“Gold is money. Everything else is credit.” - J.P Morgan (1912)

What’s going to happen to house prices over the next two years? Most people think they'll collapse. They might - but I don't think they will.

Why? Well, let’s start with looking at where money itself comes from, and the money that goes into housing in particular. Despite what some think, it’s not mostly printed by the Bank of England: in fact, banks notes are a tiny percentage of our money supply. The vast majority of money in our economy - well over 90% - is loaned into existence: in other words, it starts off as credit, being extended by a bank to a borrower, created out of thin air by the bank on a computer screen.

Now, imagine you’re a banker. Think of it! The money! The power! The sheer sexiness of staring at excel spreadsheets all day in a very well-cut suit….. mmmmmm…… crumbs I miss being a banker. Anyway: now imagine you have to lend £250,000 pounds to meet your bonus criteria, and you have a choice - you can lend to: 

(a) a person to buy a house

or

(b) a new start-up business.

Option (a) takes all of ten minutes to do due diligence on - just look at a few pay slips, and the house valuation, then pop out for a long cocaine-themed lunch - and best of all, if it goes wrong, you can confiscate the property, or force them to sell it and get the money back that way. 

Winning!

Option (b) however, is quite tricky: how on earth are you to judge whether their business plan is going to work or not? I mean you’re a banker for Chrissakes, not someone who knows anything about commerce or money. And what if it goes wrong? You’ll just lose the £250,000 and have nothing to confiscate. Crumbs. I think I need a long lunch to recover from just thinking about it.

Accordingly, most bankers would far rather lend into the housing market than to productive businesses - and the statistics bear that out: 60% of new bank lending goes into residential housing, less than a third into new businesses.

Keep that in the back of your mind. 

Now imagine you’re a politician, with an election coming up - or maybe you've just won one and need to get things motoring. A politician! Think of it! The power! The erm, lack of legitimate sources of money. The sheer sexiness of….erm….legislating, erm….. Anyway: you need to get GDP expanding, as otherwise you’ll lose and have to go back to being a banker.

Now, expansion in GDP can be driven by three things: (i) productivity growth, (ii)  population increase, or (iii) debt.

Take the first driver of growth, productivity: this has been flat in the UK since 2005. Since that year, we have been a net energy importer, and combined with a current account deficit, this element of growth has effectively stalled. Unsurprisingly, as you can’t escape physics: the correlation between energy and economic productivity is approximately 0.99 - and if you need to import energy, you need to buy it with money you’ve earned in exports. Which we’re not. Hence we’re stagnating. Simple (FYI this, not the fact she liked being nasty to northerners, is why we started growing when Thatcher came to power: we happily at the time found large amounts of oil and gas in the North sea. Which is now running out…)

Ok, so option (i) is not going to help.

What about option (ii)? Well, importing more and more of the world every year to boost GDP is increasingly off the cards: people are starting to work out that per capita GDP is partly negatively correlated with this, and if continued, it might lead to a British Trump. Or a second one, depending on your viewpoint.

So this leaves you option (iii): debt. Lots more of it. Let’s pump more into the stagnant corpse of the British economy so it makes a “wheeeee” sound as it leaks out, which in the short term voters will mistake for actual, real, growth, not just debt-fulled GDP expansion. This is basically all you have left at this stage.

Combine this with a recent collapse in money supply after the unprecedented interest rate hikes: the one thing that a government fears, other than scary monsters, is deflation - as given the unprecedented debt levels we have as a country, this could easily spiral into outright default, which is unthinkable. Hey presto, you have the perfect rationale for the government to initiate a final, gratuitous debt-binge, before the whole thing inevitably collapses, like a banker on cocai….(ok, might stop that metaphor before you get the wrong impression of my former life in banking).

So, as a politician, how are you going to do this, and get the debt pumps flowing so all those lovely votes will flow after them? Well, by leaning on banks to lend. And where will this debt go? Well ultimately obviously into lunch-expense accounts for bankers, but first…into housing.

There could be a major geo-political event that means this doesn’t happen - this process is not inevitable. Xi Jinping might fancy an extended summer holiday in Taiwan (and take the People’s Liberation Army with him as a special treat - good beaches apparently). The Houthis might decide to invade Wales. New Zealand might invade Australia. Or the bubble may pop through subconscious political hari-kari. This argument does suppose that politicians have some capacity for rational thought left, which is not a given. Who knows.

