Economic Bonfires

It's really not okay anymore to keep allowing face to the popular media – which is fundamentally lacking in integrity because of its too-close connection with banks, top level politicians, and very unfortunately, the police and even segments of nations' secret services. The more that emerges through UK parliamentarian Tom Watson and the current on-going inquiry into Rupert Murdoch's News Limited, the more it is becoming clearer that the statement above is simply abundantly factual and not at all some kind of rabid frenzied imagining – unfortunately, I guess.

As I had guessed earlier, and said, on the Wall Street Examiner's BearChat Board, John Hartigan, the up-till-then CEO of News Limited in Australia – who the media had again tried to say was not in any way involved with the illegal communications interceptions and electronic bugging scandal NOW uncovered – was forced to resign from News Limited last week. Even if you consult Wikipedia, News Limited conveniantly seems to jump the era from 1975 all the way to 2006! Clearly NOTHING happened involving News or Hartigan or bankruptcies or bugging or crooked cops or politicians during that time. What a saintly lot they all must have been. And the '89 Stock Market Crash to boot withal... A minor incident afterall. Still,

EVERYONE IN THE WHOLE ENTIRE WORLD SEEMS SCARED OF UPTURNING THE APPLECART OF LIFE AS IT IS TOLD BY FOX NEWS.

Look, Christine Lagarde is not the god of market economics. The ECB does NOT have any right to determine any politicial decision of elected democratic government anywhere and the euro money thing is nothing more or less than a criminal enterprise devised by Goldman Sachs and Wall Street and the traitors who undermined the previous independence of the Bank for International Settlements. These 'academics' who are spruiking for the ECB are sounding more and more stupid everyday and are now coming out with extreme sorts of gibberish that even Joe Sixpack is starting to recognise for what it really is – GIBBERISH!

The BIS used to be the most solid guide and enforcer of discipline that ensured real and genuine market activity surrounding bank and government bonds – and ensured that non-competitive behaviour within regions resulted in higher (not, as they are now – lower) interest rates.

Artificial lower interest rates are a 'let's pretend' thing. This is cloud-cuckoo fairyland stuff. (E.g. Scrooge visiting the Internal Revenuers above).

Low interest rates can NEVER create economic growth in a credit cycle money-multiplier world. NEVER. And that is why the gold price will keep going up and up until official interest rates reflect the real price of money to productive enterprise. Economic growth is a dynamic of multi-variable, differential equation factors (or forces) – though at minimum it is a dynamic interplay between inflation and the cost of money, or interest rates. Growth cannot ever be a 'dynamic of forces between zero interest rates and zero inflation...' This means stagnation and no money circulation and therefore no tax receipts – i.e. economic and financial death. The idea that you can 'austerity package' your way out of this 'crisis' by forcing austerity in some countries and then blanket low interest rates everywhere because Germany wants it so – is just about as nuts an idea as you can have. The whole thing flies in the face of the fact of comparative advantage - and regional specificity too. Standardisation is not the same as 'no need to consider regional difference or comparative advantage.'

Actually, the wondrous thing about MARKET economics, is that it is just that – to do with THE MARKET. Not some manufactured, 'let's pretend I'm worth a hundred billion and I'm a Wall Street-er so everything I say is true' BS!

Right now, THE MARKET is telling Wall Street and the ECB to go take a flying jump. How do I know? Well I'll tell you: “you can't get a little bit pregnant, son.” Remember that line? Apply it to the Murdoch saga and every politician and banker that you know – excluding the heroes on that UK Committee. See what happens next. Just see. I've been consistently right so far and I'm still right now. The unthinkable... ...is about to come true.

Anyway, Christmas is around the corner. Here's a nice picture of some real money. Happens to be old. I reckon this is one of the most beautiful coins ever made – the George the Fifth Penny. George's great grandfather, I think, introduced the German tradition of the Christmas Tree to England. A great and beautiful tradition. You take the Yule Log, after you've had fun with it, and ya burn it. Out of the ashes, little green trees sprout. But yer gotta burn it all down into cinders and ashes first. Otherwise (and in the great tradition of Sir Desmond Claisebrook) it'll be like you're trying to flog a dead horse and that way you'll end up up a creek without a paddle. This thing about quickie loans at no interest for shonky purposes to Wall Street banksters has all got to end!! Christine Lagarde or no Christine Lagarde, it has to stop now. And it has to stop whether Rupert Murdoch's Fox News says 'austerity is smart' or not, it just has to stop. Austerity is NOT smart. It's actually plain dumb right now.

