The Heavy Metal War

No, AC/DC aren't fighting Metallica to the death, cool and all though that would be.

I'm talking about the real world war being conducted today. The war that actually matters to us in Ireland, as opposed to the US colonisations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Heavy Metal War isn't being fought with bullets. That's not how the big wars take place anymore. It's being fought on the financial markets, by bankers and speculators and governments.

China, as we all know, has America by the scrota due to its ongoing huge trade surplus and its massive stockpile of greenbacks. Realising that the US, from municipalities, through states all the way up to the Fed, is actually bust, China is now trying to get out of the dollar before America takes them down too.

So they've been buying up Africa, and Australian commodities. Then they decided to stop exporting rare earths. These are obscure elements that are used in modern technology, from laptops to mobile phones. We need them for our toys. China's stopped sending them to us.

But even though China is in one mother of a property bubble, they still have infrastructure to build. They need things like concrete and copper. Oddly enough, one US banker (JP Morgan Chase) just cornered the copper market the other day. They now own half of all the copper on Earth, or 80%+ of the copper traded on the London metals exchange.

So we have a metals war between the US and China, playing out via the markets with banksters as the frontline generals.

It's not the only metal war, though. As the US prints its way out of economic trouble, the logical thing would be for the dollar to collapse into inflation. But that's not entirely happening right now. Why? Because as well as hedging their currency globally (by virtue of its position as the de facto world currency), America has also seen fit to suppress the value of real money, gold and silver.

Keeping the price of gold and silver down effectively keeps the price of the dollar and Dow Jones up.

JP Morgan admitted they were 'shorting' this market recently, after an investigation by regulators. This is the second front of the metals war. JPM have been fighting the price of precious metals down to prop up the dollar at the Fed's request.

Problem is, every time they smack the metals down, buyers pop up in China and India and snaffle up the real money for a bargain. And round and round the liabilities keep going, until sooner or later a stress fracture appears that cannot be papered over by permaprinting greenbacks.

This shit is likely boring the hole off you, so I'll stop there. Let's take a breath. What the fuck has any of this crap got to do with Ireland, you may be asking, if you're still awake?

Well, this is how things get done today. No more marching into the trenches to decide global disputes. Instead, you employ weapons of economic mass destruction and occupy nations via the markets.

That's what has happened in Ireland. Our sovereignty is one of the first casualties in the current world war. Bankers have run up debts, transferred them to our state and then foreclosed on us. Now we are mortgaged to international bankers to the tune of €170,000 each that we never borrowed. That's the size of a house loan. Each. One for every man, woman and child living here.

We can't pay it back. The idea isn't that we pay it back. The idea is that we service the loan for generations, as Germany did with the Versailles payments for WW1, which were only finally paid off the other month.

And while we're paying, our economy remains theirs to do with as they wish. And we remain indebentured debt slaves of the international bankers.

That's why you should care about the Heavy Metals War. Ireland was just a skirmish, a fundraising episode for bankers on the way to taking on China. But China just might be too big a target for them to take down.

For us in Ireland, until we're Back in Black, Nothing Else Matters. (Sorry!) But we don't have to accept our servitude without protest. Iceland conducted an effective guerilla economic war against their banker occupiers and succeeded. We could too.

By reneging on the bank guarantee, we would free ourselves of a hundred billion worth of debts that aren't rightfully ours. However, our politicians do not have the back bone or the sense of responsibility to their citizens that the Icelandic ones do.

But sometimes even the individual citizen can take guerrilla tactics to an occupying power. And this is something you can do too, in this economic war.

JP Morgan Chase are very short on silver. This means they've bet the price will remain low (thereby keeping it low) in order to keep the dollar high. So what can you do? Buy silver.

When you buy silver, you exchange paper money for real money. You make it that little bit harder for the banksters to keep the price low and the dollar high. You bring the banksters who took Ireland out that little bit closer to the precipice themselves. And you do yourself a favour too, by storing your hard-earned labour in real value, real money.