House prices will go down eventually. Our fiat current currency system is going to collapse - it’s simple mathematics. But, what’s my short-term base case - ie what is probably going to happen to house prices in the next two years? Well, they'll probably go up.

And why? See above.

Boom Boom Boom Boom

Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom,

Boom, Boom, Boom,

Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom,

Boom, Boom, Boom.

The German Guns, by Private Baldrick

The above poem was, of course, recited by Baldrick in the seminal television series Blackadder Goes Forth - you might remember that Baldrick was notably surprised when Captain Blackadder guessed the final line. 

Captain Blackadder's comment on it could also probably be applied to the current government's run in office: "it started badly, tailed off a little in the middle and the less said about the end the better — but apart from that it was excellent." 

Anyway, why have I started this increasingly sporadic blogpost with it, apart from the opportunity for an early cheap dig? Well, back to that in a second.

Readers of this increasingly sporadic blog (and there could be as many as three in Northern Europe alone) will know that I am somewhat of a - let's face it - tinfoil hat wearing doom-monger. And with some justification, I feel - we are clearly not being governed by people who are entirely sane, and our fiat monetary system is, by its nature, not sustainable. 

Take the talk around inflation recently, as a random example of their tenuous grip on reality: our elites are firmly of the opinion now - and this has become a 'sophisticated' and grown-up thing to say - that wage growth is a bad thing for the country, and we need a recession to reign in inflation.

Apart from the fact that, in no sane system, should people on average earning more be a bad thing - it's also complete nonsense, if you think about it for more than about two minutes. The UK's Brahmin caste that run everything think that lower wages and a recession are good for reducing inflation, as they think that people earning less on average means prices dropping: take a factory with ten employees - one worker gets fired, now nine people chase the same amount of goods instead of ten, prices go down, job done.

Except - think about it - now only nine people are producing goods, so the supply of goods also drops in line with the drop in workers. Same amount of goods, same amount of wages to be spent = no drop in inflation. But one less employed worker.

Obvious. Inflation is a monetary phenomenon (ie related to money printing).

The news now is pretty bleak, I think we'd all agree. So, given the above...

...we're going to have a panic and everything - including house prices - is going to collapse now, right?

I actually think, erm, no - and not only because when you're a doom-mongering loon it's a bit unnerving when more and more people start agreeing with you, as it makes us feel uncomfortable and we change our minds. It's not this - don't panic - I still think our monetary system will collapse in the end - all fiat currency systems tried so far have, and we'll have to boil stones for soup in due course.

It's just that, with a now falling money supply as banks crush credit in a panic, and with massive, unprecedented debt levels and huge fiscal problems all over the place - I think we are now primed for some further money creation by government. The one thing indebted governments fear is deflation (as this increases the real size of their debt, and they potentially might not be able to print their way out of the death spiral) - and if this looks like it might even potentially happen, they'll open the money spigot. 

This will, I'd wager, lead to a short sugar boom as this money starts to hit the economy - maybe for two or three years - what is called by Austrian economists a "crack-up boom". Labour could well contribute to this.

Hence the poem.

Based on things like, say, the end of the current Kondratiev wave and the law of econonic rents (won't discuss this here, but they're spot on) indicating that there are probably two to three more years to go in the current real estate cycle, I'd say 2026 is a good bet for a crash. A bigee. A whooper. Schwerer Gustav-sized.

At that stage I might write another post - except it will actually be about the German guns.

Boom Boom Boom Boom.

Il y a une Couille dans le Potage

 

The title of the blog post comes from a French phrase I am fond of - it means: “there is a testicle in the soup”. This is I think a fairly accurate description of our economy - or there are at least testicles in charge of it. Ok, that’s the last time I’ll mention testicles. I think.

Anyway, where are we? Well, not that anyone remembers more than about 24hrs back these days, but everyone – and I mean, pretty much everyone – told you a year ago that inflation would now be at about 3% - 4% in the UK (everyone that is apart from me). But it’s still not far off 10%. In fairness, M2 money supply is, it appears, beginning to contract, so according to the Equation of Exchange*, inflation could now drop a bit.

But food inflation is 20% - and, perhaps most importantly, wage inflation is now 7%. Fascinatingly, junior doctors are asking for 35%, which could start a bit of a precedent. This is why I think the most important question at the moment is still – what will happen to inflation in the UK by the end of year?

