Who Regulates The Regulators?

The Ponzi pyramid of self-justification that underpins all free market structures is always a part of the problem rather than a part of the cure.

Who guards the guardians?
Who governs the governors?
Who moderates the moderators?
Who regulates the regulators?

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is not fit for purpose.
Nine out of 12 board members were simply parachuted across from the board of the disbanded FSA - that's the FSA that failed to suitably regulate the banks prior to and during the 2007/08 crash.
The FSA's regulatory style was so light touch as to be reiki.
Reiki regulation!

The FSA was a prime example of regulatory capture - a form of political corruption that occurs when a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or special concerns of interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating.

In response, the FCA must be seen to be regulating with the utmost integrity.
Some hope.
Bizarrely, the FCA created a false market in major insurers' shares after botching a press briefing - the share prices of major insurers plunged after the Telegraph published the story.
A 225 page report released this week goes further: "The strategy and manner in which [the media strategy] was pursued was... high risk, poorly supervised and inadequately controlled. When it went wrong, the FCA's reaction was seriously inadequate and fell short of the standards expected of those it regulates."
The regulator tilted the markets!

And the FCA response is to repay some executive bonuses received in an extended window of self-justification and to immediately rush out a long delayed report into the mis-selling of annuities in a blatant display of exactly the sort of public relations and branding that regulatory bodies should not be in business of needing to undertake.

But this is the norm - other recent examples include OFWAT mistakenly overestimating water companies' capital costs when setting price levels and then refusing to impose London Stock Exchange disclosure requirements on non-stock market listed companies, or PricewaterhouseCoopers selling tax avoidance on an industrial scale with the strategy only coming to public knowledge via internal leaks.

Why is it nearly always whistleblowers and (Wiki)leakers but very rarely regulatory bodies and institutional self-policing that reveal the financial miscreants?.

The big picture is one of pure Randian psychopathy - there's minimal red tape to act as an obstacle for the steady flow of sociopathic outsiders to join the psychopathic insiders as cowboy capitalism races to the bottom of its barrel...
... but in the world of football, the situation is worse - neo-Randian!.

Nothing is regulated on any primary level of operation and there are supportive and corrupted flow networks integrated globally to prevent any hope of integrity rearing its head.

All six of the primary bodies allegedly looking into football integrity and matchfixing are compromised in their purpose via their ownership.
Indeed, in certain cases, a more motley crew of interested parties could not have been created even if one had set out explicitly with such purpose!
Fragmented cartels of corruption!

Football governance verges on the non-existent and, even at best, is merely a branding and self-justification process.

Certain entities and structures are systemically corrupt...
... in fact, I'll rewrite that sentence - there are very few bodies and networks in global football that are not systemically corrupt!
Regulation is invisible or malleable self-regulation that equates to no regulation at all - agents, dark pools, betting markets, insider trading, matchfixing, money laundering, third party ownership, mainstream media compliance in a restricted narrative while, once again, whistleblowers and (Wiki)leakers expose, bottom-up, what any decent system would implement top-down.

Inversion capitalism - asset stripping and financial profiteeering from the monetising of a brand, tax avoidance and evasion, antisocial competition practices with minimal regulation (for self-justification), alongside state punishment for 5th Estate types who get in the way - the Obama administration has started more prosecutions against whistleblowers than all presidents combined over the last century.
20 whistleblowers have been murdered in India in the last five years.

And the corrupt operations in the distorted infrastructures attract disproportionate investment as investors understand that increased returns are gained by psychopathic control in a lightly regulated marketplace, compounding up the cycles of corruption over time.

FIFA, the FCA, UEFA, PwC, the Premier League, Barclays, the Glazers, the FA Sports Betting Integrity Unit, Gestifute, Goldman Sachs, all these oil companies from interesting geopolitical locations that are buying up British football teams, private equity, dark pools, the control of whistleblowing bodies by those who should be whistleblown, derivatives markets, offshore financial centres and markets, NGO-lite structures etc - pure neo-Bayesian corruption entities beyond the reach of any economic theory as such theory may only be reactive to this juggernaut of inversion free-marketry where there are no rules.

