Vasta Carthaginiensibus

Fabius Maximus was the Roman General, Consul, Leader, and Statesman, who ended his speeches in the Senate with the phrase 'Vasta Carthaginiensibus.' Carthage must be destroyed.

History records Quintus Fabius Maximus as having been known as 'Cunctator' – 'The Delayer.'

I think he might just as easily have been known as the dripping tap. He was not politically well-supported until he was eventually proven correct in his outlook and his words which had all along been just like a dripping tap, drip drip dripping into the ears and minds of everyone, were accepted and his ideas adopted by the public in ancient Rome.

Fabius Maximus

Fabius Maximus delayed engaging Hannibal as he crossed the Alps.

The greatest problem of the Western world today is not Hannibal (nor is it the Rise of Islam, fundamentalist or otherwise), but the failure of anyone to come up with any kind of policy that can engender economic growth.

Yet, we have had short term growth from time to time in the form of real estate bubbles, and also stock market valuations bubbles before that, and now we have an enormous issuance of money via the US Federal Reserve Bank, which is a kind of a prices-and-values deflating currency bubble that keeps interest rates seemingly, down.

Economic growth can only occur in a way that doesn't terminate in calamity, when tax receipts are matching the government's own demand to spend debt. Real estate is not a good way to engage the taxing power of government because real estate turns over insufficiently quickly to create enough taxing opportunities. At the same time, commercial banks appear to only know how to lend to real estate collateral and they of course are legally permitted to create credit and thereby money, inside a ratio related to the Federal Reserve's total currency issuance. This lawful creation of money falls inside the Money Multiplier principle and is quite a legitimate thing. But, it ceases to be functional or legitimate when the creation of credit by commercial banks ONLY happens through real estate. And, in these circumstances the banks can appear to have a lot of moral credibility because they can establish quite healthy reserves and thereby claim to be acting 'responsibly.'

In other words there is a clear dichotomy between the political needs of elected governments of all persuasions (and therefore the economic requirements of society at large), and the commercially easy road for commercial banks.

THE SOLUTION

The solution is to force the lending by 'the banking sector' to business activities of every description BUT real estate – retailing, manufacturing, technology, food, and many other things – in short all sorts of things where the velocity of credit and money circulation in the domestic economic is high on an annual basis. The tax receipts will naturally increase, and the make up of banking reserves will vastly have changed from the highly-skewed illiquid and non-circulating thing that it has up till now been because of the real estate bias.

Ben Bernanke's insistence on significantly increasing the currency issuance is to do with his attempts to hide the unusually large EXCESS RESERVES of a handful of commercial banks as a ratio of the entire money supply – and this is because there is a systematic looting of the system by banks acting like a cartel to channel their credits through the low tax arena of long term real estate, and structure of pushing off bad debts into brand names designed to fail and to fall, and a strong ideological bent by those banks to deny the rest of the market credit because this is where both the tax risk is and the business risk is too.

Nevertheless, the public and the government have to pull the current thicket of commercial and investment banks in. And one way to do with this is to issue new banking sector licences to structures that will lend to higher circulation velocity business activities. The borrower need not advance any form of real estate security at all, but, they must accept a higher eventual tax rate. It need only be a slightly higher one.

And I think the fact is my concept is not only the only one that will work but the one that is inevitable at some point in the future.

Of course, it may well be quite some time into the future because no one expects the present cadre of special interests to easily depart from the centre of attention that they so passionately appear to be in love with possessing, nor give up their privileged access to fiat unbacked printed money-out-of-thin-air-at-no-cost-to-them, nor their stranglehold on the types of politicians put up for the big elections and the agenda of what is discussed on Fox News and how it is discussed.

Simply put though, the current debate about 'impossibly large national debt' and 'taxing the 1 per cent' and the 'dependent 47 %' is all complete and utter rubbish.

These things are spouted by accountants who are the equivalent of static image photographers taking snapshots of bits of a Mercedes engine on a garage floor and everyone standing around and nodding sagaciously as if it mattered that the pictures are beautiful or the car parts oily. What is needed are engineers and mechanics, not photographers taking pictures of static images. Economics is a thing in complex motion. And accountants and commercial banks biased to real estate lending have gotten away with a claim to importance that is not only overstated but politically and socially dangerous and dysfunctional. Real estate itself, has somehow manage to get away with another false and ludicrous claim about its being 'capital.' It is certainly not, a 'financial asset' for one thing – which is defined as any asset that is guaranteed to be able to be turned into cash within one standard accounting period of one year, and neither is it 'financial capital' which is defined as any asset that is guaranteed to be able to be sold by no later than ten years. Sometimes, and using various sophistications, it is true that some real estate can be sold within ten years, and some can be monetised inside one year – but there are no general guarantees about it and frankly, real estate is only weakly a type of economic 'capital' at all.

Like the case of Quintus Fabius Maximus, eventually, what I have just said will also be widely accepted as irresistably correct.

Return Of The Mack

My mother was on the stage. A lot of years ago of course. So many years ago only people in the theatre would have much of an idea what it was back then to be a contracted J. C. Williamson's artist.

Mark Morrison

Me, I can't dance and I can't sing. And I can't teach school either (my father was a teacher for more than forty years). Okay the truth is I saw what they both did and I figured, 'oh this isn't for me at all.' Way too much hard work. And of course the worst thing was my uncles who were seriously wealthy – one having been a director of Shell Far East. Result: money = good; altruism = silly. That's how little kids think. I still think 'doing good' is largely a thankless occupation. Hey look, at the time I knew my uncles, Shell was already far past just doing something beneficial for industry, middle class lifestyles and the developed and developing world – at the executives' level it was about playboy Malaysian tunkus, Chinese mistresses, British tailors, Aston Martins and Rileys and gullwing Mercedes sportscars, private luncheons and late late dinners with shiploads of alcohol, and the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund. At least it was from what I could see from hip-height (possibly the place to be to see all the action).

