The New Capitalism -by the BBC

Over the last year or so, there is one man that has become a source of pain for some in the financial services sector. Some journalists don’t like him either. It is Robert Peston, BBC Business Editor. [blog]

His idiosyncratic style and general slow delivery (plus mumbling and fumbling and humming) irritates many. Others are irritated by his “attacks” on the financial services sector and the markets. The right-wing blogosphere attack him for being a "leftie" and the mouthpiece of the Labour government. Or so they claim. Stockbrokers and investment managers despise him because he “brings the market down”. I thought the markets were "efficient"?
The FT journos call him Pestowire, or Peston RNS, a reference to the Regulatory News Service used for the public dissemination of financial markets announcements.

It is difficult to convey to anyone living outside the UK how pervasive Mr Peston’s presence in the BBC has become. Since his reports on the debacle of Northern Rock, and the collapse of the banking system and consequent recession, his presence is the main feature of the 6pm and 10pm news bulletins every single day. I remember one day he even broadcast from the garden in his house.

Recently, he has published a short essay with the title “The New Capitalism”. [PDF]
They are summarised in these two videos. [link]

Personally, I don’t have any issues with his reporting. And when someone’s argument is over style, or personality, you know that people are on a loser. So I haven’t got much sympathy for those who blame Peston for anything. The world, or the stock markets, would not be any different, had Robert Peston not reported on the stories we all know about now. Shooting the messenger is not the answer to this problem, and it shows how inward-looking and shamelessly self-preserving the financial services sector (I refuse to use the word ‘industry’) has become: denial has become the modus operandi in the face of an unpleasant reality.

I do have a bit of an issue with this essay though. Not much with the content than with it having the logo of the BBC as an endorsement. So is this the BBC’s vision of capitalism post-credit crunch or Peston’s? It may be trivial and I might be over-analysing, but the presentation of this essay is not clear, and as a license fee payer I object the way in which has been delivered.

I have no issue with Peston’s book “Who rules Britain”. It may read more like a series of articles and it lacks a cohesive argument, a central thesis that it is presented to the reader. But overall, it provides a few examples of how the City and big businesses work, and how tax avoidance, sorry tax efficiency, has been encouraged by the Labour government.

But reading his essay on the new capitalism taking shape, I could not help but wondering about some of the statements and claims made:

“Arguably the global economic crisis will turn out to be more significant for us
and other developed economies than the collapse of communism.”

Well, I disagree completely. The collapse of communism left millions of people in the world, including Europe, ideologically orphan. Suddenly, there was no alternative to capitalism in its various forms. Communism, the egalitarian, collectivist alternative had failed. We went from two competing systems to one. Now we are going from an imperfect system to another one.

I agree 100% on the debt binge ('credit expansion' to be technical about it) as the key cause of the present crisis.

Some of the language is quite emotive:

“To put it in crude terms, for much of the past decade, millions of Chinese
slaved away on near subsistence wages and still managed to save, both as a
nation (China swanks £1,400bn in foreign exchange reserves) and as individuals.
And to a large extent they were working to improve our living standards, because
they made more and more of the stuff we wanted at cheaper and cheaper prices.”

It is naive to say the Chinese slaved away on near subsistence wages. Living standards in industrialized areas of China have risen in a way that was unthinkable a few years ago. If they were “slave” wages, then they could not save as much as they do. Agreed, the wages are low compared to Western standards, but wage differentials should not be measured in absolute terms, otherwise workers everywhere except western Europe are too slaving away. I could even concede that most factory workers in China are on relatively low wages, a byproduct of the excess supply of labour, but average Chinese wages are by no means “slave”. Also, and more importantly, the Chinese were not working to improve our standards or toiling for our prosperity: they were working to improve theirs, like any sensible nation does.
It would be more appropriate to say that we were outsourcing work to China so that we could buy goods at cheaper prices and keep inflation down.

I agree that the savings imbalances and the current account deficits in the UK and US (and also Spain) are unsustainable and that our low inflation in the last few years is the result of excess savings from emerging economies being recycled into UK, US and Euro-area debt.

And I also agree with the culpability. All of us to a certain extent for being addicted to compsumption, but mainly our financial institutions for having failed to protect the interests of their shareholders, creditors and customers, and our governments and regulators for having failed to take the appropriate regulatory (disclosure, capital requirements) and political (current account deficits, allowing outsourcing to countries with unacceptable working conditions, supporting asset inflation) decisions to prevent this crisis from happening.

