The ludicrous thing was that Britain had a AAA rating in the first place.
It is four years since I started pointing out the blindlingly obvious, that quantitive easing would cause inflation and devaluation. Four years ago this blog had far fewer readers than it does now, and I am quite proud of that piece, so do read it.
At the time it was a deeply unfashionable view – in part because it was New Labour doing it, so all the BBC and Guardianista media were backing quantitive easing. Even when I wrote this two years ago:
Inflation as measured by the retail price index remains stubbornly at 5.2%, despite all the obvious deflationary pressures on the economy and continuing weak consumer demand. Strangely, the attempts to explain this being offered by media pundits all miss out quantitive easing, or to use a more old-fashioned term, printing money.
It is deeply unfashionable to hold to the view that simply to create more money reduces the value of the money already in circulation in relation to the supply of available goods; but that is what all history tells us (the benchmark example being the rampant inflation after Spanish opening up of the New World greatly increased the amount of gold coinage in circulation). Common sense tells us that too. Otherwise we could simply solve many of our problems by printing another couple of trillion pounds.
A couple of years ago, I suggested “Enough quantitive easing and we can eventually get back to stagflation”. We are just about there. Why have none of the experts noticed?
nobody much agreed.
Fashion in economics is fascinating. Now every financial pundit on the BBC and Sky has noticed that quantitive easing causes devaluation and inflation. Suddenly they have remembered that if you create a lot of something, it decreases its unit value.
Hey, but the banks have the money that was created, and bank bonuses are back to normal. So all is fine.
Well said, Craig. But the other myth that needs exploding – and which is still fashionable – is that raising government spending inevitably brings sustainable growth. As with QE, spending can be a useful kickstart in the right circumstances, but that is all, in my opinion.
“All roads, lead to Rome” History repeats, washes, rinses…..then repeats.
“[Hersh] charged that U.S. foreign policy had been hijacked by a cabal of neoconservative “crusaders” in the former vice president’s office and now in the special operations community:
That’s the attitude,” he continued. “We’re gonna change mosques into cathedrals. That’s an attitude that pervades, I’m here to say, a large percentage of the Joint Special Operations Command.”
He then alleged that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC before briefly becoming the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and his successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many within JSOC, “are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta.”
Hersh may have been referring to the Sovereign Order of Malta, a Roman Catholic organization commited [sic] to “defence [sic] of the Faith and assistance to the poor and the suffering,” according to its website.
“They do see what they’re doing — and this is not an atypical attitude among some military — it’s a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They’re protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function.”
“They have little insignias, these coins they pass among each other, which are crusader coins,” he continued. “They have insignia that reflect the whole notion that this is a culture war. … Right now, there’s a tremendous, tremendous amount of anti-Muslim feeling in the military community.””
http://whowhatwhy.com/2011/02/23/pulitzer-prize-winner-seymour-hersh-and-the-men-who-want-him-committed/
Holy Christ !……praise from Caesar.
“Galloway doesn’t talk to Israelis…”
He hasn’t said he doesn’t talk to Israelis. He said he doesn’t debate with Israelis.
Debating is George Galloway’s job, it’s what he does for a living, he is boycotting Israel.
Now, if I could only attain the heights of relentless ankle-biting; my resume would be complete.
Mevermind,
I linked a copy of “The Future of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle -An Interdisciplinary MIT Study” a few weeks ago,
http://mitei.mit.edu/publications/reports-studies/future-nuclear-fuel-cycle
I posted it mainly for Clark a few weeks ago but if anyone fancies digesting it.
They totally dismiss Thorium options as a near term option and even then they pretty much ignore Molten Salt designs completely. The amount of waste in long term storage is reduced (but not so much the actual radioactivity and heat generation of the waste). There are far more transuranic and fission products in the system than now. Just more of it is inside a reactor at criticality than outside and sub-critical as now. Decide for yourselves if that is a good thing…
They point out that the Thorium cycle apparent advantage of reducing Plutonium inventories is just swapped for an equally large amount of bomb capable U-233 cycling around the systems.
I don’t see Thorium reactors and especially MSR Thorium Reactors being widely used any time soon. Reading between the lines it seems highly likely to me that the US thorium reactor research was cancelled for very good reasons despite what the proponents say. And yes they do reply to the MIT paper but with the same old hand waving as usual once you dig down. IMHO (and that of MIT) anyway.
