Coronavirus streets to lively markets - XLVIII

Local markets alive

It is interesting to be distracted by observation to notice things that are quite serendipitous especially after review. My trip to London was mainly to see friends who reside in boroughs as far apart as you could imagine for someone from out of town, for I was in Richmond on Saturday and then Haringey on Sunday.

On my return from Twickenham, I met a lady with lots of leftover bread at the station who manned the Celtic Bakers store at the Twickenham Farmers' Market and then on Sunday, after being taken for a circulatory ride by a black cab, we were out to the City & Country Farmers’ Market at the Alexandra Palace Campsbourne School.

Just smile for a while

The wide array of foods and goods locally sourced and fresh without the dead hand of over-processing by the food industrial complex makes one think it might be prudent to seek out a farmers’ market in my locality.

The store holders had different temperaments, one could not be bothered to notice us, another was an effervescent conversationalist, please to see us, willing to oblige and present to advice and tips. You can imagine how much time we spent with him before having to visit another stall just because he had run out of something we wanted.

Noticed fame and noted infamy

There, just above the stall was a blue plaque honouring Emma Clarke, reputed to be the first black female footballer who played in the first public national match for women on Nightingale Lane in 1895. Then to think that for most of the first part of the 20^th Century the Football Association took a conservative stance against women’s football.

Blue plaque to Emma Clarke - pioneering black British female footballer.

Round to the other side of the market venue on the school premises, we stocked up on vegetables and me, a bottle of ginger and banana kombucha made by a man who seemed to have more than a passing interest in me, I guess we just notice each other by some invisible radar.

Not that Yoruba

Moving on, there was a stall with language books, I picked the one for Yoruba off the shelf which was interesting in that they there teaching Yoruba pronunciations by using English phonics which I thought strange because the sounds would at best be approximations and when spoken would sound quite foreign too.

However, one critical element was missing, the diacritical marks necessary to show that Yoruba is a tonal language such that words that look like homonyms without the diacritical marks are not homophones because of the intonations and are essentially heteronyms.

Oiled his wallet nicely

We withstood a whole exegesis on walnut and cobnut (hazelnut) cold-pressed oils, if we could remember anything of what we were supposed to learn, the pitch was persuasive enough and he made a really good sale. The walnut oil will suit my steam cooking as it best used on food that does not take direct heat.

I was last at this market probably 3 years ago, and it was a wonderfully pleasant sunny day for fourth week of October.

The auction of grey matter is open

Matters concerning

Let me see, we have a situation where a contractual engagement is up for renewal and that is a good thing for the prospect was incumbency put the principals ahead of the game, or that is the sweet talk that had presaged the circumstance.

On review, an extension was granted to allow for the formalities of the renewal be engaged from first principles as the whole assignment is now out to tender. The bland assurances that went before has now pitted the incumbents against 4 other rivals who might be bidding at different rates with a redefinition of the roles involved.

Markets in churn

Invariably, the agency now has to calibrate their bid competitively with a sweetener to keep the incumbents interested having dealt them a rather bad hand. The encumbrance is unnecessary, and the terms are hardly as favourable as obtains at present. Having only 3 weeks to go with this new development, the marketplace might be a better option than to continue in drudgery.

Marketing literature updated, profiles refined, and old contacts visited for possibilities. There is a pretence that the incumbents are being done a favour. Nothing could be further from the stark reality, that suitors are plenty and options abound, it is a chooser’s bazaar, bring your bids and get to use our brains. Miffed does not begin to convey displeasure, just push against an open door.

Credit crunch: Lazarus comes forth

A difficult case

The man was flailing, the doctors saw his condition and some diagnosed somewhere between the trivial and the critical; it could become terminal, but no one knew what was wrong.

Between a twitching eye and a radical emergency yet unforeseen, the sceptics gathered and simply said the man was faking it, it could never be that serious, don’t waste precious medicine on him.

Meanwhile the experts were conducting all sorts of tests on him but no one could afford the cost of treatment that he fell into a cardiac arrest – rather than do something in the private hospitals, they were looking at the bill and the insurance costs of reviving the man as they allowed themselves to be stunned by the fact that they were losing him faster than they could think.

