The Champagne And Club Sandwich World

And then all of a sudden a thing is right there before your eyes in reality – rather than just on the net!

And the reality teaches you a great big lesson.

A Bacon-Lettuce-Tomato sandwich can be staggeringly good. That is, if it is made with the right kind of bacon, and if the mayonnaise is top notch. To hell with all this stuff nowadays about salt. It's got to be made PROPERLY in order to be any good.

But if it is good it is sensational.

Of course in the old days this thing was known as the 'club sandwich' and it might have had all kinds of other things in it too. My personally preference is to add a few thick slices of white chicken breast.

In a day and age of great pretentiousness – hey just look at the Fed – there are those who seem to believe you have to go to a Michelin 3-star restaurant in order to open a decent champagne with a meal, and that just simply isn't the case.

Chicken goes with champagne. A few bits of chicken in a first class BLT (therefore 'plus chicken') and you can certainly justify getting out the Mumm or the Veuve Cliquot.

And what a satisfying course all of that is!

There is 15 kilos of gold-leaf spread all over the newly renovated Bolshoi Theatre - so we are told - and the carillon bells ring out at each premier night of a new ballet or opera. The beautiful red velvet drapes hang against the sides everywhere and of course also over the private boxes, and a huge glittering chandelier dazzles atop it all inside the main hall. There, indeed you can open the great champagnes and imbibe the scents of Robert Piguet's Bandit French perfume and the effluvia of the underarms of Russian mistresses and second wives in their Imperial Bargunzinskya Zobol coats...

The function of money as expense, is never matched by its ability to reward. The scale of reward from a great BLT and a glass of even vin ordinaire, is exponentially 'off the scale' as they say compared to its dollar cost. Although I'll admit that a well-prepared night at the opera or ballet equates. But only equates, mind you, in the sense that it too goes exponentially 'off the scale' of value for money. The two sorts of things are good, put it that way. And I never resist either, when opportunity puts them in my way. They are both very very satisfying experiences.

Best to All,

Calvin J. Bear

What Barry Meyer Thinks, Maybe!

A sort of type of thinking that gives me a really comfortable feeling at night – or anytime when I'm on the verge of sleep – is this fantasy of being like one of these current-era suburban or country doomsday preppers who is lying in wait for alien zombies or reptilian aliens disguised as government people or politicians. And, having and hording weapons and hi-tech equipment and things.

But what I think of is aiming a Springfield Armory M1A SOCOM with a side-mounted laser optic and other fancy fruit at some tin can or metal sign or something and blasting some fragging round into it. Or into a zombie alien, literally – that is, if such a thing existed; which it does do of course in that place between awake consciousness and deep dark sleep.

Caption? Are you kidding!

The worst thing I could think of, and not comforting at all, is shooting a human being. Even the odd few real villains and enemies I know, I'm not really certain it would interest me to shoot and kill them...

Self-defence? Not really an issue with me. I have an unusual amount of prescience, you might even say, capacity to read minds. At fifty-three I don't bother to argue the 'science' of it anymore with my own mind – I have done it too many times to bother or care to doubt myself anymore. But you don't have to believe that bit of course.

I can appreciate a piece of mechanical engineering, whether of fine wood, or machined metal, or complex synthetics – just for what it is, rather than what it claims to be able to do.

I come from a long long and ancient line of people who really know how to be angry and to cause a lot of damage.

All this nonsense that spreads out everywhere these days about people being scared of evil conspiracies and crooked governments and corrupted banks and malicious dark overlords against whom there is a deep social angst – is all simple-minded nonsense to me.

You have a choice to slump into or wallow in a myre of all-deprecating self-misery and anti-everythingness. Without wanting to turn off here, those who admire him, Richard Dawkins is another one of these one-sided self-proclaimed super-'scientific sceptics.' If anything at all, though, to me, he does genuine science a great disservice. There is a modern tendency to keep saying 'science knows thus far, but it could change its position when further science tells it different...' No. It doesn't and it couldn't. Dawkins is symptomatic of a grand social malaise that stems from the inability to take charge.

The most dangerous person you know is a philosopher, that is, the genuine philosopher. Not the mad or even the mind-controlled gunman. I have read in several different places that the head of Warner, Barry Meyer, thinks that if he can control the roughly-on-average 3000 thoughts a day that the average person thinks, he can affect directions of business and buyers' interests and tastes.

And I think he's right – that is, if indeed he ever did really say such a thing.

But there is such a thing as a David-and-Goliath effect in philosophical thought, too. A densely-packed complex idea with a small cross-section of signal, can be leveraged up against all the photons of Fox TV, if it is capable of being augmented by other intelligent minds. That is, it has to be rational. Can be wildly unlikely, but still possible...