I still can’t get round the fact that in April 2020 the UK became the first Western economy in history to directly finance the deficit using QE-like measures – ie print money for government spending. This is, quite exactly, what economic-guru Mugabe did (which, predictably, ended in hyperinflation). We then spent huge amounts of money subsidising wages. 

Consequently, we are now so much in debt that, were we to stop all government spending tomorrow – literally cease all new activity – we would still, according to my ciggie packet calculations, face a bill of approximately £6,000 per person, per year, just to pay the interest on the public debt we already owe.

So we now have inflation, but can’t make real rates positive to control it, as most of our debt is indexed, and this would quickly bankrupt the country. Combined with that, two thirds of mortgage holders have yet to feel the impact of the recent period of the fastest rate rises in UK economic history, and the Bank of England – definitely run by testicles (sorry) – are still putting base rates up and up, as they can’t distinguish between us at the US.

And now, predictably, there is a threat of credit contracting, as banking models are caput – ie they are lending long at low rates, and short term rates are spiking: so their entire business model no longer works. There’s just one small teeny problem: our system cannot sustain itself in a credit deflating environment.

Just a brief segue to Turkey: I remember when I was still working as a happily rich and moral-free (glorious days) banker, the moment 1 Turkish lira came very close to equalling 1 USD: since then the Turkish money supply has exploded, and the lira has accordingly sunk and sunk – and it’s now not far off 20 to 1 USD (although I haven’t checked for a while). So the obvious questions is: well, why don’t they just stop printing money?

Well, they can’t. Their system will implode.

Back to the UK: we have printed all this money, and inflation is now very high – so why don’t we just stop printing money?

Well, we, erm….well, we can’t.

And now we have a threat of credit contraction and a liquidity crisis: and that’s the thing about ending up with very high inflation – you need a very strong deflationary risk first, before the government and fiscal authorities panic and step in, to stop the system falling over: and once again provide massive monetary stimulus. Which will create the very high inflation - which is, inevitably, coming down the road at us.

This is only slightly complicated by the fact that CPI, the petard by which Sunak is in the process of being self-hoisted by, is produced by the government – ie the government has set itself a target to lose weight – but it also controls the scales. A bit like me going to Weightwatchers, and be able to say I have lost 2kg, each week, as I’m the only one who has access to the scales.

By the way, I lost 2kg this week. And also the week before. Hurrah! The only problem is, at some point people will notice I am just getting fat.

Oh testicles.

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* "The equation of exchange shows that the money supply M times its velocity V equals nominal GDP. Velocity is the number of times the money supply is spent to obtain the goods and services that make up GDP during a particular time period."

Escape the Chains of Humanity And Let Madness Be Your Guide

One of the big questions this year, I think, will be what happens to inflation. I think it might dip in the face of credit destruction by banks, but watching it in the medium term will be fascinating.

Just a quick recap: the rate of inflation was rising, and we were told it was ‘transitory’ and would stop rising soon. Then it kept rising. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, and, a long time after it started rising, we were told that is started rising because of the invasion.

Everyone nodded, and now that’s the accepted original cause, even if the cause of what happened, happened after what happened. It all makes perfect sense. Shhh now, shhh.....there there...

The magnitude of its importance however is reflected in the fact it was one of the main points covered by Sunak today in his big speech. All in all, I thought it was quite an interesting speech by Sunak; in case you missed it – he basically set out the Government’s priorities.

It was quite interesting in the sense that he gave a speech, and it has been thoughtfully considered, and everyone is discussing the pros and cons etc, but no one is going “WHAT THE HELL! WHAT IS THIS? THIS IS MAD! WHAT HAS HAPPENED? ARGH!”.

Why should this have been the normal rational response, in a normal, rational world? Why is the reaction that has occurred proof that all of our elite are completely insane?

Well, its quite straightforward. The position of the government now is:

1.      The Bank of England is in charge of controlling inflation, and has an inflation target of 2%.

2.      The Government now also has an inflation target, but this is 5%.

3.      Inflation is also, according to the government (and the Bank of England) largely down to factors out of Bank of England or Government control.

All makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? It does if you learn to hide from the cold, harsh wind of reality…

This is like me on New Year’s day, possibly still quite drunk from the night before, saying:

“Right! I’m too fat. I have a plan. Weight loss is outsourced to a third party, and it’s their responsibility for making my weight loss plan. So, I will also set my own, different weight loss plan. Oh, and also, whether I lose weight doesn’t matter, as whether or not I lose weight is down to factors that are beyond my control.”

And everyone goes: oohh clever.

I suppose, if you were trying to insert some rationality into analysis, you could also say that it’s quite interesting that he listed various priorities - “the People’s Priorities” (or the Priorities of People's Hearts maybe, I wasn't really listening at that point) but mentioned nothing – NOTHING – in his priority list about housing.

From a certain section of the commentarial (any journalist under 40 who can't afford a house, basically), there comes the constant cry: build more houses! But now, interestingly, the average cost of building a new house is slightly above the average cost of a house, nationally, depending on your data source. So it becomes even more paradoxical if you think this is the only answer: the policy would be to set another target the Government won't control, and to ask house building companies to solve the problem by being in charge of building houses, at a loss on each house they build, and also to reduce the price of their monopoly product overall, but with no incentive to. Hence possibly why he ignored the topic completely. He probably thought: "yah know what? There's enough madness already for one day. Just right."

I would write more about the rising cost of construction now, but I mean, what’s the point? It’s 2023. It’s time to let go. Nothing is real now, the last glimmers of sanity have been extinguished in the rain of the first week of January.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: it's time to sit back, have another biscuit, wave good bye to your loved ones, and set sail on the sea of madness.

Happy sailing.

Lost in the Arctic

 

I haven’t written a blog post for a while. This is mainly as I am slightly alarmed that my not-entirely-optimistic take on the path we’re taking as a country (everything is going to fall apart) has gone mainstream, and the one thing a tinfoil-hat wearing loon finds more disturbing than anything else is when people start agreeing with him. I have written frequently that currency debasement leads to high inflation, instability and ultimately social unrest…and, well, I suppose I could just say that, now, we are living in interesting times, are we not…

There was a story I was fascinated by as a kid: about a Victorian voyage of exploration through the Arctic where a ship got stick in the ice over winter: as the months of darkness went by, it transpired that the officers’ food supply was contaminated, and they went slowly mad as a result. The crew’s food was not affected: but although sane, the crew had to obey the increasingly bizarre commandments of their officers, or risk death for disobedience.

I’m beginning to see how the crew must have felt. I’d previously thought we were run by idiots: I am beginning to wonder if the elites across the west – not just the politicians, but the media, commentariat, top journalists  etc – are  in fact, actually, slightly mad too. Stuck staring at their twitter feeds, the real world adjacent increasingly alien to them, I wonder if their brains are going a bit, well…off.

Take energy: in the previous nine years, we have closed down most of our remaining thermal power stations (twelve in total) and shut down nuclear capacity, and only built as a replacement some intermittent renewables, and as a stop gap are relying on gas. We then, effectively, decided to turn off access to that gas continent-wide, by sanctioning Russia. And yet, the fact that energy prices are going wild, and we face blackouts, is - according to our elites, and I am told by Radio 4 time and again - somehow…erm, well unexpected?

In what world is there no sane person who didn’t think this would happen?

We’re constantly told “no one could have predicted this…” What? How is this not obvious? If you shut down reliable power you have…no reliable power. Platitudes, meet physics. Physics, meet platitudes.

Or, take inflation: inflation took hold prior to the Ukraine invasion (although this is now ignored, obviously). It took hold as it is directly as a result of unrestricted, massive, money printing, which we undertook when we idiotically shut the country down for COVID: and inflation is now being forced ever higher by the Wiemerisation of the energy markets. And yet, we are told constantly – no one could have predicted this…

What? It’s eminently f****g obvious.

The total amount of money that changes hands in an economy, equals the total money value of goods that change hands, ie nominal spending equals nominal income. In economics, this is called the Equation of Exchange. Basically, if you increase money printing, the price of stuff goes up. It’s not the only thing that’s important – you also need velocity to increase – as if money is printed and is kept in someone’s pocket, then clearly prices are unchanged. But at some point, people realise money is losing value, the currency is being debased, and bring forward purchases, which in turn stimulates inflation further. And people are starting to realise that 40% of all money printed in the west – ever – has been printed in the last two years. And inflation is rising, and rising, and rising...