A global contagion

There were similar cases all around the world but no one thought the vector was the same, each medical team everywhere was prescribing their treatments without comparing notes as each and every one of the affected relapsed into a state that warranted a quarantine that roped in countries.

He was moved out of the hospital with gold-trimmings into the state hospital where doctors who had done serious inner-city medicine had other plans and ideas; rather than the finesse of cosmetic surgery effete they brought in the defibrillator.

Stand Back! A charge of $700 billion was applied as the pads hit the chest, a beep, but he was still flat-lining; this thing was looking like haemorrhaging fever of Ebola virus proportions, somebody had to do something - pretty damn quick, none of the medicine was working – yet, we were assured the shock would revive the man.

In another room, some were praying, some were swooning and probably more had resigned themselves to the last rites – the man was as good as dead.

Treatments from the land of penicillin

In the land of penicillin, the doctor who had been a house officer for 10 years was thinking about a new kind of treatment just as the man in Iceland had already been wheeled into the refrigeration of the mortuary and the stone rolled over in front of the cave – we learnt that the house officer whilst tending his patients realised that strain in Iceland had a similar DNA profile to some of the ailing patients around Europe and he pulled their supply line of adrenaline - the man died.

He then put forward a drug regime that had chemicals pumped into the men in a concoction that would have made a 1930s hospital look like a cosy kindergarten; the men still did not seem to revive, they were all terminal, if not fatal.

He kept the regime up and he must have felt like Jesus felt as he loved the free market capitalist system and its trappings so dearly, we had been buoyed by his humour, his camaraderie, his ability to make us feel so good even when we have been so bad and we were in quite a bad way already.

We wept as the grand palace of the most magnificent illusions and mirages that were thought we were living in suddenly disappeared without a souvenir to show for living the good life.

Lazarus rises from the dead

Over the weekend, the doctors compared notes and advocated regimes of treatment that looked like the regime that the man from the land of penicillin had instituted.

Roll away the stone, he said and he bellowed – Lazarus! Come forth! A man came out of the cave having been dead for days and the bandages were removed and he was given food.

Men are reviving everywhere now, the stock markets are gaining their highest ever rallies, meanwhile we are sure we would find out what was responsible for that bout of severe illness, the men were probably poisoned, there would be a strict regime of diet and freedom, the drugs are still being administered to avoid rejection where some men have had to have heart transplants - cash injection of trillions seems to have done the job, so far.

Those men who as cannibals had craved and eaten Dutch flesh have been throwing up without respite, somehow, the third did not get Spanish flu, what a strong constitution he must have - say I. Those up North would now never be able to get away scot free and be alone from the land of penicillin.

What a long day of harrowing weeks and troublesome months of foreboding at the hospital, we are not sure we have a cure yet.

Notes on the idea

This wraps the story of the resurrection of Lazarus round a serious medical contagion baffling the experts describing the bailouts and rescues of the banking systems around the world and falling stock markets.

The land of penicillin as you know is the United Kingdom where penicillin was discovered, everything else is simply the workings of a crazy imagination.

Paulson: Burying the dead and ignoring the murderers

Bones of the bull

That was really the week that was and just as we were about the pick the dry bones of the bulls [1] slain by the plague of lack of confidence in the desolate Wall Street the great chiefs of capitalism prophesied the breath of socialism upon the bones and the cows live again to milked dry by blood-thirsty hyena cubs.

No, certainly, the events of the last week cannot have passed anyone by and I kept my counsel for as long as I could till I flipped through the pages of the Economist that arrived in the post this afternoon.

The elevenses

Just after the letters and on page 11, eleven being the number of the chapter that Lehman Brothers wrote at the beginning of the week, a firm whose existence has been swallowed in the sands of time with an 11^th hour buyout was reliving its past in an advertisement that proclaimed Merrill Lynch connects capital to opportunity.

It ended with “Our 94-year history of leadership in the financial industry has been a source of confidence for our clients in both good and challenging markets”.

I had to check if my magazine was current, it was, the advert had been paid for and basically the Economist was putting it out despite the fact that that 94-year existence had been terminated a few days before.