I suppose my only handicap in life is that I have always been fairly athletic with rather low body-fat and that means I can't do much of the alcohol thing. And thus, many people have been pretty suspicious of me. If you want to succeed in business the straightforward way, try not to encourage people being suspicious of you, I would say.

Actually in this post I was intending to focus on the stage and theatre and performance in general actually, rather than on the rich men's club stuff.

At the same time though, success in any business venture is quite similar to running a successful theatre production. And sometimes, though quite rarely, I observe in popular entertainment the fingerprints of the olden days' professional theatrical producer. I have to tell you, no one in modern politics has this quality at all. In all of the drive to mass-produce talent and garner the broadest popular appeal by standing on as few toes as possible, you end up with utter inanity.

Good theatrical producers know that every superstar talent is ideosyncratic – that's what human beings are at the top level. Individuals, different, unusual, personalities, characters... ...and difficult. Some are not difficult. But a lot are.

I was doing the hotdogs at the school sausage sizzle this week during their interschool sports carnival, when a tune came on the speaker system and one of the mothers stuck her iPhone up in the air with the Shazam App on: in fact she didn't catch the song in time and on this occasion the App didn't get the name of the pop track.

Well I happen to know the tune and it was Mark Morrison's Return Of The Mack, something from the Nineties. Mark Morrison is talent. Rare. Ideosyncratic. Not sure if he's difficult or not. Delta Goodrem – who is also talent – was up the road at a shopping centre during the same week and one of the dad's on the barbecue had a pic of her on his clone Samsung. He's a security guard. Delta Goodrem has a reputation as down-to-earth and a real nice person. All the moms and dads at the school thing said she was a 'diva' but totally without all the diva arrogance and difficult attitude. Lucky agent and producer. It's rare.

You want to see talent get onto YouTube and watch Howlin' Wolf do 'Smokestack Lightning,' or Mark Morrison do 'Return Of The Mack' or Delta Goodrem sing her latest song 'Dancing With A Broken Heart.' Goodrem's song is not raw like the work of the other two but her talent gets the thing across. And for me, I can see the handiwork of a real olden days' producer all over her video clip.

Makes much of the modern world just plain stupid. I've always felt artists, especially musicians, can pick up the trend of the near-term future extremely accurately. ...The world is not going in the direction the dumb politicians and their bureaucrat viziers might like to think that it is. In fact I tell you what; you want to make money and be at the front of the curve start thinking much much more creatively and inventively than conservative politics – which is basically the mindset of both sides.

And buckle-up. There's a ride ahead. Don't worry about money. There'll be plenty. Stop worrying about money; it isn't the problem. The problem is doubt about the avant garde. Don't doubt it though – no successful person ever did. And the public, knows talent. Just watch them stick the Shazam App up in the air to chase it. Talent... is sexy.

Financial Genius

The whole point of artistic or musical genius is that it delivers the 'artistic massage' first, and only subsequently some thinking people then tend to realise there was a serious intellectual message too.

Orgastic Love = Hand on Ass, maybe not arm in arm...

Is there such a profile available when it comes to financial genius...? What would be the equivalent? A mathematical massage? An intellectual massage? A money massage? At least it is clear what the message is – we tell you a story and then justify taking the value of your work, wealth, and efforts and handing it to someone who won't sit down and have a cup of tea with you. The vision of Stanley Fisher and Ben Bernanke walking virtually arm-in-arm at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, tells it like it is. There are hundreds of miles between me and you – and them and a bunch of armed guards.

Taking money from the citizen and from the taxpayer and continually giving it to a few privileged banks certainly creates an ethical questionmark over the purpose of a central bank like the US Federal Reserve. But of course that is unlikely to ever be addressed honestly and directly by Bernanke.

Crucially for professional private investors, assessment of economic risk nowadays falls to the question of who is 'protected' and who is not, rather than who is acting sensibly and who is acting dangerously... Can the banks and the government act sensibly at all or over the longer run? Well, let's just see for how long they can; if they are doing it even now.

The great philosopher and public intellectual Paul Ritter

Although not commonly talked about, there is such a thing as a radical pathology psychologist – or sometimes, 'radical social pathology psychologist.' You won't see much talk about such people in the ordinary media; for they are a thoroughly discredited lot you see. For instance, there is my late friend the extraordinary Paul Ritter – the architect and polymath/polyhistor who laid one of the original foundation stones at the World Trade Center. He personally knew the very thoroughly discredited psychologist and medical doctor Wilhelm Reich – who was one of those Austrian School Psychologists who more or less started all this nonsense about the establishment deliberately misleading and suppressing the masses through a steady diet of fear and crisis. Reich's main problem, it seemed to me at least, appeared to stem from the fact that he had the temerity to suggest the establishment's core dissembling nature resulted fundamentally from a sexual issue they all had! And that, as they say, was the quick end to him.

But I think that the establishment has miscalculated – or maybe even failed to calculate at all - that the internet and all it represents, is the very devil's breath itself to the common herd, because it liberates the Id of the private individual and the collective Id of his community, from the constraints and controls and social rules imposed from his political and government masters from on high. I cannot think of a single greater real test that has ever happened in history of whether Reich's style of psychoanalysis and his ideas are functionally sound or merely crackpot thoughts. Dare I say this: Reich is extremely clear about what he thinks will happen, but you will have to read his books carefully to discover what these predictions are...

And yes yes, of course I am being subserversive.