Trust me, I’m a banker

Well Bill (No Speakada) English (too good) has arisen as the slayer of the money dragons, according to his own assessment.

Old Bill (he’s about as bright as them) says he is introducing legislation to parliament to protect us from all those nasty finance companies who stole more than $8B from New Zealand investors through their sharp practices and downright lies.

Sounds like a real vote catcher doesn’t it? The trouble is; like so much of the legislation introduced to our parliament I fear it is doomed to be no more than a publicity stunt from a government desperately trying to ensure they are re-elected in four months time.

My cynicism is based not just upon my distrust of the people involved in particular and the system in general, however. Reading carefully what both JiangQi and No Speakada have said it hardly sounds like the big scary hunk of legislation it needs to be.

The first thing to note is that this Bill as opposed to the deputy PM hasn’t yet been tabled. So effectively he is referring to something that hasn’t even been written yet. Secondly I note the proposed name of the legislation would appear to be the Non-Bank Deposit Takers Bill, which implies it will not bind banks in any way. This is a worry as many of them were up to their Rolexes in the mire lately too. Why else did the government bail them out?

Another thing that bothers me about this upcoming legislation (if indeed it ever sees the light of day post election), is what we have been told about its proposed workings. No Speakada told the NZ Herald that, Under the new rules, NBDT directors will have to notify the Reserve Bank if a director or senior officer triggers new prescribed suitability criteria and the bank will have the power to remove those individuals.

Whoa now that sounds like it would work..........NOT. So we would have to rely upon directors of a Non-Bank Deposit Taker to TELL the Reserve Bank that one of their mates on their board has a dodgy past? Well that is going to happen isn’t it because they are all so very honest? In fact I don’t know why we are even proposing this legislation given that the finance company people are all such jolly good chaps.

And as if that isn’t enough; supposing one of these guys does rat on one of his mates, then the Reserve Bank will have the power to remove him. Those who read these things carefully will have already noted this is one of those conditional pieces of legislation that leaves the remedy or even enforcement entirely to the discretion of the appointed enforcer or regulator. Given this is the world of money it is not hard to imagine funds featuring as inducements to any number of people among all those involved to ‘look the other way’.

If these wallies were serious about this the law would PROHIBIT bankrupts and fraudsters from becoming involved in the finance business. Just as I wouldn’t expect a paedophile to be allowed to work in after-school care; I would have thought bankrupts and fraudsters should have no place in the finance world. Mind you it might mean a lot less people working in that particular industry, but that wouldn’t be a bad thing anyway.

No Speakada is also boasting about how they will raise the penalties for those who fail to comply with these new requirements. But even that is pathetic – ‘up to $200K for an individual and/or up to 18 months imprisonment’. You could get more for running a tinnie house!

I can’t see this idea being a fix to the problem of dodgy finance companies even if the National Disgrace Party does introduce it in the future.

Slightly used country going cheap

We ought to just put up the for sale signs now. Or perhaps if we are hell-bent on selling out, we could list our country on TradeMe

Former currency trader and lifelong money geek JiangQi has found new markets to exploit while traitorously selling out his homeland. Currently he is seeking photo opps with Barack Obama; though why he would think a big cheesy front page spread alongside a man whose country is even further down the gurgler than our own is good publicity I’m buggered if I know.

Although I suppose that is just my old fashioned attitude showing through. When I were a lad, going broke or being adjudged bankrupt was not something we aspired to. For some odd reason we saw it as failure if your business enterprise went tits up and bankrupts were not wined and dined by political leaders. These days it would seem to be some sort of badge of honour and I think many vie with each other to see who can leave the largest number of unsecured creditors thrashing about with no lifeboat in sight.

So those who have any plan to cast a vote (and see what you might catch) in November, should pay attention to what this fly boy and current polls leader has been up to. Then ask yourself if this is in the best interests of New Zealand?

The first destabilising thing he and his cronies have been up to is all this bollocks about free trade deals with what seems to be almost every country that uses child labour and has no labour laws or health and safety regulations. China and India are both soon to flood our country with their cheap nasty products made by 9-year-olds in disgusting conditions and therefore able to be sold for less than the cost of five minutes of one of our workers’ labour.

That should do heaps to solve our unemployment problems.

Next they want to sell off a whole load of assets. We’ve been there before and it’s nothing short of a miracle we have anything left to sell. This selling off is a two edged thing too, because not only are publicly owned assets earmarked for sale; they are also selling off as much of our productive land as they possibly can to the likes of Chinese dairy operations. And as if that wasn’t enough they are offering offshore mining opportunities to Brazilians who if things go wrong could make our eyes water a lot more than with one of their famous waxings.

More brilliant plans to put us firmly in control of our waka.

