It’s always odd to pass places you used to work. Nostalgia plays tricks on you. I am walking down the shaded side of Boston’s Newbury Street in the height of a wonderfully hot late September afternoon. Just across the road is the restaurant where I spent a summer washing dishes. There was a long Indian summer that year too. The heat in the kitchen must’ve been in the mid-90s.
Anthony Bourdain, the great American chef, wrote in Kitchen Confidential about the intense camaraderie which binds kitchen workers, all the way from the dishwashers and kitchen porters on the bottom, to the side chef, sous chef and – of course – the showrunner himself, the head chef.
Bourdain is spot on. Sure, you might hang out with the waiters and waitresses after a late shift, but your real mates are the creatures of the sweaty cauldron when the restaurant is slammed and everything is one side order away from chaos.
And what creatures! The kitchen is the last refuge of all sorts. No one asks too many questions, you proffer what you want and hold back what you need, initially, at least. With the exception of the Americans, everyone in our mid-1980s kitchen was illegal, so that kept us all a bit edgy. My comrades were Colombians, Argentinians and Nicaraguans.
We communicated in the international language of the free kick, the flick-on or the dodgy off-side. Our pantheon wasn’t Babe Ruth, the Red Sox and Fenway. It was Pele, Valderrama and the Aztec Stadium.
This was the summer of Diego Maradona and the ‘hand of God’. It was an America before David Beckham, Robbie Keane and the LA Galaxy – America before soccer.
Deep in the kitchen beneath the earth, we were bonded together by a love of football, reggae and a heightened fear of the Internal Revenue Service.
We also understood that the only way was up. Even from there, it felt that America was the land of opportunity.
That was the promise. We believed that if you worked hard, you could get on in a way that you couldn’t get on in your home country.
For us Irish students, we were only playing at the American Dream; for the others, it was real. They saw the guy on the hill with the big house and said to themselves: “One day, I can be him.”
Upward social mobility, or at least the promise of upward social mobility, is what keeps most western societies going forward. This has always been the case.
People get out of bed in the morning because they expect today will be better than yesterday. We invest enormously in our children to give them the chance to do the best they can. Real life seems to be a constant striving for self-improvement for all. It’s like a conveyor belt.
This is what social mobility is all about and upward social mobility demands a bit of room on the hill for everyone. There has to be a chance.
But what happens if that social conveyor belt stops? What happens when the concentration of wealth at the top becomes so extreme that there is very little left to go around? What happens when policies all over the world explicitly work to make rich people richer?
This is exactly what has happened all over the West in the past 10 years. The recessions provided a once-in-a-generation opportunity for rich people to become even wealthier.
Right now in Ireland, the spoils of society are going almost exclusively to the very rich.
Last year, the 100 people on the Irish Rich List earned €12 billion. Just to put that in context, it is twice as much as the entire growth in Irish GDP last year.
We are not talking here about the mythical 1 per cent. If it were the 1 per cent, we would be talking about a significant cohort of between 46,000 and 48,000 people. Here we are talking about 100 individuals. This is off the scales.
But now you know what happened, the question is why did it happen? It happened as the direct consequence of policy.
During the recession the value of all sorts of assets all over the world collapsed. This caused a ‘liquidity trap’ where normal economic policy didn’t work.
The rate of interest fell to zero but nothing happened because the people had too much existing debt and they didn’t want to borrow any more and the banks had too much bad debt and they didn’t want to lend. So the normal way of getting out of recession, which is to cut interest rates, was ineffective.
The economy was stuck. The authorities, from the US to the ECB, printed money and gave it to the banks to lend out as they saw fit. This is called quantitative easing.
This free money drove up asset prices, particularly stocks. And in the main who owns stocks? Why, rich people, of course.
So people who depended on assets for their income began to do very well. However, the vast majority who depend on wages for the income, saw their income go the other way because of (1) taxes and (2) competitive pressures in manufacturing from China and (3) deflation associated with austerity.
Simultaneously, a massive fire sale was going on for real assets where the value had collapsed in the recession. However, only people who either had cash or could borrow could take part in this fire sale. And who has the cash? The already wealthy do.
In addition, because the banks were nervous about to whom they should give this newly minted money, they gave it to people who already had cash and other assets. So the already wealthy were given the means to buy yet more. And as they bought the prices started to rise, expanding their wealth yet further.
