Move Within Yoga
  • Welcome
  • Yoga
    • About
    • Stand-Up Paddleboard Yoga
    • Kid & Teen Yoga
    • Live Healthy Longer
    • Mindfulness
    • Private Yoga Classes
  • ArtYogaBaby
    • Solo Exhibit, July-Aug 2021
    • Iris G Series
    • Earthscapes
    • Gallery, 2016-2018
    • Stir It Up
    • A&A Blog
    • Media Musings
  • Blue Jeans Blog
    • Yoga in Blue Jeans Blog
  • Press
  • Videos

On The Wrong Side of Sterling This Time Around

6/30/2016

0 Comments

 
From the man who broke the Bank of England in 1992 and devalued pound sterling , George Soros is warning the UK will "suffer significantly" because of Brexit.

He bases this not on any evidence or facts that the real economy is slowing,  but because of sterling's historic 11% one-day decline against the dollar. Until last Friday, pound's prior record daily selloff was set by Soros himself and his $1 billion arms race against the Bank. I don't recall him worrying about how the UK would suffer back then, do you?

Also, Soros, of all people, should know that countries around the world are competing with each other on currencies -- not on who can boost the value of their currency the most, but who can make them as worthless as possible.

No doubt this is why UK stock markets, in part, have rallied since last Friday's 9% slide. A lower currency is inflationary and will make a country's goods and services more competitively priced in a world drowning in 'stuff.' In fact, the day after the Brexit results, London's FTSE 100 index was one of the top performers in Europe and Asia, closing up 3% on the week. So, no, Soros. Sorry if you were stuck on the wrong side of the sterling trade this time around, but Brexit has not "unleashed" a financial markets crisis. They might be volatile, but have been orderly and functional. Who are the ones spreading fear?







0 Comments

The Poster Boy for Globalization Has No Clothes

6/27/2016

0 Comments

 
How this man has any credibility left to write columns, carte-blanche, for "The New York Times", boggles. When are we going to acknowledge that our poster boy for globalization, Tony Blair, has no clothes? Even after the lies of weapons of mass destruction have been exposed, the media just can't seem to ween themselves from such authority figures, even as they continue to duck and dodge, twirling around the truth to present slanted agendas, or even when they get paid seven-figures from lobbyists, banks and other interests in clear conflict with the general welfare of people.

How ironic his June 24, 2016 op-ed contribution is titled "Brexit's Stunning Coup", while savaging Labour's Jeremy Corbyn and no doubt catalyzing en masse resignations from his ministers and MPs. New Labour, Old Labour, Post-Modern Labour. If it gets in the way of globalization, get out of the way.

The larger the purported crisis, the greater he can act elder statesman. Tony trots out: "The right attacks immigrants while the left rails at bankers, but the spirit of insurgency, the venting of anger at those in power and the addiction to simple, demagogic answers to complex problems are the same for both extremes. Underlying it all is a shared hostility to globalization."

Our poster boy is of course sensibly somewhere in the middle, neither at the right nor the left, and with no addictions. Please don't hate him for being one of the few with the depth to deal with "complex problems" - even if he contributed to those problems in the first place.

He identifies the hostility to globalization, but it's like it has nothing to do with him. The man's ability to compartmentalize is extraordinary, a case study for DSM edition six. He can't see himself or give an honest assessment of his own behavior. This is a man who has received untold millions from banks, hedge funds and defense companies.  His contributions to refugees, immigrants? The elites' answer to this "complex" problem has been to Put Them Over There. Out of Sight. We Want Them Here But Just Not In Our Neighborhoods. Such arrogance and hypocrisy is galling, and is exactly why the EU referendum was called in the first place. Here's a modest proposal for the "complexity" of immigration: let's set up refugee camps in Hampstead Heath and the Blairs' country pile.

Blair bemoans the fear tactics employed during the Brexit campaign, but then sharpens his own rhetoric on "the economic fallout." He confuses the real economy of goods and services, with the financial markets throughout. If you were one of the hedge funds or currency traders who bought pound sterling at 1.50 against the dollar during the early vote tallies, convinced that the electorate would vote Remain (and many investment analysts and economists thought just that), then maybe sterling's unprecedented 17-figure decline was catastrophic and I won't be surprised to hear about a few fund casualties. However, it's doubtful that the average person will be immediately affected in an apocalyptic way. Markets are doing what they do, pricing in the future. Like the humans they are made up of, they loathe uncertainty and when faced with it, become erratic and act temperamentally.

Also, we are talking about sterling. The UK never adopted the euro currency. It was Blair's own Chancellor Gordon Brown who retained the 1,200-year-old pound sterling as the UK's national currency. Even after the credit crisis and banking meltdown in 2008, when EU apparatchiks were dangling their euro as a beacon of yet more investment flow into the UK, London didn't budge. It was Blair's successor who imposed the "five economic tests" to make sure the UK was worthy of the young currency. What a great delay tactic and how comical in hindsight. Sterling is not just the world's oldest currency, but has consistently been the most sought after currency, and certainly buffered the UK during the Greek debt imbroglio. This is one aspect of the EU we haven't been a part of and so one less bureaucratic nightmare to negotiate. No messy disentanglement here, no pulling euros out of circulation or re-issuing pounds, no disruption to transactions in the real economy of goods and services. But you won't hear any of this from our poster boy, who "believed completely that Britain's future lay in Europe", not to mention his own.

(Note: "The New York Times" overnight removed the quote, cited in my blog above, in its online edition without a correction or editor's note. Times editors deleted Blair's point that hostility about globalization on both the right and left was the reason for "Brexit's Stunning Coup". Instead, he is now quoted as saying the right-far right-immigration issue was the reason. There is now absolutely no mention of the left-banks-hostility-globalization, as referred to in the quote below. It's so telling how the mainstream media, in particular the "paper of record", does wholesale rewrites and revisions after original publication for their online editions.)
0 Comments


    Musings on the Media Matrix
    Photo: A selection of all the free newspapers in London in an average week.

    Archives

    December 2019
    October 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    February 2015

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Copyright 2021 Move Within Yoga. All Rights Reserved.