Who regulates the regulators?

The New Global Finance Capital Elite - by Dr Jack Rasmus

A practice and loophole that emerged around 2008, US corporate tax ‘inversions’—the latest version in a long list of US transnational corporation tax scams—have taken off in 2014. A tax inversion is set in motion when a US based corporation buys another company offshore and then manipulates the tax codes of both countries to extract the greatest net tax reduction. The United Kingdom, Ireland, Switzerland and others are favorite locales for ‘inversions’ of late.  And US corporations and industries at the forefront of this new wave are typically pharmaceutical, technology, cable tv, entertainment, medical equipment, finance, and related retail companies—with many others waiting in the wings as well.
Briefly, here’s how it works: After purchasing an offshore company, the US company then designates its global headquarters as located in the new country of its purchase. With its headquarters now outside the US, the company can now transfer profits made in the USA, via various ‘intra-company price transfer’ tricks, to the foreign based headquarters and country where effective tax rates are lower and where various US tax code offshore loopholes are available to US transnational corporations.  The US purchasing company can also transfer its offshore debt from the purchased company to its US operations in turn. The higher debt and resulting higher interest payments on that debt are deductible from US corporate taxes, according to US tax law. The ‘inversion’ deal thus provides a double tax cut advantage to the US corporation. But that’s only the beginning.
The gains to be realized are not only from US tax code manipulation by the purchasing non-financial corporation. Shadow bankers and their financial speculators (i.e. hedge funds, private equity firms, investment banks, insurance companies, etc.) are also big beneficiaries of the Merger & Acquisition process at the heart of what appears on the surface, in the case of the tax inversion, as ‘just’ another transnational US corporate tax scam.
Lower taxes for the US corporation from the inversion means more retained corporate cash on hand, and the prospect of more future earnings as well, all of which in turn drives up the company’s stock price. That makes the company even more attractive to investors like hedge funds and equity firms, which buy up big blocks of both the purchasing and purchased companies’ stock. Banks and shadow bankers that jump into the process at the outset, buying up company stock in the process, also provide original funding for the company’s purchase. Others jump into the stock as the acquisition deal proceeds. Once concluded, early and latecomers both then reap a nice capital gain from the eventual stock price appreciation that almost always follows the deal.
So the profits gained are not just from tax reduction for the US purchasing company, but are financial and related to asset price speculation associated with the ‘tax inversion’ process and acquisition itself.
The practice of inversions gained public attention earlier this year with the US drug giant, Pfizer, attempting to purchase the UK drug firm, Astrazeneca. Pfizer offered more than $69 billion to purchase Astrazeneca, but was rebuffed by the latter’s shareholders, who wanted even more.
The key role of hedge funds and shadow bankers in the Pfizer-Astrazeneca deal was clearly evident from the start, since Pfizer did not put up the lion’s share of its $69 billion offer for Astrazeneca from its own retained cash. The big block of financing was to come from its hedge funds and other shadow banker partners and outside investors.
In many cases hedge funds (aka Vulture Funds) and other shadow bankers are the initiators and instigators behind the acquisition. They are at the forefront, prodding US corporation managements to ‘invert’.  A good example is the recent case of Walgreen, the US drug retailer.  Its major investor, the hedge fund, Jana Partners LLC, pushed hard for Walgreen to move its headquarters to Switzerland or the UK. This kind of pressure from funds like Jana Partners makes it difficult for corporate CEOs to resist, since the hedge fund can always turn to the company’s stockholders and have them put pressure on the management to do the deal, if they don’t want to deal with a stockholder ‘revolt’ and want to keep their corporate jobs.  Major stockholders see the opportunity for significant capital gains from stock appreciation in tax inversion deals, and together with the Hedge Funds demand that management undertake the corporate purchase and headquarters relocation.
In other words, while it appears that corporations gain at the public taxpayer expense through corporate tax reduction—which they clearly do—even greater gains come from financial speculation that benefit investors, big shareholders, and senior management of the purchasing company as well.
In the Walgreen case, last week it was announced that Walgreen was backing off the purchase—for now. The timing was not right, apparently, coming just before a midterm election in the US for a company dependent on US government subsidies to its customers with which to buy its drugs. But the hesitation by Walgreen is probably temporary, to resume after the November elections when the ‘tax inversion’ loophole gets addressed in comprehensive US corporate tax revision legislation that US corporations have been demanding of the Obama administration and Congress for several years now.