Oh, you mean you want to 'penalize' those who borrowed too much previously and can't fund it now, hence austerity... Why not just RAISE interest rates so that they go bankrupt? Oh, you ACTUALLY want to protect the bastards and shoot off the problem to the mug public instead? Well why don't you just say that you are a bunch of lying thieving bastards and stop pretending that you are academic economists and highly credentialed technocrats and advanced euro-political thinkers and all that?!

Once the public fully gets – and I mean they have nearly got it now – that these people are all just a bunch of lying thieving bastards protecting a few banksters interests, then what chance do you think there is of the euro experiment actually working? None. Absolutely none at all. The wheels have already fallen off. Get your Xmas tree out, stick it up, and celebrate, and wait for the bonfire. Because there is going to be one.

Love,

Calvin J. Bear

Frightening Stuff

Have you ever been truly scared by a movie – or a story in a movie? Or a book? I don't mean by some lurid and blood-soaked but otherwise paper-thin exercise of pointless and excessive violence.

There are films I have revisited with grown eyes and have appreciated more deeply what was being driven at. And once again too, as broader society itself opens further to its own once-hidden dark secrets, there is a raised level of tolerance to things which once easily frightened the innocent. The more society knows and the less it is scientifically ignorant, of course the less it is genuinely frightened by; I mean intellectually as well as viscerally frightened by, that is.

Very very occasionally you will come across someone, some intellect, that has so vast and advanced a grasp of how things are hanging together, that he or she can appear a little patronising to you whenever you talk with them.

What scares me is when I notice a huge intellect like some huge dark shape moving beneath the waves. Cruising, observing, waiting.

The great intellect is the one who, in the throng of mayhem and the din of battle, already grasps that the enemy army of alien hydrazine-blasting land-striders, cannot withstand but even a few microbes. Horses cannot vomit, and that's why they so easily succumb to colic. And titanic scary aliens are indeed not necessarily immune to simple earthly bacteria.

Atheism is a Greek word. Some Greeks like to destroy real gods, some, false gods. Some Greeks break Ikons (i.e. they are iconoclasts), and some are anarchists. Some don't believe in gods at all.

But let me tell you something – 'horses,' 'Greeks' and 'those who set themselves up to rule as gods,' all going in the same ideas, sentences or paragraphs together spells something and it is not likely to be a gift in the long run.

George Soros told me the other day 'John,' he said. 'The Euro is already finished.' Well he didn't say 'John' and address me personally, but he may as well have, and I recommend that you take it the same way yourself too.

(Pictures of scary people from scary films for you above... Calvin J. Bear)

The Calm Before

These days clever phrases are usually repetitions of earlier inventions from authors whose names and works are lost in the mists of time past. I shall not attribute this one I am about to throw here to the person and place from whence I read it most recently, as I am quite sure I've come across it before somewhere else still...

“The weight of luxury thrills and oppresses with such charm... I felt it tempt, and enflame guilt never before with such grace.”

Of course there is too too much use of the word 'luxury' today. Singapore seems to have an obsession with the word and all the marketeers focussing on anything China are head over heels in love with the word.

Actually the world is on the edge of a complete collapse and a kind of a nervous breakdown. I don't personally go along with all this complaining about the 'elite' or the 'top 1 per cent' controlling everything and some secret cabal running ordinary people's lives. You will presently see that I am quite right. The internet, if it has done anything at all, has certainly given the lie to how smart the fellows 'at the top' are: it is difficult to imagine whether a violent physical act could have done more real damage than the very recent 'simple' webcam recording of ol' Judge William Adams! Maybe there was some thicket of crooks trying to run everything to help themselves to the gravy.

Some kid out of Queensland Australia pushing $540 million through his poker gambling website demonstrates that the early movers are killing a lot of fish – before the big sharks come in.

Speaking of which I have recently been toying with the idea of pinching that kid's market. Anyone interested to get involved should pop an email to me or post a comment here. Seems to me that apart from the strong possibility of a spot of money laundering going on with the kid for some Russian mob interests, he was none too bright with his organisation. I mean, I'll give him a lot of credit for being one of the first to exploit things, but, he was otherwise no genius. It's clearly not illegal for Americans to play online poker; it is illegal for people to steal their money and defraud the revenue services though. Moreover, there is an issue to do with presenting a fair operation to the actual players and not to manipulate things through computer programs – which goes on a lot I fear.