Crash JP Morgan, Buy Silver and let's save Ireland from the banksters.

All that glitters

It's US mid-term election night.

The exit polls are predicting a hammering for the Democrats. That should mean good news for the dollar and bad news for precious metals on the markets.

After all, the perception is that the Obama socialists (US perception, not mine) are flagrant tax-and-spenders, while Republicans are fiscal scrooges.

But of course, these aren't ordinary Republicans. These are people who have to issue ads telling the electorate that they aren't witches. These are ill-educated, small government looneys who have, with the support of frothing-mouthed cheerleaders at Fox News, successfully eaten up the GOP.

The markets like Republicans. But they don't like looneys. They probably like Obama better than they like looneys. (After all, he did bail out Wall Street.)

That fact, coupled with the inevitability of Ben Bernanke's great dollar printing machine going back into overdrive tomorrow, is driving the dollar back down and precious metals up.

Today, the Aussie dollar smashed through parity with the greenback. Expect the Swiss franc and the Canuck dollar to do likewise shortly.

What does this all mean for Ireland? Well, firstly, we're still screwed. The Germans are keeping the euro high in the ongoing currency war, meaning we're buggered on exports outside of the EU (ie to two of our nearest and biggest trading partners, Britain and America, who are both printing money like it was going out of fashion.)

Secondly, a bunch of Tea Party nutjobs won't look outside their narrow national interests. There will be more rabble-rousing about illegal immigrants, and more demands to repatriate jobs back to America. Either President Hopey Changey concedes to some of this rhetoric or he kisses a second term goodbye over two years of lame duck administrating.

The gelding of the Obama administration in conjunction with the destruction of the GOP by Tea Party malignants is not and cannot be good news for us.

Right now, Ireland is so far gone that we need a white knight to save us, and the Germans won't play ball, and the Americans are taking off their armour and hiding in a cave. And for all the Fianna Fail rhetoric and ass-kissing in Beijing, I wouldn't expect any help from the Chinese.

After all, they made their money playing a rigged currency game for the past few years, leading to the current beggar-thy-neighbour currency wars.

In 24 hours, America will look inward. It will look bankrupt. And it will look stupid.

And our Uncle Sam won't be playing sugar Daddy to Ireland possibly ever again.

The rich are suffering?

According to the spoofers, vested interests and eejits in the ESRI, the rich are suffering in what they euphemistically call 'the downturn' (a diminution akin to calling the civil war in Northern Ireland 'troubles'.)

Has anyone told Sean FitzPatrick yet? Or David Drumm? Or any of the other millionaire banksters who cut and run with their swagbags to their sunny hideyholes, laughing all the way?

The ESRI should really be wound down at this stage. It's nothing more than a national gag generator, and I mean gag in both senses, creating comedy and vomit in equal measure.

Remember, these are the same loons who were still predicting boom even after the bust had arrived, still wittering about 'soft landings' when the economy was in freefall.

Gordon's last stand

I bet Brown doesn't read this blog. And that's going to be something he'll regret, because I know how to save his career and his legacy.

He needs to call Nick Clegg and offer him the following improvement on the existing offer - two seats at cabinet for him and Vince Cable, one of them being that of the Prime Minister. And insists that he or Darling, with Cable's assistance, ride out the financial crisis.

Brown then makes a public speech acknowledging he has been rebuffed as PM, and offers the public change they can believe in - a Clegg-led administration, heavy on the Labour ministers, but with the addition of Clegg and Cable.

And he offers his own expertise as Chancellor to steer Britain out of the crisis with Cable's help.

He then steps down to cabinet and does just that, the one thing he does well - manage the economy, alongside Cable. The markets would believe in that team.

Gordon could step down, and will do if Cameron puts a deal together. It will be the cruel end that most politicians suffer. But there is the chance to stay in the game, redeem his reputation and do the state some service.

He should offer Clegg the poisoned chalice of sitting in Number 10, holding together a rainbow alliance, and the chance to implement their policy in Government.