And only today Germany has said that, to fight inflation, they are going to print another £65 billion euros. No doubt Truss is shortly going to announce that we’ll print another £100 billion or so, again to, ultimately, “fight inflation”.

These people are mad.

Oh, and what happened to the crew, you might ask? Well, they all died. Cold, starving and driven to death by insane sadists with no grip on reality.

I’m sure we’ll be fine though.

 

 

Magic Spray

 If you played schoolboy rugby in the 1990s, you’ll be familiar with the substance known as “Magic Spray”. I’m not sure what exactly was in it, all I know is that it was made illegal at some point due to the damage it was doing to public schoolboys up and down the land (maybe Labour think this is a good thing and will promise to make it legal again at the next election).

In short: it was sprayed from a weird looking bottle after a painful contact, and it sort of froze the injured body part – broken leg, snapped clavicle etc – and within seconds, the pain had gone and you could run around again. Clearly, it wouldn’t address the actual damage – and you’d find the next day you’d be in total agony, and have done far, far more damage than you would have otherwise – as you would’ve essentially still run around on a broken leg for 30 minutes the day before, just without pain.

This is sort of where we are with the UK economy. Furlough, and £400 billion of spending have kept everyone in suspended animation, with massive economic damage done, but no real pain felt as yet (and I don’t mean disrespect to those who have suffered individual economic downturns – I’m just talking generally). Rishi has jammed open the printing presses, sprayed the magic spray, and we’re temporarily up on our feet, pretending everything’s fine.

But it’s not fine. We are in enormous trouble – our economy has just had its biggest fall for centuries. There is a perhaps light at the end of the tunnel – but we’re about to find out whether this is in fact just an on-coming train, or the flash of light of a thermonuclear explosion.

I am in two minds about what will happen: either a fairly short-term economic stress event will transpire or, perhaps more likely, a continued sugar-boom for a year or two, before a reckoning of some sort, once the high wears off.

I think the evidence for the latter is quite compelling, as long as we have no more lockdowns (a big if): after all, it is important to note that there has been approx.. £170 billion in private savings built up during the last year, as those with decent fixed incomes haven’t been able to spend, and have hoarded cash instead. I know a few boomers who have bought new Porches recently, for example.

On the other hand, however, this group – the Pandemic Lockdown Winners - tend to be high up the income distribution, exactly the sort of people who tend to ultimately save, rather than splurge (except on Porches). Those further down the income scale, or those who haven’t done well, who have lost jobs or had their businesses closed down by the Stasi currently running the country – in fact, about half the UK – have often done very, very badly.

The amount of money pumped into the economy by governments has by any account been staggering. To take the US, on whom we all depend: the US government has spent $8 trillion in the last year. And the entire tax take of the US authorities over the same period? $3.5 trillion (for those who aren’t maths buffs: this is less).

And Biden has just passed a bill to spend a further $1.9 trillion, and is now proposing a further $3 trillion. This is all being done through central banks creating this money completely out of thin air – and thus without increasing the measly amount of money the government is actually collecting in taxes….is this sustainable in the long run? Well, that’s the question (spoiler: no, of course not, don’t be silly).

In 2009 the central banks such as the Fed told us that this unconventional stimulus was temporary. Twelve years on, they are pumping £100 billion into the economy every month.

Meanwhile, we’re told by central banks that any inflation is transitory, and all is well in the West.

But the US owes $31 trillion. Global economic indicators are not good. Just to take a random example: 30 year Greek government debt is currently cheaper than US debt – Greece being a country who’s own financial system is essentially based on imaginary Monopoly money - or as the Greeks call it: Monopolopolopoly money. (Ed: I am not removing this, this is a good joke.)

Given all the money being printed across the west, it’s hardly surprising stocks, house prices and hard assets generally are going up – as this is what most of the newly minted money is currently being pumped into. I finally made a correct prediction coming out of the first lockdown, after being so incorrect time and time again previously: as I finally fully understood that house prices are not a function of supply and demand, but a function of credit, which I think made me the only person - who didn’t think he was also Napoleon - to correctly predict that house prices would go up in the UK in 2020. Money printing = higher house prices, at least in the short term.

House prices may even have further to climb, in nominal terms at least.

