Show me the money

One of the reasons / themes behind much of this Head Candy stuff is the idea that soon, very soon, the state is going to go bust, and when it does, the state will no longer be able to afford these outrageous schemes such as the secret family courts and associated hangers on such as child welfare psychologists, child welfare workers, etc etc.

Bernanke said in 2008 (behind closed doors in the US Treasury) “We have to save the rich first, we have to save the gamblers.” and this is an article of faith for all “trickle down” economists, which means all modern western politicians, wall street, the city, banks, EU, US, etc etc.

This is an article of faith for these people, as long as they are able to draw breath, they will adhere to this article of faith, irrespective of the consequences.

The idea with Greece now is that Greece is x billion in debt, so a new bank steps in (EU) with a new loan, and this “money” goes straight to the banks that are owed the old loans, bypassing Greece and the Greek economy totally, and in order to service the burden of this increased debt, Greece is forced to sell off state assets, such as for example land, infrastructure, industry, whatever it takes.

All of this was inevitable as soon as banking deregulation was permitted, because it only took perhaps 30 minutes to study why banking regulation was introduced in the first bloody place, and you would realise that banking IS gambling, and that banking IS NOT, NEVER HAS BEEN, NEVER WILL BE, wealth creation….  contrary to everything these trickle down types believe.

As discussed in other pages in the Head Candy section, this all comes down to Core Competence, and related subjects, and core competence for a Banker is exactly the same as core competence in the gambler placing a bet. It is basically zero, a banker need know precisely nothing about anything else, he needs to know nothing of engineering, manufacturing, power generation or distribution, transport, shipping, agriculture, none of these are important, they are just things to place bets on, and the bets usually are not whether that thing will work, but whether that bet can ITSELF ADD PERCEIVED VALUE TO ANOTHER BANKER, and be sold on at a profit.

It is high stakes poker where the hand never ends and the cards are never revealed and the pot is filled with IOU‘s , and when one of the players folds because their IOU’s are all worthless, then the other players want to continue to play, and want everyone who is not a player, eg taxpayers, to make good on the folding players IOU’s… a child of seven can predict how this will end, and the bankers know it, too, the trick is being last ones standing when the music stops, then grabbing everything and running for the fucking hills ahead of the lynch mob.

This is not wealth creation, simply because nothing is “improved“, no iron ore is improved into steel, no thing becomes suddenly more useful or improved after a banker has “handled” it.

What we need to do is take away their toys, and their toys are the various world currencies.

I did an interesting experiment some years ago, and I have repeated it regularly since, this experiment was to convert the energy equivalence of various energy sources and their relative prices, and see if there is any correlation.

You can therefore convert a gallon of diesel into kWh equivalents, and compare the cost per kWh if buying diesel at a petrol pump, electricity from your utility company, natural gas piped in, etc etc etc.

Do this and you find something very interesting, when you convert all the various ways in which we buy energy into kWh terms, they all work out pretty much the same price…. this is fairly obvious when you think about it, if diesel was 2 cents a litre power companies would start building diesel powered generation plants and undercutting the gas and coal powered plants…

You then start to notice something interesting, you can plot this cost per average kWh globally, and simply change the label on the chart to “Standard of living” or “level of technological development” and it still works…. nobody who is not an engineer understands how closely our modern society is tied into per capita energy consumption, or just how much energy consumption is the definition of modern technology.

A friend who worked at the National Grid (UK) showed me a demand chart shortly after 9/11, when everyone in the country picked up a landline telephone at once and started making national and international calls, and the entire UK phone system spiked up to maximum energy consumption, and this was approximately equivalent to 10% of UK generating capacity…

Think about that for a minute, nobody, but nobody, in finance or politics planning national energy policies and green and renewable and solar wave yadda yadda is aware of that, the fucking phone system can at peak absorb 10% of national generating capacity… ah… what about internet infrastructure then?

In any event, relative mean per nation costs per kWh works out at a fairly useful currency, with a fairly useful exchange rate between nations, an exchange rate that is pretty much proof against speculative fluctuation… if an average UK kWh is worth 20 cents and the average French kWh is worth 10 cents thanks to France having a large nuclear power generating capacity and the cost of transmission is 3 cents and transmission losses are equivalent to 3 cents then there is potentially 4 cents to be made by importing French kWh to the UK.

Automobiles, laptops, houses, all can be represented in the kWh equivalent of energy it takes to make them.

So what is the poverty line in the UK, represented in kWh?

It is around 25 kWh per day, whether that is spent on diesel at 40 kWh to the gallon or electricity to power the home and laptop or the energy equivalence of food and clothing.

For an nation as a whole just take their energy GDP (usually measured in quads, or quadrillion BTU) and divide it by their population.

Let’s call USA annual energy budget 4,000 terawatt hours, and population 300 million.

4,000,000,000,000,000 / 300,000,000 = 13,333,333

13,333,333 / 365 = 36,529 or around 36 kWh per capita per diem. (mean)

Not petro-dollars or gold dollars, but kWhdollars, and unlike fiat money, it can only grow and shrink in line with actual production and availability and consumption, you cannot simply create trillions of these new monies at a keystroke, unless you deregulate the bankers, and if you do that again, then not only will they do that, they will also do what ENRON did and deliberately engineer power shortages in order to make winning gambles.

Think about that.

Financial Armageddon sounds awful, but the disease, unregulated banking and financial industries, is far worse than the cure, the parasite has outgrown the host.