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British Economy Is WORSE than During the Great Depression
Leading British newspaper the Telegraph reports today:
Ministers today admitted Britain is facing “very, very grave difficulties” after figures showed the economy did not grow at all in 2012.
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Economists from the Royal Bank of Scotland said the last four years have produced the worst economic performance in a non post-war period since records started being collected in the 1830s.
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“It’s the worst economic performance since at least 1830, outside of post-war demobilisations,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “It’s worse than the 1920s, it’s worse than the Great Depression.”
He said the economy has been “heading this way for a long time” because of the scale of the problems that came to a head in the 2008 financial crash.
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The top economist at RBS, which is mostly owned by the Government, said it is difficult to recover when much of the world is facing similar problems.
“It’s the scale of what happened in 2008 but also the build-up to that,” he said. “Compared with other recessions [like in the 1980s and 1990s], this is happening all over the world. There’s not a quick and easy way to export your way out of this.”
(In a separate article, the Telegraph notes that the UK is heading for an unprecedented triple dip, as its economy shrunk .3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012).
We’ve repeatedly warned that this is worse than the Great Depression …
What Do Economic Indicators Say?
We’ve repeatedly pointed out that there are many indicators which show that the last 5 years have been worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s, including:
- The housing slump
- The level of inequality between rich and poor (too much inequality destroys economies)
- The interconnectedness of financial systems and economies worldwide (interconnectedness leads to financial instability)
- Runaway spending and greed
Mark McHugh reports:
Velocity of money is the frequency with which a unit of money is spent on new goods and services. It is a far better indicator of economic activity than GDP, consumer prices, the stock market, or sales of men’s underwear (which Greenspan was fond of ogling). In a healthy economy, the same dollar is collected as payment and subsequently spent many times over. In a depression, the velocity of money goes catatonic. Velocity of money is calculated by simply dividing GDP by a given money supply. This VoM chart using monetary base should end any discussion of what ”this” is and whether or not anybody should be using the word “recovery” with a straight face:
In just four short years, our “enlightened” policy-makers have slowed money velocity to depths never seen in the Great Depression.
(As we’ve previously explained, the Fed has intentionally squashed money multipliers and money velocity as a way to battle inflation. And see this)
Indeed, the number of Americans relying on government assistance to obtain basic food may be higher now that during the Great Depression. The only reason we don’t see “soup lines” like we did in the 30s is because of the massive food stamp program.
And while apologists for government and bank policy point to unemployment as being better than during the 1930s, even that claim is debatable.
What Do Economists Say?
Indeed, many economists agree that this could be worse than the Great Depression, including:
- Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke
- Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan (and see this and this)
- Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker
- Economics scholar and former Federal Reserve Governor Frederic Mishkin
- The head of the Bank of England Mervyn King (and see this)
- Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz
- Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman
- Former Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead
- Economics professors Barry Eichengreen and and Kevin H. O’Rourke (updated here)
- Investment advisor, risk expert and “Black Swan” author Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Well-known PhD economist Marc Faber
- Morgan Stanley’s UK equity strategist Graham Secker
- Former chief credit officer at Fannie Mae Edward J. Pinto
- Billionaire investor George Soros
- Senior British minister Ed Balls
Bad Policy Has Us Stuck
We are stuck in a depression because the government has done all of the wrong things, and has failed to address the core problems.
Instead of bringing in new legs, we keep on recycling the same old re-treads who caused the problem in the first place.
For example:
- An economics professor says we’ll have “a never-ending depression unless we repudiate the debt, which never should have been extended in the first place”
- Fraud was one of the main causes of the Depression, but nothing has been done to rein in fraud today. Indeed, the only action the government is taking is to help cover up fraud
- All leading independent economists have said that the economy cannot recover until the big, insolvent banks are broken up, but the government has just helped them to get bigger
- The Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression and the current crisis, and has done nothing but help the fatcats at the expense of the little guy. And yet the government has given the Fed more power than ever.
- Government policies send manufacturing jobs and dollars abroad
- Quantitative easing won't help ... it will only make things worse.
This isn’t an issue of left versus right … it’s corruption and bad policies which help the super-elite but are causing a depression for the vast majority of the people.
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its called £375bn of gilt purchases (economy is c £1.6 tn so QE is approx 25% of GDP - same as US; exports are c.£320bn)
THE BIGGER THE BOOM, THE BIGGER THE BUST.
Alan Greenspan doubled down on 1920's FED policy, which lead into the Great Depression. That this is worse than the Great Depression should not be a surprise to anyone.
join the club, dudes. it's ruff all over.
Good article George. Helps explain why PMs (and oil) have been stuck in a rut. Although I do see food prices still rising (or packaging smaller), just not as fast as two years ago.
Higher postal rates kick in soon as well as the internet sales tax. Wonder what effects these will have on the "recovering" economy ?
Higher postal rates kick in soon as well as the internet sales tax. Wonder what effects these will have on the "recovering" economy ?