Dishonourable things abound

Now, if I were unaware of the events of last week, I suppose I would be expected to buy that bull with horns protruding like ones off a devil’s face mask and throw my money into the opportunity to see it swallowed up in great loss.

It was just over a year ago when I wrote about Baling Out Trust [2] which lamented the way the basic foundation of business following the dictum “My Word is my Bond” and its counterpart of trust had been eroded by dishonest, corrupt, vice-ridden and dishonourable practices.

In December I talked about how we were Fixing Capitalist Errors with Socialist Favours [3] ending my comment with the thought that these actions would create more problems in the future and that none of it had yet begun to unravel.

People were not focused on where the problem was as they got distracted with the idea black holes would be created by the Large Hadron Collider which is since been shut down [4], a more menacing black hole was busy swallowing banks and financial institutions in the United States in the United Kingdom.

Cleaning up a no-crime zone

Whilst these events require a lot more analysis what I see is simply this – guys with big guns came into town with a swagger and 10-gallon hats banging on tables, ordering the most expensive drinks, cavorting in wanton orgies with the women and having a raucous moment allowing the occasional tips to the locals who dared to join in.

Along the way there was something approaching complete social breakdown and a few of the guys were brought in for questioning, smacked on the wrist and let go.

By the time we knew it there were a good few dead bodies on the street and no one could do anything about it that it raised up the foulest stink everyone stayed indoors.

The sheriff walks in and says “We need this to be clean and to be quick”, and we need to get it in place [5], we’ll clear up the dead and bury them in the community playground, that may clear up the stink – meanwhile no one is worrying about the murderers, they are still walking around with big guns, probably with a little less ammunition, drinking less and having a low profile around the bar.

We need to get rid of the stink because no one is coming out unto the streets, nothing else matters.

The whiff of nothing

The funny thing is the dead are still in the streets, the stink is still there but in expectation of the clear-up – the stock markets are already behaving like the town is as pristine as a spring garden.

Well, in fact, let us pretend there has been no murder because by the time we do the forensics we would only have bones to exhume.

We are back to where we started and the vicious circle begins again and no one really paid for the crimes of the past rather the community lost their playground to an impromptu cemetery and anyone who dares to go out to play at night knows never to go out there again.

Source

[1] BibleGateway.com - Passage Lookup: Ezekiel 37:4-5; Reference to a passage where Ezekiel prophesied to the dry bones in the valley

[2] Baling out trust [akin.blog-city.com]

[3] Fixing Capitalist Errors with Socialist Favours [akin.blog-city.com]

[4] BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Hadron Collider halted for months

[5] Paulson: Plan Needs To Be "quick" And "clean", By Patrick O'Connor - CBS News

Cleaning up tough Bare Stains

No prophet of economics

The layman observer economist in my dreams suddenly acquired a mitre to my collection of hats.

In fact, the economist part is not so much the science but the basic observation of human character and nature; the mitre infers the accident of prognostication.

Before anyone beats a path to the church of the prophetess of sub-prime consequences, I have nothing to offer you about the lottery numbers for this weekend or any other weeks in the future, the ones for last week, even you can find out.

Dishonesty breeds distrust

I had before mentioned in a series of blogs regarding the sub-prime mortgage crises; that the activity started off with dishonesty regarding means and ways, it lead on to greed regarding acquiring economically unsound customers and this was given a false copper bottom by slicing up the debts and repackaging it with the best ratings on the market.

In a bull market, a good number of banks bought that bull and have now been caught out without the bull but a pair of paper marché horns.

For over six months, banks have been wary of what other fellow banks have gotten into and how much of bull or horns they have got left. So, no bank is willing to lend to another just in case the money goes into a black hole – that is the loss of trust.

Throwing in everything

The horses have already bolted, I say, meanwhile, someone is trying to lock the gates anyhow. The black hole no matter how minuscule was created when banks and customers veered from trustworthy contracts at the beginning of sub-prime deals and this is just one of the many causative issues in what we now know as the credit crunch.

Escaping the gravitation pull of the black hole is tending towards to seriously expensive with almost $1 trillion thrown to the beast with sub-prime, credit-crunch, recession and inflation heads in monetary stabilisation, socialist amelioration, write-downs and bale-outs with no let or give of respite.

