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90 at 9: NZ dollar near record highs vs Euro and pound
October 6th, 2009
Click here for this morning’s video.
Bernard Hickey details the key news overnight in 90 seconds at 9am in association with ASB, including news that the New Zealand dollar strengthened to fresh highs vs the British pound and the Euro overnight.
It hit almost 50 euro cents this morning and almost 47 British pence. The kiwi also rose to 73 USc.
The kiwi seems to be rising with the Australian dollar, which is strong on expectations the RBA may hike its official rate later today, or in a month’s time on Melbourne Cup day. However, the NZ dollar weakened a tad vs the Australian dollar itself after Bill English said it was too strong. However the dip was only temporary and the Kiwi remains up near 83 Ac.
Meanwhile, Crafar Farms has been put into receivership by its banks Westpac, Rabobank and PGGW Finance late yesterday.
However, Christchurch developer David Henderson avoided bankruptcy for now but still faces angry creditors, The Press reported.
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October 6th, 2009 at 9:38 am
Just an arty impression:
Considering other currencies/ countries the NZ$ is like an orchid, the more it is neglected the more beautiful it blossoms.
October 6th, 2009 at 10:01 am
Crikey , Walter , wear a mask , keep the fumes of those paints outta yer hooter !
October 6th, 2009 at 10:41 am
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NZDGBP
zoom to max… wow!
October 6th, 2009 at 10:53 am
Bill, I’ve been watching that currency pair for a while now waiting for the right time to jump in and buy stirling… could be an unprecedented opportunity to make some serious cash, but just waiting to see when the top is in !!!
October 6th, 2009 at 10:54 am
Tempting to buy some pounds but what to do with them while you wait? 0% interest and who knows how long you would have to sit on them.
October 6th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Hey Matt S. At what price is your “top”?
October 6th, 2009 at 11:03 am
Trust your pounds in the Bank of England ……… ..ah , better shoot George Soros first .
October 6th, 2009 at 11:06 am
@WaS .. I am looking for a double top, or possibly a rounded top formation on the charts to confirm a top is in, or a clear rollover in the oscillators. Not showing yet, but we must be close. Also Thursday (Friday NZ time) the BoE is making an announcement about their QE program.. What they have to say will be key for the GBP.
I’m not going to try and guess the top, but would be looking to buy on the downside as close to the top as I feel comfortable that momentum was going the other way..
Edit: Yup there is 0% interest on the GBP in a FCA right now..
October 6th, 2009 at 11:13 am
We earn pounds and live in NZ
October 6th, 2009 at 11:18 am
You gotta love this quote from Henderson;
“There is no real story here – not today anyway.”
Perhaps reflective of the entire NZ economy?
October 6th, 2009 at 11:25 am
So a Kiwi moving back here from UK would now get $218,060 NZD for 100,000 Pounds! That’s $67,500 less than they would have achieved not too long ago.
That will make NZ property look a tad expensive eh!
Probably won’t see too much money repatriated in the short term!
Great news foe Kiwi travel agents though!
October 6th, 2009 at 11:30 am
Lara, also interesting the other way around.. British property is looking very affordable right now if your cashed up with kiwi dollars. Not only is the Kiwi strong, the British property market is in a cyclical low. I was having a look at what $200k kiwi would buy right now, and there are some surprisingly good properties in that price range.
October 6th, 2009 at 11:31 am
..and the US$ in Oct 2009 – a bunch of flowers in a vase without any water.
“Golden Flowers” is the way to go.
Like your comment Roger
Crikey , Walter , wear a mask , keep the fumes of those paints outta yer hooter
October 6th, 2009 at 11:32 am
We might be at a short term top for the NZD – I don’t know – but in my mind it’s still dangerous to hold pounds as the issue is the weakness of the pound rather than the strength of the NZD.
The pound doesn’t have the benefit of reserve currency status meaning that the pound is getting whacked against most currencies as punishment for a weak economy, awful fiscal deficits, and record breaking QE by the bank of England. The weakening pound is welcomed by the govt and BOE as a perceived way to boost exports and fight deflation.
October 6th, 2009 at 11:33 am
Convert $100,000 NZD into pounds today at 0.47 and get 47,000 pounds
Wait for it to drop back to 0.35 and cash up and get $134,388 NZD
Tidy profit of $34,388 in what – 6 months – that’s a tidy 68% per anum return!
