Utopia, you are standing in it!

The shocks that occasionally batter the UK economy seem to be coming thicker and faster. The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) blew up in 2008. The Brexit vote followed eight year later. But we then only had to wait four years for Covid, and just two more for the cost-of-living crisis. At this rate we are already due another one.

A candidate has already emerged in the shape of a new financial crisis, again originating in the US. The GFC was prompted by a meltdown in the sub-prime mortgage market. This time the focus is on banks that mainly service the tech sector, notably the aptly-named Silicon Valley Bank.

The rosy view is that Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was an outlier. There is something in this: the circumstances that led to its collapse may not have been unique, but they were at least relatively unusual.

In a nutshell, SVB took large…

The truly deluded reckon that by adding a few giant lithium-ion batteries we’ll soon be running on nothing but sunshine and breezes. Those that (often grudgingly) concede wind and solar’s weather-driven (ie perfectly natural) unreliability, claim that storing wind and solar power when the sun’s up and the wind is blowing, just right, and releasing it when the sun sets or calm weather sets in, is a cinch.

The laws of physics and economics, say otherwise. As Van Snyder details below.

Adequate Storage for Renewable Energy is Not Possible
Substack
Van Snyder
15 January 2023

In Grid-Scale Storage of Renewable Energy: The Impossible Dream, Energy Matters (November 20, 2017), Euan Mearns used a full year of data from England and Scotland, with one hour resolution, to calculate that to have firm power, it would be necessary to have 390 watt hours of storage per watt of average demand.

In 

US Banks Have Over $620 Billion in Unrealized Losses According to FDIC:

I’ve long said that it is not the place of blogs to write about fast-moving news stories because that’s a different world from analysing them, and of course a lot of stories should be allowed to mature before being blogged – like developments in the post-C-19 medical world or the Twitter files revelations of US government attacks on free speech via private-sector groups.

But in writing about the failure of SVB (second largest bank failure in US history) and Signature Bank (third largest) the other day – GFC II – Banking Boogaloo – I find that I can’t resist writing about this developing catastrophe in real time. Credit Suisse in Switzerland is now in the firing line, months after unpublicised funds were sent their way by the Federal Reserve. And so…

According to FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg…

The New Zealand Initiative has a new report out this morning, written by Bryce Wilkinson, under the heading “Made by Government: New Zealand’s Monetary Policy Mess”. (Full disclosure: I provided fairly extensive detailed comments on an earlier draft.)

It is a curious report. There is a lot of detail that I agree with (and the report draws quite extensively on various criticisms I have made in recent years) but it ends up having the feel of a bit of a muddle.

(It is perhaps not helped by the Foreword from an Otago academic who seems wedded to a fiscal theory of the price level that doesn’t exactly command widespread support anywhere, and which would appear on the face of it to have predicted that New Zealand would have had one of the lowest inflation rates anywhere. His approach appears to absolve the Reserve Bank of responsibility for the high…

Only women can have babies. Right? WRONG! You bigot!

Two radio hosts have apologised on-air after saying that using the term “pregnant people” was “buying into bullshit”

TodayFM radio hosts Leah Panapaand Miles Davis apologised on Friday on-air for the comments they made around pronouns and inclusive language.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/tv-radio/131496480/radio-hosts-apologise-for-toxic-onair-rant-about-pronouns-inclusive-language?cid=app-iPhone

That’s right – Leah Panapa and Miles Davis have been bullied into a grovelling apology by the grifting swindlers who bestow ‘Rainbow Tick’ on subservient compliant organisations, for a fee of course. Their sin was to mock the term ‘pregnant people’, a term so stupid it deserves nothing apart from withering scorn, contempt and constant derision. Their employers only care about looking like they aren’t modern-day heretics, and so they were swiftly thrown under the bus to repent and avoid being burnt at the stake:

Martin King, awards director ofthe rainbow excellence awards– in which MediaWorks, the owner…

After 30 years and plenty of talk about being ‘competitive’ with coal, gas and nuclear, wind and solar are still being treated like untamable toddlers. The subsidies they begged for in the beginning were meant to help so-called ‘infant’ industries get on their feet. But, even now, the mere mention of reducing subsidies turns them into bawling brats, furious at the prospect of ever having to make an honest dollar.

Even when the subsidy stream is flowing strong and steady, the rent-seekers that profit from the greatest economic and environmental scam of all time are always pressing for more. As John Constable explains below.

Demands for more subsidy expose the illusion of falling wind power costs
Net Zero Watch
John Constable
1 March 2023

Net Zero Watch is highlighting the fact that claims of falling wind power costs are contradicted by demands from wind power operators for additional subsidies on…

Although you’d be hard pressed to see much coverage in NZ media other than brief and superficial outlines, Australia, Britain and the US have now released more deals about AUKUS in San Diego this morning. It is actually Australia’s biggest spend on defence ever. Australia will initially home base, and then procure, five American Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarines over the next decade. Australia will then (from the 2040s onwards) take part in a combined Aus – UK – USA production of the new AUKUS SSNs. It will cost AUS $368 Billion over the next three decades.

Geoffrey Miller spoke to Rachel Smalley on the radio about this this morning before the deal was announced. The aim of the deal is very much as a response to growing militarisation of the Indo-Pacific region, all thanks to China flexing its muscles. Retired Australian Major General Mick Ryan analyses the…

Later yesterday morning, before major international markets opened for the week, the US authorities announced two steps in response to the failure of SVB Bank

• first, depositors not covered by the FDIC (amounts in excess of US$250000) would in fact be completely covered, with the costs to be covered by levies (taxes) on other US banks,
• second, a new Fed lending facility was set up, backed by the US Treasury, under which banks could borrow at market rate against securities that for these purposes would be valued at face value not market value.   For most longer-term securities issued in the last decade, market value is currently less than face value.

Legislative changes after 2008/09 were supposed to make bailouts much harder and less likely, but at the first real test – in respect of one failed bank that was 16th largest in the US (and another a bit smaller still)…

Share your favorites in ‘comments.’

Gough Whitlam, to a heckler in Forrest place:

‘Don’t call me a bastard, you bastard.’

Bill Hayden:

‘They could have won the election with a dead dog’s donger for a leader and they did.’

David Lange:

‘Mr Peters has been delayed by a full length mirror.’

Robert Muldoon:

‘He’s like a shiver looking for a spine to run down.’

Winston Churchill, to Bessie Braddock who accused him of being drunk in parliament:

‘Yes, I am and you are ugly but tomorrow I’ll be sober.’

Winston Churchill, to George Bernard Shaw:

‘Cannot possibly attend your first night; will attend second—if there is one.’

Ronald Reagan:

‘I’ve noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born.’

Paul Keating, on Peter Costello:

‘He’s all tip and no ice berg.’

Paul Keating, on a speech by John Hewson:

‘It was like being flogged with a warm lettuce.’