But Mr Peston forgets to mention the issue of taxation and the use of low-tax jurisdictions by companies and business leaders, and how this Labour government has done nothing to stop it.
He also forgets to mention the use of off-balance sheet vehicles by banks. The Labour government and the FSA did nothing to prevent it. And he does not mention that this goverment has overseen tax changes that favour the megarich and private equity at the expense of middle class earners.

But Peston also forgets to mention the concessions China, India and others will extract from keeping buying our public debt. Just now China, if they wanted to, could bring Western economies to its knees simply by refusing to buy our low-interest, low yield government debt. But the Chinese will not do that. They will keep buying US and UK debt and will extract political concessions from the West.

What these concessions will be is difficult to predict. But I am going to venture a couple of possible scenarios:

Institutional reform: the Chinese and India will demand that international institutions are reformed and the US veto is abolished at the IMF and the World Bank.

Taiwan: Slowly, Tibet has become off-limits for the West. And next it will be Taiwan. If I were Taiwanese I would be crapping myself. Over the next few years we will see how China, slowly but surely, will gain gradual sovereignty over Taiwan as a condition for keeping Western capitalism ticking over. And this way, Mao’s dream of a unified China under one leader and one party will be accomplished.

But will the US accept that they no longer have the monopoly of power in world finance? Will they (we) accept to be humiliated once again over Tibet and Taiwan? Maybe not, since Western governments will be unable to control the press and public opinion as efficiently as the Chinese. So we are heading for a political and economic stalemate of unpredictable consequences.

There is one way out of this problem without the Chinese becoming the new superpower and gaining power over Taiwan: inflation. If the West is unwilling to make so many concessions, China, India, Gulf states and others will demand that US and UK government debt pays a higher rate of interest than it does now. That is something our governemtns can do very well, and technically is called "an increase of the money supply", or as my dad says, "printing more money". This however will fuel inflation in the US and UK and Euro-area which could have a devastating effect on employment and business investment -unless proteccionist measures are adopted to protect "national" industries. But then, protectionism itself keeps inflation high; there is no easy solution.

So over the next few years our political leaders will have to make very “tough” (don’t they love to use the word?) choices.

Do they accept that a new world order is emerging and that there are political prices to pay? Or will they postpone or delay this restructuring of world finance and political power by implementing inflationary policies that will reduce the nominal amounts of national debt but fuel domestic inflation?

In crude terms, the question is: will our (Western) politicians give up the world power mechanisms they have built up over the last few decades?

I know what my answer is. What is yours?

Russia’s way

The cat is out of the bag.

Let's recount.
An independent journalist, murdered. A bit of blackmailing regarding energy resources.
After a neat exercise of ethnic cleansing, follows an unnecessary invasion and occupation of a neighbouring sovereign state, and destruction of its military and civil infrastructure beyond the conflict area as a punishment. And a lesson for others: Ukraine.
You set out the rules of the game. States with Russian nationals are within the scope of Russia’s military activity. If I was the Ukrainian, Estonian, or Latvian government, I would be very worried indeed.
Another journalist, murdered.
A chilling threat.

I am no fan of the US foreign policy, as I wrote about in a previous entry. But Russia’s strategy and actions are frightening. Whatever the flaws about the USA’s government, standard of democracy and society cohesion, Russia is not the counterweight the world needs, despite the usual suspects' retorts. There are many people who are nothing more than resentful and bigoted souls whose hatred of the US blinds them to the authoritarian and antidemocratic nature of the Russian government. In their misguided ignorance, they think it is a “good thing” that someone is challenging America’s pre-eminent role in world politics and economy.

These are going to be difficult times.

If you are invested in an “emerging markets” mutual fund, either equities or bonds, I would encourage you to reassess your positions. Many of us have already done so.

If I had time, I would write what I really think about the term "emerging markets". A very nice euphemism for "undeveloped" or "mildly corrupt" countries.
Fasten your seatbelts.

Whose right is it?

Amidst all the noise regarding the events in the Caucasus and the Balkans, the western media is doing a very good job in dumbing down the Georgia-Russia conflict as if it were a simple choice between the goodies (the West obviously) and the baddies (Russians of course).