Corporate managers as well as hedge fund speculators benefit nicely from tax inversions. They are typically offered a ‘sweet incentive’ by their hedge fund investors and other big shareholders to do an inversion deal. So it’s not just the possible threat of a stockholder revolt, instigated by the company’s in house big fund investors, that incentivizes more corporate managers to jump on the tax inversion bandwagon. Senior managers stand to gain greatly as well from stock price appreciation in the wake of the deals.  Often their personal income tax bill from selling their own personal stock holdings after the company’s stock price rises from the deal is covered by their companies. Their own personal capital gains from the deals is often ‘grossed up’ by their company (i.e. paid for out of the company’s earnings) as part of the deal.
So all levels of financial speculators benefit from these ‘inversion’ deals—shadow bank investors, hedge fund managers, big stockholders, and top corporate managers with significant stock holdings and compensation—all realize big capital gains from stock price manipulation that is at the core of tax inversion deals. Again, it is not just about tax avoidance; it is about stock price manipulation and huge capital gains. Long term the benefits for the company may be from corporate tax reduction; but short term the big speculative profits rip-off is from engineering stock speculation and other forms of financial manipulation.
In the past year there has emerged a veritable ‘wave’ of corporate inversion deals erupting.  And the potential loss to US corporate tax revenue, should the trend continue, is considered significant by many estimates.  The Obama administration this past summer raised the possibility it may support legislation to curb the practice.  But the political outlook of such before the midterm elections in November 2014 is practically nil, so far as passage of legislation to check the trend is concerned.  While bills have been introduced earlier this year by a few liberal Senators, the Obama administration so far has been mostly just talking about supporting such legislation, or offering proposals tweaking the requirements for allowing inversions, not actually preventing them.  What’s going on politically in the administration and Congress is therefore just ‘grandstanding’ to make it appear they are concerned. Nothing will happen before the November midterm elections.
Political elements of both parties in the USA are eyeing the period after the election, during which the US tax code and general corporate tax revisions and cuts will be taken up.  An institutionalizing of rules governing corporate tax inversions going forward will undoubtedly be part of that comprehensive corporate tax revision. Tax inversions are not going away; they have only just begun.
The ‘inversion’ trend is another example of the growing dominance of the global finance capitalist elite, who are deeply entrenched in the USA and UK in particular, but worldwide growing in terms of numbers and absolute wealth as well.
This elite is deepening its control of nonfinancial companies and are increasingly directing those companies increasingly toward profits growth from financial manipulation as the primary corporate activity—in this case ‘inversions’ and corporate mergers and acquisitions activity.
Instead of making profits by making real things that require real investment and the employ real people, the focus of global capitalism is increasingly toward more financial asset investment—i.e. investment that produces even quicker, more lucrative profits growth than old fashioned ‘real’ investment that makes things that creates jobs and income for people to buy the things.
Global capitalism is growing progressively less interested in making things for profit than it is in generating forms of money capital as profit. Those engaged in financial asset investment (i.e. financial elite) are therefore accruing an ever larger share of global income and wealth for themselves, while those who were once participating in investment producing goods are finding their share of income in steady relative decline.
Global shadow banks now control more than $70 trillion in investible assets, according to such ‘radical’ sources as the Financial Times global periodical. And very high net worth investors, about 200,000 individuals worldwide with annual income flows of $30 million or more from existing assets—i.e. the new global finance capital elite—now own close to half of that $70 trillion in investible assets. And their assets are projected to rise another $10 trillion by 2017.
Inversions’ and related M&A activity are but one example of a growing emphasis of global capitalism on financial forms of speculative ‘investment’ in the 21^st century. Inversions are but the latest example of this global relative shift toward financial speculative investing.
The growing shift by non-financial corporations toward ‘portfolio’ investing; the growing trend toward speculating in M&A, derivatives, old and new forms of bonds, dark pools of stocks, and other proliferating forms of securitized financial securities; the explosive growth of shadow banking institutions worldwide; the spread of liquid financial markets in which to speculate; and the accelerating ranks and assets of very high net worth investors worldwide—two third of whom are located in the US and Europe—are all examples of the new trends in 21^st century global capitalism as it shifts toward greater reliance on financial profit making.
US politicians will not only fail to stop inversions, but following the November 2014 midterm elections, watch for both wings of the US Corporate Party in the USA to come together and legislate a new comprehensive corporate tax cut.  Included in that new code will be new terms governing future global corporate tax inversions—as well as a likely major reduction in the official US corporate tax rate to 28% or less that has been promised by both Obama and the Republicans for the past two years but has been postponed until the coming November midterm elections.

Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men - The Civilized Capitalist Machine - Deleuze and Guattari (1972)

... In a certain sense, capitalist economists are not mistaken when they present the economy as being perpetually "in need of monetarization," as if it were always necessary to inject money into the economy from the outside according to a supply and a demand. In this manner the system indeed holds together and functions, and perpetually fulfills its own immanence. In this manner it is indeed the global object of an investment of desire. The wage earner's desire, the capitalist's desire, everything moves to the rhythm of one and the same desire, founded on the differential relation of flows having no assignable limit, and where capitalism reproduces its immanent limits on an ever widening and more comprehensive scale. Hence it is at the level of a generalized theory of flows that one is able to reply to the question: how does one come to desire strength while also desiring one's own impotence? How was such a social field able to be invested by desire? And how far does desire go beyond so-called objective interests, when it is a question of flows to set in motion and to break? Doubtless Marxists will remind us that the formation of money as a specific relation within capitalism depends on the mode of production that makes the economy a monetary economy. The fact remains that the apparent objective movement of capital - which is by no means a failure to recognize or an illusion of consciousness - shows that the productive essence of capitalism can itself function only in this necessarily monetary or commodity form that controls it, and whose flows and relations between flows contain the secret of the investment of desire. It is at the level of flows, the monetary flows included, and not at the level of ideology, that the integration of desire is achieved.

So what is the solution? Which is the revolutionary path? ... Is there one? - To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist "economic solution"? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to "accelerate the process," as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet.

1313a34 Tyrannies - Aristotle

Tyrannies can be preserved in two ways, which are utterly opposed to one another. One of them is the traditional way; and it is also the method of government still followed by the majority of tyrants. Many of its characteristics are supposed to have been originally instituted by Periander of Corinth; but many features may also be derived from the Persian system of government. These include measures previously mentioned as tending to the preservation of tyranny (so far as it can be preserved): the 'lopping off' of outstanding men, and the removal of men of spirit. In addition it is possible: (1) to prohibit common meals, clubs, education, and anything of a like character-or, in other words, to adopt a defensive attitude against everything likely to produce two qualities of mutual confidence and a high spirit; (2) to forbid societies for cultural purposes, and any gathering of a similar character, and to use every means for making every subject as much of a stranger as is possible to every other (since mutual acquaintance creates mutual confidence); (3) to require every resident in the city to be constantly appearing in public, and always hanging about the palace gates. (In this way they are least likely to escape notice in what they do and they will come to have a low opinion of themselves as a result of being continually in the position of slaves.) This line of policy also includes other tyrannical measures of a similar character, common in Persia and other barbarian countries. For example, a tyrant may try (4) to ensure that nothing which any of his subjects says or does escapes his notice. This entails a secret police, like the female spies employed at Syracuse, or the eavesdroppers sent by tyrant Hieron to all social gatherings and public meetings. (Men are not so likely to speak their minds if they go in fear of people like these; and if they do speak out, they are less likely to go undetected.) He may (5) sow mutual distrust and foster discord between friend and friend; between people and notables; between one section of the rich and another. Finally, it befits a tyrant (6) to impoverish his subjects-partly to prevent them having the means for maintaining a civic guard; partly to keep them so busy with their daily tasks that they have no time for plotting. One example of this policy is the building of the Egyptian pyramids: another is the lavish offerings to temples made by the family of Cypselus; a third is the erection of the temple to Olympian Zeus by the family of Peisistratus; a fourth is the additions made by Polycrates to the Samian monuments. (All these actions have the same object: to increase the poverty of the tyrant's subjects and to curtail their leisure.) The imposition of taxes produces a similar result. We may cite the example of Syracuse, where in a period of five years, during the tyrany of Dionysius the Elder, people were made to pay the whole of their property to the city. The same vein of policy also makes tyrants warmongers, with the object of keeping their subjects constantly occupied and continually in need of a leader.