In the middle of what is referred to as our dire economic circumstances when we are told there isn’t enough money to fund health or education or anything else important adequately we find Billy Bunter Browneye has given his mates some ripper cream buns for tea. Despite a limit of $655 per day for the chairman and up to $415 per day for the rest, he has paid his old mates on the panel set up to monitor the Christchurch quake body more than twice that sum. Using what are essentially wartime powers enacted straight after the disaster and ‘in the national interest’ or rather more likely ‘in National’s interest’chairman Sir John William Hansen gets $1400 per day and the rest of them including Jenny Shipley get $1000 each per day.

That should help get Christchurch back on its feet much quicker than if he had just paid the amount specified in law, eh?

You’d think all that stuff was enough, but our lisping leader has even more up his sleeve. It now appears that we have had more activity from Mossad agents and they were present in Christchurch before during and after the earthquake. They were uncovered when their vehicle was hit by rubble and the survivors decamped leaving a dead colleague with a nice collection of false passports in his possession.

The buzz is that the SIS got onto it and has been making enquiries to see if these bastards got up to anything like hacking into our (so-called) intelligence information. If it had just been some dude with a bunch of passports we might have just thought him to be a common criminal (rather than an uncommon one). However the Israelis kind of blew it by sending a couple of ‘search & rescue’ teams over that had no UN accreditation, which was suspicious in itself. However what really blew the lid was when one of the teams was confronted by armed Kiwi patrols INSIDE the red zone and escorted out.

The Prime Prick refuses to discuss much about this saying it is not in the national interest for him to do so. Once again I think it is more likely ‘not in National’s interest’.

In the absence of any real information here we can only speculate (as we will in an information vacuum) that it is not in HIS interest to do so, because it might uncover something else he has been up to with the Israelis that he won’t want us to know about.   

This is not the first time Mossad have been found in NZ with no reasonable excuse and the fact that JiangQi refuses to do anything about it, suggests he has things he wants to cover up here. I don’t know what, but like I said at the beginning; he is a money man and the Israelis are pretty well connected in that regard, so maybe that’s the link.

In any event what this little turd is doing is called treachery. The penalty for traitors used to be much worse than electoral death. But as the scaffold is no longer around, let’s hope the voters can reclaim some of our sovereignty in November and dump this pillock back into Civvy Street. The only problem is; the heirs apparent are getting a little thin on top.

It’ll be a cold day in the treasury before they pay up

There was a classic Monty Python clip (The Money Programme) in which Eric Idle sang, “it is money that makes the world go around”. However if we are to believe many economic commentators it rather looks as if money might be about to cause the world to (at least figuratively) stop turning around.

With what is happening in Europe at the moment, and even more disturbingly, in the USA, it’s enough to make your head spin faster than a party hack.

I don’t claim to know much about money or economics as anyone who has seen my bank balance could readily deduce; however I have heard one or two things lately that put much of this stuff into some kind of context for me anyway.

Just recently a mate of mine put me on to a bloke whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, but the point was he had made a documentary about the Fed. For those not familiar with the term, this is the US Federal Reserve Bank, which in case you don’t know, is unlike any bank you have ever had a loan from.

The documentary was based around a book by G. Edward Griffin (don’t you just love the way the Americans put a first initial and use their second name – not?). The book is called The Creature From Jekyll Island and is about how the Fed was created. I have yet to read the book as it is not in any of the Tauranga libraries, however I have managed to see extracts from it and they make very disturbing reading.

For those who don’t know the history, the short version is this; the Fed was created by a group of private bankers with the backing of the US government. It determines US monetary policy and quite literally prints the money to fund it. This last bit is particularly important to understand, because what these guys are doing is magicking up money from nowhere for the US government to borrow and spend. Because this money has been invented rather than earned it actually has no true value (think Emperors and clothing). Thus the US has been funding a growing deficit with worthless bits of paper that purport to be of some value since the 1920s.

Now just to make things even more interesting the American Government is currently locked in a battle over spending cuts and deficit size. The Republicans want smaller government and for Obama to cut health care and social security. It’s a replay of our own (for all intents and purposes) two party system with Obama wanting to tax the higher earners instead. The main difference being that stakes are much higher than over here and the ripples from the bow-wave are much bigger. The lobbyists are also much bigger and richer and one such gentleman (if he is such) is a man called Grover Norquist who, according to The Washington Post, has successfully lobbied 41 senators and 236 representatives to sign a pledge opposing ANY tax increases.

This could all be very amusing were it not for the fact we're told that if the USA doesn’t get this sorted out by August 2, they will be in default over their borrowings. Further wailing and gnashing of teeth around the world is telling us that if the US economy falls over it will be a variation on that great Pat Metheny album As Falls Washington, So Falls The Rest Of The World (sorry about that Pat).