Many others have written endlessly about the authoritarian nature of the Russian government, and its lack of democratic credentials. We could write about the Georgian president and his miscalculation. We could write about the Ossetian militias and how Georgians have been driven away from Abkhazia and South Ossetia in a tidy exercise of ethnic cleansing. We could write how the Russian government caricaturises the Georgian President as some sort of crazy despot, despite Georgian elections being overseen by the OECD, unlike Russia. We could write how it is Georgia’s turn now, then it will be Ukraine and Crimea, then Poland’s energy dependency on Russia, and after that it will probably be the Baltic Republics’ (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) turn.

But not many people is paying attention to the key socio-political issue: the selfish manipulation by states of the debate on the right of self-determination versus the principle of territorial integrity.

In the last few months, we have seen how the Russian government comes out to defend the territorial integrity of Serbia, against the right of self-determination of Kosovar people. A few months later, they send troops well inside Georgian territory to defend the right of self-determination of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, without a care in the world for Georgia’s territorial integrity.

It is the exact opposite with the western states: support for the right of self-determination in Kosovo but deny exactly the same right in South Ossetia.

And the fact of the matter is that neither the West or Russia can claim the moral high ground. Both sides have switched from defending one right to supporting the other. Their positions are not based on a consistent ideological framework, but driven by geo-political and economic considerations.

The outcome however, has been the same in both cases: the right of self-determination has succeeded in both Kosovo and South Ossetia.

The lesson of the last few decades in Europe is that if there is "on the ground consensus", and some degree of external help, in the end it is the people’s right (self-determination) the one that prevails above the right of territorial integrity of states. It is also a confirmation of the politics of fait accompli: whatever happens on the ground becomes the new status quo and the new accepted reality.

But the right of self-determination does not always reign. If in doubt, ask the Kurds, who have no external support whatsoever for their cause and must be the largest and most fucked up stateless nation in the world jointly with Tibet. 

The question is: will the Russian government do the same trick in Crimea? My answer: yes, without a doubt.

US foreign policy: Weapons of Mass Destruction

Today, I have heard one of the most chilling programmes on the radio for a very long time. I used to work in a local radio station, and I listen to the wireless all the time, as I hardly watch much TV, apart from the news and Still Game.

It was a long day at work today, and I finished about 19.45h. On the way back, I realised that Hecklers, the new Radio 4 debate program was on. Excellent, I thought: long day in the office, but a pleasurable drive back from Edinburgh to Glasgow listening to informed opinions and intelligent debate.

But the proposer of tonight’s programme was one of the most dangerous and deluded people I have ever heard on the BBC.

Patrick Clawson, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argues that
it would be better to have a war with Iran than to allow its government to
develop nuclear weapons. He debates the issues with a panel of hecklers,
including George Galloway, in front of an audience at Chatham House in London.

This individual argued, in his soft American tone and paused, affable, if slightly irritating speech, that it would be in the best interests of the West to go to war against Iran rather than to allow that country to develop nuclear weapons. Patrick Clawson is deputy director for research of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. More info on the interesting views espoused by Mr Clawson here…
Don’t want to go into a tangent here... but Near East? I always thought it was Far East but never mind...

After a few minutes listening to his disparaging arguments I started to feel sick. My legs were trembling. Listening to that man gave me the creeps. I was listening to a man advocating going to war against Iran as a pre-emptive step to bring stability to the region.
Now, where have we heard this line of argument before?

Although the program is called Hecklers, it is nothing of the sort. The proposer has three slots in which he can develop his argument and the ‘hecklers’ (panellists) are not allowed to interrupt during the first 3 minutes or so of each slot. Then a bell goes off and the panel guests are allowed to raise questions. Today, George Galloway MP was always the first to speak up after the bell rang.

Whatever one thinks of Mr Galloway and his politics and media persona, it is undeniable that the man is a great orator, and one of the few MPs in Parliament willing to challenge the establishment. If only there were a few more like him, perhaps this country would not be now fighting a pointless and illegal war based on false “intelligence”. As much as I disagree with the majority of Gorgeous George’s politics, today he was top notch. He tore apart every one of the arguments put forward by Mr Clawson.