Give The Man A Gong For Being Wrong - Jeremy Bullivant

Eugene Fama was one of three winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics this year.

His hypothesis regarding the efficiency of financial markets is indeed elegant (which sometimes is enough for an award to be made) but it is also utterly and completely wrong.
Not particularly impressed with his Fama-French Three-Factor Model either (but more on that later).

If there were no government interferences, no psychopathies, no behavioural irrationalities, no corruptions nor criminalities and if market sectors didn't always evolve towards maturity, he would be right.
But as these inputs drive all markets, the laureate is surely wrong.

Fama's Efficient Markets Hypothesis was put forward in 1970 and formed an intellectual basis for the shock doctrine disaster neo-capitalism that the world has experienced since.
By being a part of the "intellectual" framework gathered as an neo-con edifice at the University of Chicago, Fama bears some responsibility for this sociopathic system.

So, what is Gene's hypothesis and why is it incorrect?

The Efficient Markets Hypothesis is split into three levels - strong-form, semi-strong-form and weak-form efficiency.
Strong-form suggests that market prices reflect all information, public and private, and it is not possible for anyone to earn excess returns.
In semi-stong-form, prices adjust to new information rapidly and rationally.
While in weak-form structures, prices simply follow a random walk.

Before we go any further we need to look at the architecture of markets.
The public markets are just the top of an iceberg of submerged Dark Pool markets - there are hundreds of unregulated Dark Pools where insiders trade against insiders in markets that the public only sees when an excess of over-enthusiasm occurs. It is in these markets that the big market plays are made not the public ones.

For all assessments of Fama's Hypothesis, therefore, it will need to be addressed on two levels - the public markets and the Dark Pools.

1) The most dominant input to the wrongness of Fama's Hypothesis is behaviouralism.
Work in the sixties by Daniel Kahnemann, Amos Tversky, Paul Slovic and Richard Thaler had already introduced psychology to the market and, in 1979, Kahnemann and Tversky developed Prospect Theory which represented the final psychological nail in the coffin of Efficient Markets. Investors do not behave in a rational manner in the marketplace for a whole continuum of different reasons that both exist within themselves and also interact in complex ways between themselves to produce the behaviours that we project. Market prices represent mass human psychology far more than they do unproved economic fundamentals.
So by 1979, Fama's Hypothesis should have been put to bed...
... unfortunately, it took the blinkered Chicago School until 2007 to acknowledge the impact of behaviouralism in markets, attempting to convince us in the meantime that an efficient pricing infrastructure underpinned the alleged validity of Friedmanian late capitalism..

Slavoj Žižek: "The problem is today when you have chaos or disorder, people lose their cognitive mapping."

2) All of the information is not in the market. Even if behaviouralism did not exist and we were all perfectly rational in all of our decision-making, efficient markets would be compromised on all three levels of Fama's efficiency hierarchy.
Public markets are largely inefficient being too far from the core Dark Pools to be benefiting instantaneously to the flow of real information. The public markets offer a distilled filtered form of this driving underground Dark Pool marketplace. Dark Pool trading strategies become converted into a holistic market strategy as Dark Pool liabilities are hedged in the public sphere.

What about the Dark Pools?
Are they a proof of Fama efficiencies?

No.
Behaviouralism is a "plug in" in any market, public or Dark Pool.
Additionally, the information flow in Dark Pools is, by its very nature, opaque.
Proxy trading, algorithmic distortions, hidden players away from the table, consortia strategies, disinformational trading, cornered markets etc etc.
At any given time, the market tends to inefficiency.
As mature markets might evolve into anything the primary operators desire, the price can be anything too.