Ah dear, the pressure of extreme knowledge and superb luxury.

You won't find this anywhere else on the net just of the minute: I had a nice little conversation a couple of days ago with the photographic director of a truly excellent 2004 (originally) internal video presentation of the Armani Prive Perfume series – David Bilowus. He worked with producer and artistic director Gilles Scalabre, and Eric Genilier to make this outstanding production. You can still see it on Youtube under 'Armani Prive Perfume 2004 Video Presentation.' He was kind enough to let me know that the music behind the film clip was the theme music to “The Quiet American” by Craig Armstrong and Matt Dunkley. There are a lot of people wishing to know all over the web what the music was. So, there it is for yer. As I said before, these guys know luxury.

Ciao ciao,

Calvin J. Bear

Online Poker and Money Laundering, Again!

Today, I'm going to touch just a little on real money laundering, and an aspect of professional risk-taking that is rarely discussed. In the days when a few oddballs went to actual book libraries, you could still indulge the phrase 'the secret of,' or 'a secret to,' but now, when everyone and everything is on the net in very easy access, anything that was a secret five minutes ago is quickly in the hands of the great unwashed, as well as fourteen year olds with fake ID's and the murky tide of 'realists' and 'sceptics' who have never contributed a single solitary idea of their own in the whole of their miserable lives!

In short, most people already think they either know everything, or can know anything and everything simply by consulting the World Wide Web. And what's most amazing, is that in spite of such conceit, you might suppose not too many would be sucked into online gambling – but no, it's incredibly successful.

And that's where the difficulties lie. Governments tacitly accept certain types of money laundering, where such a thing permits inflows of money from external (non-domestic) sources, and where the continued flow of some of it within the domestic economy attracts normal tax netting through the money multiplier consequences of ordinary domestic money circulation. Thus, when an online poker business starts up, and within a short time claims to be handling tens of millions of dollars and huge numbers of participants, the government would usually just fiddle around and castigate the owners with a soggy newspaper. But then, as soon as the government banking and currency statisticians observe that, hey!, a lot of real people are spending a real hundred bucks each to get involved, suddenly the wild claims about large numbers take on a different complexion. Because they ARE wild claims... ...to begin with. The claims are merely meant to support a money laundering scheme involving very big people behind the froth.

And then suddenly, the little people actually come in and mess everything up. The temptation to take their money and send it into the obscure tunnels of the global financial washing machine, means that suddenly, hundreds of millions of normal circulation of real domestic dollars – leaves the economy. And that, the authorities will never stand for. Thus, real players getting involved in online gambling spells the 'legal' end to the whole thing.

How could they be so silly? I mean, how can the ordinary public be so naiive? Neither you nor I will ever be able to convince them that there is no way to win money playing online poker anywhere at all – because they simply want to believe that you can. They want to have hope in 'something for nothing' and the serendipity of everything 'web,' and things being as easy as online poker seems. Something too about the ability to hide behind a computer screen answers to the fearfulness in people, and yet their cupidity which also exists at the same time.

Okay, let me modify what I said a little. The game that is being played online, is not poker. Poker is about yourself, and other people, not screenshots.

Which leads me to the 'secret' that is no real secret: the public everywhere is incapable or has become incapable generally, of independent thought.

And that is why too, that we are 'in' a so-called world financial or banking 'crisis.' The public has been told to believe, that nations that default on their debt to banks, will cause terrible consequences for everyone. Not true in any sense at all. But it is believed, and the media presses the story each and every day.

Rather than occupy Wall Street, people need to re-occupy their own heads with their own thoughts. A billion people all thinking independently will not all fail at once – but without doubt the entire population relying on the media's ideas and its pre-occupation with the art of failure will assuredly indeed all fail as a single group altogether.

Modern democracy means the Left arguing with the Right about the same idea pushed from elsewhere. It doesn't mean the Left having different ideas to the Right. At the moment, it's all about the same idea - the only idea there is, is that 'there is a financial and/or banking crisis' and there are apparently two sides from which to view that idea.

