British PM Rishi Sunak proves that his apparent cultural difference offers no political distinction or innovation!

THE GOLDEN CHALICE BELONGS TO THE BOLD!

By Professor Gilbert Morris:

Sunak’s supporters will say both that it’s early - give him a chance and he did well, appointing a cabinet and at his first Prime Minister’s question time.

But listen to him:

He simply parrots the old strategies and offered nothing newer than his ethnicity; which is itself a labyrinth of nationalities, race and ethnicities!

In his first Question Time he copied the tried and tired formula of taking the question and turning it around to attack the other side…then laughing in self-satisfaction.

Heavyweight do take such lazy, meaningless delights! [sic]

I spent a good deal of my career, trying to show elected governments that they must be bold from the first day!

If you have 5 year election cycles…you must hit pay dirt immediately with something that gives the feel of a new country with new possibilities.

Merely performing routine tasks correctly - as every previous leader has - is not a game changer!

In a 5 year cycle, you have 18 months to get a policy done, if you announce it on the first day!

If you miss that first 18 months, events out of your control - natural disasters, wars, etc. ruins plans…and you’re left making excuses!

Already, his statement on Fiscal Strategy is delayed by 15 days! As Ca Newry would say “Sigh”!

Sunak has banned fracking. That’s good! But why is it not part of a broader strategy?

If he’d banned fracking, removed all transactional taxes for small businesses and instead of sucking up to Biden - who couldn’t remember his name on their first phone call - he should have announced a global coalition of the Commonwealth, Germany, China and the 30 US Congressional group proposing a Russia-Ukraine Peace Pact.

That’s how you come out of the box as a player on day one!

I mentioned these initiatives specifically because they are within his immediate grasp. When you have a change of leader during the life of a parliament, your mandate is already active. And in the case of peace agreement…you don’t just celebrate your India ties, you leverage it because Prime Minister Modi of India would LOVE nothing more than partnering with an Indian led Britain to solve a problem created by Europe!

Moreover India is essential to the conflict in Ukraine as both Russia and the US are trying to keep India on-side; whilst China would welcome every opportunity to work with India to solve their problems. India China and Russia would also have given him Brazil and Indonesia. He’d have gotten African through the Commonwealth. Therefore, such a peace initiative would involve nearly 5 billion people on earth and immediately he would be a global player beyond Britain’s resource capacity!

The point is Britain is reeling from high energy prices: ending the conflict is the surest way to bring down energy prices in the medium to long term!

But alas…he opted for the empty - eager-to-please lackey approach; proving that his apparent cultural difference offers no political distinction or innovation!

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The Global Inflation Momentum

40% of all US dollars in circulation were printed less than 3 years ago

THIS AIN’T YOUR DADDY’s INFLATION!

By Professor Gilbert Morris

Nothing done by the Central Banks of the world, will cauterise the current inflation momentum, which is not nation centric, but global!

This last clause - about the global character of this inflationary flourish - is telling: the Central Banks seem willfully ignorant of this global scale, each applying domestic tools as if shoveling water in a strainer will at least appear to be effective.

It is galloping nonsense of the first water!

In the US, the Federal Reserve’s role is to police “headline inflation” usually the effects of the money system, the cost and value of credit, driven by the money supply.

The problem is this inflationary moment is not American, (it’s global as I said) and worse, the US Federal Reserve had a hand in distorting the money system, so much so, as to render itself and it’s tools irrelevant to the scope and scale of the problem: over the last 13 years, “Quantitative Easing” - basically printing money to inject into banks - has lead to a situation that 40% of all US dollars in circulation were printed less than 3 years ago.

The basic law of supply and demand suggests that such a phenomenon alone is inflationary.

This Quantitative Easing together with interest rates at zero destroyed traditional lending that drives growth in an economy.

Where did all those trillions of dollars end up?

In the hands of the wealthiest 1% of the population, and in large corporations whose boards initiated the largest stock buybacks in American history; rendering the securities markets a fever unto themselves; a most morally vulgar undemocratic feature of Anglo-American capitalism.

This exacerbated the wealth and income gap on its own: and COVID 19 and the impacts of economic expansion away from the traditional economy to digital platforms - like Amazon, ZOOM etc. - foolish, ill-thought out stimulus packages, work-from-home initiatives, automation and permanent labour replacement and the normal economic incentives of the marketplace have been distorted beyond recognition.

Notably, the same employees who want to remain at home, also want liquid retirement packages when the time comes. However, their 401k and retirement funds are invested in office buildings. These office buildings now empty or leases collapsed, companies go bankrupt with losses to their own retirement funds in a vicious cycle.

But these are side notes: the real problem are two:

1. The abject stupidity of shutting down the entire world in 2020, destroying global supply chains and the delicate global informal labour markets that supported it; which will never be repaired.

This is the baseline driver of price appreciation and not the money system; which as I said above has induced economic and social disequilibrium.

If one listened to the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve yesterday, he has essentially defaulted to chasing the energy markets where the Fed has zero impact. His problem is market sentiment is ahead of Fed actions in determining overall economic sentiment.

2. The war in Ukraine - which is the fault of the West - though Putin is responsible. The war, together with the COVID 19 induced supply chain crunch has driven up fuel prices and so energy costs, which means energy inputs to every aspect of modern life has been impacted …and at the same time, lack of capacity (from the stupid shutdown) means the energy induce price together with the supply induced pricing has sent prices spiraling upwards.

Now this has begun to impact product availability and consumer sentiment. Tesla raised prices three times this year alone.

Even if countries turned toward development, availability and delivery of supply suffers from both energy input costs and lack of supply scale.

In 2020, I called for a $4.5 trillion dollar global reset “stimulus”, paid in Special Drawing Rights (SDR) to avoid inflationary US dollars, tied to meeting some sustainability criteria. (“Credit Guidance toward purloined outcomes as my brother Craig Shelton advises so often). Of course this was not done. There was no global leadership on resetting the mommy world’s economy after the reopening from the shutdowns. This was barking madness; given the impact of COVID and the impacts of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing, incoming automation and the economic and financial pressures on households globally.

Now, the US/NATO in stoking Putin into this conflict in Ukraine; they have ignored all the basic economic calculations of this conflict.

Tunisia is about to starve to death for Russian/Ukrainian wheat. I’ve said again and again…hold all parties to the conflict accountable, but make deals to offset the effects of the conflict. Instead, the West - the world’s chief warmongerers - wasted time demonising Putin for doing what the West has done 120 times in the 20th century alone, rather than making critical deals as Kissinger, Professor Mearsheimer and myself have argued.

Worse, the incompetence of the West is shown not only in the near destruction of Ukraine, but also in the new strategic alignments that are stronger than the West, including Russia, China, India, much of Africa and South America or nearly 60% of the world’s population.

Additionally, at the same time that 40% of all US dollars in existence were printed in the last three years, the West’s hubris has led to the strongest Ruble in its history and a Ruble/Rupee exchange rate trading away from US dollar reserves.

For the Caribbean, we are suffering already: we will find it hard to build a bird’s nest because of supply chain issues. Our purchasing power will be routed by imported and implicit inflation. And the heat of the coming summer will cause unforeseen suffering and infrastructural collapses with no relief in energy prices…because we did not use the pandemic to shift our capacities toward alternative energy.

For those delusionists touting crypto as a hedge: Learn to read facts: crypto is not a hedge. It’s a proxy and has been in synchronisation with traditional assets for 17 months now!

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