Worth a punt? How long will it take for pound to get back to 0.35 though?
October 6th, 2009 at 11:34 am
Great idea Matt – buy property in UK, make a profit when market increases and even more profit when you repatriate the money – you could be onto a winner! Now which UK website is the best one for property?
October 6th, 2009 at 11:39 am
I like Lara’s idea- it confirms my first comment.
October 6th, 2009 at 11:41 am
I was having a quick squiz at http://www.rightmove.co.uk
But Lara, I would be careful, its easy to get your fingers burned with FX. Mark is right, it could take a while for the GBP to come back to a more normal level. Just DYODD.
October 6th, 2009 at 11:45 am
On the surface one would assume that the Kiwi to Pound Sterling rate should reverse significantly. However, I suspect there are political reasons for why – it is conceivable – that Pound Sterling will be destroyed.
A complete destruction of this currency would serve two purposes for Europe’s elitists.
1) In relative terms it would make that other ‘dog’ the Euro look better – despite its appalling fundamentals as the unbacked fiat unit of the greatest ‘welfare madhouse’ since the later stages of Imperial Rome.
2) By destroying Britain’s middle class through a collapse of Sterling the ‘Weimar Put’ could be applied – leading to serious social disorder and a pretext for exercising the Civil Contingencies Act (similar provisions to Adolf Hitler’s 1933 ‘Enabling Act’).
Remember, with Ireland having made the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty a near certainty the death of Pound Sterling seems even more likely, especially as the tactic used on the Irish worked so well – ‘gear them, bust them, intimidate them, then permanently enslave them’. A Britain – with a ‘Weimar currency’ – would have no choice but to beg for ‘mercy’ from the continent – on any terms! Seems crazy – but these are crazy times!!
October 6th, 2009 at 11:46 am
Matt S – u r right re forex fingers but does anyone realistically think that we wil hit 0.50 pence and that it will stay there for year or two.
What is the long term realistic level likely to be 0.35, 0.375 – I remember when it got down to 0.29
Would be hard to get it wrong – surely?
October 6th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Some commentators like Schiff and Roubini appear to think the USD and the GBP are going to collapse which may mean it is too early to get into GBP. Schiff is buying Kiwi so what does that tell you?
October 6th, 2009 at 11:56 am
Lara,
50p
12 months ago did we realistically think the dollar would go to these levels?
Did we think the OCR would drop over 5% in as many months?
That banks and huge companies overseas would crash?
We are living in a world where anything can and has been happening.
Who knows……..?
October 6th, 2009 at 11:57 am
GBP 250,000 for a 2 bdrm in Wimbledon http://tinyurl.com/yde4glb and looks like the funding is easy http://www.halifax.co.uk/mortgages/buytolet.asp
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/resources/property-guides/buying-guide.html
October 6th, 2009 at 11:58 am
Matt in Auck – maybe you should buy to let in the UK?
October 6th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
What a laugh, Bill English trying to talk the dollar down in HK and it rockets up through 83 au.
October 6th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
I am enjoying your blogs , Macolm . But I am wondering how much of what you attribute to a plan , to gut the middleclass , and give full socialist power back to the state , is in actual fact , just sheer stupid incompetence of the policy makers .
October 6th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Lara ……… do be careful out there its just soooooo easy to get caught in the cross trade. The blinkered approach of one currency history to anothers cost me 200k+ . glad to say I widened my game and recovered most of it so far………….
My pick don’t listen to Kicklighter and co they are ass coverers at best. I think the NZD should surge to .76 to USD and fall of a cliff……………. but I bin wrong before !!
October 6th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
It’s all a gamble but there’s no way the Kiwi should be this strong as we are just as stuffed as any other country.
October 6th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
Guys,
When thinking about what drives currency movement, think for a momment of the cockney barrow boys who move the largest volumes of FX from the sweaty trading floors of London.
To these Guys the Kiwi is a minor currency, unless any specific news hits the screens then it will be traded in a narrow range to its bigger brother the Aussie. So look to the fundamentals of the Aussie to see what influences the thinking for the Kiwi.
See http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=AUD%3DX#chart4:symbol=aud=x;range=ytd;compare=nzd=x;indicator=volume;charttype=candlestick;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined
Perhaps it might deflate the perception of sunny NZ but it is just too small to warrant much consideration all by itself amost the big currency players.