Higher postal rates are a 12-14 month cycle, expect it.
As far as Internet Sales TAax, only a few are following those rules.
Amazon, will see it's sales go down, as paying the same tacxes as locally and price matching is now common, PLUS no freight locally (on most of what people buy on the net), there will not be any reason to interent shop any longer.
No advantage,No purchasing.
Istopped buying in bulk items off Amazon just for this reason, they VOLUNTARILY complied.
So I Voluntarily told them no more $$$$$$ from me...................Bye-Bye.
I suggest the brits emigrate to Australia, plenty of land there which will be gushing fracked oil. Ten million less Brits to feed and the problem is over. After all they sent their criminals there in the first place.
They should send the second batch now. Do the Aussies like the Brits? Can you imagine Tony Blair panhandling for gold nuggets?
And Nigel Porridge telling the aborigines to get the hell out of Aussie and join the EU!
What is incredible when you read these articles on ZH is to read the contrary on BI like here; on the upcoming economic surge :
Josh Brown Explains The Huge Mistake That A Bunch Of Investors Are Going To Make Right Now - Business Insider
MSM is playing the S&P to 1600 meme loud and clear.
This is can canning better than the girls at the Moulin Rouge!
I suggest the brits emigrate to Australia
Most Brits cannot afford train fare to France.
the photo in that article is the best contrarian indicator i've seen yet.
aussies hate the brits...love licking chinese ass and try to be as cool as 90210
What's left of the Brits in Britain is thinning out badly
Anyone with get up and go has got up and gone
What's left is champagne socialism and a cafe o late race from trashy mums given black man fantasies by the NWO rubber stamped BBC
Its now officially balkanised and white flight is in full swing
But on the plus side for the Brits they have already de-armed the Aussies and manacled them with carbon taxes.
....but isn't the market the truest most pure indicator of economic health? - Dr. Sarcoff
No credit to Professor Steve Keen and his 'credit impulse' theory but a plug to the likes of the Bernank & Krugman...?
The banker class have experimented more in the uk than anywhere else because they own it
And it's going to be an interesting 20 years ahead
It's gone down badly in the last 20
Tony Blair , who now reveals himself in the pocket of JP Morgan
1.allowed the banks to do whatever they pleased
2. Imported 3million unskilled pakistanis and Africans to work for less pay
3. Sold the gold reserves at the bottom of the market....
4. Kept 3 million Brits on benefits buying them off to vote for him
5. Created a huge welfare state where people stab each other in the back and sell each other down the river to keep their clients from ever getting out of the poverty trap
No wonder it's fucked
5. Created a huge welfare state where people stab each other in the back and sell each other down the river to keep their clients from ever getting out of the poverty trap
This is why I don't respect the Brits. In America, we have guns, so we can shoot each other in the back properly, without the close-up intimacy of a knife.
Guns are for show, Knives are for pro's.
I hate those stains all over the carpeting...OXY 5 is not cheap you know.
All this economics babble is just the foam above the real problems(with no solution), typically peak oil.
Ministers today admitted Britain is facing “very, very grave difficulties” after figures showed the economy did not grow at all in 2012.
NEWSFLASH!!!!!!!!!, neither did the USA's!.
How oil is wasted by the government as it destroys other countries, the economy. and the middle class?
It commandeers 40+% of the economy doing things to reduce productivity and wealth.
how about we reached peak debt?
repudiate the debt for the new, world-wide money unit the global reserve note!
Well, lakecity55, would not this presume that there would be some global government, continuing to deliver the PRIVATIZED power to make "money" out of nothing, as debts, backed up by a globalized military and police?
In my view, it seems practically impossible to fix the problems we are in, because the overwhelming vast majority of people do NOT want to understand those problems, while the ruling classes want to make sure that other people continue to not want to understand the problems.
The basic social facts are the SOCIAL PYRAMID SYSTEM, which is control of civilization through HUGE LIES, backed up with LOTS OF VIOLENCE. The monetary system is the leading symbol of those processes. The underlying realities of the British situation are taboo topics. Therefore, those real problems will automatically get worse, beyond our imagination!
The results of the steam engine and the debt engine are like a bellows, that blew out into the world, and then were sucked back in, over and over, building and building. However, while the steam engines had enough sense to build governors into them, the debt engines did not. Furthermore, while the thermodynamics of steam engines were understood, and acted upon, the information systems of the debt engines were deliberately denied and suppressed, and therefore, not acted upon. (Since the system is BASED on crazy corruption, the banksters were able to persuade the govenment to regulate them LESS, rather than more, which was like taking the governor off the steam engine, to enable it to run too fast!) Indeed, to restate my point, it is impossible to resolve our problems with respect to the debt engines having gone into overdrive, because the overwhelming vast majority of people do not want to understand those problems, while the ruling classes want to make sure that social situation continues.