I recommend that you set aside about 1 hour of your time to listen to the program via the BBC Radio 4 website.

It shows to what extent American foreign policy is the cause, rather than the cure, for most of the ills in the Middle East and the Gulf region. For Mr Clawson, it is quite alright that Israel already has nuclear weapons pointing at Iran and other states, and that we (as in the US and the UK) are supplying conventional and nuclear weapons to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The former is a theocracy where women are second class citizens. The regime in Saudi Arabia is probably the most tyrannical in the region, and certainly the least accountable to the population. As for Pakistan, it is a breeding ground for Al-Qaida terrorists, and a country divided between a secular or moderate population and the mullahs supporting Islam fundamentalism. What happens if the latter ever get into power and get control of the nuclear weapons supplied by the US and the UK?

Exactly this is what happened a few decades ago. In order to overthrow the Soviets from Afghanistan, the US financed and supplied the Mujaidins with training and conventional weapons. Once the Soviets were expelled from the region, they turned against the US and the West. These are the origins of Al-Qaida: US finance and training. The US trained and armed Osama Bin Laden. That is the result of US foreign policy.

You may be too young to remember: Iran was a democracy a long time ago. However, its leaders did not yield to US and UK foreign policy so the US&UK instigated a coup after Iran's elected government renationalised the oil industry; then the Shah took over and instituted a dictatorial regime. Read more about Operation Ajax in the Wikipedia. Yes, we (the US and the UK) instigated a coup against a democratically elected government to get control of Iranian oil.
The people of Iran rebelled, both the secular moderates (yes, there was a Communist Party in Iran...) and the Islamists joined forces and they did overthrow the dictator; sadly, the radical Islamists won the internal battle for government control. Then they turned against the US and against the West.

Remember the Iran/Iraq war of the ‘80s. Well, guess what: Saddam Hussein was supported by the West and supplied with the conventional and chemical weapons he used in the bloody war against Iran. We (US and UK) supplied Saddam Hussein and his regime with weapons. A few years later, the US and the UK bombarded Iraq, causing mass civilian casualties but without deposing the dictator. In 2003, we then have the illegal invasion of Iraq by the US-led coalition and the country is now is a much worst state, on the brink of civil war and engulfed in sectarian violence, than it was with Saddam in power. And now the Iraqis are turning against the US and the West.

Do you see a pattern emerging?

You can read all this and much, much more in the extraordinary, priceless, colossal book “The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East" by Robert Fisk.
Admittedly, I have not yet started reading the book. A certain master degree thesis on Credit Default Swaps is taking a lot of my spare time –about 1 year and 4 months to be exact.

So you can imagine my anger when this very dangerous man was arguing live on BBC radio 4, the moral and cultural backbone of Britain, that a US strike against Iran would somehow encourage middle-class Iranians to rebel and overthrow the tyrannical dictatorship of the Council of Guardians. It was frightening.

However “imperfect” (a word he constantly used to refer to the Non-Proliferation Treaty) the Iranian electoral system is, at least people can and do vote. The same cannot be said of Saudi Arabia, apparently the West's ally in the region, with its total disregard for human rights and lack of any progress towards democracy or a more equal society for men and women.

He also said that an attack against Iran would prevent the NPT from becoming irrelevant, even though there are “imperfections” (i.e: non-compliance) in the system. He said something along the lines of “I would hate to lose that imperfect instrument in the pursuit of the perfect instrument”. In other words: it is ok for the UK, the US, France, Israel, India, Russia and others to violate the terms and the spirit of the NPT, but not for Iran. Some hypothetical, yet-to-happen, imperfection is punished by war; current imperfections are ignored. To say this smacks of double standards would be an understatement.

We are told that Iran, according to Mr Clawson, is an “irrational player”, behaving according to an “apocalyptic theocratic view” of the world. At this point I almost choked on my chocolate bar. Is it not the President of the United States who had claimed that God had given him permission to go to war in order to prevent the threat of an Iraqi attack against the West? To me that sounds pretty much like an irrational player with a theocratic apocalyptic view of the world.

No nation has behaved more irrationally in the Middle East than the US. Supporting and arming some dictatorships; going to war against others; and doing both with some, as in Iraq. Yet, Mr Clawson, and the US political establishment, either Democrats or Republicans, are in complete denial about the havoc, mayhem and suffering US foreign policy has created around the world, especially in the Middle East.