James
October 6th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Lara, your right it is a gamble, but you can lower your risk by using the momentum trading, or swing trading technique for example. There’s plenty of info on Google on these and others.
Right now, the NZD and AUD have upward momentum, the GBP has downward momentum. Never try and pick the top, you will always be wrong. When the crosses swing the other way, that’s when you jump. For example 0.47 may be the top, but you won’t know for sure until its already on its way back down. You might then decide to jump in at 0.44 and follow the trend down, and jump back to NZD at say 0.34. You may also miss the bottom, but you’ve made 10 clicks.
Personally I have a number of Foreign Currency Accounts with my bank, and I shift money between them all the time. I’ve learned to work my way around the charts. I have had numerous sleepless nights too.
October 6th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Roger Thompson: For a long time I felt that the fate of Britain, in particular, was essentially due to incompetence. Membership of the EEC, which morphed into the EU, seemed to repose on the ideas of many – that Britain could not survive alone and that the whole project would reduce the likelihood of another major war. Thus, whilst never agreeing with it, I understood the arguments of those in favour of membership.
Yet I became increasingly suspicious that something deeply sinister was at hand. Friedrich von Hayek had warned us of a coming fascist future when he wrote “The Road to Serfdom” as a refugee at The London School of Economics in 1944. Much earlier the great Victorian Statesmen Benjamin Disraeli had warned of the “secret societies” that were the real masters of Europe. Enoch Powell warned “of the formula for rending societies apart” and Lady Thatcher was ruthlessly disposed of as soon as she began to resist further subjugation by Europe’s ruling elite.
I think what needs to be remembered is that functional democracy and widespread prosperity are historic aberrations which largely depend – for their existence – on middle class values. Those values became particularly imbued in Britain during the Victorian era and Hayek reminds us of the Titanic struggle between British ideas of liberalism and free markets – and the continental ‘collectivist socialism’ begat of Chancellor Bismarck. Thus, it has become necessary to ‘knock Britain out’ because, in doing so, socialism can advance without impediment. And what is socialism but a form of corporate thuggery, in which a well connected elite exploit a gullible proletariat for their own ends?
Like ‘the case for gold’ I would prefer to be wrong. Yet I don’t think so. To me the greatest vulnerability of the middle class is its conceit. The belief that it was so clever to buy into the greatest financial fraud in history and to assume that its interlectualised arguments count for diddly squat with the people who really run the show. The middle class were never welcome at the top table – they were merely tolerated whilst it was expedient/necessary.
The Weimar disaster is a reminder of what can happen to a hitherto prosperous and sophisticated nation. A reminder of what can happen to a paper currency when the printing press becomes politically expedient. All paper currencies are now engaged in an embryonic ‘Weimar race to the bottom’ and the Kiwi’s strength is really just a case of ‘lesser debasement’. Remember, the deeper the underlying deflationary pathology the more aggressive the ‘counter-easing’ is likely to be – witness Pound Sterling & US Dollar!!!
Lara suggests we are ‘just as stuffed as any other country’. We are not – because there is a way out largely unavailable to countries like Britain!! Why? because we have ‘gold in ground’ and gold – as the ultimate extinguisher of debt – is the weapon of mass destruction against the ‘banksters’. If our government were committed to the New Zealand people, instead of to those who command it, we would be building official gold reserves with that piece of paper garbage known as $NZ ahead of the yellow metal’s re-monetization – which all of history suggests is coming.
October 6th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Lara and others:
I would never speculate on making money on currencies, too much risk, too many unknown factors. Also the British have a ratio of debt to GDP of close to 500% from memory, this is almost as high as when Island went bust. Coming from a Europe where the currency was devalued over night by decree by 10:1, meaning your money of 100 Mark were worth 10 as of 20.June 1948 (in Germany) and all savings accounts were devalued to the same ratio. All citizens got 40 new Mark, provided they did show a identification card or pass port, which was then stamped to show you got the allocation of 40 new Mark.
All old currency had to be delivered back to banks, or as the decree stated: “You are free to destroy the old money”. So paper money was destroyed, ones supposed savings an wealth was wiped out. Similar happened at the hyperinflation of the so called Weimar Republic. This happened many times in lots of countries over the centuries when debt/money was not in harmony with the underlying economic factors.
