Red Alert/red Alert

[Mega]

Re: Red Alert/red Alert

Ah,................An American relationship that works!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5xGe...eature=related
Mike

[Jim Nickerson]

Re: Red Alert/red Alert

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/09/01/cnecon101.xml

UK recession may last for over a year, says expert
By Edmund Conway, Economics Editor

Last Updated: 11:26pm BST 31/08/2008

Britain is now facing a severe recession which will last for a year or longer and a worse housing crash than in the early 1990s, according to a highly respected former Bank of England policymaker.

In comments which will intensify fears over the scale of the downturn facing the UK economy, Charles Goodhart - one of Britain's foremost economists - warns today that the economy will shrink for four successive quarters, perhaps more, as the effects of the credit crunch take hold.

Writing in today's Daily Telegraph, Professor Goodhart says that, by the third quarter of next year, "the UK is quite likely to have seen four quarters of declines. How bad could it get? The honest answer is that no one knows since credit crunches of the scale of the present one are very rare, and its combination with an energy and commodity price upsurge even more rare".

Sure am glad I am not a Brit facing a recesssion. They should all emigrate to the US where we do not have them, and when we do have them, the MSM doesn't write about them, so in our "collective reality," we don't have them.

[Jim Nickerson]

Re: Red Alert/red Alert

The £ is TOAST on MONDAY Morning!
Mike

Well, Mike, if there were an Olympic contest for prescience and you were a competitor, you would get a GOLD metal because you nailed it with your call.

Sterling tumbles to record low against the euro

By Rowena Mason Last Updated: 6:28pm BST 01/09/2008

Sterling slumped to its lowest level ever against the euro and fell against the dollar as a slew of new data underlined the weakening state of Britain's economy.

The pound ended the day almost two cents lower against the greenback after the latest survey from Hometrack showed that house prices fell for an 11th straight month in August.

Investors' willingness to hold buy sterling was also undermined after Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling said in an interview over the weekend that the economy is now in its worse state for 60 years.

[Jim Nickerson]

Re: Red Alert/red Alert

Below is another view of what some are labeling Darling's "blunder," which I take to mean if a politician were to put forth a truth to the public it is a blunder, but then Kaletsky questions the validity of Darling's views.




From The Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle4649026.ece

September 1, 2008

Crisis, what crisis? Alistair Darling’s just got his figures wrong
Anatole Kaletsky

When Alistair Darling said that Britain’s economic conditions were “arguably the worst they have been for 60 years”, the initial reaction from the Opposition and media was either to compliment the Chancellor for his “frankness” or to gloat about the way he had “let the cat out of the bag” and thereby embarrassed Gordon Brown.

This was understandable, because Mr Darling is indeed an unusually straightforward politician, respected and liked by journalists and politicians across the political spectrum. On closer inspection, the Chancellor’s reputation for frankness makes his political blunder worse, since it reveals a flaw more serious than deviousness: basic ignorance of economic facts and figures. This is a failing that the minister responsible for national finances can never live down.

Were there any interpretation of Mr Darling’s comments that tallied with either economic statistics or the realities of British life – or if the Treasury had rushed out a correction, explaining that he had been misquoted or hadn’t meant what he said – this episode might have been forgotten as just another stumble by an accident-prone Government. But sadly for Mr Darling, though luckily for the British economy, there is no way of massaging the facts and figures to make his statement even half-right.

The most obvious contrasts – today’s 5 per cent inflation and 5.4 per cent unemployment may feel uncomfortable, but these are just tiny ripples compared with the tidal waves of economic hardship – the 27 per cent inflation and 12 per cent unemployment – that hit Britain in the 1970s and 1980s.


A similar conclusion comes from almost any other economic indicator: gross domestic product, personal incomes, government finances, employment growth, repossessions. Only house prices are falling faster than ever before – because they were far higher when this downturn began. And despite all the headlines about a credit crunch, financial conditions are also relatively benign. Homeowners and estate agents may complain about a “mortgage crisis”, because banks charge over 6 per cent for a mortgage and require a 10 per cent deposit from first-time buyers, but in the 1970s and 1980s, mortgage rates repeatedly reached 15 per cent and borrowers typically had to save up deposits of 25 per cent or more.

Social and political conditions are now incomparably better than they were 30 years ago. This can be attested by anyone who recalls the three-day weeks and winters of discontent, the petrol rationing and power cuts, the dole queues and miners’ strikes, the credit squeezes and currency restrictions of those days. And other social indicators – child poverty, life expectancy, housing conditions, educational qualifications, pension levels, living standards relative to other countries – are almost all far better today than they were in the 1970s and 1980s, despite the understandable feeling that many of these conditions should be much better, considering the huge tax burdens successive governments have imposed.

What on earth, then, was Mr Darling talking about when he described the present economic crisis as the worst since 1948? The Treasury lamely suggested over the weekend that the Chancellor was not really referring to Britain, but to the world economy as a whole. This “clarification”, however, does not get Mr Darling off the hook. The US has not yet suffered a recession – much less the once in a lifetime depression predicted widely a few months ago – and only last Friday announced a stark upgrade in its GDP figures.

The European economy is slowing and it may well sink into a mild recession – but, this has not happened yet. Developing countries are still growing strongly and even the global banking system, despite all the hysteria, has so far suffered smaller losses in relation to its total capital than it did in the Third World debt crisis of the 1980s.

In short, it is literally impossible to tally Mr Darling’s comments with anything that has happened to the British and international economies so far. Could it be, however, that he meant to offer a forecast? Predictions are, by their nature, a matter of opinion, which means that Mr Darling’s comments, if they refer to the future, cannot be refuted by objective statistical evidence even though there is now no respectable economic model pointing to anything like the apocalyptic conditions Mr Darling described.

Suppose, then, that the Treasury decides to spin his comments not as a description of what has already happened but as a prediction that Britain will suffer its worst economic crisis since 1948 in the year or two ahead. If this was what Mr Darling meant, will anybody believe any economic forecast he presents in his next Budget if this is less than catastrophic?

And if Mr Darling does present a catastrophic forecast in a preelection Budget, what will this do to Gordon Brown’s chances of survival? These questions can yield only one answer: the next Budget will be presented by a new chancellor.

It's great that we don't have to worry about any of this shit of politicians even courting a notion of speaking a truth in America, where the sun always shines, and the children are all above average in intelligence.