Nassim
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James,
I am reading the translation of a Swedish book “Let the Right one” about a boy of 15 who falls in love with a vampire who is 12 years old (or 200, take your pick).
I learnt an awful lot about vampires and of how people who have been bitten, and survived the experience, go on to become vampires and zombies themselves. All almost quite new to me. Quite enthralling stuff.
Your reflections on life as a “Cassandra” have a lot in common with life as a vampire. People are afraid that you might “infect” them and that it will bring permanent bad luck to their household if they should become like you. Quite understandable really. 🙂
I note that there have been over 60,000 “views” of this article. Quite remarkable. Congratulations Nicole. 🙂
Here, in Victoria, Australia, quite a lot of PV installations have gone in – despite the feed-in tariff dropping from 60 to 8 cents per KWh.
“Rising cost prompts solar purchase”
https://www.theage.com.au/business/carbon-economy/rising-cost-prompts-solar-purchase-20130404-2h9oh.htmlPart of the reason for this enthusiasm is because mains electricity has gone up enormously in price – because of the closure of coal-fired plants and the cost-plus investment in network improvements. The power companies are making a mint out of all these changes.
“Electricity bills to increase 14 per cent”
https://www.theage.com.au/victoria/electricity-bills-to-increase-14-per-cent-20130322-2gk94.html
Despite all these gung ho articles, PV only represents some 2% of total power generation on a really hot day – when its performance is at its best. You have to do your own research because this journalist is hiding it in the totals for “renewable energy”
“Coal-fired power drops despite heatwave”
“Solar power in Australia”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Australia
Sadly, Stoneleigh is correct
Thank you for all this information. It has always been pretty obvious to me – without having seen the data. The major beneficiaries of this arrangement have always been the politicians – just like with laws against narcotics – and it is they who have made it so difficult to access the data in the first place.
The USA makes a big deal out of Switzerland while condoning practises being carried out in places like Delaware – which have precisely the same objectives. Actually, it appears to me that the reason Switzerland was targeted was because it was a threat to Delaware. There is massive money-laundering, tax avoidance and so on going on within the USA, the UK and so on.
Here, in Australian, politicians are targeting peoples’ pensions to fund their spending. A lot of nonsense is written in the papers about “high earners” getting “tax concessions”. It does not take a genius to realise that the serious money is not in pension funds – it is in trusts and offshore.
re: capital controls
I was brought up – like many people – in an environment of capital controls/ currency controls/ exit-visas/ extreme nationalism/ paranoia and so on.
I think that capital controls are going to be very difficult to implement these days – unless international trade and travel become tiny like in the 1950’s.
Let me give you a simple example. Some Cypriots/Brits may find it easy to let holiday homes to foreigners in return for money out of the country. Of course, there are many variations on this theme. The only thing one can be sure of is that such a society will rapidly degenerate into a police-state.
Sounds good. 🙂
Actually, it is very sound advice. I never have borrowed and on the very few occasions I did “lend” money it led to those borrowers no longer wanting to know me. I guess they think I will ask for it back thirty plus years later.
While I entirely agree with Skip that events in Cyprus are catastrophically deflationary, I think that the loss of confidence in bank deposits everywhere may lead to different – perhaps surprising – results.
If Cyprus had its own currency, the politicians would have chosen to turn on the printers in order to get rid of these debts and reduce the value of the currency. That would have probably led to hyperinflation – in Cyprus – and people would have been getting out of the “Cypriot Pound” and into other currencies as quickly as they could – leading to a high velocity of money. In terms of a stable currency (or gold), the price of Cypriot property would have crashed in either case.
While the fate of Cyprus is a forgone conclusion – until they get out of the Euro – I think that one would be wise to keep tabs on what is happening elsewhere. Not so long ago, it would have been almost inconceivable for deposits to be stolen from banks in the EU. I guess rules of the game have changed.
skip,
Everything you said about capital controls suggests that physical gold has an advantage over deposits in a bank.
There is no earthly way they can stop rich Cypriots who happen to have many kilos in gold from moving this stuff to places like Beirut or Turkey or Northern Cyprus.
I guess the way to find out what is really going on is to keep an eye on the local price of gold in Cyprus. When it becomes much more expensive than it should be, it would indicate that the stuff is quitting the island at a rate of knots.
Capital controls can work quite well in places like the old Soviet Union, but not in an island nation that is – nominally – part of the EU and EZ. The whole thing is a boondoggle, IMHO. A quite untenable proposition.
Like alan, I think that it can go either way. We shall see.
