by John Ward
Stand by for a news announcement from the US CNBC website. It is devoid of spin and entirely accurate – something of a rarity these days:
‘Bond trading revenue surged 86% to $3.4 billion,’ CNBC further gushed, ‘exceeding the $2.61 billion estimate by roughly $800 million, as fixed-income desks were humming, particularly in securitized products and rates’.
As I’ve already pointed out, the story is absolutely true. And you might think that makes me a chump, for only two days ago I wrote, ‘I’ll be a tad more interested in JPMorgan Chase’s results tomorrow, if only to see if there are any columns in the flyshit headed ‘plugging iceberg hole on starboard side’.
Except it doesn’t. Because CNBC is doing what all old media (especially corporate-inclined media) do these days: never assess the facts behind the news.
The New York Fed Reserve has parachuted $6 trillion onto Wall Street since late September – almost all of it into the Repo loan sector that allowed JPMC to “crush” analysts’ profit estimates.
They did this because JP Morgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon got nervous about some of his borrowers, and caused a rate spike in the Repo sector by saying No a few times. This forced the NY Fed to begin the money airlift, and get the taxpayer to pay for Jamie’s nervous condition to the tune of six trillion bucks.
The renewed energy on the Repo thus allowed Dimon to calm down to the tune of eight hundred million bucks profit.
As a result, Our Jamie himself is now personally richer to the tune of two hundred and fifty million bucks.
One rate spike, one bank, one man, $6 trillion dollars.
One third on top of the entire US National Debt.
Money that means every American citizen from 18 months to 118 years of age now owes $17,142 and 52 cents more than they did last September. So I have three grandnieces over there down for 50,000 bucks, and none of them has reached the age of twelve yet.
Except that the US money tree isn’t quite that fair, because differing levels of income and taxation come into play. Somebody with a taxable income of $1 million now owes $123,000 more. A less lucky person on a mere $100,000 a year kops for $52,000 in debt. So you see, this isn’t a Socialist “s’not fair on the workers” Max Keiser sort of jibe: it’s about over 90% of Americans.
As very few people in the bottom 30% of the US have any savings at all over $15,000 (85% of Americans have less than ten thousand stashed away, and 34% have diddly-squat) the question is somewhat academic: the real question being begged by this calumny is the same old chestnut that’s been bothering the decent folks for decades: who really calls the shots in America?
On the evidence of the Repo scandal alone, if you believe that politicians and the President do, then it’s YOU that’s Johnny Conspiranoid the Nutjob, not the rest of us.
Let’s now try and apply similar maths and logic to the “deal” haha negotiated by the British Alternative State to take the United Kingdom out of the European unelected State on January 31st next.
There may not be a money tree, but there just has to be a paper mill involved in this somewhere. Or rather, an electronically created boundless sum of silly-money as per the exacting principles of the fractional reserve central banking and UK Treasury accounting systems. If there isn’t, then on February 1st 2020 the newly “independent” UK’s budgets will have been completely shot to pieces.
So far, questions by finance workers, bloggers and MPs have gone nowhere in terms of getting a confirmation from anyone in government anywhere about whether there have been any changes at all between the May and Bojo Withdrawal Agreements. The tight-lipped nature of the response to this question would suggest that either (a) there are further nasties in the Bojo version or (b) there are no substantive differences at all.
In fact, although Boris claimed a victory in getting the original WA reopened, no such thing appears to have happened beyond the removal of the EU backstop – replaced by the Northern Ireland Protocol. This means a financial dimension to the leaving ‘deal’ roughly as outlined by The Slog three months ago:
First, there are the European Investment Bank costs and liabilities:
- Chancellor Hammond gifted £7.5bn owed to us to the EU. Nobody knows why, he just did. He had a surreal sense of humour at times
- He put Britain on the line for another €36 bn of capital help – with no preconditions – to help underwrite the EIB should the eurozone collapse
- A further £80bn per annum will be down to us to underwrite any cockups the EIB produces in lending during the transition period – even though we will already have left.
