How Agents Are Destroying Football
1. Many firms of agents have an interest in the global betting markets. Some firms specifically target goalkeepers, for example. A very high percentage of the sixty plus betting scandals to be currently under investigation feature agents as facilitators due to the way in which agents seemlessly lubricate the system.
2. Betting interest soon morphs into market control. preferably in-house otherwise in a fragmented cartel. There are a variety of tipping points where the critical mass of the control of a match corruption is reached. Matches are fixed via participants on behalf of their agents. Agents target both club and international matches.
3. Player loyalty to club is increasingly a rare factor in football nowadays. Players have an agent for life (pre to post career) and any number of clubs. Badge-kissing is simply marketing the brand of the self. Clubs that employ several players from the same firm of agents or from a web-like cartel of agents risk losing control of their matches although some of the better run clubs limit such exposure as a matter of strategy e.g. FC Bayern, Milan, Barcelona and Blackpool.
4. Once control of a very liquid betting market becomes the focus of agents/ cartel of agents' attention then control of those lily-livered reprobates, the referees, becomes the primary strategy. At the poker table of postmodern football, one goalkeeper + the referee is a very strong hand indeed. Referees are underpaid outliers with football envy - psychologically many referees are desperate for 'acceptance' within the game. Media silence and retirement hush money aid any shenanigans.
5. Once an agent/ cartel is seen to be influencing market outcomes, market makers and bookmakers enter stage right. Hence surface level criminalised trading migrates to the European and Asian underworlds, undergrounds and offshore financial centres. It is not surprising that a £1 trillion annual market attracts such intricate infrastructures.
6. Agents bleed the game of money that should be going to grass roots projects. For the year ending September 2013, agents took virtually £100 million from the Premier League (over £2.5 million for every round of games).This was a 25% increase and elicited no mainstream media attention in a week where the words 'agents' and 'match-fixing' kept appearing in the same sentences.
7. Due to loyalty to self/ agent rather than club, a perverse incentive means many players will perform fully only when playing in live tv matches with massively increased global exposure. Similarly, 'injuries' and choice of timing for operations etc are determined by agent not by the club.
8. Agents always boast about the black market sides of their job - the under-the-table illicit payments to drop interests in a player, the insider gamble that the bookies couldn't stop. Agents take far more than £100 million out of the English game in the grey and black market sectors.
9. Agents undertake mainstream media control for the promotion of their clients, the suppression of inappropriate news and reality leakages, the advancement of transfer strategies and, in the case of the Guardian, the 'creation' of an entirely fictitious neohyperreality in the form of the Secret Footballer. How apt that, with editorial involvement, a newspaper that robbed the secrets from Wikileaks and Snowden should create their very own imaginary secrets via a fake entity linked to a leading football agent!
10. There is no regulation of agents. Consequently, all agents eventually, if not initially, become linked to mafia - this is the only evolution feasible in Friedmanian capitalism in a sector that is entirely non-regulated. Market Maturity = Monopolistic Mafia. Although agents police themselves, a whole variety of mafia groups police the agents.
11. Third Party Agreements are not only still the norm but Fourth and Fifth Party ones exist too. Self-regulation means, in effect, no regulation as agents create the necessary infrastructure to allow them to optimise their operations.
12. Top agents have links to government in Britain (both Labour and Tory). Bizarrely, agents and (the limited) control of a hugely liquid global financial market that they bring are one of the few hyperreal growth areas in our austerity-wrecked post-imperial wasteland of a fake-service economy. Of course, government cannot boast this economic success story: "our match-fixing and market distortions are bringing jobs to Britain..."
When a former player-turned-agent Delroy Facey was named as a key operator in Invisiblegate - the English match-fixing scandal which allegedly happened last week - we expected an imminent media blackout, a separation of the Premier League from any allegations of match-fixing and a markedly legitimate weekend in the Premier League. And that is what we got. It was just like the old days. No sendings off and just one penalty (to Manchester United, of course). No controversy. We cannot find any other weekend in our databases with so little referee influence. What a remarkable fluke!
For many more itemised angles on corruption follow us on Twitter @FootballIsFixed
© Football is Fixed 2006-2013
Monday, 2 December 2013
Saturday, 19 October 2013
Give The Man A Gong For Being Wrong
Eugene Fama was selected as one of the three Nobel Prize for Economics recipients this week.
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 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 are driven by irrationalities and the efficiencies fall off the bottom of Fama's ratings chart. Andrew Haldane, who should have been made Governor of the Bank of England, refers to this inability to judge risk as "disaster myopia".
Disaster myopia in a disaster capitalism complex!
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.
Although Dark Pools are displaced up the efficiency hierarchy due to lack of time lag and the primary element in the insider trading, the markets 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."
For many more itemised angles on corruption follow us on Twitter @FootballIsFixed
© Football is Fixed 2006-2013
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 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 are driven by irrationalities and the efficiencies fall off the bottom of Fama's ratings chart. Andrew Haldane, who should have been made Governor of the Bank of England, refers to this inability to judge risk as "disaster myopia".
Disaster myopia in a disaster capitalism complex!
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.
Although Dark Pools are displaced up the efficiency hierarchy due to lack of time lag and the primary element in the insider trading, the markets 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."
For many more itemised angles on corruption follow us on Twitter @FootballIsFixed
© Football is Fixed 2006-2013
Saturday, 12 May 2012
In The Lap of the Big Bang - A Post from 2008
Why Free Market Capitalism Cannot Work; Why It Is Pointless To Reform Something That Cannot Work; Why Nobody Believes In Free Markets Anymore Although We Want To Maintain Appearances; Why It Is Time For A New Equilibrium State
Fractally speaking, all of our existences are to be determined to a major extent by the Physics of the Big Bang.
For financial economists, this is a pretty large externality to have left out of your risk assessments!
And, yet, that is exactly how flimsy is the intellectual rigour underpinning Friedman, Hayek and the Chicago School so mighty in ObamaWorld.
Of course, all other externalities are stripped out of the pricing system too, in order that psychopathic growth may be achieved despite the production of Real Super-Systemic Risk.
Carcinogenic Capitalism.
Occurrences that have already happened, some in the dim and distant past, are affecting the dynamics, trends and movements in the financial markets today.
Behaviouralism and Darwinism are primary drivers of the financial markets and yet such structures as 'Moral Hazard' (where market operators take excessive risk safe in the knowledge that there is no personal downside to such risk) were built into the very fabric of the free market model.
None of this Fractal Mathematics, Psychology of Finance or Behaviouralism has been utilised by regulators, government or the financial system despite such knowledge having been freely available for half a century - Mandelbrot, Kahneman and Tversky published in the early sixties.
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."
Through the provision of a psychopathic regulation-lite template where individuals were rewarded for public displays of their psychopathy in action, we should hardly express surprise that the elevation of such antisocials up the economic, financial and political ladders has produced systemic psychopathy in the atmosphere of the system.
Short-termism leads to a lack of strategy which increases risk.
Refusal to accommodate externalities produces feedback loops that also engender systemic and super-systemic risk.
And while these characters were filling their pockets while we were all still focused on all that smoke and all those mirrors, they were basing their illusion on prehistoric 'science'.
Neo-classical economics is pre-Galilean in its simplicity. Multi-disciplinary it is not!
Then there are the chartists and the technical analysts, believing in their candlesticks and their head-and-shoulder formations, all blinkered to any Holistic Reality but following the same data, the same prices, the same (dis)information, plotting the same lines on the same charts utilising the same off-the-shelf software which, if it were of any Real value, would be being used in a proprietary trading environment for isolationist profit. Actually...
Then came the Idiot Physicists - Econophysicists - to spread disaster far and wide.
Holistically challenged, this new breed of trader possessed all the professional inadequacies of their predecessors but with a new twist - black boxes.
Algorithmic analysis has grown exponentially in the last decade.
Curiously enough, this neatly coincides with the onset of the Permanent Depression which, as we all know, began in 1997, or thereabouts.
Black boxes are perfect for shenanigans.
You feed in the inputs.
You train your black box to recognise patterns in this data.
You mock trade the black box.
You build the black box into your overall trading portfolio.
And cybernetics works, to an extent, but not if any econophysicists are involved it doesn't!
It is all dependent on the quality of the inputs.
There are many additional issues with relying solely on black box technologies for trading including different pattern relevance in different market phases and the impacts of Black Swans, for example.
The key charges laid on the Chicago doormat are damning in their veracity - archaic theory, non-multidisciplinary, no Real risk assessment, unsustainability as a core competency, belief in 'magic' technologies, an absence of any atmospheric analysis and engendering super-systemic catastrophe scenarios.
Meanwhile, our Chicago Economist In Chief, Barack Hussein Obama Himself, doesn't understand the basic concept of the price-earnings ratio, thinking it is termed the 'profit-earnings ratio' in a Friedmanian Slip.
This cannot be a good thing.
Before entirely deconstructing this nonsense, we need to take a closer look at the Real reasons why such a system can NEVER work.
Gosh! This is pretty exciting for a Monday morning, I can tell you :)
On October 19th 1987, Wall Street fell by 29.2% in the biggest daily decline in a century.
The probability of Wall Street falling this amount is 10 to the power of 50.
Mandelbrot: "You could span the powers of 10 from the smallest sub-atomic particle to the breadth of the measurable universe - and still never meet such a number."
Free market capitalism underprices risk.
In fact, it frequently excludes risk from the equation entirely.
The outcome of this blinkered approach to all of our Realities is that, in the words of Mandelbrot: "The odds of financial ruin in a free, global market economy have been grossly underestimated."
October 19th 1987 simply should not have occurred.
The 2008 Crash should never have happened either.
But they did and such Black Swans will continue to blight this myopic system until it is nicely deconstructed and put away in its box, under the bed.
Fractal Mathematics are the key here, obviously.
Butterflies flutter and hurricanes hit mainly Black areas, only to be ignored as an Unreality by government.
Decisions are made, systems developed, regulations changed, globalisation created, insider trading enacted, markets are cornered, monopolies allowed, cartels fragment, the state gets involved, new financial markets are established, private markets and Dark Pools established etc etc etc. Each of these quantums of influence set in process the fractal future.
Every single quantum Reality impacts on the future market price.
Behaviouralism cuts across all these feedback loops as a further fractal input.
As Slavoj Žižek states: "The problem is today when you have chaos or disorder, people lose their cognitive mapping."
Chaos reigns.
Take volatility.
There were more daily swings of 5% or more in the FTSE 100 in November 2008 than in total since the Second World War.
Were the market hyperrealities really more volatile in November or was Mass Psychology at play?
All fundamental, systemic, regulatory and cybernetic fractals are massively disordered by the impact of the Behavioural.
Although listed under their sub-sections of Gestalt or Psychoanalysis or whatever, there is a Darwinian dynamic to the manner in which markets evolve.
This, of course, brings us back to the 'animal spirits - psychopathy' doublespeak.
And this is why super-systemic risk is being so massively underpriced in the financial system.
While all of the free market ideologues and their apologists in the seats of power are shuffling the papers, printing the money, pretending that there is another boom-and-bust possibility in this game yet (which, unfortunately, there probably is) and extending this pretence to the territory of carbon markets and cap and trade schemes, each fundamentally flawed fractally in their Ponzi capitalism, there are super-systemic fractals that might just be worthy of closer inspection.
And not just by climate change scientists either...
Fractals are the most worrying aspect of the whole array of worrying factors that make up the subject of climate change.
If fractals can do 10 to the power of 50 with financial markets when destabilisation takes hold, imagine what fractals could achieve in an eco-system that is no longer in a sustainable equilibrium state!
Mandelbrot: "The two poles of human experience - deterministic systems of order and planning and the stochastic or random systems of irregularity and unpredictability."
The latter of these poles dominate the analysis today both in financial markets and in climate change.
Better frame the argument around the issue of bankers and their bonuses then...
Jean Baudrillard: "These systems, even when they are based on radical indeterminacy (the loss of meanings), fall prey, once more, to meaning. They collapse under the weight of their own monstrosity."
Andrew Haldane describes the inability to judge risk as "disaster myopia" - a lack of awareness of the network externalities in combination with misaligned incentives.
But this is merely the first layer of "disaster myopia".
The feedback loops, the fractals, the super-systemic risk, the quantuming between different equilibrium states would combine in a second layer - more "catastrophe myopia" really...
If free market snake-oil salespeople included the primary and secondary levels of externality in their pricing system, the entire edifice comes crumbling down under the weight of its own "monstrosity", a monstrosity based on inconsequence of intellectual input to the issue at hand.
There is no growth once externalities are built into the equation.
Once one takes the holistics into account, the trickledown effect, already entirely illusory, becomes, instead, a Cinderella-fantastic fairy tale of a neohyperreality.
There is no such entity as a sustainable Ponzi scheme.
And the weight of monstrosity is the gravity.
Every free market capitalist infrastructure is Pure Ponzi - from Albanian peasants to credit default swaps.
And, because the people who have been receiving excessive bonuses for the last quarter of a century made the selfish decisions that they did, even to the detriment of their own lines of offspring (psychopathy again), we are now in what Sun Tzu might have called the Worst Variety of Ground.
The fractals yet to be unleashed, the toxicity still to surface, the mass delusions and engendered mass psychologies yet to spiral out of rationality, will all come to fruition against the backdrop of a super-systemic lack of stable equilibrium.
So, a 'system' that produces negative growth if the externalities are included, produces this deficiency of utility on a foundation that spontaneously combusts repeatedly and fractally due to historical indiscretions.
These foundational externalities have been magnified by the Greed of the Great and the Good of the last centennial quartile.
They tell us that tax doesn't have to be taxing which, in self-application, would suggest that the Great and the Good would be more than willing to return all of their ill-gotten gains so that we all might start to implement a sustainable strategy that just might provide us with the remote feasibility of halting man-made climatic change.
Free market sorts, when still willing to defend their myths, frame their discussions around new regulation and innovation and growth and other words that have no directly Real meanings in our lives.
Free market sorts are enacting massive systemic ructions on the global financial architecture without any methodology or strategy whatsoever.
Big Butterflies produce Huge Hurricanes.
But their big thinking always stops short of being out-of-the-box; big ideas exist within the walled gardens of their illusory system.
We don't need tinkering.
We need deconstruction, thank you very much.
And sustainable negative growth, economic contraction, stopping breeding, the promotion of instincts for freedom, those sort of things...
But, in the meantime, to keep your pecker up, why not wander out into the spring sunshine and anarcho-happy-slap a banker today...
Arghhhh!!! The minutiae! Don't get wrapped up in the minutiae...
© Football is Fixed 2006-2012
Friday, 24 February 2012
When Is A Third Party Agreement Not A Third Party Agreement? - A Flashback
Nearly three years ago, we produced the below post on third party arrangements and the manner in which Richard Scudamore and those in control of his actions avoided the rules, the law, morals, ethics, integrity and normal practice in the interest of all shady shades.
ScudamoreWorld remains an Adhocracy within the Murdochracy.