He should enjoy this one last victory over the Tories and over Mandelson, who would take no part in such a cabinet and would be banished to the Lords, which would then be immediately overhauled.

And he should take this chance, this last stand, to redeem his legacy with one last masterful stint at the job he's good at, rather than the job of Prime Minister.

Last of the last

According to this morning's Bangkok Post, Europe is the last region to recover economically from the global financial disasters of the past few years.

While the US is showing the fabled green shoots, and Asia is en route to booming again, sluggardly old Europe is lagging behind with barely perceptible growth, major unemployment and ongoing banking crises.

And of course, Ireland is one of the weakest economies in Europe, which given the stiff competition from other messes like Portugal and Greece is pretty dire indeed.

The moral of the story is that we are last of the last, likely to still be suffering from NAMA hangovers long after the rest of the world economies are back on track.

It must be remembered that this is a direct result of the failures in government; the blatantly corrupt and incompetent Fianna Fail aided and abetted by the dewy-eyed amateurs of the Green Party.

If we don't hold them to account, and their hangers-on (the parish pump gombeen independent TDs, the banksters, the specudevelopers) they'll only do it all over again, as they've continually done so since the birth of the state.

Frankly, only an injection of backbone and hard work is going to sort Ireland out now, even if we do rid ourselves of the Fianna Fail cancer.

Where is that going to come from? Hardly from the boatloads of Nigerian scamsters and Roma beggars we imported like idiots to parasite off our ailing economy.

The only place it can come from is the greater Irish nation itself - the Irish in America who are sick of being patronised and ripped off by us, the Irish in Argentina still wrongfully denied their heritage by the racists in the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Irish in Britain and most of all the nearly 2 million Irish in the North.

We're going to have to throw ourselves properly on their mercy and ask for help. But only after we demonstrate our own intent to roll up the sleeves and do the hard work too.

Otherwise, we're going to be the last of the last for quite some time.

It takes a thief to spot global theft

The name Darius Guppy probably doesn't provoke much recognition in Ireland, even though he lived here for some time.

A brief precis of his life thus far might run:
Privileged schooling at Eton,
followed by more of the same at Oxford where he chummed around with top Tories David Cameron and Boris Johnson as part of the odious Bullingdon society,
followed by his father's spectacular bankrupcy,
which in turn led to Guppy Jr scamming Lloyds insurance to make up for the cash he believed Lloyds had stolen from his family.

Guppy was caught, prosecuted and jailed, then vanished into obscurity on release, firstly in Ireland and latterly in South Africa.

In short, he's the sort of rum bloke that the British aristocracy churn out all the time - the well-spoken crook.

But he's no fool and no idiot. And his introductory essay as a journalist for the Sunday Telegraph today is one of the more important articles to be published today or any other day.

Guppy's not the first to argue as he does, that the core problem with our global economy is the banks and how they invent money out of nothing in a form of alchemy that better resembles a card sharp's sleight of hand.

But few others have ever made the case so convincingly, so accessibly and so simply.

He argues clearly that you cannot allow banks to invent ever more amounts of money when the planet itself is finite. But this isn't an eco-hippy argument in favour of culling children so that the whales may feel free. This is a warning to everyone - the global economic collapse isn't over; it's barely started.

Perhaps it takes a thief to tell the rest of us that the banks are thieves on a truly colossal scale, and that a root-and-branch overhaul of the entire way money operates is now needed to prevent global meltdown.

His article is essential reading for anyone with a bank account, mortgage, personal loan, savings or property. If you haven't dropped out of society entirely, he's speaking to you.

Or, like the banksters, you might prefer to embed your head back in the sand and hope for business as usual to resume. It won't of course.

Money is debt, and allowing banks to create unending supplies of it is what's wrong at the core of our world. If you've got more time, perhaps you might like to view the following documentary, which expounds even further on the same points Guppy makes so excellently.