Finally, in Ireland Nama has been offloading huge parcels of property as quickly as it can and mainly to massive funds that are owned by very wealthy individuals.
And as prices recover, these people are making fortunes which will be realised when they sell. And guess who these foreigners will sell to? They will sell to Irish people at much higher prices.
We have seen a massive transfer of wealth in the recession from the middle to the very rich. This has ensured a significant wealth divide – the sort of inequality not seen in this country for over 100 years.
The problem with wealth inequality as opposed to income inequality – which is not bad in Ireland – is that it leaves so many people in the middle behind. And when people feel left behind or locked out, they tend to react extremely.
So it’s in everyone’s interest – even the very rich – that this should not go unchecked indefinitely.
Subscribe – got up to kill a mosquito.
The Central Banks are the hitmen of the rich. Park gold for the moment. What are the instruments by which these hitmen operate and where do they get there ammunition from. 1. The ammunition comes from both the politician and the citizen. The politician may not want to balance the books but the citizen certainly can and thus breed a culture of McCawberism which will ultimately lead to future generations of politicians being more responsible – that is however a long game. 2. The hitmen need to have some of their weapons removed – level the playing field. Spread betting,… Read more »
History has shown that massive social inequality eventually leads to Kafka’s theory of ‘War not necessarily being the destruction of Human Life,rather the destruction of the products of Human Labour’?
I have no idea what weaponry will be used to fight the Third World War, but the Fourth World War will be fought with sticks and clubs…
Before QE the money system was already designed such that wealth consolidation is inevitable and very easy: banks create almost all the money in an economy, and they create it out of interest-bearing debt. Here is an excellent presentation on this by Ben Dyson (co-author of Modernising Money and co-founder of Positive Money)
ttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JBZWw1DG8zU
Distillation of ideas tour de force right there! Very bleak outlook too, and unfortunately the reality of it! NAMA was a real sickener rubbing it in who is boss, running things and nothing you can do about it kinda attitude stamped all over its skullduggerous inception. And you now when the system has been hijacked by moneyed elites the banking system, policy and the media etc the jig is up for free enterprise in a general sense. Basically the free market system has been locked down like never before by whomever. Interestingly when one goes back even 30 years ago… Read more »
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-20/going-back-what-works-gold-money-again-thanks-utah
Re-paste of the link posted by Clare Leonard on previous thread. Thanks Clare
A Practical use of an existing coin deposited and then used as electronic payment using a debit card system. It works.
“Well the very rich and their facilitators have not the common sense to get things back to sustainability. When have they ever done so in the past? So David we can only count on ourselves, the 99.08%!”
For some people it seems greed is good;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF_iorX_MAw
David, realistically, hasn’t this been the Elites policy for a century or two?!?
Wipe out the middle class…………. that is their agenda, it’s no longer a hidden agenda.
It’s in everyone’s interest that this can’t go on unchecked David and it can be summed up with a quaint little Spanish phrase. Plata O Plomo. This translates as silver or lead. Lead is what the poor use to get Silver or Gold. It’s a phrase used by the Latin American drug cartels meaning accept the bribe we’re offering you or accept the consequences. That’s how corruption has become endemic in the region. Unfortunately the targets of the offer fail to realise that they’ve usually only delayed the lead by accepting the silver. The result is societies with extremes of… Read more »
The commentary is inconsistent and in some regards inaccurate. You talk of the banks “giving ” free money. you talk of the QE as if it was free money. You talk of the central banks as if it were free money. Incorrect and totally misleading. It is loaned at interest. All this money is issued as a debt to be repaid. Central banks issue money from thin air to commercial banks. This is piled up and used as reserves.(In some cases the central bank money is at negative interest rates and the banks sit on the reserves doing nothing except… Read more »
http://www.gold-eagle.com/article/russians-buy-gold-bars-%E2%80%93-1-million-ounces-august-alone
http://usawatchdog.com/fed-has-lost-control-bill-holter/
Hi Adam I agree with treating people decently and fairly and if you’ve seen any of my comments I have zero tolerance for racism and other base comments. There are plenty of those people here too as they exist in every society. But be under no illusion Adam when people feel that their identity is under threat the reaction can be extreme even if that fear isn’t always grounded in reality.Fear can push people to extremes.If they’re throwing missiles at your border police what will they do in your major cities? I looked at the crowd scenes from those videos… Read more »
