Why do the People of the UK Accept Financial Repression?

It is amusing yet disturbing to see that the UKs media fails to mention the public debt of the UK but refers only to GDP and inflation figures, the ‘everything is awesome’ meme. Both of these numbers are manipulated but asking how the GDP deflator number is derived, what the actual number is and why does it increase GDP and lower inflation? This would be the start of a discussion.

When governments find themselves in a situation where they cannot pay off their accrued debt, they have a number of plays open to them. They will not relinquish power without a good scrap.

1.The first play is hyperinflation and this destroys the currency but also the debt, not ideal if you wish to remain in control.

2. The second is default, also known as the Argentinian option but this eventually leads to the destruction of the currency.

3. The third option is austerity, which is parroted by the political parties as necessary but if we have had austerity for 5 years why has public debt gone up by 80% since the coalition came to power? Currently standing at £1.4 Trillion with £1 billion per week being used to fund interest payments on the debt, £52 billion per year and rising. Austerity is a lie, it’s never worked but we’re all in this together, well most of us as you will see. As public debt has increased so much, interest rates are not going to rise, it’s counterintuitive and illogical for government to do so, they have another option.

4. The fourth and my personal favourite is financial repression, sounds like fun which it is. Repression hits both savers and wage earners, if inflation is higher than interest rates then savers lose out. If inflation is higher than wage increases, the wage earner loses out. If both of these scenarios play out, savers and wage earners lose out and those that hold the debt benefit.

UK Debt Is Actually £100 Billion Higher Than We Thought, Official Stats Body To Say

Courtesy of Huff Po:

George Osborne’s austerity message is set to be dented by the government’s own statistics body, as it prepares to adopt new calculations that mean the UK’s public sector debt will be £100 billion greater than estimated.

The Office for National Statistics will bring in the new calculation this autumn as part of sweeping changes that include estimating illegal activities like prostitution and drug dealing as worth £10 billion to the country’s national wealth.

The UK’s debt will effectively increase from well over £1 trillion by more than £100 billion, or 7.3% of GDP, as the ONS attempts to improve its accounting standards changes introduced by the US, Canada and Australia.

The ONS will bring Network Rail’s debt onto the UK’s books and also stop classifying the state’s stakes in the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds as liquid assets that can be sold off quickly.

But in good news for the coalition, the ONS will give the UK’s GDP a boost of up to 5% (£75 billion) by reclassifying research and development as capital spending rather than a cost of production

Everything we thought we knew about the economy is wrong

Well the UK is taking steps to become a true banana republic, bought and paid for by corporates and using accounting fraud to mask the issues of the economy. Don’t worry, Big Dave and hokey cokey Gidion have a plan to include ‘illegal’ activity, R&D spending and a wholehost of other nonsense. Not only does this lead to a monumental misallocation of resources and lulls people into a false sense of security but it gives the corrupt media a siren song to sing about.

Just remember, they’ll tell you it’s raining while they’re stood overhead pissing on you. Courtesy of Allister Heath @ City AM:

FACTS are sacred, unlike mere subjective opinions – or so most sensible people believe. In reality, as every good French philosopher would tell you, what we trust to be objective data-based truths all too often turn out to be social constructs. We are about to see a beautiful demonstration of this with the British economy, where the official statisticians will shortly entirely and drastically rewrite decades of history.

Everything we thought we knew – all the “facts” – are about to change. This is massive news for anybody who cares about the UK economy, politics and public policy; the last time a similar rewriting took place was when the UK’s economic statistics were harmonised with those of the rest of the EU many years ago.

One change will see research and development spending classified as capital expenditure; at a stroke, this will raise the level of the UK’s economic output by a cool £25bn. That’s just the beginning: overall, the statistical deckchair shuffling will boost the size of the UK economy by between 2.5 and five per cent, a shockingly large amount (and a vast range that makes it hard for outside forecasters to be able to predict exactly what the Office for National Statistics (ONS) will come up with).

Nothing real will have changed – but we will all officially be substantially richer. Hurrah – who said economic growth was hard to come by? The changes will start to come into effect this year but there is an “ongoing programme of work until 2017”; the ONS will publish various pieces of research this month and in May.

The UK’s “new economic model” – deferred or dumped?

Courtesy of Prime Economics:

The UK economy has – in terms of GDP – performed somewhat better in 2013 than almost all analysts expected. That includes us in PRIME. But the “growth” – which looks like being around 1.75% year on year – is nothing like as large or as entrenched for the future as many commentators want to persuade us. It comes after a year (2012) of utterly dismal economic performance, due largely to the austerity policy of the government, in which real GDP per head of population fell again, with GDP rising by just 0.25%.