P01,
Hold no deposits is even better advice than “hold no debt”
Cyprus Finance Minister: Uninsured Laiki Depositors Could Face 80% Haircut.
Asked if, like in other bank closures, it could take six to seven years before depositors get back there money, he said: “maybe yes. And the amount [returned], could be 20%. Certainly, for depositors above 100,000 euros it could be a very significant blow.”
skip,
I think you will find that people who keep some of their wealth in gold do so not because they think that it is a great investment. They do so because they know that it will always be worth something – even when the disk drives have been reformatted.
In another age, Napoleon was – for excellent reasons – considered to be the Antichrist (like Hitler). He was an amazing individual with heaps of bravado and good luck to start with. He also had an excellent understanding of the superiority of canon over infantry and cavalry.
However, he did not have a clue as to how to create wealth – only how to rob others or to borrow it. In many ways, he was the personification of the modern American/Australian/Brit/Canadian etc.
He left France’s middle-classes entirely bankrupt – they lost all their savings and capital. Later, to try to encourage people to save again and to use their savings in industry and commerce, the French created the Caisse des dépôts et consignations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caisse_des_d%C3%A9p%C3%B4ts_et_consignations
This organisation has a very special legal status in France – to try to protect it from predatory politicians. I spent some time with them a long while ago working on their software. They were very proud of having made it very difficult for the Germans to remove France’s capital during WW2. Their accounts and shareholdings are a labyrinth of complexity. The listing of their holdings was a computer printout around around 15cm high. Of course, I doubt if the recent crop of French politicians have not managed to “fix” it in some way. They had much more time than the Germans to do so and they could appeal to the “national interest”
I can’t help wondering why Berezovsky chose this moment to disappear from the stage and whether this was an assisted disappearance.
In any event, I don’t think Putin did it as Berezovsky was a spent force in Russia. At one time, he more or less bought up their parliament – but that was a long time ago.
I would not put it past the British – but they prefer do do this things on foreign soil. What can be more convenient than for the mother of the future king – who had an Egyptian lover – to have a car accident abroad and disappear. I am sure the French demand these sorts of quid pro quo, when they have a similar need. Security services are really legalised gangsters.
A long while ago, I thought that someone ought to think of a way where people can swap murders – A kills X for B, and in return B kills Y for A. The job of the police would be quite impossible if A does not have any link to X and B does not have any link to Y. It would make a good screen-play, IMHO.
I just happen to like home grown tomatos.
The tomatoes – as you well know – were just an example of the dislocation of that society. A dislocation not unconnected to having joined the EU and the EZ.
When I was studying civil-engineering in London in ’68-’71, I had a friend from Cyprus – it was one country at that time. He used to tell us about how “backward” the “peasants” on his island were. For example, he mentioned that in the villages the women washed the reusable condoms and hung them on their wash-lines to dry in the sun. I bet that trick does not have a place in the TAE’s Primers. 🙂
By the way, he vanished shortly after the Turkish army invaded Cyprus. His home town was Famagusta and it is now in the Turkish zone. I made enquiries recently and I guess he was one of the many victims.
In 2009, I went to the South of France on holiday with my family. I wanted the kids to see the place before we moved to Australia. I found they were selling grapes in the supermarkets at 5 Euros/kilo – during the month of September. Amazing. Nearby, there were vineyards and the as yet unharvested grapes were rotting and falling in bunches on the ground.
This is what I mean by dislocation. There are tax and administrative reasons why this is happening. It is a direct consequence of governmental meddling in the marketplace. The EU has a battery of laws which prevent people from carrying on activities that they were doing from Roman times. Cyprus suffers from the same malaise.
The main benefit will be Greece who will not need to pay back the money lent to them by the Cyprus banks who have gone bankrupt.
jal,
When a concern goes bankrupt, the debt of others to this concern do not disappear!
The debts now belong to the creditors of that bankrupt concern – its depositors in the case of a bank. It does not mean that they will eventually get it (except in the best-case scenario), only that the debt is still there and has not disappeared.
To give you a further idea of how f***ed up the Cyprus economy has become since joining the EU, the elderly lady I mentioned above cannot find tomatoes for less than 3 Euros per kilo. I hardly need mention that Cyprus offers an ideal climate for growing tomatoes and there are plenty of people with time on their hands.
IMHO, they would be better off leaving the EZ. Obviously, it would accelerate the departure of the Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, Irish, French and so on. The Germans would find it really hard selling their BMW’s to Southern Europe and real competition would ensue.
I ask how innocent are the savers?