___________________________________________________________
On Friday July 13th, Football Is Fixed posted that the Carlos Tevez transfer was a done deal with the only remaining obstacle being how to construct a "reality" that would accommodate the multifarious public stances taken by the protagonists. That the final resolution has taken until yesterday to complete was solely a result of further non-strategic foot dragging by the Premier League. The deceleration of this process has merely served to make both their posturing as an organisation and the incompetence of chief executive officer (CEO), Richard Scudamore, more apparent to more people, as the delay has merely produced more damning column inches that have allowed more individuals to discern the Premier League's truly Orwellian fabrication of crime and punishment.
Briefly looking at the overview of this blatant piece of spectacular society corruption, we'll take each of the key participants in turn.
We stated just a couple of days ago that Richard Scudamore has more than passed his sell-by date. His mismanagement of the English game both within the public arena and away from the prying eyes of probity has been abysmal. When one compares his decision making with the interests of the more crooked elements that are corrupting our game to its core, we find a far-too-revealing positive correlation (which obviously occurs entirely by chance). However, his psychic ability to parallel Premier League strategy with the black and grey market's agenda is one of those spooky coincidences that has to be resultant in unemployment if such individuals were accountable to watchdogs. But they're not. The Premier League's accountability axes lead to some rather unsavoury loci.
Scudamore has been the media face that has projected his and his organisation's incompetence onto the footballing public in the Carlos Tevez affair. They dug themselves into a hole and just kept digging when strategic oversight would have preferenced a negotiated settlement. In financial markets, a key behavioural factor is testosterone. The male-dominated marketplace repeatedly throws up instances of testosterone-driven individuals undertaking strategies that are to their own and their associates disadvantage rather than selecting alternative options that might produce a small gain for all. The Premier League have behaved similarly. One of the problems for the likes of Scudamore is when the spin gets out of control. The conjunction of a variety of separate media realities results in people getting cornered in nightmares of their own chaotic creation. So it is with Scudamore. Quest and bungs, the influence of Zahavi and Berezovsky, the takeovers by Shinawatra and Yeung, the Carlos Tevez transfer and the West Ham non-relegation, mismanagement or what? And this are only the tip of the iceberg that is available to public eyes. Insiders also are able to detect the other machinations that are totally undermining and destabilising the game to the financial advantage of a smallish number of very corrupt entities.
Specifically with regard to Tevez and West Ham. By clearing and, indeed, financially rewarding the Hammers for their corrupt practices related to third party agreements, the Premier League set in motion the very public decline of their executive authority. The crisis was spun from Day One as the Premier League sought to achieve their aims with an abusive template. The other parallel stories conspired to establish a typical damage limitation infrastructure where each of the options open to Scudamore's brigade was a losing position. The scenario whereby the third party contracts never existed legally would have been overturned in the High Court to the accompaniment of excessive public awareness of the Premier League's murkier activities = LOSE. Or the scenario where the third party agreements did exist and were legal calls into serious question how the Premier League could possibly not relegate West Ham = LOSE. Keeping the various plates spinning in a spectacular creation of endless contortions until the media loses interest = LOSE. Or, the choice that the Premier League eventually arrived at, reach an out-of-court settlement with all the parties. Despite the fact that this settlement is conclusive proof of the corruption undertaken by the Premier League on a range of different levels as they repeatedly break (and allow others to break) the rules that they are supposed to oversee, pretend that you are still in control of the process while avoiding any cross-referencing between the final solution and any of the executive decisions preceding it = LOSE.
In non-sophisticated sectors like football, the tone of the press releases following these type of tiffs are always revealing. The Premier League's entirely desperate attempt to paper over the chasms states: "The decision of the board, having received leading counsel's opinion, is that the agreement reached is compliant with the rules of the Premier League and consistent with the undertakings given by West Ham United to the Premier League board at various times since 27th April 2007".
No, the agreement is not compliant with the Premier League rules and what about undertakings given by West Ham United PRIOR to April 27th?
Sack the bastard...
When there is a very very big loser, there is usually more than one big winner. In this particular little scam, everybody wins big except the Premier League (who could not have played their hand less expertly) and Sheffield United. Disturbingly, two of the winners should, with judicial equivalence, actually be losers.
In the last two years, it is difficult to find any aspect of the business realities of West Ham United that have even approached the area of ethical behaviour. The illegal transfers of Tevez and Mascherano; the cosy ties with Brooking at the FA; the "interesting" choice of sector links - ask any market analyst; the takeover battle between MSI and Iceland's dodgiest businessman; the undermining of Pardew; the crowning of mr nice guy, Alan Curbishley; the £30 million payment as punishment; having the cheek to spend that money on transfers; accepting the £2 million pay-off from Manchester United that proves the illegality of their historical operations. And, yet, Magnusson's men march into the 2007/08 season in a very strong position with, approximately, £26.5 million worth of assets illegally gained. This is quite a weight advantage in the Premiership Handicap Chase 07/08.
As this tawdry affair has developed, there has been an ever-increasing amount of media flak thrown at the real winners of this confrontation, the really dodgy people - Joorabchian, Zahavi, Berezovsky, MSI Group Limited and Just Sport Inc (JSI). The Quest inquiry, the match fixing scandal at Corinthians and the money laundering charges in Brazil against Joorabchian and Berezovsky are all indicative of the sectors in which these people choose to operate. It is common practice in South America and Africa for slave-like contractual conditions to be the norm as players are tied to criminal operations. The fact that this particular operation has come to light is just another tip of just another iceberg. The football authorities, on the whole, accept this illegal trafficking in legally non-represented human beings - the contracts are heavily tilted in favour of the owners of the player's registrations. Looking at another iceberg - the one representing the financial gains to MSI and JSI - shows exactly how much these dodgy operators have profited from Tevez and Mascherano. Manchester United will pay £10 million to these people for loan playing rights for the next two seasons and then United will have an option to buy. MSI have consequently gained financially from these players at every step of their career entirely illegally and totally without internal policing within the game. And we won't even venture anywhere near the influence that these crooks have on the global football betting markets...
The only parties to have behaved with moral rectitude are Manchester United and Carlos Tevez, himself.
Throughout the process, Man Utd have remained as inside the legal boundaries as was feasible when one is dealing with a rotten edifice. Like Liverpool with Javier Mascherano in January, United have skillfully taken advantage of a slimy corruption to gain competitive advantage. The two year loan deal with an option on outright purchase is a gem of a deal. But, just a point, aren't Manchester United entering into an illegal third party agreement in establishing this loan deal? Just a point... We expect to see the hyper owners hovering around the corruptions, even those corruptions not directly under their influence, as a frequent backdrop to the future English Premiership.
Tevez is a bit of a hero. His life story from day one has entertained Maradona-esque escapades with his existence being anchored by his immense football talent. It is absolutely not only the financial terms of this deal which makes it so massive - Tevez is the business. He has already shown that he can hack it at speed in Argentina, at Corinthians (it is incredibly difficult for any Argentinian footballer to make an impact in Brazil both due to the difference in playing styles and their treatment from opponents, officials and, even, team-mates), for his country in the 2006 World Cup, for a relegation threatened bunch of scallies and, soon, no doubt on the premier footballing stages of Europe. This speedy adaptation to new and alien environments at great rapidity is the very hallmark of a top player. And, to achieve all this against a backdrop of corruption, uproar and criminality = astonishing... Tevez or Torres. Get a grip...
Unless the Premier League determines that another spectacular cataclysmic implosion might best serve their interests, the final word on this corruption should go to one of the biggest losers out of this affair, Neil Warnock. Following the High Court's decision to back the relegation of Sheffield United while acknowledging the efficacy of their legal position, Warnock stated: "so much for the integrity of the Premier League. So much for fairness and justice in English football". Fair dinkum...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
ScudamoreWorld remains an Adhocracy within the Murdochracy.
___________________________________________________________
On Friday July 13th, Football Is Fixed posted that the Carlos Tevez transfer was a done deal with the only remaining obstacle being how to construct a "reality" that would accommodate the multifarious public stances taken by the protagonists. That the final resolution has taken until yesterday to complete was solely a result of further non-strategic foot dragging by the Premier League. The deceleration of this process has merely served to make both their posturing as an organisation and the incompetence of chief executive officer (CEO), Richard Scudamore, more apparent to more people, as the delay has merely produced more damning column inches that have allowed more individuals to discern the Premier League's truly Orwellian fabrication of crime and punishment.
Briefly looking at the overview of this blatant piece of spectacular society corruption, we'll take each of the key participants in turn.
We stated just a couple of days ago that Richard Scudamore has more than passed his sell-by date. His mismanagement of the English game both within the public arena and away from the prying eyes of probity has been abysmal. When one compares his decision making with the interests of the more crooked elements that are corrupting our game to its core, we find a far-too-revealing positive correlation (which obviously occurs entirely by chance). However, his psychic ability to parallel Premier League strategy with the black and grey market's agenda is one of those spooky coincidences that has to be resultant in unemployment if such individuals were accountable to watchdogs. But they're not. The Premier League's accountability axes lead to some rather unsavoury loci.
Scudamore has been the media face that has projected his and his organisation's incompetence onto the footballing public in the Carlos Tevez affair. They dug themselves into a hole and just kept digging when strategic oversight would have preferenced a negotiated settlement. In financial markets, a key behavioural factor is testosterone. The male-dominated marketplace repeatedly throws up instances of testosterone-driven individuals undertaking strategies that are to their own and their associates disadvantage rather than selecting alternative options that might produce a small gain for all. The Premier League have behaved similarly. One of the problems for the likes of Scudamore is when the spin gets out of control. The conjunction of a variety of separate media realities results in people getting cornered in nightmares of their own chaotic creation. So it is with Scudamore. Quest and bungs, the influence of Zahavi and Berezovsky, the takeovers by Shinawatra and Yeung, the Carlos Tevez transfer and the West Ham non-relegation, mismanagement or what? And this are only the tip of the iceberg that is available to public eyes. Insiders also are able to detect the other machinations that are totally undermining and destabilising the game to the financial advantage of a smallish number of very corrupt entities.
Specifically with regard to Tevez and West Ham. By clearing and, indeed, financially rewarding the Hammers for their corrupt practices related to third party agreements, the Premier League set in motion the very public decline of their executive authority. The crisis was spun from Day One as the Premier League sought to achieve their aims with an abusive template. The other parallel stories conspired to establish a typical damage limitation infrastructure where each of the options open to Scudamore's brigade was a losing position. The scenario whereby the third party contracts never existed legally would have been overturned in the High Court to the accompaniment of excessive public awareness of the Premier League's murkier activities = LOSE. Or the scenario where the third party agreements did exist and were legal calls into serious question how the Premier League could possibly not relegate West Ham = LOSE. Keeping the various plates spinning in a spectacular creation of endless contortions until the media loses interest = LOSE. Or, the choice that the Premier League eventually arrived at, reach an out-of-court settlement with all the parties. Despite the fact that this settlement is conclusive proof of the corruption undertaken by the Premier League on a range of different levels as they repeatedly break (and allow others to break) the rules that they are supposed to oversee, pretend that you are still in control of the process while avoiding any cross-referencing between the final solution and any of the executive decisions preceding it = LOSE.
In non-sophisticated sectors like football, the tone of the press releases following these type of tiffs are always revealing. The Premier League's entirely desperate attempt to paper over the chasms states: "The decision of the board, having received leading counsel's opinion, is that the agreement reached is compliant with the rules of the Premier League and consistent with the undertakings given by West Ham United to the Premier League board at various times since 27th April 2007".
No, the agreement is not compliant with the Premier League rules and what about undertakings given by West Ham United PRIOR to April 27th?
Sack the bastard...
When there is a very very big loser, there is usually more than one big winner. In this particular little scam, everybody wins big except the Premier League (who could not have played their hand less expertly) and Sheffield United. Disturbingly, two of the winners should, with judicial equivalence, actually be losers.
In the last two years, it is difficult to find any aspect of the business realities of West Ham United that have even approached the area of ethical behaviour. The illegal transfers of Tevez and Mascherano; the cosy ties with Brooking at the FA; the "interesting" choice of sector links - ask any market analyst; the takeover battle between MSI and Iceland's dodgiest businessman; the undermining of Pardew; the crowning of mr nice guy, Alan Curbishley; the £30 million payment as punishment; having the cheek to spend that money on transfers; accepting the £2 million pay-off from Manchester United that proves the illegality of their historical operations. And, yet, Magnusson's men march into the 2007/08 season in a very strong position with, approximately, £26.5 million worth of assets illegally gained. This is quite a weight advantage in the Premiership Handicap Chase 07/08.
As this tawdry affair has developed, there has been an ever-increasing amount of media flak thrown at the real winners of this confrontation, the really dodgy people - Joorabchian, Zahavi, Berezovsky, MSI Group Limited and Just Sport Inc (JSI). The Quest inquiry, the match fixing scandal at Corinthians and the money laundering charges in Brazil against Joorabchian and Berezovsky are all indicative of the sectors in which these people choose to operate. It is common practice in South America and Africa for slave-like contractual conditions to be the norm as players are tied to criminal operations. The fact that this particular operation has come to light is just another tip of just another iceberg. The football authorities, on the whole, accept this illegal trafficking in legally non-represented human beings - the contracts are heavily tilted in favour of the owners of the player's registrations. Looking at another iceberg - the one representing the financial gains to MSI and JSI - shows exactly how much these dodgy operators have profited from Tevez and Mascherano. Manchester United will pay £10 million to these people for loan playing rights for the next two seasons and then United will have an option to buy. MSI have consequently gained financially from these players at every step of their career entirely illegally and totally without internal policing within the game. And we won't even venture anywhere near the influence that these crooks have on the global football betting markets...
The only parties to have behaved with moral rectitude are Manchester United and Carlos Tevez, himself.
Throughout the process, Man Utd have remained as inside the legal boundaries as was feasible when one is dealing with a rotten edifice. Like Liverpool with Javier Mascherano in January, United have skillfully taken advantage of a slimy corruption to gain competitive advantage. The two year loan deal with an option on outright purchase is a gem of a deal. But, just a point, aren't Manchester United entering into an illegal third party agreement in establishing this loan deal? Just a point... We expect to see the hyper owners hovering around the corruptions, even those corruptions not directly under their influence, as a frequent backdrop to the future English Premiership.
Tevez is a bit of a hero. His life story from day one has entertained Maradona-esque escapades with his existence being anchored by his immense football talent. It is absolutely not only the financial terms of this deal which makes it so massive - Tevez is the business. He has already shown that he can hack it at speed in Argentina, at Corinthians (it is incredibly difficult for any Argentinian footballer to make an impact in Brazil both due to the difference in playing styles and their treatment from opponents, officials and, even, team-mates), for his country in the 2006 World Cup, for a relegation threatened bunch of scallies and, soon, no doubt on the premier footballing stages of Europe. This speedy adaptation to new and alien environments at great rapidity is the very hallmark of a top player. And, to achieve all this against a backdrop of corruption, uproar and criminality = astonishing... Tevez or Torres. Get a grip...