And I always like to remind folk that the famous “inherently safe” US Oak Ridge MSR nearly blew itself apart in a U-233 (bred from Thorium) chain reaction decades after it was shut down.
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ridgelines/nov12/msre.htm
Israel has failed for 8 years to change ‘that sort of attitude’ you so dislike in Mr. Galloway, ResDiss.
Netanyahu has failed to engage and wasted eight years to talk to the most compliant and forthcoming opponent, Mahmoud Abbas, according to his own zionist critics saying so.
Should Argentina be allowed to drill for oil near the Falklands if Syrian territory is prospected upon?
a far more interesting question unless you like to join the tabloidal jokers making much column inches of Galloway’s walk out.
“And you are very wrong on South Africa – there was plenty of dialogue at the individual level – just read Mandela’s biography.”
But our sports organisations still refused to participate in games with them. Which is more akin to what happens at a debating society, a competition, with spectators.
@ Fred :
“Debating is George Galloway’s job, it’s what he does for a living..”
But not in the House of Commons, it seems (which pays him his generous salary).
*********
I’ve now heard it all! Galloway chickens out of a debate with an Israeli and Fred says oh, this is part of the boycott of Israel (presumably the intellectual boycott). LOL
Does not George Galloway remind one of that hero from the wonderful pre-Thatcherite 1970s, the great Derek Hatton of Liverpool?
Both are sharp dressers, both are eloquent beyond one’s wildest dreams, and both are utter frauds beyond one’s wildest nightmares.
The only difference is that Hatton has been well exposed for the fraud he was; Galloway’s turn is yet to come.
*********
La vita è bella, life is good! (better than in the 1970s)
thanks, M’anon, I shall read it carefully and then ask myself why the Chinese might want to build some new MSR reactors, maybe they want to use them in other industrial recycling processes.
I should have added that the above assumes the goal is to use nuclear power to fuel the planet. If the goal is to design reactors to burn the waste and then close down one by one as nuclear power is phased out then burning waste in fast reactors does make a lot of sense.
Bottom line is barring a miracle with fusion (and Lockheed’s Skunk Works have just made an astonishing claim that they know how to do it commercially) we are stuck with making the best of a set of bad choices.
Nevermind,
One of India’s nukes was a U-233 bomb that came out of their own Thorium research. Shakti V a 0.2kt blast. That’s a low yield but they may well have planned for the low yield – either as a battlefield device or part of a fusion boosted bomb (without the boosting) or even a trigger for a full on H-Bomb. Reference: http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=VE9JTS8yMDA5LzA4LzI4I0FyMDE1MDA
As China investigates Thorium it will probably follow the US and India by exploding a Thorium bomb at some point. Thorium proponents often talk about India but never mention that they have already used some of their bred U-233 to produce a bomb.
There have virtually certainly been other U-233 tests we don’t know about.
Anon @ 4:54
Do you have a link to the Lockheed fusion reference?
A Methodist Yorkshireman got lucky with a WW2 refugee, possibly Gerald Kaufmans cousin sister in Manchester, and we have to suffer the crypto in this blog ! La vita è bollocks !
Ben,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAsRFVbcyUY
Will our Gorgeous friend be boycotting all Israeli citizens or just the Jewish people?
Maybe he could do us all a favour and start boycotting the UK.
Coming from the Dictators arselicker of choice, this takes chutzpah to new levels.
Should also point out that the Skunk Works proposal (or have they already built one for DoD?) is traditional hot fusion not Low Energy “Cold Fusion”.
The design is described as “the adjacent possible”. Hmm,. adjacent to what? 🙂
Seems to me either Skunk Works have lost the plot with or they know more than they are letting on. I wish I knew which.
Clegg will make a statement on the Rennard affair later tonight. Reminder that Rennard is a Lib Dem Friend of Israel.
Another friend of Israel and a friend of Clegg is the Indian Choudhrie. Note Clegg’s 2005 intentions for OUR NHS. He succeeded there didn’t he in aiding Cameron’s Health and Social Care Act 2012 through Parliament. Shame on him and his party.
Cross posted from Medialens.
