-link, deer will not jump where they can’t see) it creates a real microclimate of all sorts, harboring warmth, water, and focus, where over time you create the soil inside wholesale. Downside: very permanent and walls cost $6 lin ft in materials alone. Still, they last 200 years, maybe that’s good. The one thing you don’t want to hear when market food is at a 100-year low: more money.
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