Unless the Premier League determines that another spectacular cataclysmic implosion might best serve their interests, the final word on this corruption should go to one of the biggest losers out of this affair, Neil Warnock. Following the High Court's decision to back the relegation of Sheffield United while acknowledging the efficacy of their legal position, Warnock stated: "so much for the integrity of the Premier League. So much for fairness and justice in English football". Fair dinkum...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Wednesday, 18 February 2009
The Predator State
"The Predator State" is the title of the latest publication by Professor James Galbraith (son of J.K.).
In the words of the man: "The Predator State refers to the takeover of state power by private interests masquerading behind conservative principle and basically acting for private clients and private profit."
This is the crux of the matter.
As The Economist states: "In a fight, the regulators have the legal power. But the financiers have the political power."
This post, which is a sequel to "¡Que Se Vayan Todos! - All Of Them Must Go" that we churned out last week, addresses the progression from where we stand now on the cusps of Depression to the Real demise ahead, and assesses the mechanics of decline as well as the paucity of intellectual robustness behind the free market capitalist model.
Reflexivity, Behavioural Economics, Psychopathic Personality Disorders, Fractal Mathematics, an Analysis of Shadow Banking and Markets, the Instability of Government Finances, the Black Market, Global Regulation, and Darwinism and Markets are all incorporated into a Collective Scenario Analysis of the state of play.
And we use the word "play" deliberately.
For that is what this crisis represents to the insiders - a game, a competitive and volatile opportunity where serious money may be made by correct market timing.
Ah! The Dichotomy of the Insider - informing all and sundry that everything is hunky dory when, in Reality, Hanky Panky and his hocus pocus ensured that everything is, in fact, Something Awful.
Friedman Is Fixed
Icelander, Gudrun Jonsdothir: "I don't trust the government, I don't trust the banks, I don't trust the political parties, I don't trust the IMF."
Marching Italian students: "We won't pay for your crisis."
The whole unsound foundation of the idiocies of Milton Friedman and the free market model is based on neoclassical economics.
This is a pseudoscience.
We might as well base our financial system on readings of the I Ching.
Neoclassical free market sorts base the fake solidity of their ideas on the rationality of the marketplace.
This is inadequate for two reasons.
Firstly, human beings are hardly rational and, secondly, by allowing an anything-goes environment, individuals with psychopathic and antisocial personality disorders (APDs/ PPDs) come to dominate the system.
Hence, there is a systemic instability in the model.
George Soros on Reflexivity: "... a two-way feedback loop, between the participants' views and the actual state of affairs. People base their decisions not on the actual situation that confronts them, but on their perception or interpretation of the situation. Their decisions make an impact on the situation and changes in the situation are liable to change their perceptions."
But, this is only part of the Real Reality.
Behavioural Economics originated over forty years ago but is only now being taken seriously by some of the more enlightened free market ideologues. Greed and stupidity blinded this myopic grouping to the true state of the game for nearly half a century.
As one may see, free market economics is most certainly not a science, dismal or otherwise.
Neither is is an art or an -ology.
It is a scam - a Giant Pyramid Ponzi scheme for the enrichment of the privileged and the psychopathic.
We are all a bundle of different personality styles and disorders. Each particular style/disorder possesses its own portfolio of associated perversions of rationality.
Magic Thinking, the Representativeness Effect, Adaptive Attitudes, Regret Theory, Cognitive Dissonance etc etc etc all combine to produce a cumulative effect.
Although individually these cumulations are, largely, neither here nor there, in accumulation, the mass psychology of the marketplace is something altogether more worrying.
So, when a system is primed for the advancement of individuals with APDs and PPDs, the result is a spiralling of the behavioural attributes linked to such characters.
Soros argues that the "market fundamentalism" of Alan Greenspan and his ilk, especially their assumption that "financial markets are self-correcting", was an important cause of the current crisis.
We would go further than this.
Friedmanism was the ONLY cause of this Depression.
The Here and Now
We have covered the present in the prequel to this monologue but there are two other infrastructural inadequacies to which we would like to draw your, no doubt, already waning attention.
Firstly, let us return to the deep thinking of the good Prof Galbraith.
The fiscal stimuli being rolled out globally will not work unless the banking stimuli work. Furthermore, for the latter to be addressed on any level, a meticulous audit of the banking assets needs to be undertaken before any government takes on such toxicity. The taxpayer must not take full responsibility for the psychopathy of the financial sector.
For, when you are dealing with a bank that is already underwater then "the risk capital is worth nothing. It [the bank] is being held up only by the expectation of Federal bailout."
The Reality is that many US, British and other global banks may already be insolvent.
Galbraith: "But so long as you're dealing with the old management and so long as you're dealing with old practices, so long as you don't have a clean audit of the books, the chances are that the bank is going to behave in ways that are not constructive, which do not contribute to the growth of the economy, and which leave all types of suspicions present in the system about the integrity of the institutions and of the regulatory process. And that's the problem that the Treasury Department seems determined not to face. And so long as it doesn't face it, we're not going to get out of this."
The second infrastructural fallacy of the free market is represented by the IMF - the International Misery Fund.
The US and its client state, the United Kingdom, dominate the IMF with their free market principles (sic). By forcing indebted countries to accept Friedman, the IMF ensures that financial crises will repeatedly return to haunt us.
Due to the psychopathic capital flows globally, ALL poor countries must build up reserves and savings to insure against the boom-and-bust cycles that Slack Jaw told us that he had terminated.
These savings are then regarded as a problem by the IMF as they distort, in their eyes, the various current account balances around the world.
The poorest people are supposed to get out there and spend and take risk so that those at the top of the Ponzi scheme may continue with their greed.
But people, and even governments, learn.
Consequently, the Most Idiotic are currently blaming China for both saving more and being less reckless. The Most Idiotic claim that the Chinese yuan is grossly undervalued (it isn't - all reasonable economists would agree that any undervaluation is less than 5%, and this miniscule matter has absolutely no relevance to the Reality).
For, as The Economist states: "The currencies of virtually all low income countries are undervalued, since prices are generally lower in these countries."
Then the ideologues at the paper get onto a sticky wicket regarding their fallacy of purchasing power parity (PPP). But things progress. At least, The Economist now regard PPP as merely an "idea" rather than immutable theory.
Although the Reagan, Bush and Clinton Regimes must bear the primary responsibility for the Depression, ObamaWorld hardly offers any respite.
Despite the inadequacies of the fiscal approaches, the same class of ideologue are making the same choices based on the same invalid model.
It is interesting aside here to note that nothing has changed under the Agent of Change.
Noam Chomsky: "As for current policies, I think Obama looks more aggressive and violent than Bush. The first acts to occur under his administration were attacks against Afghanistan and in Pakistan, both of which killed many civilians."
Oh! And the silence over the slaughter in Gaza.
If Obama were Black, he might choose to focus on Real change closer to home rather than illegal campaigns against "friendly" nations.
As the excellently named Benjamin Jealous of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured (sic) People (NAACP) says: "Young Black people in the US are the most incarcerated people in the world."
The Predator State better elect a black man then...
The Onset Of The Real Depression
The parallels between 1929 and today are ominously expansive, both in the form of the crisis and in the lack of an holistic response to the crisis.
As we have stated before, the only difference is one of orders of magnitude.
We were being economic with the truth here.
There is another major difference - the specifics of the mechanism that will engender the full-blown Depression.
In 1929, market traders were dependent the ticker-tape. In a pre-IT world, all trades were manually recorded by armies of under-privileged people. There was no other option.
When the Crash occurred, the ticker-tape operators were unable to keep up with the tsunami of "sell" orders. Consequently, the ticker-tape started to fall behind time. Traders (and normal human beings too) were selling stock without being able to gauge the price at which they were selling their assets, as the prices were out-of-date and everybody understood that there was a run on.
This led to Panic.
This led to various Behavioural Exponentialities being energised.
The Panic became a self-fulfilling process.
But, let us step back a pace or two and take a bigger picture overview of this situation.
When the monster from the deep was first checking out the crisis in 1929, the historical equivalents of the financial elite (sic, once again) moved in to support the market.
Quoting from J.K. Galbraith in his book "The Great Crash 1929": "A decision was quickly reached to pool resources to support the market... Word had already reached the floor of the Exchange that the bankers were meeting, and the news ticker had spread the magic word afield. Prices firmed at once and started to rise. Then at one-thirty Richard Whitney [the vice-president of the Exchange] appeared on the floor and went to the post where steel was traded. Whitney was perhaps the best-known figure on the floor... As he made his way through the teeming crowd, Whitney appeared debonair and self-confident... At the Steel post he bid 205 for 10,000 shares... He continued on his way, placing similar orders for fifteen or twenty other stocks. This was it. The bankers, obviously, had moved in. The effect was electric. Fear vanished and gave way to concern lest the new advance was missed. Prices boomed upwards."
Exactly the same process is being attempted in today's computerised trading environment. In Britain, officials are buying into the market to inflate prices - the FTSE 100 is 5% inflated in this neoreality.
The next part of the story is of far greater concern and represents the Real beginning of a proper Crash, Noughties-Style.
In 1929, the officials who bought into the markets to inflate prices and to establish a positive psychology in the marketplace had a self-preservatory ace up their collective sleeves.
These officials understood that Finance Was Fixed.
These officials knew that the fake rise in prices was temporary and hyperreal.
These officials knew that, at some point, there was a selling opportunity to lock their own profits in, while driving the rest of the market to rack and ruin.
These officials profited by utilising the inadequacies of the ticker-tape.
Once the operators at the top of the Ponzi scheme decided that the fake price summit had been reached, they sold across the board and extensively.
The next layer of insiders below reacted similarly.
But the ticker-tape meant that the Reality was lost on the general trading population until it was too late.
Exactly the same mechanism has been put in place today.
The recent establishment of Dark Pools, where huge levels of institutional trading are taking place both off-exchange and away from any regulation whatsoever, are the modern-day ticker-tape. Dark Pools facilitate insider trading without any of the regulatory rigours of the Commitment of Traders Reports.
Once officials start to short-sell their illusory positions in the marketplace, there will be a time-asymmetry between these insiders and the rest of the planet. The Real price (although there is, in Reality, no such publicly available price) will be hidden from the market until, once again, it is too late.
The Friedmanists will continue to game the Depression for proprietary profit.
The Dark Pools and the associated Shadow Banking System (Offshore Financial Centres and the like) are the mechanisms.
Impostures new...
And we, through our Predator States, are paying for this ruse - we are buying the poker chips that are being traded in the Dark Pool Casino.
The timing of the Ponzi sell-off is difficult to determine without access to the hidden pricing system of the Dark Pools (effectively non-regulated private markets equivalent to those that have destroyed the integrity of football).
American banks have exposures to Alt-A mortgages (one level up from sub-prime) equivalent to $800 billion, for example. As Guy Cecala of Inside Mortgage Finance states: "The mortgage storm's first wave was sub-prime. Now we have been buffeted by Alt-A. But a bigger wave is on the horizon, and it cuts across all loan types."
But, whatever the trigger, we should rest assured that the insiders who created this Depression will also profit nicely from it's eventual formation as a full-blown Crash.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
As is rather too frequently the case, keyboard diarrhoea (I love the sound of my own keys!?) has resulted in my having to delay an assessment of the role of Darwinism and the conclusion of this rather excellent post until a later date.
But it will be worth waiting for as it will be an entirely top conclusion that will alter the way that you think about your hyperrealities.
It will be a Big Thought :)
Forget our arrogance.
Feed on our arguments.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
In the words of the man: "The Predator State refers to the takeover of state power by private interests masquerading behind conservative principle and basically acting for private clients and private profit."
This is the crux of the matter.
As The Economist states: "In a fight, the regulators have the legal power. But the financiers have the political power."
This post, which is a sequel to "¡Que Se Vayan Todos! - All Of Them Must Go" that we churned out last week, addresses the progression from where we stand now on the cusps of Depression to the Real demise ahead, and assesses the mechanics of decline as well as the paucity of intellectual robustness behind the free market capitalist model.
Reflexivity, Behavioural Economics, Psychopathic Personality Disorders, Fractal Mathematics, an Analysis of Shadow Banking and Markets, the Instability of Government Finances, the Black Market, Global Regulation, and Darwinism and Markets are all incorporated into a Collective Scenario Analysis of the state of play.
And we use the word "play" deliberately.
For that is what this crisis represents to the insiders - a game, a competitive and volatile opportunity where serious money may be made by correct market timing.
Ah! The Dichotomy of the Insider - informing all and sundry that everything is hunky dory when, in Reality, Hanky Panky and his hocus pocus ensured that everything is, in fact, Something Awful.
Friedman Is Fixed
Icelander, Gudrun Jonsdothir: "I don't trust the government, I don't trust the banks, I don't trust the political parties, I don't trust the IMF."
Marching Italian students: "We won't pay for your crisis."
The whole unsound foundation of the idiocies of Milton Friedman and the free market model is based on neoclassical economics.
This is a pseudoscience.
We might as well base our financial system on readings of the I Ching.
Neoclassical free market sorts base the fake solidity of their ideas on the rationality of the marketplace.
This is inadequate for two reasons.
Firstly, human beings are hardly rational and, secondly, by allowing an anything-goes environment, individuals with psychopathic and antisocial personality disorders (APDs/ PPDs) come to dominate the system.
Hence, there is a systemic instability in the model.
George Soros on Reflexivity: "... a two-way feedback loop, between the participants' views and the actual state of affairs. People base their decisions not on the actual situation that confronts them, but on their perception or interpretation of the situation. Their decisions make an impact on the situation and changes in the situation are liable to change their perceptions."
But, this is only part of the Real Reality.
Behavioural Economics originated over forty years ago but is only now being taken seriously by some of the more enlightened free market ideologues. Greed and stupidity blinded this myopic grouping to the true state of the game for nearly half a century.
As one may see, free market economics is most certainly not a science, dismal or otherwise.
Neither is is an art or an -ology.
It is a scam - a Giant Pyramid Ponzi scheme for the enrichment of the privileged and the psychopathic.
We are all a bundle of different personality styles and disorders. Each particular style/disorder possesses its own portfolio of associated perversions of rationality.
Magic Thinking, the Representativeness Effect, Adaptive Attitudes, Regret Theory, Cognitive Dissonance etc etc etc all combine to produce a cumulative effect.
Although individually these cumulations are, largely, neither here nor there, in accumulation, the mass psychology of the marketplace is something altogether more worrying.
So, when a system is primed for the advancement of individuals with APDs and PPDs, the result is a spiralling of the behavioural attributes linked to such characters.
Soros argues that the "market fundamentalism" of Alan Greenspan and his ilk, especially their assumption that "financial markets are self-correcting", was an important cause of the current crisis.
We would go further than this.
Friedmanism was the ONLY cause of this Depression.
The Here and Now
We have covered the present in the prequel to this monologue but there are two other infrastructural inadequacies to which we would like to draw your, no doubt, already waning attention.
Firstly, let us return to the deep thinking of the good Prof Galbraith.
The fiscal stimuli being rolled out globally will not work unless the banking stimuli work. Furthermore, for the latter to be addressed on any level, a meticulous audit of the banking assets needs to be undertaken before any government takes on such toxicity. The taxpayer must not take full responsibility for the psychopathy of the financial sector.