A connection between Israeli arms exports and the privatisation of the NHS
Posted by AndrewC on February 24, 2013, 12:37 am
Arms dealing
One of the biggest donors to the Liberal Democrats is “non-dom” Indian arms dealer Sudhir Choudhrie who, together with other members of his family, has given over £1m to the party since 2004 – both directly, and through businesses they control.
Sudhir Choudhrie fled India for London as a result of an investigation by the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) into an arms deal between Israel and India. The CBI issued a warrant for his arrest and raided his offices in October 2006.
In April 2009 the Indian broadsheet newspaper Daily News and Analysis (DNA) reported that its “own investigations have shown that Choudhary (sic) and family hold a 50% stake in the Israeli defence conglomerate Mikal, which owns artillery gun-maker Soltam”.
In 2010 The Times of India reported of the Choudhries:
“Their donations [to the LibDems] escalated after 2006, when Choudhrie left India and settled in the UK after he was accused by the CBI for manipulation and bribery”
In July 2007 the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation formally asked Britain for help in their investigation into the Israeli “Barak” missile deal. Yet over four years later, Daily Mail India (28 March 2012) reported that
“CBI sources say its probe into the case has hit a roadblock and “Letters Rogatory” sent to Israel and the UK remain pending”.
Choudhrie had already returned to India the previous year, the Indian Express reported his arrival, complete with British passport, on September 28th 2011.
Arms dealer Choudhurie is back in India after CBI closes payoffs case (Oct 01, 2011)
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/arms-dealer-choudhurie-is-back-in-india-after-cbi-closes-payoffs-case/854229
On June 13, 2012 India Today reported that Choudhrie`s name had been added to the CBI`s list of dubious middlemen, known in official terminology as “undesirable contact men” (UCM). Such lists feature individuals “who are suspected to be resorting to corrupt or irregular practices in their dealings with official agencies”.
Choudhrie has been on the list before.
NHS
Alpha Health, one of the companies controlled by the Choudhries, made a donation of £100,000 to the LibDems on 03/05/2005. Less than 5 months later, Nick Clegg, then a leading candidate for party leader, made a remarkably bold statement in an interview he gave to the Independent, where he said:
“One very, very important point – I think breaking up the NHS is exactly what you do need to do to make it a more responsive service.”
Intriguingly, the interview is no longer available on the Independent`s website, neither is the accompanying article also written by Woolf, entitled “Call for break-up of NHS will anger activists”. Fortunately the interview is still available through the Internet Archive, at this webpage:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/frontbencher-calls-for-nhs-to-be-broken-up-8062257.html?origin=internalSearch
LibDem voters may have thought immediately after the 2010 election (i.e. before the Coalition with the Tories was announced) that they`d saved the NHS from what LibDem politicians had claimed only the Tories would do to it. A very different conclusion had been drawn by some of the rich backers of the LibDems.
On May 9, 2010, just 3 days after the General Election, The Mail on Sunday reported that parent company, C&C ALPHA Group, was preparing a stock market listing for its healthcare division (C&C Alpha Healthcare) for hundreds of millions of pounds.
More on the Choudhries’ involvement in the NHS can be read in the original version
http://cheltenham-gloucesteragainstcuts.org/2013/02/06/the-tax-dodging-arms-dealing-major-liberal-democrat-donor-whos-making-money-from-our-nhs/
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2013/02/fashionable-economics/#comment-395703
Don’t you dare to patronize me with your ‘deary’, you piece of slime.
Anon;
It’s a start. This is the one good thing about capitalism. Co’s such as Lockheed/Martin have the investment capital to pursue the ‘X’ project and only have to answer to the stockholders, not the politicos who have no vision, or courage. But 10 years seems too optimistic, and too late, for operational readiness.
http://www.the-weinberg-foundation.org/2013/02/15/latest-entrant-in-the-fusion-sweepstakes-lockheed-martin/
Ben,
If the presentation had been by anyone other than “senior program manager, revolutionary technology” ” at the Skunk Works I would dismiss it out of hand. As they are one of the very few organisations in the world that could potentially have black projects in this area, I am very curious. How the hell did they get into magnetic containment of fusion reactors? And with a public prototype within 5 years? That seems only possible if they already have a working demo.
Or possibly someone has slipped some acid into their coffees.
Opus Dei or Knights of Malta……same smell.
Anon; How did they get the SR-71 in 1960? The only thing I worry about is L/M’s total reliance on military applications in the past. Someone is always trying to weaponize new tech.