Bare Stains

So, whilst the Northern Dust in England received emergency funds that resulted in a bank-run last September, we have Bare Stains (Bear Sterns) granted such emergency funds sending a shudder through the markets and giving us a feeling of foreboding that we are no where near the end of the economic crises.

If honesty were still not the best policy, especially in business, what other policy do we have to do business and avoid this mess?

These are just bare stains which cannot be easily wiped off with emergency funds; the real muck is still somewhere out there waiting to be unveiled, no amount of throwing money and policy at it would solve it till the truth is out about how everyone got caught out.

Dishonest lending clue to market tremors

Central bank influence

I am no economist but I know that one has to be a little smart about the handling of money and investments.

Somehow, I had be quite concerned about the way hedge funds and their private equity counterparts have been buying up companies in takeovers and buyouts with highly leveraged instruments that heaps debts on acquisitions and sells on debt though systems that eventually have one institution holding the baby with adequate baby nourishment.

Interest rates have been going up in all regions for the past few years as Central Banks work hard to keep inflation down with the blunt hammer of interest rate manipulation and the assessments written in a language that would make parseltongue sound like baby chuckles.

Central bank to the rescue

What really bothers me is the way these sophisticated debt instruments have now come full circle as these debts cannot be sold on to raise more capital that the markets are presumably suffering a credit crunch, as if that is not fearful enough, the Central Banks in Europe, the Americas and Asia have pumped $326.3 billion into the markets to maintain investor confidence to no avail, the markets are falling like flies.

For Central Banks to be pouring money into the markets in this manner, the one side of maintaining investor confidence should not obfuscate that deeper issue of the possibility of Central Banks knowing a lot more about the problems inherent in the market than they are letting on.

Sub-Prime lending farce

It is the accepted legend that this whole debacle was caused by problems in the sub-prime lending for mortgages in the United States. Basically, people who normally would not qualify for loans and mortgages are allowed to take on these liabilities with lax due-diligence and higher interest repayments with the banks hoping to cash in on these higher risk stupidities.

With rising inflation also fuelled by cheaper credit coming from the appreciated value of existing homeowners, interest rates are raised to contain inflation making sub-prime loan repayments unserviceable.

Avalanche effect

Foreclosures take homes from the borrowers who cannot keep up and banks are left with debts that cannot be repaid and houses that cannot been sold at a premium to cover their losses – the avalanche effect has had banks reeling from exposures that has tightened liquidity and in some cases closed banks.

I am not convinced that we have seen the extent of banking exposure to sub-prime loans and the existing contingencies obviously have not been enough to give investors any confidence as they are selling up before thy get more caught up.

Thankfully, it is Friday, another trading day this week could have meant a complete meltdown – well, something close to a run on the markets.

Dishonest and fraudulent

Some people have talked about predatory lending practices that take the inadequacies of borrowers, sweeten up their circumstances to fit within lending parameters to derive commission and profit at completion of the deal but leaving the borrowers with liabilities the brokers know for sure they cannot handle.

The Financial Times yesterday gave an insight into the workings of this sub-prime lending activity. I will quote the text exactly as it appears in the article – Payback time.

"At the height of the US sub-prime lending boom, taking out a mortgage could not have been easier. Low credit score and history of bankruptcy? No problem. Income too low to qualify for a mortgage? Inflate what you earn on a "stated income" loan. Nervous that your lender might check up on your "stated income"? Visit http://www.verifyemployment.net

For a $55 fee, the operators of this small California company will help you get a loan by employing you as an "independent contractor". They provide payslips as "proof" of income and, for an additional $25, they also man the telephones to give you a glowing reference should your lender need it.

But perhaps the most absurd aspect of the US subprime mortgage market in recent years is that lenders became so generous with credit provision for out-of-pocket borrowers that very few checks were ever made."

If this is not completely dishonest and fraudulent, I wonder what is. In all the analysis and reckoning from market experts everyone seems to have an explanation apart from the real truth, people have been dishonest, banks have collaborated in perpetuating a lie and conducted financial transactions that are no more borderline criminal whilst Central Banks are now trying to clean up the mess without addressing the cause.