Couldn’t agree more with you, Adam!! We have plenty of fuckwits running the country back here in Ireland and we have even more fuckwits who keep on voting for them time after time after time! It makes me cringe to see those people who keep on going out and voting for the same idiots time after time, it’s just plain stupidity! Maybe after the General Election next year things might start to change, but somehow I doubt that this will happen unless the Irish electorate goes through a complete change of tune. It’s like the old adage of ‘Turkey’s voting… Read more »
“The typical buyer was a poor farmer in south India, for whom gold was an ancient currency and collateral to borrow against in bad times”
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/11/economist-explains-11
Look at the distribution of wealth in 1929 and today – they are almost identical and capitalism cannot function unless you have a reasonable distribution of wealth. I say almost identical as the concentration of wealth today is greater than 1929. Expect the collapse to also be proportionally greater than 1929. Brace yourself, it cannot be avoided. The rich can only get richer when we (the people) allow them the monopoly to print so called money (fiat currency). We get paid for our work in their printed monopoly ponzi paper currency. Our savings and pension plans are nothing more than… Read more »
Only Irish grads travel thousands of miles to clean dishes and toilets (illegally). You won’t find Brits, Frogs, Krauts, Canadians doing that type of work. IRELAND NEEDS TO PRODUCE FAR MORE GRADS. LOL. Third level staff need to retain their cushy numbers. Most school leavers wouldn’t touch a restaurant job in a billion years.
Who wants to be treated like crap ?
Maybe returning to the Gold standard isn’t such a good idea after all.
Alchemy is possible after all.
http://phys.org/news/2015-09-golden-silver-nanoparticle-gold.html
Maintain your buying power in the long term by saving silver in hand From lemetropolecafe.com Derek lays out the silver scenario extremely well… Silver Hi, Bill— The PM price managers are now in a really awkward pickle regarding silver. When faced with allowing the price of silver to rise, they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Here’s why… We already know that silver shortages are developing around the globe. THEY know this too, of course. If they allow the price to rise in any significant way, they know they’ll simply add to an already intense silver buying… Read more »
*Interesting Snippets Dear Bill, There are two interesting snippets which I’ve picked up in the last few days which I thought might interest you. I was in touch with Alasdair Macleod of GoldMoney and he’s recently been speaking to his contacts at the refineries in Switzerland and they confirmed that demand from China is still very strong but sourcing is still an issue. Interestingly they are now seeing good amounts being shipped to Switzerland from the US for conversion into Kilobars destined for the Eastern markets. I was also listening to a recent interview with Dave Kranzler who maintained that… Read more »
*Mark O’Byrne… Keynes Would Be “Buying Gold Hand Over Fist” Today What Keynes would think of today’s “Neo-Keynesians” Unlike his acolytes, he understood the value of gold and the dangers of currency debasement Keynes did not desire “a world where currencies are backed by nothing more than a governmental promise to pay while the printing presses whirled unchecked” Keynes would have been puzzled that his theories are associated with aggressive currency debasement and a rabid hostility to gold” With “today’s economic vista of near-zero interest rates and quantitative easing, it is clear that he would be buying gold hand over… Read more »
Bo Polny checked in with us… September 22, 2015 The US Dollar, Treasuries and Stock Market MELTDOWN in November 2015! Dear Bill, The GOOD and the BAD for Gold and Silver. The BAD news as you know, both Gold and Silver are down today with Gold down $8 at $1125 and Silver down $0.40 at $14.80 as I write. On Monday, September 14, 2015, based on our analysis, we bought Gold on the rumor of a rate increase. On Friday, September 18, 2015, based on our analysis, we sold the news into profits and furthermore we put on ‘paper’ short… Read more »
21 September 2015
Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts – IMF: ‘Gold Only Financial Asset With No Counterparty Liability’
“The IMF has put Monetary gold right at the top of the global reserve assets list – above SDRs. The IMF writes, ‘…The gold bullion component of monetary gold is the only case of a financial asset with no counterpart liability.'”
“The former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere, who was angered that debt-ridden African states were forced to hand over their sovereignty to the IMF (and World Bank), once asked: ‘Who elected the IMF to be the ministry of finance for every country in the world?‘ And now the Chinese have openly asked for a ‘new world wide central bank‘.