But here we go again. Chancellor George Osborne tells us – 16 months ahead of the next General Election – that we must cut public spending by a further £25 billion after the election. Whatever the state of the economy. The problem, he claims, is public spending. Yet the austerity policies pursued – though not as severe as the Eurozone’s masochistic policies – have contributed directly and significantly to the UK’s weak economic performance till mid 2013.

Let us travel back in time to February 2010, less than 3 months before the last General Election. George Osborne delivers the Mais Lecture. In it he says:

“We have to move away from an economic model that was based on unsustainable private and public debt. And we have to move to a new model of economic growth that is rooted in more investment, more savings and higher exports.”

First, note that – at that time – Mr Osborne was rightly concerned about the level of private debt as well as public debt. While private debt has slightly declined, the ‘deleveraging’ has been modest over the last 3 years. But ever since he became Chancellor, he and his government have turned a blind eye to private debt, concentrating solely on public debt.

And as regards more investment and higher (net) exports, well, see below.

So the big question is whether the ‘new’ economic model promised has been ditched in favour of, well, the old economic model – and indeed whether either model is right for Britain today.

BBC Business Editor Robert Peston puts it nicely today in his blog:

“Households are behaving in a way that Keynesian economists say the chancellor should have been acting. And the chancellor has on the kind of hair shirt that consumers should perhaps still be wearing, given that they went so spending and borrowing bonkers in the boom years.”

Let’s look a bit deeper.

UK GDP: It’s not a Recession but a Depression

I have wrote, blogged and re-blogged about market manipulation, I believe with conviction that all markets are manipulated and statistics on inflation, GDP and employment are not representative or true. If they were, inflation would be 6% plus, unemployment would be double and GDP numbers would prove we are in a depression.

Cui bono? Our illustrious leaders of course, if George Gidion Osborne, David ‘Never worked a full day in my life’ Cameron and William ‘War Criminal’ Hague had to stand in front of the British public with representative statistics, heads would roll…literally. Not forgetting that the wealth transfer, happening through quantitative easing, would end and the banks would fail due to being completely insolvent. Courtesy of Money Week:

I wrote here a few weeks ago about the oddly opaque manner in which the government figures out what inflation-adjusted GDP growth in the UK is. It doesn’t use the RPI or the CPI as a representative of inflation – as you might think they would – instead, it uses its own deflator. I have no idea how that is calculated, and I strongly suspect that almost no one else does either. The key point to note is that until 2010 the RPI and the deflator were much of a muchness. But in the last few years, they have suddenly (and to my mind inexplicably) parted ways. James Ferguson at MacroStrategy Partners has kindly picked this point up for me and produced this chart:

Real GDP vs NGDP adjusted for RPI

If you assume that the Office for National Statistics’ occult calculations for the deflator are entirely reasonable and correct, the UK has avoided a double dip recession (hooray!). If, on the other hand, you note that the deflator and the RPI have rarely diverged in the past, and so think that using the RPI to deflate nominal GDP continues to make perfect sense, it turns out that the real economy has been contracting since 2008 (boo!).

That’s not a double dip. It is a depression.

The UKs recovery is the worst since 1930

The UKs recovery from recession has been slow, in fact the economic recovery since the crash of 2008 is the slowest since 1921, as reported in the Guardian. It’s no wonder things seem so hard looking at the below chart.

The ONS blamed the weather for a low rate of growth: “The strongest evidence was that it reduced retail output in January and March 2013 but boosted demand for electricity and gas in February and March, which increased output in the energy supply industries.”GDP was 0.4% higher in Q1 2013 than in Q3 2011 and therefore has been broadly flat over the last 18 months.”

I think there’s more than the weather at work.

A recession is defined as two or more consecutive quarters of economic decline, the UK has just missed its third recession in four years. Is austerity really working? No it’s not, the UK government needs a different approach and quick but it has nothing to offer.

If this is the worst recovery since 1930 then that should be reflected in the stock market performance and you guessed correctly. It doesn’t.

The stock market has appreciated over 85% since its lows of 2009 but if the economy has just missed its third recession in four years, how is this possible? Quantative Easing is looking like a likely culprit, excess fiat is being pumped into the banks and inflating the stock market to give the appearance of a healthy economy. I’ve discussed that the financial markets are fixed here and here but rather than dwell on fixed markets, have a QE giggle with Mr John Clarke.