It’s funny how the savers always get it in the butt. First, we have ZIRP (Zero Rate Interest Policy] combined with false price inflation statistics – i.e. negative real interest rates over a period of many years. Now, their deposits are being raided.
I do so wish that the big borrowers were subject to the following:
1- A real rate of interest
2- No tax concessions for borrowingThe sad truth is that many savers are old and cannot work. It is money that they put aside after paying their taxes. Borrowers tend to be a lot younger and smarter. It used to be advised to “save for your retirement”
The ageing widowed mother of a Greek-Cypriot friend of mine has already had her pension reduced, and now this.
Frankly, your attitude and ethics quite disgust me. They are a reflection of the times, I guess
I think a lot of people have been sucked in by all this “mafia” talk. The fact is that the biggest mafias of them all are at the City of London and Wall Street. The big drug money is all laundered through large “respectable” banks – not though Cypriot banks.
If you go into Google and type “fined for money laundering”, it will come up with the following suggestions:
Wachovia
HSBC
ING
Coutts
RBS
Barclays
Lloyds
Wells Fargo
Standard CharteredIf the list is heavily weighted with British concerns it is simply because the Americans prefer to fine them than to fine their own. It is really just a form of tax – a business expense – to the banks.
Seriously wealthy Russians keep their accounts offshore UK – that is what the City excels at doing – or in places like Lichtenstein. Israel is another favourite as 70% of the really big oligarchs happen to be Jewish. The phrase “Russian mafia” is often used because “Jewish mafia” would upset some people. Just check out some of these guys and you will see what I mean:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_oligarchs
Cyprus is for ordinary middle-class Russians who have already seen their savings wiped out once – in 1998. I suspect a lot of them will be moving their money either back to Russia or to Asia. They will give the West a miss.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Russian_financial_crisis
This particularly obnoxious mafia spin has been very successful at stopping people from asking the correct questions.
I have a 22 year old son who lives in Norway. He is also a student – about to start medicine. He finds everything you mentioned “depressing” and refuses to read articles about it or to listen to me pontifying about it.
His philosophy is that since there is nothing he can personally do about it, why worry? Perhaps he has a point. I don’t know.
I was in Los Angeles in the summer of 1970 and I well remember the people in the street who were buttonholing passersby to tell them all about how the Federal deficits were going to sink the country – the Vietnam War was expensive. Petrol was around 27 cents/US gallon at the time and the trial of Charles Manson was ongoing – many young people thought he was a hero because he was smashing up conventions and helping bring down the “system”
I think it is very easy to predict the eventual breakup of an empire, but the timing can be decades out. I mean, even the British seem to have developed a taste for empire-building once again. I think Germany has a better immunity against these delusions than lots of other places.
I wish I could be more constructive.
Pipefit,
It has always been my contention that when women have few babies – let’s face it, they make the decision – it is a sign of declining expectations. The fact that this decline – in native European women – has been so great over the past few decades is highly significant, IMHO.
In the UK, the fertility of native-born women is significantly less than that of other women (1.89 versus 2.28)
Dramatic differences can be found between Polish women in Poland and those who have moved to the UK – 1.23 versus 2.48
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1366063/Polish-population-growing-faster-UK-Poland.html
Personally, I think the rich should be encouraged to have more kids. The current system tries, inadvertently, to encourage the poor to have more. They should also be encouraged to marry the not-so-rich. I mean, the big landowners in the UK only hung onto these phenomenal properties by giving it all to their first-born son and by only marrying others in a similar situation. That very limited gene pool has resulted in some of them looking like equines.
https://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120721090756AAdSjt0
pipefit,
The fertility (babies per woman) in Japan is 1.27 while it is (drumbeat) 1.41 in Spain. Not a huge difference when 2.2 is the natural replacement rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_fertility_rate
Mark,
I fully sympathise with you. You would have clearly done very well had you sold your Spanish property a while back.
I also agree that property quality in Spain – on modern properties – is no different from elsewhere. Older buildings in good parts of Madrid are very similar to Parisian properties from that age and are of a superior quality to London properties from a similar epoch. Furthermore, the benign climate keeps things together for much longer than in places like Ireland and the Netherlands.
My first encounter with Spanish property speculation was back in 1964. I had a schoolmate whose dad was building holiday homes in Spain. He must have become very wealthy as his timing was impeccable, or maybe too early. My parents lived in Spain 1965-70 and they considered property expensive at that time. They could have bought a villa in a place like Sitges for what was almost pocket money to them at that time. It just goes to show how difficult it is to tell what is really going on when one is actually in it. A little distance gives better perspective, IMHO.