As the USA and Britain are printing money “like it would to out of fashion” as the saying goes, it WILL go out of fashion (collaps)…………and this over a long weekend when nobody expects anything happening.
So to speculate in a currency to perhaps make a gain? Not even very experienced traders know for sure, otherwise they would all be millionares. Well, everybody has his free will and choice.
October 6th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
I think currently the currency market is similar to a flower market – everyone is impressed about the variety and the colours of the flowers, but nobody really knows how long they last.
October 6th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Interesting argument , Malcolm . Agree that Kiwi peso is soaring due to greater debasement of other currencies . You don’t by any chance have a vested interest in gold , which may skewer your objectivity ? I love the yellow metal myself , got the gold-bug years ago , sluicing blacksand on a beach near Okarito lagoon . Would be a tadge surprised but , if we were to look at a gold-standard again , the horse has bolted on that scenario .
October 6th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Geez Walter , you’re on the flowers today . What’ve the Kaikoura Council put into the town’s water-supply ? ( aha , ’tis spring , the sap is rising , scent of romance in the old nostrils ! Nudge nudge , wink wink ………. Say no more ! )
October 6th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Gold is good buying in Pacific Peso’s right now… I’m with you Roger, a bit of a gold bug too.
http://goldprice.org/gold-price-new-zealand.html
October 6th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
Roger,
my “Flower stories” are more realistic then most other comments about the currency market – even the ones from so called experts.
October 6th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Absolutely , Walter . Enjoyed the metaflor , sorry , metaphor ! Let the sap rise , release the beast within , pick those flowers , you may get lucky .
October 6th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
..no no Roger I don’t eat the flowers to get… you know “springy”, like the currency market does with some people.
October 6th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Roger: I became aware that there is something wrong with paper money during the 1970s when my dad’s modest nest-egg was largely wiped out by the inflation under Edward Heath’s disastrous administration (remember Heath, he was the guy who stuffed your country via the EEC).
Anyway, I could never really understand this until I first began studying the ideas of Enoch Powell (much better known for the immigration controversy). Powell was influenced by Hayek and I gradually became persuaded to the ideas of the Austrian School and the need to remove control over the money supply from politicians – or more correctly their masters. Within this, I concluded that the classical gold standard was not actually dead but was merely hibernating.
New Zealand always struck me as the one country that could have escaped the vice of debt because, despite the best efforts of characters like Heath, it had huge advantages and one of these is ‘once and future capital in the ground’ – gold. The tragedy (and sometimes it is easier to see this as an outsider) is to watch New Zealand throwing its advantages away – for what? To conspire to pay ludicrous multiples of income for pretty average housing and to cover the topography in diary farms (by borrowing increasingly overwhelming sums from overseas – frankly astonishing!)
I started http://www.nzgold.org/ a few years back to try and encourage a better understanding of the way in which Kiwis are being drawn into irredeemable debt enslavement and European authoritarianism, by a flawed system of paper money. Within this the idea of restoring the gold standard is generally ridiculed but moves are afoot – with the recent formation of the “Gold Standard Institute” in Australia under the guidance of Professor Antal Fekete.
http://www.goldstandardinstitute.com/
Gold is pretty boring stuff really but, throughout millennia, it has been money and it will be money again in due course. Technology raises the potential for ‘gold backed money’ in a way not possible in the past – provided there are the most rigorous auditing arrangements. This is perhaps gold’s greatest weakness – to transact with it is highly inconvenient, yet that inconvenience has the potential to fade if formulae can be developed to prevent the scams of the past. Ultimately people must make up their own minds. Is it better to use a ‘relatively’ strong Kiwi to buy Pound Sterling or to buy gold? Crystal ball anyone?
October 6th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
My crystal ball tells me (and has told me for sometime) that the wheels of our current monetary system are falling off. The system narrowly survived complete meltdown one year ago but the damage was so severe that the repairs have simply allowed breathing space and time to get ones’ affairs in order.
People are happy to accept a country’s paper for many reasons usually starting with a powerful military, large economy, stuff you can use, eat and other similar issues.
The USA has the large economy and military. The UK has the world financial center (London..for now), Australia and NZ have commodities, the Swiss have everyone’s money (clean and dirty) and a brand for keeping it quiet and so on and so forth.