The last point put forward by Mr Clawson is beyond surreal. He argues that an US-led attack against Iran would unite Iranians in blaming their own government for developing nuclear weapons and thus provoking a crisis. This popular rebellion would result in the Iranian regime engaging (i.e: yielding to US foreign policy) with the West. For someone who claims to be an expert in the Middle East, this is surely a joke.

But the warmongering lunatic goes on: according to him, an attack against Iran should not mean a land invasion of the country, but rather targeted, high-precision attacks against military objectives. Have we not heard this before? Yes, we have. As recently as 2003, when the US-UK coalition targeted attacks against Iraqi military infrastructure resulted in hundreds of civilian casualties and the destruction of hospitals. I also remember a certain aspirin factory in Sudan that was targeted with a combination of intelligence and high-precision weaponry.

Mr Clawson also argued that not only Iran’s population would rebel against their elected leadership following a US attack, but also that Iran’s neighbours would rise to the challenge and support US action too. This is the world of fantasy inhabited by the neocon revolutionaries in the US.

This last point was absolutely demolished by all panellists. One by one, audience members and panellists reduced Mr Clawson “lightweight argument”(quote from a former correspondent of the FT in Tehran) to what they are: absolute warmongering shite. The only voice of support came from, wait for it... an US Embassy employee.
Priceless if it was not so depressing.

What is scary about this man and his ilk is their level of delusion; their disregard for the facts about the Middle East, and the loss of human life; their arrogant ignorance of the damage US foreign policy has caused in the region in the last 40 years, 20 years or even since the ill-conceived invasion of Iraq. As with the Iraqi non-existent weapons of mass destruction, an enemy is created and the threat is hyped up in the friendly press, and thus war is justified. Their irrational minds see no flaw in this perverse logic, despite its disastrous consequences in Iraq, or in Iran decades ago.

War is still another option in the US foreign policy toolkit and the neocons have not learnt anything. And now they want to start another war against Iran. History will not be kind to these despicable people.

And the question for us in Britain is: what will PM Gordon Brown do? Will he be America’s lap dog like former PM Blair, or will he have an “ethical foreign policy”, as New Labour promised in 1997? I am not sure I want to know.

Next week, Hecklers will hopefully be less frightening and distressing. Tax specialist Richard Murphy argues at the free market Institute of Economic Affairs that Britain should stop trying to woo the foreign super rich with tax breaks.

Whatever next?

I am watching Question Time, tonight, Thursday 5th July. I cannot believe my ears. Davina McCall, host of the UK version of Big Brother, has morphed into a political pundit. What next?

The debate has started around the topic of the terrorist threat from the fundamentalist Islam, and the interventions of some members of the audience show their delusion and lack of knowledge.

As much as I despise the New Labour government that took this country into an illegal and ill-advised war in Iraq, I do not share the view this country’s foreign policy is somehow responsible for our becoming a terrorist target.

The crazymen who tried to kill as many innocent civilians as possible last weekend in London and Glasgow do not care about the UK’s foreign policy or anything else for that matter, not even their own lives. Whatever this government does in terms of foreign policy, the nutters will continue to blow themselves up trying to kill as many innocent civilians as possible. End of story.

I used to have a lot of sympathy for Palestine, I used to despise the West’s foreign policy in the Middle East. I still do. It has been a shambles and a disgrace. I attended the big demonstrations against the illegal war in Iraq, and I still attend the anti-Trident (Trident is a UK government sponsored system of nuclear weapons of mass destruction based in the Clyde, near Glasgow) rallies. But the nutters will not hesitate to kill me, you and all of us just because of the simple fact we are infidels. It is that simple.

There is a numptie talking, telling off a young guy. What he said is spot on, but she ticked him off because his language was aggressive. Well, at least he makes his point of view known by debating in a TV programme, rather than blowing himself up in Harvey Nichols. I was once on the Left, but not anymore. It has taken a while, the best part of about 10 years. But the discourse of the so-called ‘Left’ and its apostles is as irrational as we hear from the ‘neo-cons’. Softly-softly approach with the subhumans who support Jihad will not get us anywhere. Islam will have to sort out this problem internally.

Thank goodness the debate is about to end. What a waste of time.