Bob Green Innes,


curmudgeon

Hamiltonian by birth & occupation!  

.... seeking to restore values, traditions, institutions, laws and protections Canadians once enjoyed
      .....lost by apathy
          ..... but stolen nonetheless



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TAGS

FCP, CAP, Election 2011

Bank of Canada (BOC)

Money - create, inflate, deflate, banks

Fluoridation

LRT 1ST, Latest

Stadium, Ti-Cats, Pan-Am

student debt, OSAP

Light bulbs, ban

Green

Other

If you're too rushed to read, just click the LISTEN button.

Commentary on the ongoing trainwreck Sept 29, 2011

The inflation lie has gone on for so long that I'm wondering when folks are going to wake up to a consequent truth - long term recession. Charts showing recession usually show short recessions every couple of years but it has to be that if GDP is inflated by false inflation numbers, then recessions are much longer and more continuous. If the final blowoff reveals gold to be true money, and gold has appreciated at about 18% per year since 2000, then recession will be said to be continuous. This jives with the fact that real wages have been flat or falling for a few decades - probably a much better indicator of recession. The globalist media have hidden this from us to ensure compliance. USA Watchdog is being added to my watch list. The link points to the article that inspired this thought. Last year I told you about our roofy garden. Now we're harvesting delicious eggplant, cucumbers, bitter melon and an interesting Korean veggie, called perilla, sometimes mistaken for sesame.


Blog - day 2. Detour

Were you looking for something related to my recent bid for trustee? Click here for post mortem, links, thoughts, even some updates. . There's no such thing as a finished topic or a last thought in politics.

Oct 28, 2010. Today I detour into economic matters

I had intended to delve into my computer shenanigans but my morning readings took over leading to a need to expand or explain further my polemic on the ongoing economic train wreck. I want to post some great info and my thoughts on how to interpret the various pundits cheerleading for various sides. My hope is to help folks avoid the worst of the nightmare that lies ahead.

One of the blogs I follow mentioned an article in the Globe and Mail by John Reynolds describing how the financial situation in the US is far worse than we are being told. True, but one has to be a little careful since Reynolds, for all his good research, is somewhat of a neo-con. Please have a look.

I wont argue that the situation is not grim, just that the numbers he mentions point you in one direction (cut entitlements) without giving you any idea that there are other choices you as a citizen should contemplate before you decide which you prefer.

Have you figured out what those choices are and what Reynolds did to make it appear as case-closed? One of the reasons I prefer blogs over newspapers is that one can understand the weakness of an argument much more quickly. Have a look at the comments. The Globe helps by putting good comments first - your wise shepherds. You can see that there are many nuances to be thought about before you make up your mind. Reynolds used the certainty of an accounting phrase "unfunded liabilities" to rope us in. We should realize from Enron how um, 'creative' accounting can be. Unfunded liabilities are future payments on present services such as welfare, health care, etc. There is nothing certain about future promises. The monstrous debt he mentions assumes that the liabilities cannot change with the implication that taxes must double. He did not differentiate between cutting other services such as the US military or cutting spending (without cutting services), and he did not go into other options such as devaluation, currency manipulation, default, etc. The consequences vary so we do have choices. Do not confuse spending and services - the difference is one crucial word - wages. Now that is a sacred cow, eh?

Recap:

  • cut services - social, health, education or military. Britain just embarked on this path.
  • cut wages, the sacred cow, raise retirement age, cut pensions
  • default = repudiation of debt held by ??? you? China?
  • devaluation = severe inflation relative to products from China
  • Canada can sink our dollar with the US per option 4 or kiss our manufacturing goodbye.

So do you want to see your fixed spending power evaporate via inflation or would you prefer to maintain your spending power at the cost of everyone around you being thrown out of work as in the Depression? Cuts don't sound so bad eh? Boomers might be a tad worried about their pensions which rest on the economy and share prices and for CPP, on government viability per the above. Cutting wages sounds like the best bet but oooo, who is ready for a massive strike action, French style??? I hope that is a no-brainer.

There is more to this crisis than bloated gummerment budgets. That is just the easiest, most basic thing to fix. There are two other immediate problems: overhang of derivatives and a financial system that lost its moorings placed after the great Depression.