It’s clear that the Fiat experiment of the last 40 years in the US is coming to a close but it will be a very messy end and there is no way to predict what might happen or the financial flows that may accompany it. The idea that the $ is a one way sell is too simple. When the crunch comes repatriation will be the name of the game (as we saw last year) as investors take what they can get and bring it home.
Major deficit countries like NZ and Australia are very exposed in that regard. That’s why I have been urging for some time for us to pay down our overseas debt and then create a stable money supply of our own linked to what we have (energy, food etc). I’m not a big fan of gold……I do own some in a vault but really that’s just for fun….I think in our current environment we can be much smarter and design a currency that we actually can consume…..that is real. We cannot consume gold as many people have found out in times of war and famine.
The Egyptians had a nice system…but there are many ways too approach it.
Chances of the authorities looking at it? Zero.
But there are plenty of local currency systems springing up all around NZ. No doubt that Gold is going to be a rollercoaster ride from here…any price is possible but really i would ask who needs gold when you can build your own resilient communities trading energy/time/food backed money?
October 6th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Malcolm, on your website one of your articles talks about a person who does not intend to “save for retirement”, but you didn’t really go into details.. Are you planning to write more about this person?
October 6th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
try this for size
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-the-end-of-the-dollar-spells-the-rise-of-a-new-order-1798200.html
October 6th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
oooer missus the Aussies just raised their interest rates!
October 6th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Raf: the thing about gold is that it is universally recognized – and things did work pretty well under the classic gold standard. The real benefit is that it is a medium of exchange whose supply is independent of politicians and bankers. Thus, as a facilitator of monetary communication, it tends to ’speak’ honestly – and this is what we saw with the relative price stability of the Victorian era. This is always the problem with money – can it be relied upon? A simple system of barter fulfills this criteria because the transaction is always complete – you have a pig, I have a cow, we are happy to exchange! The problem comes when I accept some ‘token’ for my pig – because I wish to defer completion of the transaction to a later date. Within this I only accept the token because, presumably, I believe it will obtain me a ‘pig’s worth’ in six months or six years or sixty years time. Gold, historically, has done this – paper money has not!
You are right, in theory we don’t need gold but in practice we probably do. This is especially the case for countries like New Zealand that are rapidly moving to the point where debt can never be extinguished, because it is constantly compounding upon itself. One of my fears is that the ‘banksters’ – whilst ridiculing gold as Keyne’s ‘barbarous relic’ are quietly accumulating the stuff and, some time hence, settlement of debt will only be possible with the yellow metal. This would leave countries, and peoples, in conditions of permanent debt enslavement – indentured person-servants of a new world order.
Matt S: I remember the article and I mentioned it because it seemed such a contrarian position. We are so bombarded by people trying to persuade us to defer living – and pay into this plan or that that it seemed refreshingly alternative. Again, in a sense it mirrored my father’s experience. Pay for years into a ‘provident fund’ – find yourself redundant – but at least you have that nest egg. Lose a bit on unit trusts but lose the most because your purchasing power is destroyed. Strange, cos the bank deposit is still there – declaring itself to be a store of value. Only problem is all you can get with the money is stuff all. Within this I suspect there is a case for a more holistic approach to retirement saving. Maybe, in the future, a decent vegetable garden and glasshouse will be as valuable as a modest share portfolio? I do think our retirement obsession needs addressing because it is leading people to do things that increasingly defer living into some ‘never never land’. A bit like the donkey with the carrot dangling in front. You constantly aspire to a destination (because some financial planner insists you must get there) but it never gets any closer. Meanwhile, life has passed you by whilst you worry about what might happen financially decades hence.
October 6th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Malcolm
Sure I’m all for a stable money supply. But we are always going to settle in paper not physical gold. The gold will always be stored in a “banc” and paper receipts issued against it.
And we have seen countless times in history, from the Bank of England on inception to the US government during the Vietnam War that governments and bankers can easily misrepresent the amount of gold they actually hold. In fact even now no one really knows who has the gold or where it is…and as for paper ETF gold funds..good luck.
October 6th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
and QE continues. What car crash?
October 6th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Malcolm: Maybe that’s where Gen-Y have an advantage over us, they just live in the now and don’t worry about the future… something to think about I guess.
raf: Interesting link, but I have a theory that the US will vigorously defend its currency rather than see it decline, even if it has to sacrifice the market or go to war.. there has been a lot of MSM coverage about Iran recently …
October 6th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Roger…… Walter blooming heck…….. i claim no expertise in FX…….. I just have the burns is all. No mistake it’s fire they play with and sooner or later….BOOOoooom…..uh
.