Britain has the wrong Bullingdon yobs running for office. Guppy would make a much better PM than Call-me-Dave Cameron. Because his criminality is so much less serious, and because he at least is prepared to acknowledge the real wrongs.

New Year's Revolutions

Happy nearly New Year, y'all.

Hopefully, you realise tomorrow is just another day, and you don't need to make lifechanging decisions while drunk tonight that will transform into mid-January bouts of guilt as you fail.

You could stop smoking, lose weight or try to get a new job starting any particular day. Why do it alongside the rest of the herd? Is there camaraderie in failing en masse? I don't know.

What I do know is that I think New Year's Resolutions are about as pointless as those 'Caution: Hot!' warnings on takeaway coffees - they're really only needed for the truly remedial.

So I've decided to go with some New Year's Revolutions instead. Here are the revolutions I'd like to see in 2010:

1. A Chinese counter-revolution. Seriously, fuck the Chinese Communist Party. I'd love to see them overthrown and subjected to a quick round of real people power, the human-abusing thug junta. This same prescription also applies to the scum ruling Belarus, North Korea, Burma, Zimbabwe and a host of other thugocracies.

2. A drugs revolution. The war on drugs is lost. Why are our governments still fighting it? Increasingly, world leaders, health experts, religious minorities and influential commentators have come out in favour of a complete reversal of current failed policies.
I hope that either the lawmakers start listening, or else a proper grassroots movement comes along and makes ongoing prohibition unworkable for good. If the EU reverted to the Portuguese model, we might finally get a handle on drug crime and on harm reduction for addicts.

3. An economic revolution. The return of the gold standard? The end of fractional banking? Back to barter? Jail for banksters?
I'm no economist (and am suspicious of that pseudoscience in any case), so I will refrain from being prescriptive.
But since the current system just went pop for the umpteenth time, you'd like to think we might rebuild with some new method that doesn't unerringly result in a bubble and collapse every decade or two.

4. A democratic revolution in Ireland. Take a look at the Dail. Do those people really represent you? Do they look after your interests? Well, why keep voting for them?
I'd love to see an end to the cronyism, the parochial parish pump politics, the gombeens, the brown envelopes and the nepotism in Irish politics.
But that would require an electorate to grow up and take responsibility for those they elect.

What revolutions would you like to see next year? And are there any that you're prepared to man the barricades to bring about?

Plan B

Biffo says there is no other option than NAMA. He says there is no Plan B.

Apart from the fact that Fine Gael have proposed a good bank/bad bank option and Labour have proposed temporary nationalisation of the banks, Biffo is still wrong.

While the Opposition proposals are improvements on the blatant bailout of Biffo's plan, there is a third option. It's called capitalism. Not crony capitalism like Fianna Fail understand. Proper capitalism.

Allow me to summarise: LET. THE. BANKRUPT. BASTARDS. GO. TO. THE. WALL.

But Biffo says we need to bail out these banks so that they can get lending to the rest of us and improve the economy so that we can stop borrowing a billion every fortnight and we won't have to call in the IMF.

Biffo couldn't be thicker if he was a bottle of pigshit.

Here's how to save the country's finances, Biffo. Here's Plan B:

• Let the zombie banks and the developers go to the wall. 77 billion saved right there. Then start prosecuting the bankers. Take them through the courts, using CAB if necessary. Probably a couple of billion minimum right there.

• After that, there's halving the salaries of TDs, closing the Seanad and making all representatives provide receipts for expenses, and capping the total at 10K per person per annum. Hundreds of millions saved.
  

• Make ministers drive their own cars and fly with their new bessie mate Mick O'Leary, and sell the Mercs and jets.
  

• Increase corporation tax by 2%. Not enough to drive FDI away, but enough to bring in an absolute ton of revenue.
  

• Cut the dole to no more than 25% higher than Britain's. That'll stop the vast amount of welfare tourism into Ireland, and will incentivise the unemployed to seek other options. Ideally, I'd timecap it to six months too, but in current circumstances it's unreasonable to expect people to find work in that period. But I'd timecap it as soon as we get unemployment back under 300,000. Billions saved there. Literally billions.
  