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.ca/2015/09/notes-from-currency-war-that-few.html
You need go no further than many of the comments on this thread, and elsewhere on the blog, to conclude that this lamentable state of affairs where a privileged few are licensed to loot the nation’s wealth, can only be explained by psychology (or psychiatry). It forms part of a familiar pattern (or one that should be familiar) in which all kinds of weird and exotic beliefs which defy reason or common sense become conventional wisdom simply because others believe them. There is ultimately no safety in numbers.
coldblow It was never any different coldblow. Christ and Caesar have worked hand in glove to claim legitimacy and authority for their actions for as long as people have bowed to the authority of institutions. That’s a central defining feature of social control.People fought each other in this State less than a 100 years ago because they no longer accepted that the UK was a legitimate authority to organise their society. They then handed over their hard won freedom to a religious authority which was just as undemocratic. The people in the North have just found out that they’re governed… Read more »
More monetary madness
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/09/23/time-nuclear-option-raining-money-main-street
Russia says thank you to the West for imposing sanctions as it has enabled a closer relationship with China.
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/russia-china-alliance-could-launch-new-world-order/523711.html
Deutsche bank is in major trouble with trillions of derivatives. Also fines for criminal activity in fiddling along with other banks the Libor interest rates.
Huge ramifications for Europe are present.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/there-are-indications-that-a-major-financial-event-in-germany-could-be-imminent
http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?ca=8443573c-1d9b-4589-b443-a7c730c0656b&c=877a32b0-427b-11e3-ad08-d4ae52a45a09&ch=8905dbc0-427b-11e3-ad3c-d4ae52a45a09 Take your pick of a selection of essays. Helicopter money is on its way. QE has not and cannot work. Soon will be direct distribution of money to government for infrastructure and or direct injection of money to your bank account. Then negative interest rates on all savings will encourage you to remove cash from all bank accounts. Then cash will abolished and all money will be electronic so that the only way you can use it is to pay debt or spend it. Then all economic activity will be controlled by central authorities. Then we all revert to… Read more »
“”Within the structure of a central bank counter-party paper Ponzi, central banks are trapped into a future of negative interest rates and the end of capitalism.
For capitalism to work there must be a return on capital and no amount of counterfeited money or easing can re-engineer the tragic collapse of a financial house of cards built on a pyramid of unpayable leverage or prevent gold from being independent money!””
http://www.goldcore.com/us/gold-blog/fed-central-banks-trapped-gold-foundation-of-exters-pyramid/
Money Money is defined as any good that can be used in exchange for other goods and services and as payment of debt. It has to be a tangible asset to be a sound unit of measure to value other goods and services, to act as a stable unit of exchange and to provide a lasting store of value that can protect wealth. Counter-party money is someone else’s liability, it is the liability owed to the issuing central bank and it has no value apart from a legal stipulation that prevents real money from being used in competition. Gold Gold… Read more »
As prices recover means – when firesale prices return to REAL VALUE based on real value to income or rent ratio. Buying at real value is not a major problem for Irish people. Profits made from selling previous firesales that returned to real value are just a measure of the upfront losses for customers inflicted by Irish Banks. If prices recover to levels above real value then this is NOT A RECOVERY but “A RETURN”.There is a lot of bankers,media and political pressure for A RETURN. I cant see Broke Irish Banks lending to Irish buyers for such profits though.… Read more »
The rich & powerful have been fuckin over every one else for years and will continue to do so . The destruction of the middle class , the criminalization of the working class & the unemployed. The feeding of bigotry & turning neighbour against neighbour through strategic defaulters or because you may be on welfare , a benefit you paid for through taxation. I can’t eat Gold or Silver & if I can afford to buy it then I don’t have the problems I thought I had so I don’t need it.!! What I need is shelter , food ,… Read more »
http://inflation.us/there-is-no-inflation/
Yer right!
Building the road to Utopia.
http://techxplore.com/news/2015-09-d-wasp-maker-economy-home.html
[…] the Incompetent Incumbents. Their brand of Trickle Down Economics has given us the fastest growing wealth inequality in the western world. They have the societal vision of Goldman Sachs. And you can forget about the […]
[…] Last year, the 100 people on the Irish Rich List earned . . . twice as much as the entire growth in Irish GDP. . . . We are not talking here about the mythical 1 per cent. If it were the 1 per cent, we would be talking about a significant cohort of between 46,000 and 48,000 people. Here we are talking about 100 individuals. This is off the scales. (davidmcwilliams.ie here) […]