Total EIB liabilities therefore stand at £124 billion.
There are then the monthly extension payments still in force as a result of Remoanoid MPs blocking our exit last March. By the time we leave, these will have cost exactly £10 billion.
Finally there is the ludicrous ‘divorce fee’ of £39 billion. It has no legal standing at all under the Treaty of Lisbon and has never been explained. To this day, nobody in Whiteminster or Brussels anywhere has given anyone else anywhere else a fraction, scintilla, or even glimmer of a reason why we are paying it. We know of course why the EU is demanding it, because they are a bunch of feral mobsters. But either way, it seems like we’re going to cough up unless we leave without a trade deal on December 31st.
So – largely thanks to Whitehall idiots and Remoanoid ideologues – the cost of Brexit plus a trade deal at the end of 2020 will have reached a less than trivial £173 billion. Chickenfeed in the Jamie Dimon League of Laughtermaking, but nevertheless what we Whitehall mandarins call an Ennaitchess, and what 1950s born SPA victims would call due restitution for criminal embezzlement.
Given the state of our national finances, there is no way that money can be simply ‘found’: it will have to be either taxed, created or borrowed.
Depending on whose population stats you believe (I’m being kind and thus using the census) getting the Brexit plus trade deal will have cost every UK citizen £2,650.
Every one of us has paid that just to have our democratic decision recognised and acted upon. It comes on top of the £624 billion we paid in tax as a nation last year.
Three fifths of a trillion Pounds every year. One point two trillion Pounds since 2016, just to have them needlessly cost us another fifth of a trillion. These, the “legislators” and “civil servants” whose salaries, unfunded pension liabilities and incontinent vanity-project write-offs have added nearly three trillion Pounds to our debt since 1995.
This system may be working for sore-loser fascist minorities, corporations doing dodgy tax deals, frontal-lobe depraved bankers, arrogant Sir Humphreys, MPs and the City, but it isn’t doing a lot for some 80+% of the electorate….or the viability of Sterling.
So a similar question ought to be posed by Brits as by Yanks: who really calls the shots in Britain?
I can’t speak for the US, but although a resident of France I am still a UK citizen from birth. Slog threader Asimong suggested yesterday that my beat-of-the-street may be off, given I only visit Blighty rarely these days. It’s a fair point, although it is also true that a non-resident making rare visits is vastly more conscious of decline than the unfortunate lobsters being slowly boiled alive every day.
But this issue isn’t beat-of-the-street stuff: it’s not about what people at UK ground level think at the moment, it’s about collating the evidence to show what is rather than what people imagine the situation to be.
On the basis of that evidence, I would suggest that the Borisonian Cabinet badly needs a regulator on a number of key issues….otherwise we are all going to be taken for a ride over the next five years as we have been over the last hundred or more. And there is no need for the past to be a guide to the future in all matters.
Whatever the relativists say, this ‘regulation’ job used to be done by the news media. Today we are overwhelmed with Shopfront news, but nobody is looking under the counter.
Today, that job is being largely performed by online investigations undertaken by individuals, small collectives like Wall Street on Parade, and the bigger fish like Zero Hedge, Spiked!, Off Guardian and so forth. I can only tell others involved in the task what my investigative priorities are in the UK & Europe of the moment:
- Keeping Boris the Spider in check
- Instilling some global fiscal urgency into Sajid Javid
- Revealing the real state of eurozone liquidity and economics
- Waking people up to the reality behind Boy King Macron
- Getting to the Truth about UK liabilities to the EIB
- Further revelations about Guy Verhofstadt and chums
- Demanding more details about the UK/EU trade topics and progress
- Unearthing something – anything – that will see SPA Reform Victims reimbursed.
In the immediate term – and I don’t give a damn if people are bored with the subject – we badly need more openness about our WA2 liabilities and the trade deal with the EU – topics, personnel, goals, progress, whatever.
Thanks for reading.