October 6th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Raf: I suspect the potential could be found in digital gold monies with high levels of custodial control and audit. After all, at the moment, most of our transactions only involve an electronic transfer from one account to another. The only way to eliminate all ‘conterparty risk’ would be under a system of transaction by coin only. Could be tricky for anything out of town or substantial. Surely the issue is that no money system is perfect – but there are some less imperfect than others. For me, the gold standard (and it was only a partial standard) delivered an era of substantial peace and individual liberties in Europe with a dramatic growth of prosperity (from a low base). Compare with the fiat money twentieth century and its massive wars, relentless erosion of personal liberties, state intrusion, and debt enslavement.
October 6th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/the-demise-of-the-dollar-1798175.html#font-normal
“Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would henceforth be held in euros rather than dollars. Bankers remember, of course, what happened to the last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in euros rather than dollars. A few months after Saddam Hussein trumpeted his decision, the Americans and British invaded Iraq.”
Any WMD technology in Iran?
October 6th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Jacko: And what’s the betting that the U.S. and ‘whipping boy in chief’ Britain will be piously preaching about democracy and freedom – if they can borrow enough money to attack Iran. If you want a taste, hot of the press, of freedom British style read this. 1984 has arrived!
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6862398.ece
October 6th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Malcolm, dude, keep it down, NZ gubmint don’t need ideas, encouragement in this area. Whether they can borrow enough, on this occaision they don’t need to make up the WMD story, do they? Anyway if they do hesitate, others in that area won’t and then it’s buy calls for crude, and who cares what currency?
October 6th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Malcolm & Raf
This piece is worth reading: http://www.thedailybell.com/544/Larry-Parks-central-banks-fraud.html
The key take away for me is that we should scrap legal tender laws – they are morally odious and economically senseless
Raf: the one thing you can’t really do with the alternative currencies you note is save them, which you can do with gold (and silver). Plus there is couterparty risk. I agree with you re staying away from ETFs, and am convinced there is no gold in Fort Knox (I believe they even leased out the German’s gold!)
regarding trading/settlement in gold, there are a number of digital gold currencies in place or development – this site is worth exploring: http://www.dgcmagazine.com/blog/
October 6th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Thing to remember about Iran is that, unless I am much mistaken, they never sought Islam. Rather, it was imposed on them by conquest. I’ve met a number of Iranians over the years and they have always been very friendly and well educated. Personally, I suspect the real target is Russia – particularly if you take time to research the activities of NATO on their Eastern flank.
Funny thing all this nuclear business, because the U.S. is developing a non-proliferative nuclear technology based on Thorium. Potential of this has been known about for years with India (with its huge Thorium reserves) a potential energy giant. Although the development of this technology is going on privately you would have thought the U.S. & U.K. governments would look to pursue possibilities with Iran. Maybe they are but one senses the usual excuse for a fight. Crazy thing is we Poms could be enjoying a great retirement from world affairs, safely protected by that great big moat called the English Channel. Instead, we are constantly encouraged to find new enemies and now to spy on each other. As Enoch Powell once said: “those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad”. Makes me wonder why anyone would ever want to buy Pound Sterling. After all, if the country is constantly at risk from attack, terrorism, and so many criminals that it requires 20% of the entire world’s CCTV cameras, it does not look like a good bet. I mean, at any moment your Pounds could be incinerated by WMD. Funny then, how so many people want to move there – don’t they know what danger they are in?
October 6th, 2009 at 7:31 pm
@Lara: don’t go buying in Greenwich on the strength of the Olympics. Interesting piece that reflects the awful state of the UK economy. http://nz.sports.yahoo.com/news/article/-/6146735/venues-continue-worry-london-organisers
October 7th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Just an other arty impression on an other day:
There is some turbulent on the flower market. All of a sudden overnight people want yellow flowers – hmm “Solid Gold Flowers”.
.. and it seems all the pots with the colourful flower arrangements are running out of water.
..and most of the flowers, especially in some bigger pots are starting to hang their heads.
The Flower Market is losing customers and one cannot afford to buy expensive “Solid Gold Flowers”. What next ?
Yes – print more water.
Roger your turn now -> ?
January 16th, 2010 at 6:56 pm
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