You’ve gotta love the way that the mainstream media somehow manages to keep on missing the real news.
In a week when the plight of Geronimo the Bovine TB+ive Alpaca was creatively made to look like some 160,000 deaths of infected cows over the same period that his owner has been fighting Defra simply didn’t exist, the pillars of our information rich society managed to overlook the further £1.15Billion of Bonds that the Bank of England has bought, extending Rishi Sunak’s mammoth money printing and public spending spree into realms which really do now span into the complete unknown.
Don’t get hung up on who is buying or who is selling what to who, when it comes to any kind of financial ‘product’, when the Bank of England or the Government are involved. Either way, this is a process of injecting even more obscene amounts of cash into an already overladen economy – all of which is effectively debt being run up on the public tab.
The thinking that underpins financial jiggery-pokery of this magnitude isn’t only flawed; it is also exceptionally dangerous. The repeated bouts of money creation that the Johnson Government has instigated since the Covid Pandemic began are so high, there is no practical way that this Country can pay anything near the whole amount back.
There is talk that our children and grandchildren will still be paying the bill. But the Johnson Government really have gone too far.
What is more, they have done this not off the back of owning something secure like gold – that actually exists.
They have literally created all of this money out of thin air, all on the principle that the system will keep rolling, accumulating like a rolling snowball, and that as long as it keeps rolling in the same direction (That means the money available gets bigger and bigger), then those driving it and who are responsible for it will never suffer from a fall.
What this apparently bright idea overlooks is the stark reality that exits when the amount of money available increases exponentially, whilst products, land, houses and capital assets that we can actually own, increase at a significantly slower rate – that is, if the amount of them available actually increases at all.
Those at the top of the money chain – who always end up with the bulk of all this newly created cash, have increasing buying power that the majority of us can only dream of. Meanwhile, they push the value of everything up significantly – alongside all the others who are milking the system or taking out value without giving anything back – whilst those on the lowest wages and increasingly even the middle classes too, simply don’t get the wage rises that mean they can keep up with price rises just enough to stand still.
By now, you will probably have realised that this isn’t a Covid-related problem. In fact, this problem isn’t really that new at all. It’s been in the making for 50 years or more.
What’s different now, is the way that the Government and the Bank of England under its instruction, has upped and is continuing to spend.
It is a matter for debate whether the money pumped out to keep the economy moving during Lockdown should ever have been needed at all. But we are well past that point now. And if we go back to the snowball idea that I mentioned above, the reason that so much money is being created and pumped into the economy, is literally to keep the whole thing moving because the Government is terrified what will happen if the whole thing stops.
SPOILER ALERT: It’s going to stop. The snowball will stop rolling and will not be able to grow any more.
The financial system and the economy are going to crash.
It’s not an if. It’s a when.
And the only question that we and ideally the media should be asking, is which will be the straw that finally breaks the camel’s back.
There are a range of different ways, and the list is growing. It could be the escalation of cost-of-living prices, like the energy price rises coming in the autumn, or even the flattening of the additional £20 per week allocated to families on Universal Credit as part of the Covid ‘bounce’. It could be a shortage of food on the shelves being caused by a shortage of drivers (that has more to do with the ridiculous standards and licensing requirements that the EU imposed on the industry rather than any lack of EU drivers caused by Brexit) and the unadulterated greed of shipping companies that have created a worldwide shipping monopoly that is seeing prices for goods transport go stratospheric – not for any good reason other than that they can name their price, based on making obscene levels of profit alone. Then there are the issues that are out of our hands such as the precarious state of the US economy, which itself is on the edge of a precipice so large, that it could end the US hold on everything economic as we watch the position of the US Dollar as the World Reserve Currency simply implode.
Whatever tips the balance, it really doesn’t matter. The way that money and economics works today is already well and truly sunk.The neoliberal dream that money can be whatever you make it is dying. That is, If it’s not already dead.
Instead of using the borrowed time that the Bank of England and the Government has left to do anything that they might be able to try to mitigate or offset this coming disaster, they are instead upping the throttle and increasing the speed of compiling and contributing events, literally treating the whole thing as if a disaster is impossible and will never happen. They are working on the premise that they can literally fake it til they make it, by printing more and more money until they believe they will have completely weathered the storm.
Think very carefully about the relationships you have with the people, businesses and community members located around you. Do all that you can to cultivate and develop them in positive ways. Because a time will come perhaps very soon, when we will all have to trade, borrow, barter, help and support the people who are immediately around us – just as life for everyone in this Country once was.
Obsessed with big headlines and the powerful job titles that each and every one of them is sniffing out next, MPs and Government Ministers focus only on what bigs them up, rather than fulfilling the roles that they were elected for.
Foreign trade deals really aren’t going to help in a world that has to reject globalisation because of the fallout from covid and the fact that we are being woken quickly to the unfolding nightmare which is climate change.
Government should instead be investing the money it has available whilst it still has tangible value. Government should support the growth and sustainability of local economies and supply chains that really do away with every kind of unnecessary journey and make it both practical and cost effective for as much of the food we eat and the products we buy to have travelled next to no miles as possible.
We really should be taking this opportunity to focus proactively on going back to improved and better ways and models of working that value every form of human input equally, meaning that a happy debt-free, safe and healthy life is something that even the poorest members of our society and communities can afford.
These things can be done in ways that will remove a lot of unnecessary pain when they are done not by necessity, but by reasoned choice.
Adam Tugwell 