The FACTS are that the debt controls depend on the death controls. Money is actually backed by murder. The United Kingdom became the leader in developing that system, whereby the power of the state was effectively privatized through the Bank of England, and then that was able to drive the British Empire all over the world ... which now has resulted in the ultimate blowback, returning home.
The United Kingdom is an imploding empire, which implosion will eventually match the magnitude of its previous explosion around the world. None of that will be understood, or allowed to be understood, by most of the British people. Therefore, social storms of unprecedented magnitude will eventually develop in Britain, which will correspond to the larger social storms all over the world.
There are no solutions to the political economy problems that can be designed which do not understand that those are inside the human ecology problems. However, human ecology is, by far, the most deliberately ignored, denied, repressed and suppressed topic. There are NO real solutons to the problems that the whole world faces, which are exemplified in the way the United Kingdom manifests those, which do not include better design science regarding the death controls, because those are what are necessary to make a different system of debt controls workable.
The astonishing ways that the Bank of England developed illustrated the history of the debt engine. The fractional reserve banking system that most of us take for granted now got going most there, and, so far, has consistently been able to spread around the world, including retaking control of the USA through the Federal Reserve Board system. That Anglo-American (Zionist) system now dominates the world, and is attempting to consolidate its hegemony by being able to make the whole world's money supply out of nothing, as debts, by being able to enforce that fraud with a global force.
This comment by lakecity55 implicitly raises all those issues. However, the idea of a "global reserve note" must be backed by a global death control power. However, so far, there are no signs that the dominant organized crime gangs that currently control the planet are going to be able to better negotiate such a transition. Indeed, everything they do is based on the maximum possible deceits, which requires that the vast majority of the people continue to not understand the monetary system, and moreover, continue to not want to understand the monetary system.
The bottom line is always going to be that money is backed by murder. "Peak debt," along with every other possible peak everything, as exponential growth rapidly reaches a wide variety of limits, where another doubling becomes impossible to sustain, BY DEFINITION requires there to be DEATH CONTROLS.
The ruling classes are preparing to start more genocidal wars, along with democidal martial law, BUT, are not preparing for anything else, because they can not admit the truth about anything they have been actually doing in the past, and want to make sure that the vast majority of other people continue to not understand that either, because they continue to be brainwashed to believe in bullshit, and therefore, do not want to understand the real social situation.
I agree with lakecity55 that we are close to reaching some state of "peak debt" where the previous systems of debt slavery have runaway to become debt insanity. However, any further globalization of that, as a solution, must be based upon some globalization of the murder systems, or death controls, in order to back up the money system's debt controls. At present, that has no sane way to be redesigned or renegotiated, since the basic social facts are deliberately ignored and denied by the vast majority of the people, and their ruling classes.
Therefore, the established runaway debt insanity situation is headed towards psychotic breakdowns, which will be matched by psychotic breakdowns of the established murder systems. Since the United Kingdom was originally the leader in these kinds of developments in the past, it will probably become a perverse leader towards those kinds of psychotic breakdowns of its social systems in the future.
The scary prospects are that, since the current depression is worse than the last great depression, and that depression ended in world war, the current depression is probably going to end in a worse world war!
In my view, it would take a prodigious series of political miracles for anything better to happen, instead of an insane effort to globalize a new money system, based upon a new global murder system. Of course, those things WILL and MUST happen, however, since the vast majority of the people refuse to understand any of the deeper issues, and their ruling classes want to keep things that way, the ability to negotiate an agreed upon better designed system of debt/death controls, to make a new money/murder system work, are practically guaranteed to have to go through unprecedented social storms, involving the psychotic breakdown of the established systems.
I am in favour of the idea of a "global reserve note" ... However, that requires a globalized murder system, which will not blow up everything in omnicidal ways instead! At the present time, continued efforts to consolidate a global system of electronic fiat money frauds, backed up by atomic bombs, does not look likely to succeed in any linear way. Since the overall global context, in which the economy and ecology of the United Kingdom exists, are mostly taboo topics, which the vast majority of people do not want to understand, and which their ruling classes do not want them to understand, the ways that Britain, and the rest of the world, will muddle through their madnesses remains to be seen.
In short: Mrs Lincoln ain't gonna like the play!
You lost me at "Zionist". Invalidated your whole spiel.
"I am in favour of the idea of a "global reserve note" ... However, that requires a globalized murder system, which will not blow up everything in omnicidal ways instead! At the present time, continued efforts to consolidate a global system of electronic fiat money frauds, backed up by atomic bombs, does not look likely to succeed in any linear way."
If the GRN displayed a picture of a drone armed with a hell-fire missile, would that be sufficiently less omnicidal? Or will the Queen still suffice?
The "global reserve note" trick!
Beings global, will be authorized under the auspices of the UN and thus referred to as the;
grUNt
Boris is not care what to call it, but for when is crashes, how many ply. Mabye is "grunt" goodly names.
Thank God the indexes are making new highs......
Boris is thanks Vodka for new highs!