Trainspotting.

We are colonized by bankers.

“The potential macro-economic benefits of easing the Zero Lower Bound constraint appear to be significant.”

- Bank of England Chief Economist Andy Haldane, November 2010

“Negative rates are probably the dumbest idea in the entire history of finance and we’ve just been living through it.”

- Financial Historian Edward Chancellor, September 2022

Are there any clawbacks on Andy Haldane?

What current Chief Economist of the Bank of England Huw Pill doesn’t say here is that the people in the UK are poorer largely because of the policies of the Bank of England.

Bank of England apparatchik Huw Pill reminds me of a scene from the 1996 movie, Trainspotting:

Tommy: Doesn't it make you proud to be Scottish?

Mark "Rent-boy" Renton: It's SHITE being Scottish! We're the lowest of the low. The scum of the f**king Earth! The most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilization.

Some hate the English. I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are COLONIZED by wankers. Can't even find a decent culture to be colonized BY. We're ruled by effete arseholes.

I’m not British, forgive the profanity - but I love the word Wanker. It’s very fitting and concise, like Putz.

Unelected, unaccountable central Bankers like Huw Pill now rule the world.

We are all colonized by wankers.

I used the word when appropriate.

“The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.”

Hannah Arendt, On Violence

A timely podcast from the great Grant Williams with Brendan Ballou, author of the upcoming book, Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America.

The plague of private-equity locusts in America was a frequent topic on my Twitter account (plus the tendency of their CEO’s to be buddies with Jeffrey Epstein.)

As you may know, Jerome Powell is a private-equity guy, which I wrote about in We need to talk about Jerome.

Ballou: Are there specific industries where private equity seems to be particularly enamored? And so there have been some headline industries that I think your listeners are probably familiar with, whether it’s nursing homes, physician staffing companies, and health care more broadly, prison services, single-family rental homes, and mobile homes housing generally. And I think one of the interesting discoveries of this project, and there are a lot of nuances to this, is that, in a lot of ways, many private equity firms target businesses, not ones that cater to the rich, but rather that ones that cater to the poor, which was an interesting discovery. And I think part of the reason is those are the industries where the firms are going to have a large ability to raise prices and potentially decrease quality care without consequence because the customers really don’t have an alternative.

Reminds me a bit of Elizabeth Warren’s 2010 FCIC testimony (before she went full identity-politics), detailed here: “a far more profitable model of lend widely, and in large amounts, and reap large short-term profits from people who have only a marginal capacity to repay.”

Jerome Powell, in 2022 at Jackson Hole, explaining to Lael Brainard and John Williams how the Carlyle Group was going to buy up these mountains, load them up with tons of unsustainable cheap debt, pay out massive dividend distributions to the partners, and then file for bankruptcy.

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This is interesting: Zimbabwe’s central bank to issue gold-backed digital currency

We may have to invade Zimbabwe soon to prevent this. Bring ‘em some freedom and democracy.