IS THE BANK OF ENGLAND A ONE TRICK PONY?

 

Can someone explain how increasing interest rates helps to tackle inflation?

A Google search tells me: “Higher interest rates make it more expensive for people to borrow money and encourage people to save”, but how can you save more if your mortgage goes up and the price of goods and services is running away at an alarming rate?

The Bank of England’s website tells me: “If, people on the whole, spend less on goods and services, prices will tend to rise more slowly. That lowers the rate of inflation”.

To me as a layman, this makes no sense - if demand is reduced due to people having less disposable income, companies - who also have their own borrowing costs - will surely increase the price of their products to maintain their income stream. How can we stimulate the manufacturing, agricultural and retail economies if people are being deterred from consuming more?

Apart from borrowing costs, the current energy crisis is pushing up business production costs, which again are passed on to the consumer. A prime example - as borne out by a staggering rise in food inflation – might be dairy, where farmers are seeing their overheads to run their milking machines going through the roof.

The way that the Bank of England responds to all of this needs a serious overhaul, but they only seem to have one item in the tool box.  These are not normal times, and outmoded fixes simply won’t work.

We all know that the root cause of this crisis was sparked by a war leading to a massive shift in the energy market. And then Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng sunk the economy and the pound with their over-zealous ‘reforms’. I don’t even blame them - I blame the dinosaurs running our economic institutions to protect the interests of the elite.

At my most cynical, I’m sure there were machinations behind the scenes to deliberately make Truss and Kwarteng the fall guys to justify bleeding us dry in order to pay for the cost of Covid. The government had always previously cried poor to properly fund the NHS and, actually, pretty much everything else - so where was the money going to come from to regenerate the coffers?

Cue you and me.

They needed to capitalize on a demand that, unlike food and luxuries where people could tighten their belts, was essential to the populace - fuel and energy. I don’t have the answer as to how this feeds back to the government but, in my view, inflation will never come down while we’re being held to ransom by oil and energy producers and the politicians who are in their pockets.

Feel free to enlighten me or contribute in 'Comments' below.

The Day Human Rights Died ... in Plain Sight

I'd hoped never to find myself writing this - and there's lots more to the back story that doesn't need to be revisited - but the injustice meted out to Julian Assange on 10 December 2021 is so clearly politically motivated that we need to amplify the considerable noise we're already making in calling for his release. If we don't, a dangerous precedent will have been set to silence anyone who seeks to hold our governments to account.

Yesterday, the UK's High Court upheld the US's appeal to extradite Assange, effectively surrendering him to the very country whose misdeeds he exposed - the latest ruling in a series of travesties that suggest our legal system has bowed to the relentless pressure the US applied right from the off to get its man.  Had it been anyone else, would the government have spent millions surrounding the Ecuadorian embassy solely on the strength of dubious Swedish allegations?  The overkill had all the marks of bigger fish to fry.

We only need look at the players in Assange's legal journey to start asking questions about dirty deals, complicity, nepotism and compromise:

Keir STARMER - a human rights lawyer no less, and a colleague in the same chambers as Assange's defence team, was head of the Crown Prosecution Service at the time they implored Sweden not to get "cold feet" in pursuing Assange. Now Labour leader, politics was seemingly already at play - was he protecting Tony Blair, who dragged us into the very conflicts that led to Wikileaks publishing the 'Collateral Murder' video?

Chief Magistrate Lady Emma Louise ARBUTHNOT - initially presided over the extradition proceedings until a conflict of interest arose due to her husband's association with British military and intelligence services and further compromised by her son being employed by an anti-data leak company.

District Judge Vanessa BARAITSER - appointed as Arbuthnot's subordinate, and still overseen by her, she rose from obscurity and was soon considered to be taking her orders from above, given her barely disguised bias and hostility towards Assange, often appearing to be reading from pre-prepared statements. The proceedings under her tenure were fraught with obstacles, both physical and communicative, being placed in the way of those seeking to report on developments. More than once she seemed to be in the prosecution's pockets. In the event, she was dismissive of the actual legal basis of the US's indictments, focusing instead on Assange's mental health, thus opening the way for the US to get around this final hurdle by offering assurances about the conditions under which he would be held. It's worth noting that, despite acknowledging the detrimental effect of incarceration on Assange's mental state, she denied his release and sent him straight back to Belmarsh - the UK's supermax facility.

Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett - one of the two High Court appeal judges who yesterday overturned the January decision not to extradite Assange, he has for 40 years been a friend of Sir Alan Duncan who, in 2018 while Minister of State for Europe and the Americas, described Assange as a "miserable little worm" and didn't hide his glee when Assange was eventually expelled, some say illegally, from the Ecuadorian embassy. Intriguingly, in August this year he and Robert Buckland QC advised the Queen in appointing Vanessa Baraitser as a Circuit Judge - reward for a 'job well done'?

Of course, these are only a few factors in Assange's persecution. The US has been involved in all sorts of deals behind the scenes, including granting Ecuador an IMF loan in exchange for withdrawing his asylum, but this is about the transparent abuse of power over a legal system that used to set the standard for the rest of the world.