Mature markets (and these are the ones most traded in the Dark Pools) are largely under the absolute control of a small grouping of operations, think OPEC. Individual members of OPEC have their own hidden agendas over and above the shared agenda with fellow members. Even when the structure is held in place with extra robustness due to government scaffolding around the market, the major player(s) is/are still able to make the market whatever they desire whenever they desire.
In effect monopolistic corruption distorts any semblance of efficiency in the market while duopolistic or cartel behaviour offers a slightly diluted version of the same.

3) Disaster capitalism undermines any efficiency in any financial market.
The Friedmanian disaster capitalism complex thrives on chaos. When a disaster strikes or, as in the case of Chile, is created, the Chicago school Hayekians move in with their shock tactics to further destabilise an already destabilised people. As US security entities move into the vacuum, the markets are utterly chaotic. Although some efficiency and robustness is added to the marketplace ironically by the strategies of these security operations (the same template being micro-adjusted from territory to territory) the holistic performance of the markets is driven by irrationalities and the efficiencies fall off the bottom of Fama's ratings chart.

4) Private information is introduced to the market in a variety of strategies that, by their very nature, imply market inefficiencies being created for the advantage of Dark Pool operations.
Knowledge within a company, governmental or central bank policies, trading disinformation for future profits, competitive market poker play all are based around the possession of the ultimate power play for the marketplace. Just think of the variety of ways in which, say, Ben Bernanke could have utilised his absolute knowledge of the variables related to quantitative easing. An individual, with evolving strategies, could make money without the full reality hitting the market by placing trades laterally and peripherally.

Noam Chomsky would call this "cogntive regulatory capture" and it is a structure typical of late capitalism.

5) The most obvious way in which financial markets are inefficient is by their refusal to accept the cost of externalities in the price of an asset.
How on earth can a price be efficient in the holistic sense if externalities are not included in the calculation? The price can only be considered in any way efficient in short time frames as, when the true costs are included, the asset value is very different indeed. The timing of this market implosion can be an unknown variable.

Friedmanism underprices risk and ignores externalities.
The eventual impact of these externalities is infrastructurally significant.

Andrew Haldane, who should have been made governor of the Bank of England, calls this "disaster myopia".

Disaster myopia in disaster capitalism complex!
Although Dark Pools are displaced up the efficiency hierarchy due to lack of time lag and the primary element in the insider trading, the market increase in efficiency is only marginal and only due to corrupting inputs being introduced to the market price.
If all corrupt inputs in a mature market could be known and assessed both singly and in association with one another, only then might a corrupt market approach strong-form efficiency and in a non-regulated marketplace this is simply not going to occur.

Which brings us to the conclusion of yet another aspect of the fake of Friedmanism.

Fama's only other claim to fame is the already mentioned Fama-French Three-Factor Model.
This attempts to replace the old Capital Asset Pricing Model (which, by the way, is also inadequate).
Needless to say the Three-Factor model doesn't work as it ignores corruption and behaviouralism.

Entertainingly, Foye, Mramor and Pahor (2013) have shown an improvement in the performance of the Fama-French model if one of the terms is replaced by a term that acts as a proxy for accounting manipulation!

These papers are amongst the first tentative steps of economics crawling towards holistically analysing the hyperreality.

Benoît Mandelbrot: "Financial economics, as a discipline, is where Chemistry was in the 16th century: a messy compendium of proven know-how, misty folk wisdom, and unexamined assumptions and grandiose speculation."

As a former pupil of Mandelbrot, Fama should know better...
... grandiose models, unexamined inputs, misty economic wisdom mixed with the status quo.

And, anyway, as economics in rather dubious fashion claims to be a science, let's address it as such...

Michel Foucault: "If one recognises in science only the linear accumulation of truths or the orthogenesis of reason, and fails to recognise in it the discursive practice that has its own levels, its own thresholds, its own various ruptures, one can describe only a single historical division, which one adopts as a model to be applied at all times for all forms of knowledge."

Ancient Pasty-Faced Flabby Goth Chats Shit

Yesterday, serial failure and intellectual incompetent, Lord Nigel Lawson, was given odious amounts of mainstream media time to spout on about his little Englander view of the world.