For, when you are dealing with a bank that is already underwater then "the risk capital is worth nothing. It [the bank] is being held up only by the expectation of Federal bailout."
The Reality is that many US, British and other global banks may already be insolvent.
Galbraith: "But so long as you're dealing with the old management and so long as you're dealing with old practices, so long as you don't have a clean audit of the books, the chances are that the bank is going to behave in ways that are not constructive, which do not contribute to the growth of the economy, and which leave all types of suspicions present in the system about the integrity of the institutions and of the regulatory process. And that's the problem that the Treasury Department seems determined not to face. And so long as it doesn't face it, we're not going to get out of this."
The second infrastructural fallacy of the free market is represented by the IMF - the International Misery Fund.
The US and its client state, the United Kingdom, dominate the IMF with their free market principles (sic). By forcing indebted countries to accept Friedman, the IMF ensures that financial crises will repeatedly return to haunt us.
Due to the psychopathic capital flows globally, ALL poor countries must build up reserves and savings to insure against the boom-and-bust cycles that Slack Jaw told us that he had terminated.
These savings are then regarded as a problem by the IMF as they distort, in their eyes, the various current account balances around the world.
The poorest people are supposed to get out there and spend and take risk so that those at the top of the Ponzi scheme may continue with their greed.
But people, and even governments, learn.
Consequently, the Most Idiotic are currently blaming China for both saving more and being less reckless. The Most Idiotic claim that the Chinese yuan is grossly undervalued (it isn't - all reasonable economists would agree that any undervaluation is less than 5%, and this miniscule matter has absolutely no relevance to the Reality).
For, as The Economist states: "The currencies of virtually all low income countries are undervalued, since prices are generally lower in these countries."
Then the ideologues at the paper get onto a sticky wicket regarding their fallacy of purchasing power parity (PPP). But things progress. At least, The Economist now regard PPP as merely an "idea" rather than immutable theory.
Although the Reagan, Bush and Clinton Regimes must bear the primary responsibility for the Depression, ObamaWorld hardly offers any respite.
Despite the inadequacies of the fiscal approaches, the same class of ideologue are making the same choices based on the same invalid model.
It is interesting aside here to note that nothing has changed under the Agent of Change.
Noam Chomsky: "As for current policies, I think Obama looks more aggressive and violent than Bush. The first acts to occur under his administration were attacks against Afghanistan and in Pakistan, both of which killed many civilians."
Oh! And the silence over the slaughter in Gaza.
If Obama were Black, he might choose to focus on Real change closer to home rather than illegal campaigns against "friendly" nations.
As the excellently named Benjamin Jealous of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured (sic) People (NAACP) says: "Young Black people in the US are the most incarcerated people in the world."
The Predator State better elect a black man then...
The Onset Of The Real Depression
The parallels between 1929 and today are ominously expansive, both in the form of the crisis and in the lack of an holistic response to the crisis.
As we have stated before, the only difference is one of orders of magnitude.
We were being economic with the truth here.
There is another major difference - the specifics of the mechanism that will engender the full-blown Depression.
In 1929, market traders were dependent the ticker-tape. In a pre-IT world, all trades were manually recorded by armies of under-privileged people. There was no other option.
When the Crash occurred, the ticker-tape operators were unable to keep up with the tsunami of "sell" orders. Consequently, the ticker-tape started to fall behind time. Traders (and normal human beings too) were selling stock without being able to gauge the price at which they were selling their assets, as the prices were out-of-date and everybody understood that there was a run on.
This led to Panic.
This led to various Behavioural Exponentialities being energised.
The Panic became a self-fulfilling process.
But, let us step back a pace or two and take a bigger picture overview of this situation.
When the monster from the deep was first checking out the crisis in 1929, the historical equivalents of the financial elite (sic, once again) moved in to support the market.
Quoting from J.K. Galbraith in his book "The Great Crash 1929": "A decision was quickly reached to pool resources to support the market... Word had already reached the floor of the Exchange that the bankers were meeting, and the news ticker had spread the magic word afield. Prices firmed at once and started to rise. Then at one-thirty Richard Whitney [the vice-president of the Exchange] appeared on the floor and went to the post where steel was traded. Whitney was perhaps the best-known figure on the floor... As he made his way through the teeming crowd, Whitney appeared debonair and self-confident... At the Steel post he bid 205 for 10,000 shares... He continued on his way, placing similar orders for fifteen or twenty other stocks. This was it. The bankers, obviously, had moved in. The effect was electric. Fear vanished and gave way to concern lest the new advance was missed. Prices boomed upwards."
Exactly the same process is being attempted in today's computerised trading environment. In Britain, officials are buying into the market to inflate prices - the FTSE 100 is 5% inflated in this neoreality.
The next part of the story is of far greater concern and represents the Real beginning of a proper Crash, Noughties-Style.
In 1929, the officials who bought into the markets to inflate prices and to establish a positive psychology in the marketplace had a self-preservatory ace up their collective sleeves.
These officials understood that Finance Was Fixed.
These officials knew that the fake rise in prices was temporary and hyperreal.
These officials knew that, at some point, there was a selling opportunity to lock their own profits in, while driving the rest of the market to rack and ruin.
These officials profited by utilising the inadequacies of the ticker-tape.
Once the operators at the top of the Ponzi scheme decided that the fake price summit had been reached, they sold across the board and extensively.
The next layer of insiders below reacted similarly.
But the ticker-tape meant that the Reality was lost on the general trading population until it was too late.
Exactly the same mechanism has been put in place today.
The recent establishment of Dark Pools, where huge levels of institutional trading are taking place both off-exchange and away from any regulation whatsoever, are the modern-day ticker-tape. Dark Pools facilitate insider trading without any of the regulatory rigours of the Commitment of Traders Reports.
Once officials start to short-sell their illusory positions in the marketplace, there will be a time-asymmetry between these insiders and the rest of the planet. The Real price (although there is, in Reality, no such publicly available price) will be hidden from the market until, once again, it is too late.
The Friedmanists will continue to game the Depression for proprietary profit.
The Dark Pools and the associated Shadow Banking System (Offshore Financial Centres and the like) are the mechanisms.
Impostures new...
And we, through our Predator States, are paying for this ruse - we are buying the poker chips that are being traded in the Dark Pool Casino.
The timing of the Ponzi sell-off is difficult to determine without access to the hidden pricing system of the Dark Pools (effectively non-regulated private markets equivalent to those that have destroyed the integrity of football).
American banks have exposures to Alt-A mortgages (one level up from sub-prime) equivalent to $800 billion, for example. As Guy Cecala of Inside Mortgage Finance states: "The mortgage storm's first wave was sub-prime. Now we have been buffeted by Alt-A. But a bigger wave is on the horizon, and it cuts across all loan types."
But, whatever the trigger, we should rest assured that the insiders who created this Depression will also profit nicely from it's eventual formation as a full-blown Crash.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
As is rather too frequently the case, keyboard diarrhoea (I love the sound of my own keys!?) has resulted in my having to delay an assessment of the role of Darwinism and the conclusion of this rather excellent post until a later date.
But it will be worth waiting for as it will be an entirely top conclusion that will alter the way that you think about your hyperrealities.
It will be a Big Thought :)
Forget our arrogance.
Feed on our arguments.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Tuesday, 20 January 2009
Gaza - A Panopticon For The Palestinians
Noam Chomsky: "On Saturday December 27, the latest US-Israeli attack on helpless Palestinians was launched. The attack had been meticulously planned, for over 6 months according to the Israeli press. The planning had two components: military and propaganda. It was based on the lessons of Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon, which was considered to be poorly planned and badly advertised. We may, therefore, be fairly confident that most of what has been done and said was pre-planned and intended.
That surely includes the timing of the assault: shortly before noon, when children were returning from school and crowds were milling in the streets of densely populated Gaza City. It took only a few minutes to kill over 225 people and wound 700, an auspicious opening to the mass slaughter of defenceless civilians trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee."
Why are we not able to watch, on the telly, Kettering and their Palestinian charity shirt sponsors against Egyptian-owned Fulham in the FA Cup next weekend?
Noam Chomsky: "The meticulous planning also presumably included the termination of the assault, carefully timed to be just before the inauguration, so as to minimize the (remote) threat that Obama might have to say some words critical of these vicious US-supported crimes."
Why are FIFA taking action against Frédéric Kanouté for displaying the slogan "Palestina" in a recent Copa Del Rey match?
Noam Chomsky: "Two weeks after the Sabbath opening of the assault, with much of Gaza already pounded to rubble and the death toll approaching 1000, the UN Agency UNRWA, on which most Gazans depend for survival, announced that the Israeli military refused to allow aid shipments to Gaza, saying that the crossings were closed for the Sabbath. To honour the holy day, Palestinians at the edge of survival must be denied food and medicine, while hundreds can be slaughtered by US jet bombers and helicopters."
Why on earth would Kaká have left Milan for Abu Dhabi United?
Noam Chomsky: "The rigorous observance of the Sabbath in this dual fashion attracted little if any notice. That makes sense. In the annals of US-Israeli criminality, such cruelty and cynicism scarcely merit more than a footnote. They are too familiar. To cite one relevant parallel, in June 1982 the US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon opened with the bombing of the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, later to become famous as the site of terrible massacres supervised by the IDF (Israeli "Defence" Forces). The bombing hit the local hospital - the Gaza hospital -- and killed over 200 people, according to the eyewitness account of an American Middle East academic specialist. The massacre was the opening act in an invasion that slaughtered some 15-20,000 people and destroyed much of southern Lebanon and Beirut, proceeding with crucial US military and diplomatic support. That included vetoes of Security Council resolutions seeking to halt the criminal aggression that was undertaken, as scarcely concealed, to defend Israel from the threat of peaceful political settlement, contrary to many convenient fabrications about Israelis suffering under intense rocketing, a fantasy of apologists."
Why did the roof collapse, killing nine people, at Kaká's church, the Reborn in Christ Church, during his negotiations with Abu Dhabi United? Was it a Sign?
Noam Chomsky: "All of this is normal, and quite openly discussed by high Israeli officials. Thirty years ago Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur observed that since 1948, "we have been fighting against a population that lives in villages and cities." As Israel's most prominent military analyst, Zeev Schiff, summarized his remarks, "the Israeli Army has always struck civilian populations, purposely and consciously...the Army, he said, has never distinguished civilian [from military] targets...[but] purposely attacked civilian targets." The reasons were explained by the distinguished statesman Abba Eban: "there was a rational prospect, ultimately fulfilled, that affected populations would exert pressure for the cessation of hostilities." The effect, as Eban well understood, would be to allow Israel to implement, undisturbed, its programs of illegal expansion and harsh repression. Eban was commenting on a review of Labour government attacks against civilians by Prime Minister Begin, presenting a picture, Eban said, "of an Israel wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr.Begin nor I would dare to mention by name." Eban did not contest the facts that Begin reviewed, but criticized him for stating them publicly. Nor did it concern Eban, or his admirers, that his advocacy of massive state terror is also reminiscent of regimes he would not dare to mention by name."
Why are the mainstream media pretending that we have a January Transfer Market when, in Reality, we have an Abu Dhabi United Transfer Window?
Noam Chomsky: "Eban's justification for state terror is regarded as persuasive by respected authorities. As the current US-Israel assault raged, Times columnist Thomas Friedman explained that Israel's tactics both in the current attack and in its invasion of Lebanon in 2006 are based on the sound principle of "trying to 'educate' Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population." That makes sense on pragmatic grounds, as it did in Lebanon, where "the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians -- the families and employers of the militants -- to restrain Hezbollah in the future." And by similar logic, bin Laden's effort to "educate" Americans on 9/11 was highly praiseworthy, as were the Nazi attacks on Lidice and Oradour, Putin's destruction of Grozny, and other notable attempts at 'education'."
Why is Rafa so "disturbed" and full of "venom" over his historical revisionism?
Noam Chomsky: "Like others familiar with the region, Middle East specialist Fawwaz Gerges observes that "What Israeli officials and their American allies do not appreciate is that Hamas is not merely an armed militia but a social movement with a large popular base that is deeply entrenched in society." Hence when they carry out their plans to destroy Hamas's "social wing," they are aiming to destroy Palestinian society."
Why, even Fernando Torres does not agree with his manager...
Noam Chomsky: "Hamas is regularly described as "Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel." One will be hard put to find something like "democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus" -- blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel, which flatly and explicitly reject the right of Palestinians to self-determination. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable."
Why is Rafa cracking up?
Noam Chomsky: "Such details as those mentioned earlier, though minor, nevertheless teach us something about ourselves and our clients. So do others. To mention another one, as the latest US-Israeli assault on Gaza began, a small boat, the Dignity, was on its way from Cyprus to Gaza. The doctors and human rights activists aboard intended to violate Israel's criminal blockade and to bring medical supplies to the trapped population. The ship was intercepted in international waters by Israeli naval vessels, which rammed it severely, almost sinking it, though it managed to limp to Lebanon. Israel issued the routine lies, refuted by the journalists and passengers aboard, including CNN correspondent Karl Penhaul and former US representative and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney. That is a serious crime -- much worse, for example, than hijacking boats off the coast of Somalia. It passed with little notice. The tacit acceptance of such crimes reflects the understanding that Gaza is occupied territory, and that Israel is entitled to maintain its siege, even authorized by the guardians of international order to carry out crimes on the high seas to implement its programs of punishing the civilian population for disobedience to its commands - under pretexts to which we return, almost universally accepted but clearly untenable."
Why the satanic beard, Rafa?
Noam Chomsky: "Who cares, for example, if the editors of Lebanon's Daily Star, generally pro-Western, write that "Some 1.5 million people in Gaza are being subjected to the murderous ministrations of one of the world's most technologically advanced but morally regressive military machines. It is often suggested that the Palestinians have become to the Arab world what the Jews were to pre-World War II Europe, and there is some truth to this interpretation. How sickeningly appropriate, then, that just as Europeans and North Americans looked the other way when the Nazis were perpetrating the Holocaust, the Arabs are finding a way to do nothing as the Israelis slaughter Palestinian children." Perhaps the most shameful of the Arab regimes is the brutal Egyptian dictatorship, the beneficiary of most US military aid, apart from Israel."
Why does PGMOB official Stuart Attwell always cover his mouth when talking to senior referees?
Noam Chomsky: "The new crimes that the US and Israel have been committing in Gaza in the past weeks do not fit easily into any standard category - except for the category of familiarity; I've just given several examples, and will return to others. Literally, the crimes fall under the official US government definition of "terrorism," but that designation does not capture their enormity. They cannot be called "aggression," because they are being conducted in occupied territory, as the US tacitly concedes. In their comprehensive scholarly history of Israeli settlement in the occupied territories, Lords of the Land, Idit Zertal and Akiva Eldar point out that after Israel withdrew its forces from Gaza in August 2005, the ruined territory was not released "for even a single day from Israel's military grip or from the price of the occupation that the inhabitants pay every day... Israel left behind scorched earth, devastated services, and people with neither a present nor a future. The settlements were destroyed in an ungenerous move by an unenlightened occupier, which in fact continues to control the territory and kill and harass its inhabitants by means of its formidable military might" - exercised with extreme savagery, thanks to firm US support and participation."