Let me give you an example:

I learnt this from J. Paul Getty, who I met once as a young boy in Singapore through my uncle who was then a director of Shell Far East.

Getty said that he was able to observe the incredible value enhancements of technology – for instance as they did away with entire office blocks and stenographers and typists (and their attendant costs), through for example the invention of the Xerox copier. And that he adjusted how he himself operated along with those technological advancements that he could see cut down capital costs and operating expenses.

If I look at Daimler the automotive manufacturer, and consider the huge capital investment base they have to work from, I have to laugh about what they consider is a great achievement for them, say, something like their Mercedes SLS AMG. How can you produce what is essentially only a copy of someone else's past design, admittedly with current materials and technology, when you have so much capital at risk?

The car has some nice aspects, but it also has some desperate flaws.

The Alfa C8 Competizione gets me more interested...

We are thinking entirely incorrectly when we still give face to banks and governments and so-called ratings agencies and to the pop media and their running dogs in politics. Cut all of this expense out. In the sense of stop being concerned that the big financial solutions to modern markets must come from any of these. The big solutions will come from guys with just a few computers, iphones, ipads, usb sticks, video cameras, printers, satellite connections, and basic (by modern standards) software programmes. We make a huge mistake in not personally accounting for the frankly, billions of dollars of capital cost savings, that we make, when we can successfully integrate these bits and pieces of common technological gadgets, and link with even half-way decent individual brainpower.

I'm not really in the mood for self-critique, or morose whining about moribund banks and sharemarkets, when right now I get to play with effectively greater resources than NASA had in the Sixties. Okay, maybe I'll come up with only a decadent way of using them. But so what?!! There's a lot of freedom and power in there. And I'm not feeling either powerless, or suppressed, or concerned that there will be a lot of hyper-deflationary forces out there. Those forces are only applying to the dying economy of the office blocks and the sunset methods and thinking styles.

The Kangaroo Arms

Once again I sing the praises of the Joondalup Resort in Connolly, Western Australia. And this time, allow me to focus on their english-style pub - 'The Kangaroo Arms." Yeah okay it doesn't have an english name, but it is at least located in what was once a Brit Colony so there is natural authenticity in there somewhere. Leaving all that aside, you are talking about an establishment with rock solid staff and great pub food. As with everything else at this premier golf course resort, the ingredients in the meals are simply over-the-top standouts as far as quality is concerned - truly, truly excellent. You combine that with professional and legit bar staff and you get the basis for a proper sports bar. Pleasant in every way.

In a way though this place is always going to rate as 'understated.' Which of course suits me anyway. I'm not searching for either the fame, infamy, or glory of the big splash. And that means no one, absolutely NO ONE is going to give a damn that I AM SHERLOCK HOLMES!

...I walked off the pages of an Irishman's fictional tale, and into the real world. But frankly, there are a lot fewer mysteries in the real world for me than you might think. And I am certainly at least as arrogant as the fictional Holmes was. Certainly. One day I shall present you all with a mystery the reckoning of which will thrill, and tax, and enervate, and reward.

Best,

Calvin J. Bear

Lifestyle Destination

A bank is not a lifestyle destination. Why not? Mine is.

Talise Spa - a Lifestyle Destination

How much money do you need? You wouldn't need any greater sum than what goes through the so-called 'dark pools' or 'dark liquidity' funds that are the secret behind why no government or central bank anywhere really is interested in 'fixing up' the banking system today.

The banking system isn't broken.

Got it? The system IS NOT broken. It is simply NOT. By all means you go ahead and read all the crap that is posted everywhere else and in every newspaper and is shown through every av media channel throughout the world but hey, you know what – they are all just proving how much on the outside they all are.

The reason you even bother looking at this web-log is that deep down inside you have a disquieted little feeling that maybe you really are reading someone on the inside.

The single biggest problem in the world of finance today is merely the hijacking of terms and phrases that mean one thing in the hands of intelligent people – and another thing altogether once they get rough-ridden through the mire of modern let's-pretend journalism. There is no way the hedge funds – as they are called now and even rated by rating agencies(!) - are, really hedging anything. The structure and investment process of these funds rely on the same driving forces that installed idiots like Bob Diamond in clown paradises like Barclay's. Barclays died around 1989. Barings officially died. Barclays – like a lot of other corporations riddled with tertiary qualified twits at management level – hung around through the political nuance of family connection its employees had with members of government and political parties. Barclay's did not manipulate LIBOR. LIBOR wasn't there. It still isn't. The end game for pretending that moneyed interests who got snipped a few points because of a 'reference rate' require to be compensated through the courts will wash up onto the wrecking shore either of staggeringly higher interest rates (I'd like to see the modern politician deal with that context) when proper admissions are made, or bankrupt governments through an economy without any circulatory lifeblood by continuing the pretence of artificial low interest rates.