@ Mary :
“deary” – that was me in Michael Winner mode.
If you prefer it, I could go over into Cockney bus conductor mode and call you “ducks”.
Your choice, d****
Ben, 4.14pm and 4.30pm
Yes, I’m around. The Barrett Brown case is very interesting, and perhaps the most egregious case of all the recent ‘hactivist’ cases – mainly because the crux of what they are trying to convict him on (with their usual trick of charging a single action x12 counts bringing a potential 100-year sentence if they succeed) is something we all do on a daily basis: sharing a link. Here’s another good article on his case:
http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/why-is-barrett-brown-facing-100-years-in-jail
The WhoWhatWhy article is very good on exploring what else might be in play here: the Project PM site (recently down but people are at work rebuilding it – BarrettBrown was doing some really strong investigative digging on that site, it would be such a shame if it were lost) and particularly the HBGary hack. I’m not sure which out of those two would be seen as the greater threat by the US authorities, possibly HBGary as it was that hack which revealed that HBGary, Palantir and Berico were commissioned by the Department of Justice – via Washington law firm Hunton & Williams (thereby giving the DoJ cover by being able to utilise the attorney/client privilege of this arms-length arrangement to obvious plausible deniability advantage) – to devise their Target Wikileaks plan. IIRC, it was only the fact the meeting to ink the $megabucks deal (was it $6 million per quarter? per year? – can’t remember the figures) was still a couple of days off when the hack happened which stopped this becoming an even bigger scandal.
I’m also familiar with Seymour Hersh’s work on the links between US Army top brass and the Knights of Malta. Here’s an article slightly closer in time to the original Foreign Policy report of the Doha meeting at which Hersh first made his remarks (sorry, can’t access the FP article itself without signing up):
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/21/highranking-members-military-part-knights-malta-opus-dei-reporter-claims/
The Knights of Malta are a rather strange entity. They come up in the Cablegate releases as having received some State Dept funding (40,000 euros, I think, something like that) as an “extra-territorial, paramilitary” function of the Italian police, which doesn’t really marry up with the image of a purely pastoral charitable organisation they put out. (This is all from memory, but easily checked on cablegatesearch.org if you feel so inclined.) The Knights of Malta have a quite unique status in that they are officially a non-territorial sovereign state. The only territory they hold is a fort in the middle of Malta’s Grand Harbour and a small enclave just outside the Vatican. I can imagine the US Army finding all sorts of uses for a non-territorial sovereign state.
Ben,
I could speculate more but, in the unlikely event I got it right, they’d have to kill me 🙂
Ever hear about the “ultimate” weapons system design shown to JFK for a nuclear power space-faring battleship that could destroy the world from space? That’s what the military wanted to do with Project Orion. JFK was horrified according to reports. There’s a lot of interesting info in published details on Project Orion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29
There is some info in the now hard to get hold of book on Project Orion that, if correct, is very, very interesting and probably shouldn’t be there. Also this BBC Documentary on Project Orion at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYoLcJuBtOw for a general overview of the Project.
Anon; My speculations might bring Craig out to question my sanity. 🙂
From your Orion link; “Freeman Dyson performed the first analysis of what kinds of Orion missions were possible to reach Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to the Sun.[9] His 1968 paper “Interstellar Transport”[10] (Physics Today, October 1968, p. 41–45) retained the concept of large nuclear explosions but Dyson moved away from the use of fission bombs and considered the use of one megaton deuterium fusion explosions instead. His conclusions were simple: the debris velocity of fusion explosions was probably in the 3000–30,000 km/s range and the reflecting geometry of Orion’s hemispherical pusher plate would reduce that range to 750–15,000 km/s.[11]”
As i was reading the incredible stats on thrust, I was thinking about space travel, and then this graf popped up. Could the fusion research they are conducting resemble any form of Quantum Leap, which I have viewed with the same skepticism as Hermetics and the philosopher’s stone?
As I understand QL, whether spiritual or technological, it seems to occur on the precipice of disaster, and the fusion research seems to come at a precipitous time. Too late?
Hi Arbed;
Any thoughts about connection between KoM and Knights Templar? Malta was their base.
Ben,
Ever read any Robert Anton Wilson? Or genius physicist David Bohm’s “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”?
That there is more to the Universe than we understand is one of the few things that keeps me going.