If you are a smart person you'd better make sure you have some individual and personal ideas beyond this 'fear the crisis' business. Professional risk-taking is about quality thinking. Quality risk-taking is about independent thought. It involves uniquely perceiving the rewards ahead of some determined, planned action. Uniquely. I used that word deliberately. Rarely can you rely on other people's quick signing-up to a really clever idea, but then, really decent-sized rewards are not generally found to go along with common ideas in the hands of a large number of people.

The only think that's risky about quality risk-taking is that it is almost guaranteed to have you ostracised by the crowd. Which is a good thing right now because when the crowd all sink and drown together – which they are about to and will do – you will not be with them.

It's quite clear that neither the media, politicians, nor the public possesses the one true and necessary component and indicator of a potential for quality thinking – imagination.

You can imagine that, for example, online poker will make you money, successfully. But you must extend that imagining into the region of uniqueness for such ideas to start to possess quality. Stylishness risks you little and colours your thinking. Be stylish. It does help.

The Armani Soundtrack

I am happy to tell you, that not much more than about 800 people worldwide read this blog... And that is not because it could not be more, but it is very limited intentionally because I wanted to see how many would get here of their own accord. My own purpose was, at some point, to start to divulge views into a world not popularly known.

Is there such a thing as an absolute hierarchical set of intellectual or aesthetic values? Beyond the apparent arbitrariness of taste, and the influence of monied interests, may there be an ascending set of values across a whole spectrum of human pleasures? I don't say that there is – it isn't evident to me that there is if you go by the fashions that come and go in music or art or literature or film. There appears to be some type of sense of quality or meaningfulness or consistent positive sensatory reaction in audiences, but it is not clear to me that this is particularly sophisticated even though it can be very elaborate.

So let us not say that what I am about to divulge or discuss is at the top. But I will say that it will be sophisticated. Why I chose to keep this blog relatively unheralded, is that I don't appreciate the number of times that whatever I was discussing in my office in Allendale Square next to the Quantum Fund's office here, suddenly turned up seemingly to have come from George Soros. Okay, maybe it was just synergy – I do believe he is a very very bright man. Having said that though, no sooner had I stopped enunciating my own strategies and thoughts on a vast swathe of subjects, than they stopped appearing in the newspapers and in the media in the mouths of others.

'Cross-Reflexivity In Bio-mechanical Nervous Systems Applied To Other Spheres,' drafted in Edith Cowan University under Doctor Thomas W. Odgers' department, turned up as George Soros's by-now famous 'Reflexivity In Markets' theory. The fact that James Wolfenson swept through Cowan once or twice around the same time is of course, just another mere co-incidence.

Have you noticed though, how nothing of any serious note or merit has been advanced in financial markets over recent years? How there is a total lack of creativity? How there is this monolithic megalithic attitude about everything financial? Maybe quite a few more than just me realized what was going on... It isn't a conspiracy theory - there is a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry about it in the United Kngdom right now! Frankly I think that Inquiry is making Rupert Murdoch look like the arrogant fool he always was but had gotten away with things previously.

How on earth is it possible for an investment bank to fear the default of a sovereign debt?? Surely, they can fear falling currencies, but hardly should this be the reason for a catastrophic Euro Zone financial crisis requiring the bailing out by taxpayers worldwide and austerity everywhere...

No I rather think we have at last entered the phase in which those who really can, do, and all others merely appear to do in the media because they control that media. Which at last brings me to divulge my personal tastes in things that idle people like me do. And I know that these things will leave some people cold.

You see, the fact is that when it comes to really big money, some people appear to think there is an absolute hierarchy of taste. I have earlier pointed out my own admiration for Karl Lagerfeld. The enormously wealthy Dubai rulers commissioned Armani to add design elements to eponymous hotels and resorts located there. And what truly brilliant places they are. One needn't actually go there to experience the style values and themes. I recommend you Google-up 'Armani Hotels & Resorts' and merely listen to the soundtrack behind his website to see that these artists understand a thing or two. But I think many people struggle to understand in their gut what is really being said. And I think that from around 800 individuals, perhaps 200 will acount for those who can understand. But then, I take that from the movie Half Moon Street, do I not?

I have sometimes taunted a woman with the statement that I prefer the company of women who are able to deserve ah, ah,ah, mah-ney.

JW/CJB!