I personally think that property prices pretty well everywhere are going to go down to what people can pay cash for. That is the way it was historically and it is obvious that the banks are all going to be put through the wringer and hung out to dry – eventually.
Here are Grillo’s thoughts on money and gold. Well-worth watching. 🙂
“Our Money Is A Joke”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dEemZ2pVyosid,
Here is another interesting article, this time by the FT
But I found myself puzzled that these self-styled Masters of the Junior-verse were hell-bent on home ownership, ready to spend every penny they had – and more – on something that may yield no financial reward and which they will probably have to soon abandon when dispatched to make money in some distant corner of the non-economically paralysed world.
Even among these sharpies, owning is still, in spite of all the difficulties of getting on the ladder – mortgage requirements for first-time buyers are at their highest level for generations – the only game in town.
https://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/68441d74-7ffe-11e2-af49-00144feabdc0.html
It seems to me that lots of young people in London seem to be very keen to become debt-slaves – despite all the warning signs over the past 5 years. Intriguing!
I checked out Lindsey Williams on the Wikipedia. It would seem that his profile has been thoroughly ruined. I wonder why? 🙂
23 years ago, just before the birth of my first child, I took out a life insurance policy with Norwich Union. I had a background in statistics and maths and, should I have wished to become an actuary, would have been exempt from the first part of the exams to join their Institute. It seemed to me a ridiculously good deal – too good to be true in retrospect. Furthermore, the company was a mutual – owned by policy holders – so I thought that they are unlikely to be too mercenary. They assured me that I would be able to renew this policy after 10 years – after making an “inflation” adjustment. In the event of my death, a big lump would end up with my hypothetical kids and trust was formed for it and so on. In sum, I thought I had worked out all the nooks and crannies of the deal.
After 7 years, Norwich Union ceased being a mutual and since I did not own the “right” sort of policy, I did not get free shares in it or anything of the sort. The company it merged with was CGU – which was in turn a merger of General Accident plus a few others. I had a long-standing feud with General Accident as I had once been hit – I was on a motorbike – by a van driven by one of their policy holders and they had threatened to take me to court for “compensation.” Obviously, I was not very happy with that, but I could do nothing about it.
After 10 years, they offered to renew my policy after increasing the premiums to 5 times their former level – official inflation was way below that figure – while not changing the payout. The people I had been dealing with had been replaced by a new set – in the UK, not Scotland. Of course, I did not renew the policy – having sunk £20,000 into the first 10 years.
The – expensive – lessons I learnt from this experience were never to buy a policy that runs for longer than 12 months, and that if something is too good to be true then it is too good to be true.
Sadly, Berlusconi is correct. The real problem is that he is saying the truth. He is nothing if not a realist – within the Italian context. I am not in any way supporting him, I am simply saying that he is stating the obvious – not just in Italy.
What do you think lobbyists and PR people do? I mean, if you get someone re-elected by manipulating the media that is just as good as giving him/her a suitcase full of cash. Indeed, it is even better since it is quite legal.
Of course, Berulsconi owns or controls much of the media, so he does not need the help of PR people – he cut out a big swathe of middlemen. Maybe that is why so many of them don’t like him.
It might be worth mentioning here that when he started his TV empire he had to rush tapes around Italy to be able to simultaneously broadcast them locally – since he was not allowed to have a national network. He improvised and later changed the rules in his favour.
Dave,
I put your link in a comment on FT.com – you may get some new visitors:
https://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/bc55e40a-767c-11e2-ac91-00144feabdc0.html
One of the more obvious applications of the internet is in local democracy. It is quite stunning how none of the established politicians proposes direct voting on local concerns – by local people.
Clearly, the middleman in politics should be cut out. Switzerland is a good example – wealthy, educated people living in a resource-poor society, but in peace.
This article has since appeared in my local paper:
“Ratzinger was behind great Catholic cover-up”
https://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/ratzinger-was-behind-great-catholic-coverup-20130212-2e9jb.htmlNow that I have had a little time to think about it, I am beginning to wonder whether it has anything to do with MontePaschi. The point is that Italian politics, the catholic church, big business and mafia have a good deal of overlap.
https://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324906004578291813964318642.html
Let’s not forget what happened to “God’s banker” in London in 1982:
I suspect the child abuse scandals are catching up with the person who was running the Vatican’s internal “police” for 24 years before becoming pope.
Here, in Victoria, Australia, at least 50 boys who were abused went on to commit suicide later on in life.
https://www.theage.com.au/victoria/churchs-suicide-victims-20120412-1wwox.html
When I think that I – as a 10 year old – spent some months in a Brothers school in Northern Ireland, I get the shivers.