                                  Why Would Anybody Buy A UKIP Policy From This Man?

Two points...

1) The Guardian: "[Lawson] decided that the best way to keep the cost of living in check was for the pound to shadow the German mark, believing that this would import Teutonic anti-inflationary zeal into the UK. It was a policy disaster. Interest rates were cut to prevent sterling from rising and this led to an orgy of mortgage borrowing. House prices rose sharply and so did inflation, from a trough of just over 2% in 1986 to almost 10% in 1990."

So the goth can't do macroeconomics and caused a recession.

2) The goth also denies human-influenced climate change...
... so he is a fool to boot.
Even the oil companies recognise their role in changing the equilibrium state of the planet.

The Economist: "The Arctic also has oil and gas... Exploration licences are now being issued across the region... Oil companies do not like to talk about it, but this points to another positive feedback from the melt. Climate change caused by burning fossil fuels will allow more Arctic hydrocarbons to be extracted and burned."

Destroy the planet once, destroy the planet twice, all for privatised profits of a psychopathic elite.

Lord Lawson of Blaby is married to a woman 39 years his junior and who is ten years younger than his daughter Nigella...
... the true mark of a man of inappropriate power and influence.

Exactly why was Blabby of Blaby given this amount of airtime?

© Football is Fixed 2006-2013

Gideon Osborne, Carmen Reinhart And Ken Rogoff Are Charlatans

On the day that UK unemployment jumped 70,000 and one of the architects of that steady stream of unemployment and minimum wage slavery was buried, something else was buried too...
... the revelation that the academic paper that all austerity policies are based on - "Growth in a Time of Debt" by Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart - is based on a fallacious and malicious analysis of the data.

  
                              Carmen Reinhart Contemplating The Children She Will Eat For Breakfast

"Sloppy statistics" according to Robert Harding in Wednesday's Financial Times.

Rogoff and Reinhart found that growth falls to a mean average of minus 0.1 per cent when public debt is greater than 90% of output.
But researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst find a figure of plus 2.2% when repeating the analysis.

"Coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics led to serious errors that inaccurately represent the data between public debt and GDP growth."

"Unsupportable statistical techniques..."

Financial Times: "The Amherst researchers said that Ms Reinhart and Mr Rogoff had made an error in their spreadsheet, missed several years of data and then averaged their results in a way that put unusual weight on short episodes in particular countries."

Robert Pollin and Michael Ash: "The main policy plank is riddled with faults."

The original paper and the arbitrary nature both of the 90% threshold and the general manner that economic/econometric "science" is addressed show the ludicrous nature of depending on the dismal science to produce anything other than dismal science.

Although the pseudo-case for austerity doesn't solely depend on Rogoff and Reinhart, other supportive sources have also recently been discredited.

And Rogoff and Reinhart produced their propaganda in 2010...
... why has it taken three years for anyone to check the figures when global economic policy has been based on the austerity that the paper proposes?
Because Rogoff and Reinhart refused to release the data, that's why!
They were that confident of their analyses!!

Paul Krugman: "For the truth is that Reinhart-Rogoff faced substantial criticism from the start, and the controversy grew over time... many economists pointed out that a negative correlation between debt and economic performance need not mean that high debt causes low growth. It could be the other way around... (T)he Reinhart-Rogoff fiasco needs to be seen in the broader context of austerity mania: the obviously intense desire of policy makers, politicians and pundits across the Western world to turn their backs on the unemployed and instead use the economic crisis as an excuse to slash social programs."

We're either being run by entirely incompetent fools or by malicious psychopaths.

Incompetent Fool Or Malicious Psychopath? Too Busy Selling His Cheshire Estate Two Days Before High Speed Rail Route Announced To Notice That The "Intellectual" Authority Underpinning His Class War Perversion Was Of No Merit

A former professor of mine, Neville Topham, told me about a high level consultancy document that he had written showing that house prices increase more than average for properties directly under the flight paths at Heathrow Airport.

"You can show anything with data in economics" was the justification for his fee.
 
© Football is Fixed 2006-2013