Yesterday's ruling was an affront on human rights, demonstrating that the US is trying to dampen scrutiny way beyond its domestic reach.

And all this on International Human Rights Day, upheld by Amnesty International and only days after US Secretary Antony Blinken announced, "Media freedom plays an indispensable role in informing the public, holding governments accountable, and telling stories that otherwise would not be told. The U.S. will continue to stand up for the brave and necessary work of journalists around the world."

There are other players in this saga too, both political and institutional - here's my extended Hall of Shame:

HP Pavilion Laptop Review - Noisy Fan and Indifferent Support

In March 2018 we bought what would be our third HP Pavilion laptop from Currys PC World, despite the fact that the previous one, purchased only three years prior, was already developing hard drive problems.

Within only a few weeks it started making a significant whirring noise, which at first we couldn't decide was coming from the hard drive or the fan. Here's the sound, for your delectation:

We took it back to Currys PC World who told us it was too late to exchange and that it would have to go back to the manufacturer for over a week (if we were lucky). My wife's a writer and, as she'd already begun her next novel and also needed to keep engaged with her significant social media base, couldn't afford to be without what was essentially the means to earn her livelihood.

We decided to put up with the noise for the time being, which subesquently became much louder and even more distracting for writing. There followed a hugely frustrating period of trying to find contact numbers for the right people, having conversations about 'fit for purpose' regarding our consumer rights and a complete failure on HP's part to escalate our concerns.

HP Twitter 'Support' (and I use the term loosely) referred us to their regional team, who got in touch to say they didn't provide email support and to call the technical helpdesk or chat support. When I went back to the Twitter team to say that path had got us nowhere, I was told they'd take it up with the regional office again, who should respond within 4 days. When they didn't, there was more back and forth with numerous cut'n'paste repsonses and three more lots of four days waiting, with no contact.

At this point I insisted on talking to someone in Customer Relations but was instead contacted by the technical team, who told me I couldn't talk to CR because they were already aware and had delegated back to them to make the call - only to repeat that we would be without a laptop during repair. Back to the Twitter team who said they couldn't override the decision and to continue to 'work with' our local support team.

I then received a call from the UK and Ireland office, who emailed me for more info and said they looked forward to a reply, which I sent (copying Dion Weisler, HP's CEO) - only to receive a message that the mailbox was unmonitored! Unsurprisingly, nothing from the CEO either. Over four months had passed at this point.

Both my wife and I were by then so incensed with the lack of ownership of the problem that we began venting our dissatisfaction on open Twitter and taking to forums, where we discovered that many people were experiencing the same issue - just Google 'HP fan noise' and it's now a widely recognised design fault, which HP have always denied. We've since exacted some revenge by warning people off buying HP Pavilions. You know what they say: "If someone has a good experience, they might tell a few people - but if they have a bad one, they'll tell everyone". 

Eventually we just bit the bullet until I decided to take a peek inside the laptop for myself, where I discovered it was the vibration against the mounting of the fan that caused the noise - which would stop when you held the working fan in your hand. No attempt to buffer it with rubber or padded tape resolved it.

So there we are. Apart from never buying an HP product again (and we've also had printers), all we can hope for is that we might inflict some pain back on HP by discouraging others from buying their laptops.

AVOID!

Update 11 Dec '20: HP got in touch from their France HQ but, while I got lots of 'Thanks for feedback', 'We'll learn from this' and 'there was clearly miscommunication in the early stages' they did or said nothing by way of amends. In fact they batted the blame back on Currys PC World for not fulfilling their obligations by looking at the laptop instore, which contradicted another part of the conversation where they said it was still on one year warranty to the 3rd party retailer at the time, and also explains why Currys may not have wanted to invalidate that warranty by opening it up. HP did apologise though, even acknowledging we were 'loyal' customers, completely missing the point that they've alienated us.

Your 'Man on the Ground' in London

Q: What do you do if you have important business to conduct in London and can't be there in person?

Q: Who could you trust to represent you without compromising confidentiality?

A: Me

Let me be your stand-in.  Visit Your London Proxy.

Will YOU Be Silenced?

A lot has been written about Julian Assange, so I’m not going into his back story - we've got Google for that.

Suffice it to say, he's either loved or loathed.

But the thing I feel passionately about - and which should unite people on all sides of the debates, political, legal or otherwise - is that he’s being deprived of liberties the rest of us are free to enjoy every day.

We live in an age where social media is fast overtaking main stream media ('MSM') as the ‘Go To’ place to get a sense of the world. It not only connects us to friends and family, wherever they may be, but also gives us a voice to express our thoughts on matters we feel strongly about - and even influence the outcomes.

And being electronic, the Powers That Be can silence anyone almost at the flick of a switch.

Which is exactly what they’ve done to Julian - a prominent spokesperson in these turbulent times. Whether you agree with his views or not, he provides an important balance to help shape your own opinions while we're all trying to distinguish between what is or isn't fake news.

And, if it can happen to him - and you don’t speak up to defend what should be everyone’s right to be heard - then we’ll all sleepwalk into an Orwellian nightmare.

This should matter to you.

Will YOU be silenced?