• Scrap the asylum system entirely, including the appeal system, and implement a pro-active approach involving identifying a capped number of those worthy of asylum and patriating them here ourselves. Deport everyone who has lost their case without appeal. Stop anymore coming in at the airport. Insist on Romanians and Bulgarians demonstrating an ability to support themselves here for three months or refuse them entry. Hundreds of millions annually saved on legal fees alone. Hundreds of millions more saved on processing bogus claims from the likes of Nigerians, over 95% of whom were found NOT to have a case on first application. And probably at least a billion saved in free legal aid, medical care, welfare benefits and so on.
  

• Introduce a third rate of tax on earnings over 100K per year of 60%. Introduce the American system of demanding tax returns from ex-pats on pain of loss of citizenship.
  

• Cap public sector wages at 150K per annum per person across the board from Brendan Drumm down. Introduce legislation to end their generous pension entitlements.

• Cancel all property-related tax incentives immediately, and the same for stud farms and all the other rich men's tax shelters.

• Legalise cannabis, licence it for sale and tax the hole out of it. Hundreds of millions in revenue right there.
  

• Introduce a property tax based on square footage of property owned, on an exponential scale, with exemptions for primary family homes under 100 sq m. Own half of Wicklow? Time to pay up, sell up, or open up your stately home to the nation.
  

• Prosecute Ahern. Not a lot of cash in this, but it is essential to demonstrate to the world that we're drawing a line under our corrupt and shady past.
  

I'm not saying this will reverse our currently catastrophic economic situation overnight. It won't.

But it is such a clear and vast improvement on the Government's plan A - to give tens of billions to corrupt bankers and their bankrupt specuvestor clientele - that you'd have to question who the Government actually represent.

Because it's definitely not the Irish taxpayer.

SCAMA

Courtesy of Amhran Nua, I bring you the unofficial guide to NAMA (click for big):

Ireland's debt clock

Ticking down to the midnight hour when the IMF turn us all back into peasants, I bring you...

Ireland's debt clock!

A thousand unemployed call centre workers cheer...

It's happening in India too. Three cities in a row, I've found that waiting and kitchen staff in hotels in India were predominantly Chinese.

Fair enough, a lot of people like Chinese food, even in India. But I cannot fathom how it could be cost-effective for employers to take on migrant workers ahead of one of the lowest- paid workforces there is.

Perhaps the Chinese government is subsidising this as part of some sort of training programme? Does anyone out there know if there is method behind this madness?

Surely when Chinese staff are populating the rosters of hotels in a place like India, we've already exceeded even the flimsy economic purpose for mass migration?

And how can the Indian authorities justify these jobs going to non-Indians, given the poverty and deprivation in the country?

And have they foreseen the negative effects on their tourist industry?

After all, it wasn't that long ago that they were hiring hotel staff for Connemara in Newfoundland because so many complaints were coming in to Bord Failte from American tourists about non-English speaking staff in Irish establishments.

And with no Irish forthcoming for the jobs, they looked for staff in the one other place where people sounded and looked Irish. There is, it appears, a premium of authenticity that tourists attach to visiting places like Ireland or India that involves interacting with locals and not with imported Chinese labour.

So why are Indian hotels hiring from China? Does anyone know?

I know nothing about the budget

I'm abroad and I've been deliberately ignoring all news from home. We all need a break.
So, I've heard nothing about the budget and now I'm afraid to look.
Could someone break the news to me gently?
(I'm assuming it's bad.)

Enjoy the holidays

Seriously, do.

Eat, drink and be merry. Be nice to family and friends if you can. Get over the cloying schmaltz of the season and roll with it. Allow yourself to be suffused with fellow-feeling.

Because I am fearful that this could be the last opportunity for some indulgence for a little while.

