Beware: Mindbenders at Work

First, there was disinformation about the looming collapse of the housing market. It wasn’t going to happen, then it would be a soft landing – all to maintain a mythical “confidence” on which the property market is supposed to be built.
                               
Now, disinformation about the recovery: housing wasn’t the cause of the UK crisis, and prices will bottom next year – and they won’t lose 40% of their value. What’s more, there’s no way to avoid a re-run of the boom/bust cycle, so get a life and stop moaning.

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Hail to the Location Louts

The G20 leaders meeting in Washington this weekend want us to believe that they are setting a new course for the global economy. They are in fact setting up the next classic boom / bust cycle.
 
The two planks of their “never again” package of proposals are tighter regulation of the banks, and massive expenditure funding of infrastructure.
 
The regulatory ruse – some calling it Bretton Woods II – is an irrelevance. Over the past 200 years we had bank-funded crises under all supervisory regimes: no regulation, tight regulation and (latterly) light-touch regulation. Count on banks being at the forefront of events at the end of the next cycle.

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When is a Recession Not a Recession?

How we define a recession assumes relevance when we are heading for what looks like a depression.
 
Three years ago they laughed when I forecast a depression. Economists were emphatic: governments had learnt the lessons. By definition, therefore, they were determined that there would be no return to the 1930s.
 
Which is why economists are now bringing to bear their most potent weapon: the elasticity of language.

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Gordon Brown: The Cover Up Exposed

Gordon Brown is orchestrating a Big Lie. He wants to hoodwink people into thinking that he is not responsible for what the Governor of the Bank of England now admits will be a “prolonged” crisis. The economic tsunami about to hit the UK need not have happened, for two reasons.

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Greenspan... mea culpa... almost!

For 18 years, investors hung on his every word. As Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan could move markets. A slight inflection of the voice, a hint of this or that, and the price of shares shot up or down.
 
This was the Master of the Universe. Our universe. He strutted his stuff as if he knew what he was doing. And yet…

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