fahrenheit451:028

" Every major downturn since the First World War has been caused by the Fed, determined to snuff out inflation as the credit cycle matures.  Expansions rarely die of old age. They are killed. "

Public discourse on virtually any topic or issue of note,tends invariably toward the sensational and the superficial . Even those who once might have been acquainted with a modicum of academic/intellectual rigour are nowadays prone to the self same vices afflicting the great majority. The Right articulates and expresses its worldwiew in bullet point, tabloid speak as does The Left. There are, however the odd exceptions to this general rule of thumb. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard,writing in the Daily Telegraph being foremost amongst that small grouping. Whilst the Right and Left bleat and rail and hurl calumnies at one another with the joyous abandon and nihilistic lack of rational foresight and analysis we have all become accustomed to from those mutually antagonistic quarters, the likes of A.E.P. et al endeavour to maintain and promote what seem now like hopelessly arcane qualities of journalistic candour.  Chancellor of the Exchequer Osborne's fairy-tale pronouncements about growth, recession, productivity, investment and this or that tax, are exposed, as indeed are all variants of such thematic nonsense, as the grand idiocies for which they are. Herewith gleaned from AEP in the Telegraph of 15 March - the day before  " The Budget " ritual was performed in Parliament.

" The trigger for the next global recession is at last coming into view after a series of loud distractions and false alarms.

The Atlanta Federal Reserve's gauge of "sticky-price" inflation in the US soared to a post-Lehman peak of 3% in February. This index is a 'pure' measure of core inflation - the underlying story once the noise is stripped out.

The Fed's veteran vice-chairman Stanley Fischer is itching to tighten "We may well at present be seeing the first stirrings of an increase in the inflation rate,” he said in a portentous speech last week.

Every major downturn since the First World War has been caused by the Fed, determined to snuff out inflation as the credit cycle matures.  Expansions rarely die of old age. They are killed. "

Dans la Merde. That's where the faltering,dysfunctional global capitalist economic system is heading straight into, yet again. Not even having gotten itself out of the Merde it jumped into back in 2007/08. We - the 99% - can expect no better. Austerity is endless, or at least until a sufficiently critical mass of mobilised public opinion gets around to initiating an epochal sea change.

Harsh and brutal and as unjust as they are or might appear to those most affected by them, the paltry economic/fiscal policies announced and at some stage enacted by whatever government in any " Budget " are as  but a few individual lashes from a single whip held by a solitary Roman soldier serving an army of an empire whose global pre-eminence is predicated on the enslavement of millions. Getting them to desist from using whips would be a start...

It has ever been thus.