Next year we'll see jobs lost. Many of them. Houses repo-ed. A spike in the dole, the homeless, deprivation and poverty in general.

The credit bubble is over and now the bill's arrived. Many people literally won't be able to pay.

It would be nice to think that as a society we can look after the less fortunate in hard times. But that's not the sort of society Ireland is today. Perhaps it was once. If so, that was quite a while ago, and to be honest, I don't remember.

After a decade of gombeen government and PD-brand Thatcherism, we're all out for ourselves now. I've already overheard conversations between people discussing where they hope to buy repossessed houses on the cheap. It's sickening, but that's life today in Ireland.

It will get worse before it gets better. That's the nature of these cycles.

I really hope people throw themselves into Christmas this year, learn to reconnect with each other and get a perspective on true value in society. It might turn out to be the difference in how we survive this depression.

I also hope that people push the boat out one last time this year. A little irresponsible indulgence on top of the already preposterous national credit bill won't make a massive difference. And it might keep a few people in jobs who'd lose them otherwise.

See ya next year. Be good.

Banking bailout - The Wile E Coyote version

Remember, what happened in the US happened here too.
This is a cautionary tale from leading economist, Dr Wile E. Coyote.

Budget carnage

Did you enjoy your decade of gombeen government?

I hope you did, because the bill just arrived:

1% 'levy' on all earnings.
2% over 100K.
HSE middle management axed; review of public service to find more job cuts.
Decentralisation paused till 2011.
8c a litre on petrol, 50c on pack of fags, 50c on bottle of wine.
'Review' of pension reserve fund (he's going to raid it later.)
Dublin Metro on pause.
Over 70s med card axed for those who don't qualify - but they'll get a 400 euro donation towards med costs in its place.
Capital gains tax up.
10 euro tax on airport departures, 2 euro for 'shorter' journeys.
Tax on second homes and let homes, but not on homes for sale but not sold (got to look after those poor builders).
Child benefit halved for 18 year olds, and to be scrapped in a couple of years.

When your next pay cheque arrives, notably lighter than before, remember who to blame. You'll get a chance to have your say next year, when the local government elections come around.

(Pic shamelessly nicked from the geniuses at The Irish Sentinel)

So who goes to jail?

Now that economic armageddon has been averted/postponed/cancelled (delete as your confidence in the future dictates), who's going to carry the can?

Taxpayers, of course, will be paying in real terms for the banking and trading sectors' mistakes.

But will any of the criminals who brought us to this point be held accountable?

In Britain, it seems that despite nationalisation of four banks the only penalty for the bankers will be the removal of their bonuses this year. Big swinging mickey. How about removing their pay packets too, then removing their freedom?

In America, the bankers will be inflicted with 'oversight'. Apart from the fact that oversight should have been going on from day one, this seems to indemnify those responsible for this mess from any responsibility.

So we remain in the asymmetrical risk situation, whereby bankers make tons of money when their irresponsible bets come off, but lose little or nothing when they don't.

And in Ireland? No penalties for the bankers thus far, despite the state underwriting all their mess. And I predict that tomorrow's emergency budget will hammer the taxpayer while continuing to reward the big losers who caused this mess - the bankers and the builders.

Nick Leeson, now a successful employee of Galway United FC, went to jail for this sort of irresponsible investing. I'd love to see the many others who emulated his model of speculation receive a similar penalty.

But they won't, you can be sure of that.

A little bell will ring

In a few hours, in New York, a little bell will ring.

And then all your hard work, a lifetime's effort of diligence and sacrifice, will begin to vanish. All that you saved, all that you invested, all that you salted away in pensions for when you're old which is sooner than you'd like it to be, will start to erode, like salt in a rainstorm.

You think it's been bad already, with indices like the Dow and Nikkei falling 7-10% a day, and the Iseq a mere fraction of what it was only a year ago.

But once that little bell rings, complex mathematics overseen by overpaid shouting white men will take over, and all the many hours of your effort, all the careful scrimping and saving, the self-denial, the sacrifices you made, they'll all begin to fall in value.