I'm no expert on derivatives but briefly, they are something like insurance policies, except instead of insuring your house, they insure financial products, transactions based on other financial conditions. Hedging, and products that guarantee your capital back are all derivatives. The sky is the limit, only imagination and writers I follow opine that the sums of derivatives written is orders of magnitude bigger than the entire world economy! Buffett called them financial weapons of mass destruction. Then he bought some! So much for honesty. The problem is that derivatives are like a house of cards - let one crucial card fall down and the whole thing collapses. Part of the problem too is these things were unregulated so nobody really knows how much there is - or how to manage it. Think of your house - you probably have title insurance (another hot topic I will blog about). This is supposed to protect you against problems and theft of title. But how big is the company that guarantees you can sleep at night? What if some entity orchestrates a massive theft job on all of a company's customers? The company goes down, no one is protected. This is farfetched? What is your peace of mind worth? I'll leave it at that.

With regard to fixing the financial system, the economist mentioned, Laurence Kotlikoff, appears to be pushing (besides his new book!) an idea he calls Limited Purpose Banking. This sounds to me like a regurgitation of the old Glass Steagal Act passed in the 30s to separate lending retail banks that we use from investment banks such as the dreaded Goldman Sachs. Beware anyone contaminated by Goldman Sachs. They teach particularly evil forms of anticipatory manipulation based on their deep understanding that our money is their plaything, not our utility. There is no sacred trust with the people, who gave banks their privileges. Well, if Kotlikoff can make a buck, that's ok, especially if he gains some traction in pushing back against the banks.

My own sense is to ask why not just bring back the law that FDR passed to corral the banks in the first place? The Glass Steagall act that was gutted by presidents of both persuasions. That's what I want to know. Why reinvent the wheel? I listened to FDR the other day - he was viciously anti-bankster, nothing like Obama, who bows to Arabs and banksters alike. Or was that Bush? Well, no matter, those two are the same - despite what many believe. So will idiot Republicans roar ahead in Nov 2? Or will idiot Democrats hold the line? A pox on both their houses. America will not be fixed until a new party emerges to change the rules, i hope, probably in vain. Rigid thinking will ruin America.

All this applies to Canada with the caveat mentioned above. Divide the numbers by 10. Replace FDR who chained the banks with Mackenzie-King who made banks subservient to his new invention, the Bank of Canada. Change Nixon, who abolished the gold standard, to Trudeau who gave the people's BOC to the G7 in return for a nice title - chair, Club of Rome. Maybe, I'll get into that another day. Thanks Pierre. Enjoy your undeserved reputation - it won't last much longer.

As a result of reading Reynold's article and comments, I added a peak oil link and an economist link to my bookmarks. Hooray for online. I do wonder how traditional news media will ever survive but I'm going on the proposition that advertising pays writers' wages and distribution is almost free.

PS. Wow, those beans & kohlrabi were delicious yesterday. Talk about fresh. I'm still working on the forms code to allow comments. Well, not so much working as just downloading and changing a few filenames, etc.

Stay tuned.

Coming up - something on LRT, streetcars and buses. The view from the moon.

Bob Green I

Have Your Say




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Recent Blogs

Re - recent bid for trustee

Coming Up

    MyStoneyCreek asks pertinent questions - i'd better explain myself - if that is possible!

    Solar energy vs the last of the PIIGS vs local efforts

    Banking, money risks, a modest proposal

    Reflections on a Greek phrase

    Forcing my mind to grapple further with that pesky smart meter thing. I'd hate to be a party pooper when it comes to the good intent of the smart meter - BUT.........

    So much to mention - GMO foods, fluoridation, dogcast listening, Puppy - maybe I'll put up a sort of note space for miscellaneous

    Ongoing economic meltdown - two threads: Hamilton's unique problems and the more general economic melting down of the US. Four Horsemen.

    Global warming questions and myths. I'll borrow this for now.

    Eventually, thoughts on the deeper questions that vex our world.


Favs & Locals

Bob's BlogLog

    This website is finally getting to be something organized. Alas, just as it's getting into full swing, it's getting full! I'll be keeping this site alive for various purposes, but I'll be more or less migrating to my page at Hubpages.com, probably with a trailer here.