This problem would continue until honest, principled, truthful and trustworthy men step up to root out fraudulent practises in banks and lending procedures whilst ensuring that sensible due-diligence guidelines are adhered to for every loan offered.

Now, this should not mean that credit should not be available to all who seek credit, it means if doubts of recoverability do exist more should be done to safeguard the manageability of the loan when times do get tough – if that cannot be done, it would be a field day for loan sharks and that would be unacceptable.

NB: Like I said at the beginning of this write-up, I am no economist and this is not an exhaustive analysis of the sub-prime lending debacle or market volatility, it is simply a layman’s perspective on contemporaneous issues.

Eureka! is Farsi for Enrichment

The science and the conscience

Now, I am beginning to wonder what the reaction of the United States would have been if Iran had announced that they had made a breakthrough in some other cutting-edge science like finding a cure for cancer, stem-cell research or cure for HIV. [1]

I could almost wager that the self-same Donald Rumsfeld would have appeared on the news-wires condemning Iran for trying to destabilise thriving American enterprise in drug research.

This would have create havoc in the markets because Big-Pharma suddenly finds that investors are no more interested in their block-buster drugs which burst the wallet and bring not respite, even so none for the mind.

The Nuclear Pandora box

My drift here is; Iran has unlocked for itself the science some countries in the world think is their exclusive right to know and practice.

Suddenly, I am beginning to appreciate the patriotism of the Pakistanis and Indians for allowing their scientists to complete all their research and test their nuclear bombs before America was alerted to that earth-shaking discovery.

The type of dissidents that dissembled in terms of Iraqi weapons are the sort that for self-interest and probably an iota of patriotism revealed to us the fact that Iran was going nuclear.

Mordecai Vanunu still vanquishes in jail in Israel for revealing in a thriving democracy that Israel had developed nuclear weapons.

Makes you wonder if democracy is really about freedoms or some other supposed greater good of the majority – we are learning.

The nuclear Pandora box was opened in the 1940s, it is fallacy to think that knowledge can be caged like battery hen – knowledge is a leviathan, arresting it is hard enough, talk less of taming it.

Impugning all fairness

In America, the issue of spying on Americans has another voice protesting – that of the government – that it was the most classified activity in National Security; agreed, but it also appears to be illegal.

A new slant of declassification is also emerging as we are informed that the president probably approved the process of uncovering a CIA operative – it reads thus – if the president decides to reveal classified information, as president, he has duly fulfilled the terms of declassification regardless of the consequences.

This impugns everything we would regard as fairness. We have to remember that everything about Iran developing nuclear weapons is circumstantial – They have not developed nuclear weapons, they have no nuclear weapons, they want nuclear energy to meet their energy means.

In some cases, diversifying energy profiles from complete dependence on oil is not only smart, it is strategic and adroit, and sometimes Americans would have wished they had that kind of leeway.

Nuclear or new dare

I am being am being an apologist for the Iranian political class, but seeing how besieged they are from Iraq, Afghanistan, the Security Council, American vituperation and the sponsorship of dissident voices within the country; an leadership would be in dereliction of duty if they have not charted the Iranian course of action.

Indeed, this development is dual-purpose, within the New World Order it might as well be better for Iran to veer to the right than to the left as the diagram shows.

From the BBC

The fixated American mindset about Iran even though Iran protests to the contrary.

A smoke-screen for supercavitation?

Only last week, Iran tested an under-water missile which seems to have the makings of another break-through insupercavitation which some commentators believe was being tested when the Kursk submarine went under almost 6 years ago.

If this under-water high-speed torpedo is not nuclear powered, then I would say Iran is a long way ahead in securing its territory than we have imagined. Bully! To them.

Now, the markets are going wild with speculation about possible attacks on Iranian infrastructure, oil and gold are reaching new highs and American once again is about to turn the world upside-down with briefings, rhetoric, threats and more.

Sometimes, this dominant power is like some elephant sent into a china shop to do the window dressing – go figure!

Meanwhile – Eureka is Iranian for enrichment.

References

US condemns Iran nuclear advance