Why has Steve Bennett officiated at five out of the last 28 Premiership matches?
Noam Chomsky: "The US-Israeli assault on Gaza escalated in January 2006, a few months after the formal withdrawal, when Palestinians committed a truly heinous crime: they voted "the wrong way" in a free election. Like others, Palestinians learned that one does not disobey with impunity the commands of the Master, who continues to prate of his "yearning for democracy," without eliciting ridicule from the educated classes, another impressive achievement."
Why were there three changes of referee in the Premiership last weekend when most leading European leagues see one such instance every five years or so?
Noam Chomsky: "Since the terms "aggression" and "terrorism" are inadequate, some new term is needed for the sadistic and cowardly torture of people caged with no possibility of escape, while they are being pounded to dust by the most sophisticated products of US military technology - used in violation of international and even US law, but for self-declared outlaw states that is just another minor technicality. Also a minor technicality is the fact that on December 31, while terrorized Gazans were desperately seeking shelter from the ruthless assault, Washington hired a German merchant ship to transport from Greece to Israel a huge shipment, 3000 tons, of unidentified "ammunition." The new shipment "follows the hiring of a commercial ship to carry a much larger consignment of ordnance in December from the United States to Israel ahead of air strikes in the Gaza Strip," Reuters reported. All of this is separate from the more than $21 billion in U.S. military aid provided by the Bush administration to Israel, almost all grants. "Israel's intervention in the Gaza Strip has been fueled largely by U.S. supplied weapons paid for with U.S. tax dollars," said a briefing by the New America Foundation, which monitors the arms trade. The new shipment was hampered by the decision of the Greek government to bar the use of any port in Greece "for the supplying of the Israeli army."
Greece's response to US-backed Israeli crimes is rather different from the craven performance of the leaders of most of Europe. The distinction reveals that Washington may have been quite realistic in regarding Greece as part of the Near East, not Europe, until the overthrow of its US-backed fascist dictatorship in 1974. Perhaps Greece is just too civilized to be part of Europe."
Why does Howard Webb get every major match and isn't this just a little too much power in one policeman's hands?
Noam Chomsky: "There are good reasons why the voting record is consistently unreported and dispatched deep into the memory hole by the media and conformist intellectuals. It would not be wise to reveal to the public what the record implies about their elected representatives. In the present case it would plainly be unhelpful to let the public know that US-Israeli rejectionism, barring the peaceful settlement long advocated by the world, reaches such an extreme as to deny Palestinians even the abstract right to self-determination."
Why has Keith Harris finally admitted that there is no possibility of any club being sold in the current global financial climate that was absolutely not caused, in any way whatsoever, by free market capitalist ideologues?
Noam Chomsky: "The figures for killed and wounded are surely an underestimate. And it is unlikely that there will be any inquiry into these atrocities. Crimes of official enemies are subjected to rigorous investigation, but our own are systematically ignored. General practice, again, and understandable on the part of the masters.
The Security Council Resolution called for stopping the flow of arms into Gaza. The US and Israel (Rice-Livni) soon reached an agreement on measures to ensure this result, concentrating on Iranian arms. There is no need to stop smuggling of US arms into Israel, because there is no smuggling: the huge flow of arms is quite public, even when not reported, as in the case of the arms shipment announced as the slaughter in Gaza was proceeding."
Why is Richard Scudamore keeping very very quiet at the moment? It surely would have nothing to do with the new televisions deals, would it?
Noam Chomsky: "Israel abandoned Gaza in September 2005. Rational Israeli hardliners, like Ariel Sharon, the patron saint of the settlers movement, understood that it was senseless to subsidize a few thousand illegal Israeli settlers in the ruins of Gaza, protected by the IDF while they used much of the land and scarce resources. It made more sense to turn Gaza into the world's largest prison and to transfer settlers to the West Bank, much more valuable territory, where Israel is quite explicit about its intentions, in word and more importantly in deed. One goal is to annex the arable land, water supplies, and pleasant suburbs of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that lie within the separation wall, irrelevantly declared illegal by the World Court. That includes a vastly expanded Jerusalem, in violation of Security Council orders that go back 40 years, also irrelevant. Israel has also been taking over the Jordan Valley, about one-third of the West Bank. What remains is therefore imprisoned, and, furthermore, broken into fragments by salients of Jewish settlement that trisect the territory: one to the east of Greater Jerusalem through the town of Ma'aleh Adumim, developed through the Clinton years to split the West Bank; and two to the north, through the towns of Ariel and Kedumim. What remains to Palestinians is segregated by hundreds of mostly arbitrary checkpoints."
Why will the Premiership title race go to the very last game again this season?
Noam Chomsky: "The checkpoints have no relation to security of Israel, and if some are intended to safeguard settlers, they are flatly illegal, as the World Court ruled. In reality, their major goal is harass the Palestinian population and to fortify what Israeli peace activist Jeff Halper calls the "matrix of control," designed to make life unbearable for the "two-legged beasts" who will be like "drugged roaches scurrying around in a bottle" if they seek to remain in their homes and land. All of that is fair enough, because they are "like grasshoppers compared to us" so that their heads can be "smashed against the boulders and walls." The terminology is from the highest Israeli political and military leaders, in this case the revered "princes." And the attitudes shape policies."
Why is the Premiership now a handicapped event?
Noam Chomsky: "The plans that Olmert sketched in 2006 have since been abandoned as not sufficiently extreme. But what replaces the convergence programme, and the actions that proceed daily to implement it, are approximately the same in general conception. They trace back to the earliest days of the occupation, when Defence Minister Moshe Dayan explained poetically that "the situation today resembles the complex relationship between a Bedouin man and the girl he kidnaps against her will...You Palestinians, as a nation, don't want us today, but we'll change your attitude by forcing our presence on you." You will "live like dogs, and whoever will leave, will leave," while we take what we want."
Why? Is it true that the Dalai Lama wishes an audience with Harry Redknapp?
Noam Chomsky: "As the crimes passed beyond what the carefully honed Israeli propaganda campaign was able to suppress, even confirmed Israeli hawks became concerned that the carnage is "Destroying [Israel's] soul and its image. Destroying it on world television screens, in the living rooms of the international community and most importantly, in Obama's America" (Ari Shavit). Shavit was particularly concerned about Israel's "shelling a United Nations facility...on the day when the UN secretary general is visiting Jerusalem," an act that is "beyond lunacy," he felt."
Why does Stevie G take such an interest in matters of the underworld variety?
Noam Chomsky: "Before, Israel had sensibly barred all journalists, even Israeli, while its crimes were proceeding in full fury. Israel's use of white phosphorus against Gaza civilians is "clear and undeniable," Amnesty International (AI) reported. Its repeated use in densely populated civilian areas "is a war crime," AI concluded. They found white phosphorus edges scattered around residential buildings, still burning, "further endangering the residents and their property," particularly children "drawn to the detritus of war and often unaware of the danger." Primary targets, they report, were the UNRWA compound, where the Israeli "white phosphorus landed next to some fuel trucks and caused a large fire which destroyed tons of humanitarian aid" after Israeli authorities "had given assurance that no further strikes would be launched on the compound." On the same day, "a white phosphorus shell landed in the al-Quds hospital in Gaza City also causing a fire which forced hospital staff to evacuate the patients... White phosphorus landing on skin can burn deep through muscle and into the bone, continuing to burn unless deprived of oxygen." Purposely intended or beyond depraved indifference, such crimes are inevitable when this weapon is used in attacks on civilians."
Why is Thaksin Shinawatra still allowed to own 25% of Abu Dhabi United when the latest Amnesty International report accuses his government of "systematic" genocide against Muslims in the south of the country?
Noam Chomsky: "Aggression always has a pretext: in this case, that Israel's patience had "run out" in the face of Hamas rocket attacks, as Barak put it. The mantra that is endlessly repeated is that Israel has the right to use force to defend itself. The thesis is partially defensible. The rocketing is criminal, and it is true that a state has the right to defend itself against criminal attacks. But it does not follow that it has a right to defend itself by force. That goes far beyond any principle that we would or should accept. Nazi Germany had no right to use force to defend itself against the terrorism of the partisans. Kristallnacht is not justified by Herschel Grynszpan's assassination of a German Embassy official in Paris. The British were not justified in using force to defend themselves against the (very real) terror of the American colonists seeking independence, or to terrorize Irish Catholics in response to IRA terror - and when they finally turned to the sensible policy of addressing legitimate grievances, the terror ended. It is not a matter of "proportionality," but of choice of action in the first place: Is there an alternative to violence?"
Why have Victor Chandler International decided to enter the spread betting sector at the onset of the Depression? Did they not learn when they last dipped their toes in the waters?
Noam Chomsky: "Israel has a straightforward means to defend itself: put an end to its criminal actions in occupied territories, and accept the long-standing international consensus on a two-state settlement that has been blocked by the US and Israel for over 30 years, since the US first vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a political settlement in these terms in 1976. I will not once again run through the inglorious record, but it is important to be aware that US-Israeli rejectionism today is even more blatant than in the past. The Arab League has gone even beyond the consensus, calling for full normalization of relations with Israel. Hamas has repeatedly called for a two-state settlement in terms of the international consensus. Iran and Hezbollah have made it clear that they will abide by any agreement that Palestinians accept. That leaves the US-Israel in splendid isolation, not only in words."
Why are Victor Chandler International so concerned at the integrity of football?
Noam Chomsky: "After Israel broke the June 2008 ceasefire (such as it was) in November, the siege was tightened further, with even more disastrous consequences for the population. According to Sara Roy, the leading academic specialist on Gaza, "On Nov. 5, Israel sealed all crossing points into Gaza, vastly reducing and at times denying food supplies, medicines, fuel, cooking gas, and parts for water and sanitation systems..." During November, an average of 4.6 trucks of food per day entered Gaza from Israel compared with an average of 123 trucks per day in October. Spare parts for the repair and maintenance of water-related equipment have been denied entry for over a year. The World Health Organization just reported that half of Gaza's ambulances are now out of order" - and the rest soon became targets for Israeli attack. Gaza's only power station was forced to suspend operation for lack of fuel, and could not be started up again because they needed spare parts, which had been sitting in the Israeli port of Ashdod for 8 months. Shortage of electricity led to a 300% increase in burn cases at Shifaa' hospital in the Gaza Strip, resulting from efforts to light wood fires. Israel barred shipment of Chlorine, so that by mid-December in Gaza City and the north access to water was limited to six hours every three days. The human consequences are not counted among Palestinian victims of Israeli terror."
Why did Alan Shearer rewrite Reality in his assessment of Mike Dean's comedic performance in allegedly refereeing the game between Sunderland and Aston Villa?
Noam Chomsky: "Israel's senior diplomatic correspondent Akiva Eldar reports that shortly before Israel launched its full-scale invasion on Saturday Dec. 27, "Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshal announced on the Iz al-Din al-Qassam Web site that he was prepared not only for a 'cessation of aggression' - he proposed going back to the arrangement at the Rafah crossing as of 2005, before Hamas won the elections and later took over the region. That arrangement was for the crossing to be managed jointly by Egypt, the European Union, the Palestinian Authority presidency and Hamas," and as noted earlier, called for opening of the crossings to desperately needed supplies."
Why did Dave Whelan put all his ill-gotten gains into dodgy Icelandic banks?
Noam Chomsky: "Today, Israel could have security, normalization of relations, and integration into the region. But it very clearly prefers illegal expansion, conflict, and repeated exercise of violence, actions that are not only criminal, murderous and destructive but are also eroding its own long-term security. US military and Middle East specialist Andrew Cordesman writes that while Israel military force can surely crush defenseless Gaza, "neither Israel nor the US can gain from a war that produces [a bitter] reaction from one of the wisest and most moderate voices in the Arab world, Prince Turki al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia, who said on January 6 that `The Bush administration has left [Obama] a disgusting legacy and a reckless position towards the massacres and bloodshed of innocents in Gaza...Enough is enough, today we are all Palestinians and we seek martyrdom for God and for Palestine, following those who died in Gaza'.""
Why does Dave Whelan object to other's tilting markets for proprietary advantage when he employs such tactics himself?
Noam Chomsky: "One of the wisest voices in Israel, Uri Avnery, writes that after an Israeli military victory, "What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints. This will have severe consequences for our long-term future, our standing in the world, our chance of achieving peace and quiet. In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too, a crime against the State of Israel.""
Why is the collapse of the BSkyB linkage with pubs going to be so key to the next tv deal, to the Premier League's financial detriment?
Noam Chomsky: "There is good reason to believe that he is right. Israel is deliberately turning itself into perhaps the most hated country in the world, and is also losing the allegiance of the population of the West, including younger American Jews, who are unlikely to tolerate its persistent shocking crimes for long. Decades ago, I wrote that those who call themselves "supporters of Israel" are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration and probable ultimate destruction. Regrettably, that judgment looks more and more plausible."
Why was it so funny seeing psychopath Dick Cheney arriving for the inauguration of ObamaWorld - not "Renewing America" so much as "Rebranding America" - in his wheelchair? Why was this just so funny...?
Noam Chomsky: "Meanwhile we are quietly observing a rare event in history, what the late Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called "politicide," the murder of a nation -- at our hands."
We are all Palestinians...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
That surely includes the timing of the assault: shortly before noon, when children were returning from school and crowds were milling in the streets of densely populated Gaza City. It took only a few minutes to kill over 225 people and wound 700, an auspicious opening to the mass slaughter of defenceless civilians trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee."
Why are we not able to watch, on the telly, Kettering and their Palestinian charity shirt sponsors against Egyptian-owned Fulham in the FA Cup next weekend?
Noam Chomsky: "The meticulous planning also presumably included the termination of the assault, carefully timed to be just before the inauguration, so as to minimize the (remote) threat that Obama might have to say some words critical of these vicious US-supported crimes."
Why are FIFA taking action against Frédéric Kanouté for displaying the slogan "Palestina" in a recent Copa Del Rey match?
Noam Chomsky: "Two weeks after the Sabbath opening of the assault, with much of Gaza already pounded to rubble and the death toll approaching 1000, the UN Agency UNRWA, on which most Gazans depend for survival, announced that the Israeli military refused to allow aid shipments to Gaza, saying that the crossings were closed for the Sabbath. To honour the holy day, Palestinians at the edge of survival must be denied food and medicine, while hundreds can be slaughtered by US jet bombers and helicopters."
Why on earth would Kaká have left Milan for Abu Dhabi United?