Currently the American national debt figure stands at US$14.3 trillion – that’s 14 followed by a comma and 3 followed by 11 zeroes! Old Backtrack wants to raise the debt ceiling (I would have thought it had already been blown to smithereens); and some of his supporters have proposed a scheme where it would be increased by a mere US$2.5 trillion in three instalments. Scary, huh?

But to return to my original point; what is all the bickering about? The money will come from the Fed and as we know that is illusory at best and possibly crooked at worst. And who says it will be the end of the world as we know it, (apart from Michael Stipe that is)? I realise that the Americans are not the only ones facing a so-called budget crisis; Ireland, Spain and Greece have all had their problems and Italy is the latest to begin wearing out the seat of its pants.

But there is another nation that has already hit that particular wall and they took the route few dare to travel. They said ‘up yours’ (or in their case “upp kveôja) and simply defaulted on their debt.  The Third World War did not erupt and this tiny nation is still supporting intelligent life, so maybe they are the only ones with a clear vision of what a crock most of this is. If you don’t buy into shit then perhaps you won’t find yourself up to your neck in the stuff.

That nation is Iceland. Go Íslendingar!

Balmy nights and barmy people

This balmy winter is giving rise to some pretty barmy behaviour; although it is probably rather generous to the nitwits to whom I’m about to refer that I should blame their stupidity upon the weather.

The first culprit is the imbecile who sent a bill to a couple of poor buggers who found themselves trapped on the 22^nd floor of the Grand Chancellor Hotel in Christchurch on February 22. Understandably the pair was mighty pissed off, despite the fact the hotel has since waived the bill (such generosity!). The poor buggers had to exit the rubble via collapsed staircases and eventually get rescued from a rooftop by a crane (while aftershocks were still happening). The bill included a parking fee for their car which was trapped in the building for two months and even a charge for the movie they were in the middle of watching when the quake struck. The Grand Chancellor’s big cheese for Australia and New Zealand explained that the accountant ‘wouldn’t have realised these people were stuck in the building’. 

So where has this retarded bean counter been for the last four months? In outer space? He had to know this was the hotel that was hit by the quake and it would hardly need Sherlock Holmes to figure out that anyone who was in it on Feb 22 should not be sent a bill.

The second idiot to come to my attention this week is the mean spirited individual at the aforementioned guests’ insurance company who refused to pay out on their luggage because he said it could still be recovered. I reckon he should go in and get it if he is so sure about that. Either these people will then get their luggage back or this nincompoop will get a better appreciation of the situation.

And so the ninnies keep popping up. What about the Kronic debate. It’s Kronic by name and chronic by nature if you ask me. I just read of a dimwit in Dunners who reckons she and her partner have spent $8500 on this rubbish over the last five months. As if this wasn’t silly enough, she even had the audacity to say, “It was a natural product, it got us way higher than pot, it is legal, cheaper, easier to get and you get way more than in a tinny [of cannabis]."    

Well clearly she and I have a completely different idea of what is and is not ‘natural’. So for her benefit; a plant that is grown and harvested without any additives is natural whereas a mixture with acknowledged added chemicals (and a few that weren’t like the phenazepam) is not. Here endeth the chemistry lesson.

But her stupidity doesn’t enedeth there; this silly cow and her silly dropkick bloke need an economics lesson, which is rich coming from an impecunious writer such as me. $8500 divided by five equals $1700. Therefore they have been consuming $1700 worth of this stuff each month. They say they used to use the real thing, but I have to wonder how long ago, because for $1700 I’m guessing they could have bought between five and six ounces of cannabis for amount. Now if we take that a bit further it breaks down to between two and three ounces each per month and that is a hell of a lot for one person. If Kronic was getting them any more stoned than that quantity of dope I would estimate they would barely be able to walk or talk on it.

So my bottom line on this one is that there is another idiot involved in this story and it is Hamish McNally of the ODT who is so credulous he actually believed these figures and wrote such a patently stupid story to climb on the bandwagon of Kronic (or chronic if you like) features in the media.

Of course reading drivel like that story and listening to all the posturing by MPs, civic leaders et al about this dreadful ‘threat to our yoof’ and all the things they reckon they’re going to do to stop it unmasks some more idiots. The legislators who ban things like cannabis in the first place have effectively handed a ready-made (and let’s face it profitable) market to the criminal fraternity. But what is really sickening about this is the fact many of these legislators know this is not the way, but none have the intestinal fortitude to take the first step to change it. And why?  Because they are genuinely worried about the dangers of the substance? No; it’s because they are afraid of an electoral backlash in which they might lose their seat and actually have to work for a living.

Where is the Monster Raving Looney Party when you need it, eh?