I hope, that the phrase 'dark pool' doesn't also get hijacked by all these idiots. It has significant meaning to those who know what it is.

For gold bugs, dark pools are where the difference between the actual deliverable physical price of precious metals, and the New York digitally-groomed price, goes. Once again, read all the rubbish you like about this ancient relic and how 'the bankers' are suppressing its price and how it earns no dividend. Rubbish people = rubbish ideas.

Armani Spa is a Lifestyle
Destination

That is why Bob Diamond's old job is now a 'lifestyle destination' for some lucky (though still rubbish) bastard with a degree from even some backwater university. Because even a half-smart clown realizes that Barclays is, as are all other fake banks, dead as the proverbial Dodo bird and that he/she will have to be compensated for taking the next fall when it happens again.

There is a man somewhere (several in fact, and one or two women) who owns a dark pool. That man is a bank. And he sends his wife to Armani Spa Dubai on weekends and his mistress or mistresses to the Talise Body Regenerator. As for the one or two women, I have no idea what they do for their husbands and expensive friends.

The lifestyle destination of idiots with degrees who are playing around in deathtraps – is eventually to be fucked. The lifestyle destination of the wise and knowledgeable is the hamam, the place you recoup from doing a lot of fucking.

Diamond Bob, Not Diamond Jim

So London gets religion all of a sudden, does it? Bob Diamond goes and half of the USA says 'we should learn from the Brits...'

The only thing you can learn from the Brits in these circumstances is how to push stuff under the carpet.

The media is covering the story at the moment as though it is about the collusion of several bankers from different brand name banks 'manipulating' the interest rate call between themselves (bank-to-bank rate, aka LIBOR, or the London Interbank Offering Rate), supposedly for a financial benefit to themselves.

Bar at the Savoy, London... Old men and...!

Uh-huh. Sorry. Let me remind you that the problem was that when the Lehman thing happened the LIBOR trade COMPLETELY DRIED UP ALTOGETHER. You know that was the position back then and I know it, and we both remember this coverage by the Bank of England's Governor put out into the media at the time. And with the subsequent effect of a global series of actions by Western Central Banks to provide liquidity TO BANKS to ameliorate the feared run on them and any prospect that they would not be able to meet withdrawals. We ALL remember this.

I cannot reconcile that story back then, with the current idea being floated that somehow, bankers or their designated LIBOR traders 'artificially' suppressed the cost of interbank money and 'artificially' dropped the interest rates with any kind of financial advantage to themselves. EVERYBODY knows that the plain and simple fact is that every single bank was asked at the time by the Bank of England to continue to lend to their fellow banks – and in order to catch a bid, as they say, I'm sure that it was a legitimate action to offer lower and lower interest rates until someone started borrowing.

And yet, even this characterisation begs the question of why, apparently, banks also at the same time were said to have feared the creditworthiness of other banks. So now we have this convoluted story that 1. banks conspired and colluded to create artificially low interest rates, wheras 2. no one was willing to lend in any case, and 3. no one apparently was seeking to borrow at the LIBOR rate (which is generally the lowest rate) in the first place.

And the only resolution to that cockamamee mix-up, is one to do with collateral and security, rather than lack of actual need to borrow money. Therefore, one must ask, is there already in existence, an independently scrutinized process whereby LIBOR borrowings HAVE TO comply with set collateral and risk ratings? And if so, isn't the problem rather more that the banks have no collateral left to hock? Or that all their collateral is purest rubbish?

So I guess then that when the ECB and others speak of 're-capitalising' banks, they must mean supplying them with adequate collateral... And where, one might ask, are they going to get this 'decent' collateral from, since the property valuations all over the place are now known to be wildly overstated.

Argh maybe just write properties down to what they should be and get on with things... You know deflation. Wait a minute, then governments would not be able to collect stamp duties, and rates and taxes at the usual exorbitant levels! We can't have that! So, what we must have then, is collusion between GOVERNMENTS and bankers to manipulate 'market' values and prices – but not between bankers and other bankers to do the same thing. Oh I get it: good old hypocrisy.

Not Nekulturny

Supposedly, Bob Diamond is worth around $650 million. He wears atrocious clothes for a fellow of that kind of wealth; they're cheap-looking in the sense of common and banal. And I would never have stuck my money anywhere near an organisation headed by someone common and/or banal. Vulgar, yes, common, no.

Best, Calvin J. Bear (nod nod, wink wink to the wise.)