Good luck with your surgery.
I hope to get something done about my knee before it all unwinds – a very long waiting list.:)
Here is a piece of news from the Figaro which does not seem to have gone international:
Essentially, a group of young French/North Africans from Marseilles stopped a high-speed train and tried to rob it. They were chased off by the police.
Google’s translation was so bad that I reworded it:
Twenty youths forced a TGV to stop on Saturday when it was returning from Marseilles to Nice and attempted to board before taking flight on the arrival of the police.
It had left the Saint-Charles station in Marseille a little after 14 pm when the driver was forced to stop by torches placed on the line in the district of La Pomme.
“These red flame torches are security tools that is commonly used to indicate a big problem and in this case the drivers are instructed to stop,” said a spokesman for the regional management of the SNCF Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur.
Some damage
The police were alerted immediately and the attackers fled on foot. Five of them were arrested. The train, whose doors remained locked, suffered minor damage and left shortly before 16 hours, according to these sources.
Nine young people from a city in the 11th arrondissement of the city were arrested and placed in custody at the Police department.
“We went back to the time of attacks on stagecoaches, it is full Wild West … We’ve had attacks in Marseille freight trains in the northern suburbs, and assault regular controllers now was taken a step further with this unconventional attack. Pending understand the motivations of those thugs a city that more sensitive (classified Priority Security Zone, ed.), we welcome the swift action of our colleagues who acted to preserve the safety of passengers and who put themselves in danger, “said David-Olivier Reverdy, Deputy Secretary zonal police union Alliance.
It is pretty obvious to me that this can only escalate with copy-cat activities by others around France. The gulf between the passengers on these luxurious trains and the people who live near the tracks is growing too large. It is one thing defending airports, but defending a railway line is a lot more difficult.
Sid,
I am not really interested in discussing public schools – I am simply using the fees as historical data points. They have good and bad points, are pretty different from one another and they change over time so I am unqualified to comment about their latest incarnations.
The website https://www.measuringworth.com suggests that in 1955 average nominal annual earnings were £434 and that that was equivalent to £8,887 in 2010.
Personally, I think that was probably equivalent to twice that value at least if the RPI was honest. I mean, people actually used to save money. Sure, their houses were tiny and cold, but that is the way it is in many modern houses. OK, they only had black and white TV and one or two channels, but so what. Few drove, but they were not fat. I could go on in that line …
I don’t really know why these estate agents fudged the numbers. I don’t think it is a conspiracy – more a case of bad maths. I studied maths at a 3rd world school and didn’t need to learn anything in that line between the ages of 12 and 16 when I moved to the UK.
It always amazes me how price inflation destroys peoples’ ability to think rationally. I gave some gold coins 3 years ago to my grown-up boy. Today, I told him that they had gone up in value by 30% in terms of US dollars. He quickly said that a 30% profit was great. I tried to explain to him that since inflation is really around 10% per annum they had not generated any profit, but had not made a loss either. He shook his head and said that he could not really understand what I was getting at. He gets upset and confused when I offer any of the nuggets that I glean from this website. 🙂
I have just read this excellent report by Tim Morgan of Tullett Prebon
“perfect storm – energy, finance and the end of growth”
https://www.tullettprebon.com/Documents/strategyinsights/TPSI_009_Perfect_Storm_009.pdf
It explains in great detail how the figures for GDP – in the USA and elsewhere – are largely bogus.
It is a great – and very depressing – read. Much in common with TAE, sadly. 🙁
He does not dwell so much on the crash of credit – and gives a bit more weight to EROEI
Hi Sid,
While I entirely agree with your sentiments, I think some of your data went astray. 🙂
Your 1950’s diagram made the following points:
Income per year – £8,896
House price – £2,000Well, I went to an expensive public school (one of the top ten) and the fee was £692 per year in 1964. It is now almost £30,000 per year. An income of £8,896 would have allowed Mr average to send 10 kids to such a school!
Let me give you another example. When I graduated as a civil engineer in 1971, my salary was £1,500 per year. I suspect the figure for income given above should be divided by 10 – £889.6
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1270527/Stowe-School-Two-boys-arrested-knife-attack.html
My children seem to do a lot of their more serious learning at home – although they attend full-time schools. All the basics of alphabet, reading, maths and so on were acquired initially at home – although they go to “good” schools. The twelve year old had a tutor recently for two hours each week and passed entry tests to a selective-entry school. It would not have happened without one-to-one tuition.
I can’t help thinking that schooling is not really geared to teaching – more towards instilling values. Indoctrination, if you prefer.