Noam Chomsky: "The rigorous observance of the Sabbath in this dual fashion attracted little if any notice. That makes sense. In the annals of US-Israeli criminality, such cruelty and cynicism scarcely merit more than a footnote. They are too familiar. To cite one relevant parallel, in June 1982 the US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon opened with the bombing of the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, later to become famous as the site of terrible massacres supervised by the IDF (Israeli "Defence" Forces). The bombing hit the local hospital - the Gaza hospital -- and killed over 200 people, according to the eyewitness account of an American Middle East academic specialist. The massacre was the opening act in an invasion that slaughtered some 15-20,000 people and destroyed much of southern Lebanon and Beirut, proceeding with crucial US military and diplomatic support. That included vetoes of Security Council resolutions seeking to halt the criminal aggression that was undertaken, as scarcely concealed, to defend Israel from the threat of peaceful political settlement, contrary to many convenient fabrications about Israelis suffering under intense rocketing, a fantasy of apologists."
Why did the roof collapse, killing nine people, at Kaká's church, the Reborn in Christ Church, during his negotiations with Abu Dhabi United? Was it a Sign?
Noam Chomsky: "All of this is normal, and quite openly discussed by high Israeli officials. Thirty years ago Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur observed that since 1948, "we have been fighting against a population that lives in villages and cities." As Israel's most prominent military analyst, Zeev Schiff, summarized his remarks, "the Israeli Army has always struck civilian populations, purposely and consciously...the Army, he said, has never distinguished civilian [from military] targets...[but] purposely attacked civilian targets." The reasons were explained by the distinguished statesman Abba Eban: "there was a rational prospect, ultimately fulfilled, that affected populations would exert pressure for the cessation of hostilities." The effect, as Eban well understood, would be to allow Israel to implement, undisturbed, its programs of illegal expansion and harsh repression. Eban was commenting on a review of Labour government attacks against civilians by Prime Minister Begin, presenting a picture, Eban said, "of an Israel wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr.Begin nor I would dare to mention by name." Eban did not contest the facts that Begin reviewed, but criticized him for stating them publicly. Nor did it concern Eban, or his admirers, that his advocacy of massive state terror is also reminiscent of regimes he would not dare to mention by name."
Why are the mainstream media pretending that we have a January Transfer Market when, in Reality, we have an Abu Dhabi United Transfer Window?
Noam Chomsky: "Eban's justification for state terror is regarded as persuasive by respected authorities. As the current US-Israel assault raged, Times columnist Thomas Friedman explained that Israel's tactics both in the current attack and in its invasion of Lebanon in 2006 are based on the sound principle of "trying to 'educate' Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population." That makes sense on pragmatic grounds, as it did in Lebanon, where "the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians -- the families and employers of the militants -- to restrain Hezbollah in the future." And by similar logic, bin Laden's effort to "educate" Americans on 9/11 was highly praiseworthy, as were the Nazi attacks on Lidice and Oradour, Putin's destruction of Grozny, and other notable attempts at 'education'."
Why is Rafa so "disturbed" and full of "venom" over his historical revisionism?
Noam Chomsky: "Like others familiar with the region, Middle East specialist Fawwaz Gerges observes that "What Israeli officials and their American allies do not appreciate is that Hamas is not merely an armed militia but a social movement with a large popular base that is deeply entrenched in society." Hence when they carry out their plans to destroy Hamas's "social wing," they are aiming to destroy Palestinian society."
Why, even Fernando Torres does not agree with his manager...
Noam Chomsky: "Hamas is regularly described as "Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel." One will be hard put to find something like "democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus" -- blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel, which flatly and explicitly reject the right of Palestinians to self-determination. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable."
Why is Rafa cracking up?
Noam Chomsky: "Such details as those mentioned earlier, though minor, nevertheless teach us something about ourselves and our clients. So do others. To mention another one, as the latest US-Israeli assault on Gaza began, a small boat, the Dignity, was on its way from Cyprus to Gaza. The doctors and human rights activists aboard intended to violate Israel's criminal blockade and to bring medical supplies to the trapped population. The ship was intercepted in international waters by Israeli naval vessels, which rammed it severely, almost sinking it, though it managed to limp to Lebanon. Israel issued the routine lies, refuted by the journalists and passengers aboard, including CNN correspondent Karl Penhaul and former US representative and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney. That is a serious crime -- much worse, for example, than hijacking boats off the coast of Somalia. It passed with little notice. The tacit acceptance of such crimes reflects the understanding that Gaza is occupied territory, and that Israel is entitled to maintain its siege, even authorized by the guardians of international order to carry out crimes on the high seas to implement its programs of punishing the civilian population for disobedience to its commands - under pretexts to which we return, almost universally accepted but clearly untenable."
Why the satanic beard, Rafa?
Noam Chomsky: "Who cares, for example, if the editors of Lebanon's Daily Star, generally pro-Western, write that "Some 1.5 million people in Gaza are being subjected to the murderous ministrations of one of the world's most technologically advanced but morally regressive military machines. It is often suggested that the Palestinians have become to the Arab world what the Jews were to pre-World War II Europe, and there is some truth to this interpretation. How sickeningly appropriate, then, that just as Europeans and North Americans looked the other way when the Nazis were perpetrating the Holocaust, the Arabs are finding a way to do nothing as the Israelis slaughter Palestinian children." Perhaps the most shameful of the Arab regimes is the brutal Egyptian dictatorship, the beneficiary of most US military aid, apart from Israel."
Why does PGMOB official Stuart Attwell always cover his mouth when talking to senior referees?
Noam Chomsky: "The new crimes that the US and Israel have been committing in Gaza in the past weeks do not fit easily into any standard category - except for the category of familiarity; I've just given several examples, and will return to others. Literally, the crimes fall under the official US government definition of "terrorism," but that designation does not capture their enormity. They cannot be called "aggression," because they are being conducted in occupied territory, as the US tacitly concedes. In their comprehensive scholarly history of Israeli settlement in the occupied territories, Lords of the Land, Idit Zertal and Akiva Eldar point out that after Israel withdrew its forces from Gaza in August 2005, the ruined territory was not released "for even a single day from Israel's military grip or from the price of the occupation that the inhabitants pay every day... Israel left behind scorched earth, devastated services, and people with neither a present nor a future. The settlements were destroyed in an ungenerous move by an unenlightened occupier, which in fact continues to control the territory and kill and harass its inhabitants by means of its formidable military might" - exercised with extreme savagery, thanks to firm US support and participation."
Why has Steve Bennett officiated at five out of the last 28 Premiership matches?
Noam Chomsky: "The US-Israeli assault on Gaza escalated in January 2006, a few months after the formal withdrawal, when Palestinians committed a truly heinous crime: they voted "the wrong way" in a free election. Like others, Palestinians learned that one does not disobey with impunity the commands of the Master, who continues to prate of his "yearning for democracy," without eliciting ridicule from the educated classes, another impressive achievement."
Why were there three changes of referee in the Premiership last weekend when most leading European leagues see one such instance every five years or so?
Noam Chomsky: "Since the terms "aggression" and "terrorism" are inadequate, some new term is needed for the sadistic and cowardly torture of people caged with no possibility of escape, while they are being pounded to dust by the most sophisticated products of US military technology - used in violation of international and even US law, but for self-declared outlaw states that is just another minor technicality. Also a minor technicality is the fact that on December 31, while terrorized Gazans were desperately seeking shelter from the ruthless assault, Washington hired a German merchant ship to transport from Greece to Israel a huge shipment, 3000 tons, of unidentified "ammunition." The new shipment "follows the hiring of a commercial ship to carry a much larger consignment of ordnance in December from the United States to Israel ahead of air strikes in the Gaza Strip," Reuters reported. All of this is separate from the more than $21 billion in U.S. military aid provided by the Bush administration to Israel, almost all grants. "Israel's intervention in the Gaza Strip has been fueled largely by U.S. supplied weapons paid for with U.S. tax dollars," said a briefing by the New America Foundation, which monitors the arms trade. The new shipment was hampered by the decision of the Greek government to bar the use of any port in Greece "for the supplying of the Israeli army."
Greece's response to US-backed Israeli crimes is rather different from the craven performance of the leaders of most of Europe. The distinction reveals that Washington may have been quite realistic in regarding Greece as part of the Near East, not Europe, until the overthrow of its US-backed fascist dictatorship in 1974. Perhaps Greece is just too civilized to be part of Europe."
Why does Howard Webb get every major match and isn't this just a little too much power in one policeman's hands?
Noam Chomsky: "There are good reasons why the voting record is consistently unreported and dispatched deep into the memory hole by the media and conformist intellectuals. It would not be wise to reveal to the public what the record implies about their elected representatives. In the present case it would plainly be unhelpful to let the public know that US-Israeli rejectionism, barring the peaceful settlement long advocated by the world, reaches such an extreme as to deny Palestinians even the abstract right to self-determination."
Why has Keith Harris finally admitted that there is no possibility of any club being sold in the current global financial climate that was absolutely not caused, in any way whatsoever, by free market capitalist ideologues?
Noam Chomsky: "The figures for killed and wounded are surely an underestimate. And it is unlikely that there will be any inquiry into these atrocities. Crimes of official enemies are subjected to rigorous investigation, but our own are systematically ignored. General practice, again, and understandable on the part of the masters.
The Security Council Resolution called for stopping the flow of arms into Gaza. The US and Israel (Rice-Livni) soon reached an agreement on measures to ensure this result, concentrating on Iranian arms. There is no need to stop smuggling of US arms into Israel, because there is no smuggling: the huge flow of arms is quite public, even when not reported, as in the case of the arms shipment announced as the slaughter in Gaza was proceeding."
Why is Richard Scudamore keeping very very quiet at the moment? It surely would have nothing to do with the new televisions deals, would it?
Noam Chomsky: "Israel abandoned Gaza in September 2005. Rational Israeli hardliners, like Ariel Sharon, the patron saint of the settlers movement, understood that it was senseless to subsidize a few thousand illegal Israeli settlers in the ruins of Gaza, protected by the IDF while they used much of the land and scarce resources. It made more sense to turn Gaza into the world's largest prison and to transfer settlers to the West Bank, much more valuable territory, where Israel is quite explicit about its intentions, in word and more importantly in deed. One goal is to annex the arable land, water supplies, and pleasant suburbs of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that lie within the separation wall, irrelevantly declared illegal by the World Court. That includes a vastly expanded Jerusalem, in violation of Security Council orders that go back 40 years, also irrelevant. Israel has also been taking over the Jordan Valley, about one-third of the West Bank. What remains is therefore imprisoned, and, furthermore, broken into fragments by salients of Jewish settlement that trisect the territory: one to the east of Greater Jerusalem through the town of Ma'aleh Adumim, developed through the Clinton years to split the West Bank; and two to the north, through the towns of Ariel and Kedumim. What remains to Palestinians is segregated by hundreds of mostly arbitrary checkpoints."
Why will the Premiership title race go to the very last game again this season?
Noam Chomsky: "The checkpoints have no relation to security of Israel, and if some are intended to safeguard settlers, they are flatly illegal, as the World Court ruled. In reality, their major goal is harass the Palestinian population and to fortify what Israeli peace activist Jeff Halper calls the "matrix of control," designed to make life unbearable for the "two-legged beasts" who will be like "drugged roaches scurrying around in a bottle" if they seek to remain in their homes and land. All of that is fair enough, because they are "like grasshoppers compared to us" so that their heads can be "smashed against the boulders and walls." The terminology is from the highest Israeli political and military leaders, in this case the revered "princes." And the attitudes shape policies."
Why is the Premiership now a handicapped event?
Noam Chomsky: "The plans that Olmert sketched in 2006 have since been abandoned as not sufficiently extreme. But what replaces the convergence programme, and the actions that proceed daily to implement it, are approximately the same in general conception. They trace back to the earliest days of the occupation, when Defence Minister Moshe Dayan explained poetically that "the situation today resembles the complex relationship between a Bedouin man and the girl he kidnaps against her will...You Palestinians, as a nation, don't want us today, but we'll change your attitude by forcing our presence on you." You will "live like dogs, and whoever will leave, will leave," while we take what we want."
Why? Is it true that the Dalai Lama wishes an audience with Harry Redknapp?
Noam Chomsky: "As the crimes passed beyond what the carefully honed Israeli propaganda campaign was able to suppress, even confirmed Israeli hawks became concerned that the carnage is "Destroying [Israel's] soul and its image. Destroying it on world television screens, in the living rooms of the international community and most importantly, in Obama's America" (Ari Shavit). Shavit was particularly concerned about Israel's "shelling a United Nations facility...on the day when the UN secretary general is visiting Jerusalem," an act that is "beyond lunacy," he felt."
Why does Stevie G take such an interest in matters of the underworld variety?
Noam Chomsky: "Before, Israel had sensibly barred all journalists, even Israeli, while its crimes were proceeding in full fury. Israel's use of white phosphorus against Gaza civilians is "clear and undeniable," Amnesty International (AI) reported. Its repeated use in densely populated civilian areas "is a war crime," AI concluded. They found white phosphorus edges scattered around residential buildings, still burning, "further endangering the residents and their property," particularly children "drawn to the detritus of war and often unaware of the danger." Primary targets, they report, were the UNRWA compound, where the Israeli "white phosphorus landed next to some fuel trucks and caused a large fire which destroyed tons of humanitarian aid" after Israeli authorities "had given assurance that no further strikes would be launched on the compound." On the same day, "a white phosphorus shell landed in the al-Quds hospital in Gaza City also causing a fire which forced hospital staff to evacuate the patients... White phosphorus landing on skin can burn deep through muscle and into the bone, continuing to burn unless deprived of oxygen." Purposely intended or beyond depraved indifference, such crimes are inevitable when this weapon is used in attacks on civilians."
Why is Thaksin Shinawatra still allowed to own 25% of Abu Dhabi United when the latest Amnesty International report accuses his government of "systematic" genocide against Muslims in the south of the country?
Noam Chomsky: "Aggression always has a pretext: in this case, that Israel's patience had "run out" in the face of Hamas rocket attacks, as Barak put it. The mantra that is endlessly repeated is that Israel has the right to use force to defend itself. The thesis is partially defensible. The rocketing is criminal, and it is true that a state has the right to defend itself against criminal attacks. But it does not follow that it has a right to defend itself by force. That goes far beyond any principle that we would or should accept. Nazi Germany had no right to use force to defend itself against the terrorism of the partisans. Kristallnacht is not justified by Herschel Grynszpan's assassination of a German Embassy official in Paris. The British were not justified in using force to defend themselves against the (very real) terror of the American colonists seeking independence, or to terrorize Irish Catholics in response to IRA terror - and when they finally turned to the sensible policy of addressing legitimate grievances, the terror ended. It is not a matter of "proportionality," but of choice of action in the first place: Is there an alternative to violence?"
Why have Victor Chandler International decided to enter the spread betting sector at the onset of the Depression? Did they not learn when they last dipped their toes in the waters?
Noam Chomsky: "Israel has a straightforward means to defend itself: put an end to its criminal actions in occupied territories, and accept the long-standing international consensus on a two-state settlement that has been blocked by the US and Israel for over 30 years, since the US first vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a political settlement in these terms in 1976. I will not once again run through the inglorious record, but it is important to be aware that US-Israeli rejectionism today is even more blatant than in the past. The Arab League has gone even beyond the consensus, calling for full normalization of relations with Israel. Hamas has repeatedly called for a two-state settlement in terms of the international consensus. Iran and Hezbollah have made it clear that they will abide by any agreement that Palestinians accept. That leaves the US-Israel in splendid isolation, not only in words."