Not in real value. You put those hours in, you did the work, you strove to ensure the future for you and your family. That value remains in your character and the admiration of those who love you and witnessed how hard you slogged.

But in monetary value, a large proportion of your efforts is about to vanish for no good reason other than the greed of bankers and traders and their deliberately opaque and complex system of self-reward.

The solution is NOT to do what is currently being done. The solution is to do the exact opposite. Rather than ensuring their losses, it is time to hold them culpable for them.

It's a solution I'm prepared to bet no government in the world will implement, not even Iceland which officially went broke as an entire nation yesterday. But it's the right solution.

It may provide you with a little comfort today, after the little bell rings and your savings, investments, pensions and stocks start to diminish before your very eyes, to know what the answer is to this economic meltdown.

That's why I offer it to you. Remember who's responsible for this mess and hold them to account. They just stole years of your working life and pissed it up the wall.

Otherwise, when that little bell rings, take cover. A global depression is coming out swinging.

Update: It's bad alright.

Blarney O'Leprechaun bites de Big Apple

Acccording to the ever-gorgeous Government Press Office, our glorious leader is off to Noo Yawk later this month:

The Taoiseach, Mr. Brian Cowen TD, will undertake his first official trip to the United States next month [sic].

He will visit New York for a series of engagements with key political and business leaders, as well as representatives of the Irish community.

The highlights of the visit are expected to be a visit to the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday July 16th and a keynote address at the Wall Street 50 Dinner on Thursday 17th July.

In his meetings, the Taoiseach is expected to discuss the global economic situation, how to further develop the relationship between Ireland and America and the issue of immigration reform and the undocumented Irish in the US.

So Cowen will continue the ignominious whining and begging of the Irish government to make our illegals in the US legal. So far, so Bertie.

But the man who claims the Celtic Tiger credit is also set to share his wisdom with the gloom-mongers of the NYSE. It will of course not be fascinating to hear what turgid twaddle and covert FDI pleading that Cowen intends to serve up as his main course at the Wall Street dinner.

I just wonder how all of this will go down among the stockbrokers. They're already feeling the pain of the credit crunch. The Chinese are at the gates, their economy is bleeding money on at least two wars, and their reliance on cheap fossil fuel is utterly unsustainable.

Then Blarney O'Leprechaun, who's been boasting about what an economic genius he is based upon the long-gone Celtic Tiger phenomenon, comes along pleading the poor mouth, begging for investment, and asking that America doesn't ship the tens of thousands of Irish hiding out there back to our shores?

I bet it's just what they need to hear right now. It should give them a right good giggle.

There's no such thing as a free lunch

... unless you're the worms of San Francisco, of course, who will soon be feasting on the father of monetarism, Milton Friedman, who died today.

If that sounds a bit harsh on someone who was esteemed as the father of the free market and a Nobel laureate to boot, then consider his legacy - Reagan, Thatcher, the massive growth in the wealth disparity between rich and poor over the past three decades, and of course bubble markets such as our own property boom.

Now, obviously Milt did not intend all of that to occur when he first championed monetarism. And in later years, he was an outspoken advocate of equality of access in education.

But there is little doubt in my mind that, visionary though Friedman may have been, his theorems have proved incredibly destructive in the hands of lesser minds over the latter third of his life.

The destruction of the British Miners in 1984, the degradation of the American working class into what Barbara Ehrenreich has termed 'canned labour', and of course the phenomenon of overseas outsourcing are all direct developments of Friedman's ideology being put into practice for the benefit of the few and to the detriment of the many.

His legacy, not presumably something he might have wished for, will be the enrichment of a tiny cabal of people worldwide at the expense of all the rest of us. His ideology, lacking as it does in human compassion, leaves itself open to the self-serving sociopathy of big business and big businessmen (and their puppet politicians.)

Farewell then, Milt. You've had your last free lunch, though the fat cats you inspired still have their head in the trough more than ever.