    In case you had some difficulty with broken links, please be patient. I'm just changing files over to php so if something doesn't work, try changing the extension from .html to .php. PHP cuts the storage requirements and facilitates the updating of anciliary sections like this one. Master files are used that are pulled into every page (links, header, footer, favs, breviations, etc). For anyone interested, the clever command that is used for this is 'include', the syntax for which can be found on the net. Very cool, no?

    Most blogs are based on simple table layouts - two or three column using a markup language. The professional sites have sophisticated coding in many languages to provide many features such as automatic archiving, variable text size and the like. We shall see what the future brings but for now I'm just enjoying using HTML and a smidgeon of others such as PHP, javascript. CSS looked interesting too but with the above php setup, looks to be unneeded. Debugging is not my strong suit but this page is nothing like the old basic programs that once drove me nuts.
    Next: I'll also be starting to group blogs on the same page - why not - saves storage space too. New table for miscellaneous??? (For now, I'll just stick odd stuff below.) Eventually I may get code to improve the comment section but in the meantime, i found an online forum site which makes things easy and fast. First though is to bring some order to the numbering system which right now is conflicted between normal chronological postings, logical pointing system, and page groupings in reverse chronological.

    Also need to ensure font is not too small on newer hi res screens. Please use your browsers zoom feature as needed - or complain!

    As you can see, Netfirms is hosting this site. My frugal buddy Johnny suggested it as the most economical site for a modest blogger. The two domains and the two sites cost about a case of beer per year which i guess is justified. There is limited storage and limited bandwidth but that's ok for now. They offer pagemaking services but being a control freak, I prefer to stick to my own understandable system. Hope you enjoy.

Bob's 'Breviations

  • LRT - Light Rapid Transit
  • MSM - Main Stream Media
  • k, Mn, Bn, Tn - thousand, Million, Billion, Trillion Dollars
  • GMO - Genetically Modified Organism Foods
  • PIIGS - Portugal, Iceland, Ireland, (Italy?) Greece, Spain,
  • OSAP - Ontario Student Assistance Program.
  • RAP - Repayment Assistance Plan
  • CSLP - Cdn Student Loan Program
  • Cdn, US, Aus, GB, Fr, Ont, PQ - Places abbreviated
  • F - fluorine or, because I'm lazy, fluoride, fluoridated water

Pet Peeves

      * gummerment overspending
      * what we're doing to our political and educational systems -

      * banksterism.

      * political correctness (equity policies) along with

      * MSM - mainstream media, especially the Spectator, our local rag

      * human rights commissions and their guilty-until-proven-innocent destruction of our ancient rights. Soon to get worse.

      * Overmedication in our society - this link relates to kids ADD, ADHD

      * Rigid thinking, dismissiveness, judgementalism, The Spectator

      * legal liability issues - playgrounds, bake sales gone. This is stupid (corporatism).

      * senior (upper levels of ) gummerment funding - distorts and deflects responsibility

      * Public sector unions

      * credentialism

      * a little rant on mailboxes!

      * spelling in the English language. The real culprit is Johnson and his dictionary that picked words before they ripened!

      * apathetic people. Plato said 'Your silence gives your consent'

      * aphids, Torx screwdrivers, proprietary parts, the great Eyeglass ripoff





    * retired Professional Engineer, married, father of 2 including one still in the system.

    * pursuing many interests - partial list below

    * small-c conservative (but not a Harper PC - that's the party of big business!)

    * investigating causes of economic problems, finding troubling trends and possibilities

    * Former candidate, Hamilton East Stoney Creek, FCP, Public System Trustee, Ward 4

Links to other Interests.

Requests.

For other items or requests, please feel free to email me. Sorry for the spambot-fighting inconvenience but I've learned not to provide the normal link or the inbox becomes clogged or breaks down completely. Please paste the following then remove the spaces and add the usual symbols where noted:

r o b e r t i n n e s (at sign) r o b e r t i n n e s (dot) c a.

Alternatively, Click here to bring up your email window - but you'll have to change the fake address!

Thanks

 
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