Why are Victor Chandler International so concerned at the integrity of football?
Noam Chomsky: "After Israel broke the June 2008 ceasefire (such as it was) in November, the siege was tightened further, with even more disastrous consequences for the population. According to Sara Roy, the leading academic specialist on Gaza, "On Nov. 5, Israel sealed all crossing points into Gaza, vastly reducing and at times denying food supplies, medicines, fuel, cooking gas, and parts for water and sanitation systems..." During November, an average of 4.6 trucks of food per day entered Gaza from Israel compared with an average of 123 trucks per day in October. Spare parts for the repair and maintenance of water-related equipment have been denied entry for over a year. The World Health Organization just reported that half of Gaza's ambulances are now out of order" - and the rest soon became targets for Israeli attack. Gaza's only power station was forced to suspend operation for lack of fuel, and could not be started up again because they needed spare parts, which had been sitting in the Israeli port of Ashdod for 8 months. Shortage of electricity led to a 300% increase in burn cases at Shifaa' hospital in the Gaza Strip, resulting from efforts to light wood fires. Israel barred shipment of Chlorine, so that by mid-December in Gaza City and the north access to water was limited to six hours every three days. The human consequences are not counted among Palestinian victims of Israeli terror."
Why did Alan Shearer rewrite Reality in his assessment of Mike Dean's comedic performance in allegedly refereeing the game between Sunderland and Aston Villa?
Noam Chomsky: "Israel's senior diplomatic correspondent Akiva Eldar reports that shortly before Israel launched its full-scale invasion on Saturday Dec. 27, "Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshal announced on the Iz al-Din al-Qassam Web site that he was prepared not only for a 'cessation of aggression' - he proposed going back to the arrangement at the Rafah crossing as of 2005, before Hamas won the elections and later took over the region. That arrangement was for the crossing to be managed jointly by Egypt, the European Union, the Palestinian Authority presidency and Hamas," and as noted earlier, called for opening of the crossings to desperately needed supplies."
Why did Dave Whelan put all his ill-gotten gains into dodgy Icelandic banks?
Noam Chomsky: "Today, Israel could have security, normalization of relations, and integration into the region. But it very clearly prefers illegal expansion, conflict, and repeated exercise of violence, actions that are not only criminal, murderous and destructive but are also eroding its own long-term security. US military and Middle East specialist Andrew Cordesman writes that while Israel military force can surely crush defenseless Gaza, "neither Israel nor the US can gain from a war that produces [a bitter] reaction from one of the wisest and most moderate voices in the Arab world, Prince Turki al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia, who said on January 6 that `The Bush administration has left [Obama] a disgusting legacy and a reckless position towards the massacres and bloodshed of innocents in Gaza...Enough is enough, today we are all Palestinians and we seek martyrdom for God and for Palestine, following those who died in Gaza'.""
Why does Dave Whelan object to other's tilting markets for proprietary advantage when he employs such tactics himself?
Noam Chomsky: "One of the wisest voices in Israel, Uri Avnery, writes that after an Israeli military victory, "What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints. This will have severe consequences for our long-term future, our standing in the world, our chance of achieving peace and quiet. In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too, a crime against the State of Israel.""
Why is the collapse of the BSkyB linkage with pubs going to be so key to the next tv deal, to the Premier League's financial detriment?
Noam Chomsky: "There is good reason to believe that he is right. Israel is deliberately turning itself into perhaps the most hated country in the world, and is also losing the allegiance of the population of the West, including younger American Jews, who are unlikely to tolerate its persistent shocking crimes for long. Decades ago, I wrote that those who call themselves "supporters of Israel" are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration and probable ultimate destruction. Regrettably, that judgment looks more and more plausible."
Why was it so funny seeing psychopath Dick Cheney arriving for the inauguration of ObamaWorld - not "Renewing America" so much as "Rebranding America" - in his wheelchair? Why was this just so funny...?
Noam Chomsky: "Meanwhile we are quietly observing a rare event in history, what the late Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called "politicide," the murder of a nation -- at our hands."
We are all Palestinians...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Friday, 9 January 2009
Polychrysos - The Illusory Game Of Exchange
The Illusory Game of Exchange, the Giant Poker Table where our Realities are determined...
In the previous post in our seasonal triptych, by focusing on the gathering Depression from the perspective of hedge-funds, Dark Pools, Behaviouralism, Darwinism and climate change, we outlined some of the reasons why a Deep Depression is our future.
Only time and space prevented us from venturing further into this systemic murkiness, and in the week since the post, there have been numerous further disturbing pieces of news that, under normal circumstances, would be headline-grabbing.
For example, the Bank of England reducing interest rates (and thereby eliminating its monetary options) to 1.5% - the lowest rate since the central bank was established 315 years ago. This is a statement of extreme historical weakness.
Or, the US economy losing more jobs (2.6 million) in 2008 than in any year since the 2nd World War.
Or the relentless conveyor belt of major job losses and fraud exposures on a daily basis (Alcoa, Satyam etc).
To begin this article, we intend looking at some of the other areas of non-sustainability that will guarantee the Deep Depression.
The Hyperreality (continued)
* Price-earnings (p/e) ratios - Bottom feeders are claiming that longer term investors are able to find value in the current market climate by taking advantage of the low p/e ratios in the marketplace. As stock prices have plummeted, earnings have, until recently, not fallen so far, as companies employ various accounting shenanigans to hide the true carnage from the balance sheets.
But earnings are about to go through the floorboards as the feedback loops and economic contagion poison the entire global economy.
Prices will follow.
The whole efficacy of p/e ratios as a potential measure of value in the marketplace is based on historical analyses and data.
Economists always look to the past for solutions, yet no economic hyperreality is replicable, which renders such research as quite pointless.
In a Depression, p/e ratios become an outmoded yardstick - systemic and super-systemic risk sees to that.
For this reason, there is not one global asset that might be thought of as offering sustainable value - any rebound is nothing more than an example of a dead cat bouncing...
Spokesperson for the Bank of England: "The world economy appears to be undergoing an unusually sharp and synchronised downturn."
* Ratings Agencies - All investors rely on the ratings bodies for a measurement of the level of risk within an organisation or a sector. These ratings are always inflated as any journey through the companies who either went into liquidation or were saved by governmental handouts in 2008 would demonstrate.
This is a systemic enigma built into the fake structure.
As the Economist states: "Although ratings are relied on by investors and regulators as impartial measures, the Rating Agencies are paid by those they rate for their judgments."
Think advertising - no newspaper contains negative editorial against its advertisers.
Think ratings - no Ratings Agency will downgrade an entity that is, in effect, paying the wages.
Some of the AAA/Aaa nonsenses standing proud at Standard and Poors and Moody's today, will seem just a trifle optimistic in less than twelve months time.
Jean Baudrillard: "... all current strategies boil down to this: passing around the debt, the credit, the unreal, the unnameable thing that you cannot get rid of."
* Private Equity - All the focus has been on the plight of the banks and the insurance companies, on the credit crunch and on the toxic assets, on targeting hedge-funds and on the state of the currency markets.
As attention has shifted to the 'real' economy (NB: it is our assessment that the ONLY Real economy is the informal one), the fake finance of private equity operations will come under increased scrutiny.
All firms under the yoke of private equity have been stripped of their assets and saddled with debt. With the current very real concerns about deflation this is very very bad news indeed.
When the Bank of England produced their Inflation Report on November 12th, the future spread of likely inflation rates projected negative values for the first time ever ie deflation.
Under a climate of deflation, indebted businesses (and households) will be more anxious to pay off loans and debts as soon as feasible.
How they are going to be able to achieve this is another problem entirely.
Jean Baudrillard: "The illusion of the economic sphere lies in its having aspired to ground the principle of reality and rationality on the forgetting of this ultimate reality of impossible exchange."
* Deflation - With the indebted desperately trying to pay off their financial millstones, a deflationary world is trouble as there will not be enough cash-rich entities to offset the activities of the indebted. This produces a deadly mix of falling prices and high leverage, leading to a debt deflation of the type first postulated by Irving Fisher in the 1930s.
And don't even get us started on the fine balance between deflation/stagflation tipping over into hyperinflation...
Jean Baudrillard: "Here and now, the whole edifice of value is exchangeable for Nothing."
* Moral Hazard - Moral hazard got us into this mess, and moral hazard is the template of choice to cement the Depression.
Excessive leverage, fake mathematics and accounting, all neatly wrapped in a regulatory-lite environment with no downside to the taking positions of excessive risk. Plus ça change...
Last week in the Financial Times, the war criminal called Blair admits to mistakes in his stewardship of the economy, but pleads for any reactive regulation to be as feeble as possible so that the innovation might be allowed to continue.
What innovation?
Credit default swaps? Derivatives generally? Ponzi schemes at hedge-funds? All very fucking innovative but of absolutely no value to anybody other than the psychos with their fingers in the till.
If such innovation had been put into Real research in medicine, science, rather than the myopic minutiae of available knowledges that are allowed to be marketed in this shareholder capitalist poker game, we would not be in this situation.
Still, its great to hear that the war criminal called Blair has earned £12 million from after-dinner speeches since he gave up his full-time post in applied genocide.
Friedrich Nietzsche: "One must push what is already collapsing."
* Emerging Economies - The new paradigmists, a particularly stupid breed of capitalist, reckoned that the emerging economies would rescue the US, the EU and Japan once the Recession began to bite. Yet all economies are declining in lock-step.
Furthermore, the shareholder capitalist model that has been foisted onto numerous gullible territories has been shown to be invalid.
So, for example, China needs to undertake some financial restructuring and recapitalisation. As the Economist states: "It would once have been easy to argue that a market-driven system served up by big western banks could do a better job of this than government. When virtually every such institution has been given state support to stay in business, that case is much harder to make."
George Soros: "If you need systemic change, you might as well go for something that is vastly superior."
* Credit Crisis - Although the record amounts of public money that has simply been handed over to the greed architects of this Depression has succeeded in freeing up some of lack of confidence in the financial system, the Real solidity so created is mainly an illusion. The Real economy will continue to suffer (British retailers experienced their worst xmas ever in 2008 and banks are refusing to pass on the interest rate cuts to businesses and customers) and banks will create a cycle of contagion whereby the businesses that they do support will be undermined by the complete collapse of the rest of the economy, with associated bad debts and further risk of toxicity. we should expect more hedge-funds and banks to go under this year.
Mark Twain: "Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."
* Governmental, Regulatory and Central Bank Errors - It is now generally accepted that allowing Lehman Brothers to go bust was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the ban on the short-selling of financial stocks was a short-sighted mistake.
It is now generally accepted that solely targeting the toxicity in the financial system was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the excessive financial support provided to insurance giant AIG was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the highly leveraged private equity model was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the lack of regulation in the free market was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the targeting of hedge-funds was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that giving the Bank of England control over the setting of interest rates was a mistake.
It is not yet regarded as a mistake that interest rates have been slashed to historical lows.
It is not yet regarded as a mistake that the financial industry is rushing to create secretive Dark Pools.
There are more mistakes to come from a financial elite (sic) who see the financial world solely through the prism of their own self-interest.
Satyajit Das: "Markets placed great faith in the volume of money available to support asset prices and assist in alleviating shortages of liquidity. The perceived abundance of liquidity was, in reality, merely an illusion created by high levels of debt and leverage as well as the structure of global capital flows. As the financial system deleverages, it is becoming clear, unsurprisingly, that available capital is more limited than previously estimated."
Trust, Psychology, Psychopathy, Freemasonry and Freebie Bets
* Trust is one key component in the current crisis - nobody trusts the banks any longer no matter what their government-sponsored advertising campaigns may claim.
All analysts must judge the security of their investments, savings and cash, and correctly apportion their monies accordingly.
Taking sports brokerage as an example, we set a limit on the degree of trust that we place in our routes to market. Once a threshold has been set, we maintain our cash levels with the said institution below these levels AND we build into our financial projections the probabilities of brokers reneging on our agreements.
We are now at the point where we place banks at the same level of risk as our second tier brokers ie below the level of trust that we have in our primary level Asian brokers.
This breakdown in trust will not be easily repaired.
We don't know them and we don't trust them.
And we don't trust their system either.
As the Depression begins to bite in earnest, many more individuals are going to be reaching this same conclusion.
As Sigmund Freud once observed: "Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces."
* The Trickledown Effect - One of the great fallacies of shareholder capitalism is the trickledown effect, an illusory piece of fake mathematics that is solely dependent on the imaginary hyperreality of purchasing power parity (PPP). There is no trickledown other than in misery and psychopathy.
In a Depression, this Real trickledown effect is a downward spiral in the fake pyramid selling scheme that is our system.
The greed, the psychopathy and the mistakes were made at the top.
Our representatives bailed them out with huge handouts.
Moral hazard determines that the same greed, the same psychopathy and the same mistakes will be made at the top.
Psychopaths are unemotional and irrational - these two factors must go together as research by Antonio Damasio, professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, has shown.
There is a sufficiency of psychopathy among financial folk.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko: "When the truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie."
* Freemasonry, the World Economic Forum, our Freebie Bets - We are in the middle of a Secular Bear Market which began in 1997 and which will last until around 2017, even ignoring the super-systemic risk of climate change. There are scenarios where the secular Bear Market becomes a Permanent Depression and, in that the same mistakes are repeatedly made until they cannot be made anymore, this scenario has a significant probability of coming to fruition.
Despite this Reality, we are about to experience another hyperreal inflating of asset bubbles. It should be remembered that two of the biggest bubbles of last century occurred in the years immediately following the 1929 slump.
At Davos this year, we should be expecting to hear numerous public statements as to the seeds of recovery and other such nonsenses. Jim O'Neill of Goldman Sachs has already started the ball rolling. The pyramid scheme is being talked up.
Furthermore, the few disaffected freemasons with whom I collaborate are informing me that there is an agenda for the deep state to buy back into the financial markets in the summer months, after the worst early year bankruptcies have been accommodated into the already illusory market prices.
In yesterday's post, we briefly discussed the lack of meritocracy in nepotism and cronyism, but this is nothing when compared to systemic control through secret societies.
Let's examine (again briefly) three of the inefficiencies brought to the financial system by the activities of the lodges. It is the remainder of society that pays for these inefficiencies.
For Freemasonry is a hyperreal heist.
Example 1 - When the Meadowhall Mall was being constructed in Sheffield, the tiling/ceramics contract was not a competitive tender. The contract was simply given to a masonic company in Rotherham. This is not meritocratic and it is not an example of a free market.
Example 2 - The biggest sixth form college in England required a new headmaster. A shortlist was drawn up. The chairman of governors objected that a catenian (catholic mason) who had applied was not on the shortlist and, even though he accepted that professionally this was the correct decision, he was duty bound to interview the man. The other candidate withdrew and the catenian was appointed. Two years later 90% of the board of governors at the school were composed of catenians from the same Knutsford lodge as that attended by the headmaster. The chair of governors retired and the new chair is the wife of a leading regional freemason. This is also not meritocratic.
Example 3 - Masons are given prior warning of changes in government regulation. So, when the government announced a change in the way that nursing homes could be operated in the Thatcherite free marketplace in the 80s, freemasons received the tip off of the market opportunity fully six months before the matter had even been discussed in parliament. Ah, democracy... This is neither meritocratic nor proof of the existence of free markets. It is more like Russia...
So, by the summer, the concerted efforts of the Davos brigade and the deep state apparatus will be driving market prices higher AGAINST the Real dynamic of the market which should, at best, be stagnant. Remember - markets are priced for a Recession, not a Depression, and most certainly not a Permanent Depression.
Selective buying into the markets is our Freebie bet for this year. For now, we restrict ourselves to suggesting a purchase of the systemic indices, but nearer the time we'll be more specific both with regard to the markets and the timing.
This is truly a contrarian Cynical Realist market position.
There is a risk in this position and the primary skill will be knowing when to close out - it is only in a fake hyperreality that one might make money out of opposing the true Reality. For, although an attempt will be made to drive a new collection of illusory bubbles, the state of the planet and the financial and economic systems may well determine that the bubbles will not be able to be inflated to any great extent.
Buttonwood in the Economist: "... low government-bond yields could lose their appeal and equities could rebound. Income-seeking investors seem unlikely to get much of a return from cash this year. An equity rally could occur even if the global economy is in for a prolonged period of weakness."
The other part of our Freebie Bet is for Dietrological Professional clients only and is ##################### to win the Premiership title.
* Conclusion - As the fallacious system runs on in its empty sameness, the illusion must be replaced by truth, otherwise there will not be eco-system in which to continue to peddle the propaganda and lies.
Satyajit Das: "In this current financial crisis, the quantum of available capital, the munificent resources of central banks and sovereign wealth funds, and the globalization of capital flows may be some of the accepted "facts" that are revealed to be grand illusions."
Michel Foucault: "There is a battle 'for truth'... It is necessary to think of the political problems of intellectuals not in terms of 'science' and 'ideology', but in terms of 'truth' and 'power'... 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A 'regime' of truth... The problem is not changing people's consciousnesses - or what's in their heads - but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth."
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
In the previous post in our seasonal triptych, by focusing on the gathering Depression from the perspective of hedge-funds, Dark Pools, Behaviouralism, Darwinism and climate change, we outlined some of the reasons why a Deep Depression is our future.
Only time and space prevented us from venturing further into this systemic murkiness, and in the week since the post, there have been numerous further disturbing pieces of news that, under normal circumstances, would be headline-grabbing.
For example, the Bank of England reducing interest rates (and thereby eliminating its monetary options) to 1.5% - the lowest rate since the central bank was established 315 years ago. This is a statement of extreme historical weakness.
Or, the US economy losing more jobs (2.6 million) in 2008 than in any year since the 2nd World War.
Or the relentless conveyor belt of major job losses and fraud exposures on a daily basis (Alcoa, Satyam etc).
To begin this article, we intend looking at some of the other areas of non-sustainability that will guarantee the Deep Depression.
The Hyperreality (continued)
* Price-earnings (p/e) ratios - Bottom feeders are claiming that longer term investors are able to find value in the current market climate by taking advantage of the low p/e ratios in the marketplace. As stock prices have plummeted, earnings have, until recently, not fallen so far, as companies employ various accounting shenanigans to hide the true carnage from the balance sheets.
But earnings are about to go through the floorboards as the feedback loops and economic contagion poison the entire global economy.
Prices will follow.
The whole efficacy of p/e ratios as a potential measure of value in the marketplace is based on historical analyses and data.
Economists always look to the past for solutions, yet no economic hyperreality is replicable, which renders such research as quite pointless.
In a Depression, p/e ratios become an outmoded yardstick - systemic and super-systemic risk sees to that.
For this reason, there is not one global asset that might be thought of as offering sustainable value - any rebound is nothing more than an example of a dead cat bouncing...
Spokesperson for the Bank of England: "The world economy appears to be undergoing an unusually sharp and synchronised downturn."
* Ratings Agencies - All investors rely on the ratings bodies for a measurement of the level of risk within an organisation or a sector. These ratings are always inflated as any journey through the companies who either went into liquidation or were saved by governmental handouts in 2008 would demonstrate.
This is a systemic enigma built into the fake structure.
As the Economist states: "Although ratings are relied on by investors and regulators as impartial measures, the Rating Agencies are paid by those they rate for their judgments."
Think advertising - no newspaper contains negative editorial against its advertisers.
Think ratings - no Ratings Agency will downgrade an entity that is, in effect, paying the wages.
Some of the AAA/Aaa nonsenses standing proud at Standard and Poors and Moody's today, will seem just a trifle optimistic in less than twelve months time.
Jean Baudrillard: "... all current strategies boil down to this: passing around the debt, the credit, the unreal, the unnameable thing that you cannot get rid of."
* Private Equity - All the focus has been on the plight of the banks and the insurance companies, on the credit crunch and on the toxic assets, on targeting hedge-funds and on the state of the currency markets.
As attention has shifted to the 'real' economy (NB: it is our assessment that the ONLY Real economy is the informal one), the fake finance of private equity operations will come under increased scrutiny.
All firms under the yoke of private equity have been stripped of their assets and saddled with debt. With the current very real concerns about deflation this is very very bad news indeed.
When the Bank of England produced their Inflation Report on November 12th, the future spread of likely inflation rates projected negative values for the first time ever ie deflation.
Under a climate of deflation, indebted businesses (and households) will be more anxious to pay off loans and debts as soon as feasible.
How they are going to be able to achieve this is another problem entirely.
Jean Baudrillard: "The illusion of the economic sphere lies in its having aspired to ground the principle of reality and rationality on the forgetting of this ultimate reality of impossible exchange."
* Deflation - With the indebted desperately trying to pay off their financial millstones, a deflationary world is trouble as there will not be enough cash-rich entities to offset the activities of the indebted. This produces a deadly mix of falling prices and high leverage, leading to a debt deflation of the type first postulated by Irving Fisher in the 1930s.
And don't even get us started on the fine balance between deflation/stagflation tipping over into hyperinflation...
Jean Baudrillard: "Here and now, the whole edifice of value is exchangeable for Nothing."
* Moral Hazard - Moral hazard got us into this mess, and moral hazard is the template of choice to cement the Depression.
Excessive leverage, fake mathematics and accounting, all neatly wrapped in a regulatory-lite environment with no downside to the taking positions of excessive risk. Plus ça change...
Last week in the Financial Times, the war criminal called Blair admits to mistakes in his stewardship of the economy, but pleads for any reactive regulation to be as feeble as possible so that the innovation might be allowed to continue.
What innovation?
Credit default swaps? Derivatives generally? Ponzi schemes at hedge-funds? All very fucking innovative but of absolutely no value to anybody other than the psychos with their fingers in the till.
If such innovation had been put into Real research in medicine, science, rather than the myopic minutiae of available knowledges that are allowed to be marketed in this shareholder capitalist poker game, we would not be in this situation.
Still, its great to hear that the war criminal called Blair has earned £12 million from after-dinner speeches since he gave up his full-time post in applied genocide.
Friedrich Nietzsche: "One must push what is already collapsing."
* Emerging Economies - The new paradigmists, a particularly stupid breed of capitalist, reckoned that the emerging economies would rescue the US, the EU and Japan once the Recession began to bite. Yet all economies are declining in lock-step.
Furthermore, the shareholder capitalist model that has been foisted onto numerous gullible territories has been shown to be invalid.
So, for example, China needs to undertake some financial restructuring and recapitalisation. As the Economist states: "It would once have been easy to argue that a market-driven system served up by big western banks could do a better job of this than government. When virtually every such institution has been given state support to stay in business, that case is much harder to make."
George Soros: "If you need systemic change, you might as well go for something that is vastly superior."
* Credit Crisis - Although the record amounts of public money that has simply been handed over to the greed architects of this Depression has succeeded in freeing up some of lack of confidence in the financial system, the Real solidity so created is mainly an illusion. The Real economy will continue to suffer (British retailers experienced their worst xmas ever in 2008 and banks are refusing to pass on the interest rate cuts to businesses and customers) and banks will create a cycle of contagion whereby the businesses that they do support will be undermined by the complete collapse of the rest of the economy, with associated bad debts and further risk of toxicity. we should expect more hedge-funds and banks to go under this year.
Mark Twain: "Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."
* Governmental, Regulatory and Central Bank Errors - It is now generally accepted that allowing Lehman Brothers to go bust was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the ban on the short-selling of financial stocks was a short-sighted mistake.
It is now generally accepted that solely targeting the toxicity in the financial system was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the excessive financial support provided to insurance giant AIG was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the highly leveraged private equity model was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the lack of regulation in the free market was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the targeting of hedge-funds was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that giving the Bank of England control over the setting of interest rates was a mistake.
It is not yet regarded as a mistake that interest rates have been slashed to historical lows.
It is not yet regarded as a mistake that the financial industry is rushing to create secretive Dark Pools.
There are more mistakes to come from a financial elite (sic) who see the financial world solely through the prism of their own self-interest.
Satyajit Das: "Markets placed great faith in the volume of money available to support asset prices and assist in alleviating shortages of liquidity. The perceived abundance of liquidity was, in reality, merely an illusion created by high levels of debt and leverage as well as the structure of global capital flows. As the financial system deleverages, it is becoming clear, unsurprisingly, that available capital is more limited than previously estimated."
Trust, Psychology, Psychopathy, Freemasonry and Freebie Bets
* Trust is one key component in the current crisis - nobody trusts the banks any longer no matter what their government-sponsored advertising campaigns may claim.
All analysts must judge the security of their investments, savings and cash, and correctly apportion their monies accordingly.
Taking sports brokerage as an example, we set a limit on the degree of trust that we place in our routes to market. Once a threshold has been set, we maintain our cash levels with the said institution below these levels AND we build into our financial projections the probabilities of brokers reneging on our agreements.
We are now at the point where we place banks at the same level of risk as our second tier brokers ie below the level of trust that we have in our primary level Asian brokers.
This breakdown in trust will not be easily repaired.
We don't know them and we don't trust them.
And we don't trust their system either.
As the Depression begins to bite in earnest, many more individuals are going to be reaching this same conclusion.
As Sigmund Freud once observed: "Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces."
* The Trickledown Effect - One of the great fallacies of shareholder capitalism is the trickledown effect, an illusory piece of fake mathematics that is solely dependent on the imaginary hyperreality of purchasing power parity (PPP). There is no trickledown other than in misery and psychopathy.
In a Depression, this Real trickledown effect is a downward spiral in the fake pyramid selling scheme that is our system.
The greed, the psychopathy and the mistakes were made at the top.
Our representatives bailed them out with huge handouts.
Moral hazard determines that the same greed, the same psychopathy and the same mistakes will be made at the top.
Psychopaths are unemotional and irrational - these two factors must go together as research by Antonio Damasio, professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, has shown.
There is a sufficiency of psychopathy among financial folk.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko: "When the truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie."
* Freemasonry, the World Economic Forum, our Freebie Bets - We are in the middle of a Secular Bear Market which began in 1997 and which will last until around 2017, even ignoring the super-systemic risk of climate change. There are scenarios where the secular Bear Market becomes a Permanent Depression and, in that the same mistakes are repeatedly made until they cannot be made anymore, this scenario has a significant probability of coming to fruition.
Despite this Reality, we are about to experience another hyperreal inflating of asset bubbles. It should be remembered that two of the biggest bubbles of last century occurred in the years immediately following the 1929 slump.
At Davos this year, we should be expecting to hear numerous public statements as to the seeds of recovery and other such nonsenses. Jim O'Neill of Goldman Sachs has already started the ball rolling. The pyramid scheme is being talked up.
Furthermore, the few disaffected freemasons with whom I collaborate are informing me that there is an agenda for the deep state to buy back into the financial markets in the summer months, after the worst early year bankruptcies have been accommodated into the already illusory market prices.
In yesterday's post, we briefly discussed the lack of meritocracy in nepotism and cronyism, but this is nothing when compared to systemic control through secret societies.
Let's examine (again briefly) three of the inefficiencies brought to the financial system by the activities of the lodges. It is the remainder of society that pays for these inefficiencies.
For Freemasonry is a hyperreal heist.
Example 1 - When the Meadowhall Mall was being constructed in Sheffield, the tiling/ceramics contract was not a competitive tender. The contract was simply given to a masonic company in Rotherham. This is not meritocratic and it is not an example of a free market.
Example 2 - The biggest sixth form college in England required a new headmaster. A shortlist was drawn up. The chairman of governors objected that a catenian (catholic mason) who had applied was not on the shortlist and, even though he accepted that professionally this was the correct decision, he was duty bound to interview the man. The other candidate withdrew and the catenian was appointed. Two years later 90% of the board of governors at the school were composed of catenians from the same Knutsford lodge as that attended by the headmaster. The chair of governors retired and the new chair is the wife of a leading regional freemason. This is also not meritocratic.
Example 3 - Masons are given prior warning of changes in government regulation. So, when the government announced a change in the way that nursing homes could be operated in the Thatcherite free marketplace in the 80s, freemasons received the tip off of the market opportunity fully six months before the matter had even been discussed in parliament. Ah, democracy... This is neither meritocratic nor proof of the existence of free markets. It is more like Russia...
So, by the summer, the concerted efforts of the Davos brigade and the deep state apparatus will be driving market prices higher AGAINST the Real dynamic of the market which should, at best, be stagnant. Remember - markets are priced for a Recession, not a Depression, and most certainly not a Permanent Depression.
Selective buying into the markets is our Freebie bet for this year. For now, we restrict ourselves to suggesting a purchase of the systemic indices, but nearer the time we'll be more specific both with regard to the markets and the timing.
This is truly a contrarian Cynical Realist market position.
There is a risk in this position and the primary skill will be knowing when to close out - it is only in a fake hyperreality that one might make money out of opposing the true Reality. For, although an attempt will be made to drive a new collection of illusory bubbles, the state of the planet and the financial and economic systems may well determine that the bubbles will not be able to be inflated to any great extent.
Buttonwood in the Economist: "... low government-bond yields could lose their appeal and equities could rebound. Income-seeking investors seem unlikely to get much of a return from cash this year. An equity rally could occur even if the global economy is in for a prolonged period of weakness."
The other part of our Freebie Bet is for Dietrological Professional clients only and is ##################### to win the Premiership title.
* Conclusion - As the fallacious system runs on in its empty sameness, the illusion must be replaced by truth, otherwise there will not be eco-system in which to continue to peddle the propaganda and lies.
Satyajit Das: "In this current financial crisis, the quantum of available capital, the munificent resources of central banks and sovereign wealth funds, and the globalization of capital flows may be some of the accepted "facts" that are revealed to be grand illusions."
Michel Foucault: "There is a battle 'for truth'... It is necessary to think of the political problems of intellectuals not in terms of 'science' and 'ideology', but in terms of 'truth' and 'power'... 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A 'regime' of truth... The problem is not changing people's consciousnesses - or what's in their heads - but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth."
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
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