It is however an iron law of economic history that societies that manipulate their money supplies eventually create uncontrollable inflation, which in turn leads to economic chaos, and political instability.

The questions is, how long can we run around on our broken leg before the magic spray wears off?

Quite a while, perhaps. But it’s still going to hurt eventually…

The Grown Ups Are Not Coming Back

 

I’m going to take you back in time briefly, to about 1990. I’m eight, sitting in a classroom (3A), and it’s 9am. About twenty of us sit still, in total silence, waiting for our class teacher – Mrs Heater – to come in and start the day after morning assembly.

Five minutes tick away, then ten…and still no teacher arrives. Then on the fifteen minute mark, almost on the dot – I was marking the time with my new Mickey Mouse watch – havoc lets rip: the first I know something is up is when a projectile whistles right by my ear. Then, rapidly, chaos ensues classroom-wide: desks are overturned and transformed into barricades, general shouting and screaming erupts and small bands of eight year olds launch themselves, berserker-like, at other eight year olds, armed with pens and supported by indirect rubber band artillery fire.

We were quite a repressed lot – this was a prep school – and we’d never been left unattended in a classroom before: several years’ worth of pent up chaos-demand was consequently unleashed, instantaneously.

I sat in the middle of the maelstrom, diligently going through my latest textbook and ignoring the chaos around me – then, Mrs Heater arrives back: the prep-school version of the military police are summoned (senior school prefects) – and we are locked down, man. Gulag time.

I was at that point suddenly hit by a terrifying thought: one day, all the grown-ups will be gone (I was in the "learning about mortality" stage), and we – my generation, the kids around me - will be in charge and… it’s going to be like this every day, isn’t it? It’ll be chaos. And no one will come back to restore order.

This is one of my strongest memories from school: and…well, it turns out, three decades later - I was f*****g right, wasn’t it? All the grown-ups have gone. No one in charge has the vaguest idea what they’re doing. I reckon we’re about one minute off hitting the 9:15am post-assembly time – and the maelstrom is about to hit.

To bring you back to the present: listening to Boris Johnson’s speech yesterday, I was hit by the same feeling: this chap has no clue what he’s doing, at all, has he? But it’s not just him: no one else has either. No one on the radio, or phoning in to the radio, probably no one even listening to the f*****g radio - no one at all has the faintest idea.

I’m not just talking about the totally, obviously, completely bananas topical things, like the 10pm curfew. Or people sitting in cars on their own wearing masks.* 

I don’t just mean those things: I mean, objectively insane things, things the government are saying, in actual public, apparently in earnest. For example, take Boris announcing yesterday that the government is introducing 5 per cent mortgage deposits for first-time buyers to transform “generation rent” into “generation buy”.

(Incidentally, ten years ago – almost to the day – the headline from the then PM’s speech was “we plan to turn Generation Rent into Generation Buy” – how’d that go, then, Dave? But I digress.)

There’s the fact that he said that, and the fact that, in recent months, all mortgages for buyers with a 5% deposit have *completely* evaporated: there are now NONE. The number of 90% LTV mortgages has also decreased from 800 or so to a handful…which are shortly, probably, to be withdrawn completely too.

And the fact that banks today have said, in response to this plan, in short: “no”.

They actually gave a longer, more detailed answer, which was:

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.”

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said today, when asked, that they have no plans on how this will work, no detail on the scheme and no idea on a timeframe on when it would, theoretically, launch.

So: the key-note of his speech, the man in charge of our country, was to announce exactly the opposite of what is actually happening.

He could have stood up and said: “my government are introducing more jelly into the UK” at the same time as actively destroying all UK-jelly, and no one would’ve blinked.

Having said that: giving him the benefit of the doubt, is there any evidence, at all - even shaky evidence, I’ll take that - that if subsidised 95% mortgages were widely introduced (despite the fact that they're not) that they would increase homeownership in any way, rather than just drive prices up higher and handing yet further profits to the monopoly housebuilders, and - ultimately - reduce home ownership? 

I refer you to the banks’ longer answer above.

So, I think I might give up on even listening to the radio, or the news, or trying to contain my fury at the insanity dribbling from the mouths of the berserker-mentality children supposedly in charge of this utter sh*tshow. This isn’t really a political point, by the way, I’m just singling out the person who’s meant to be in charge: we’re all now inhabitants of Golding’s Coral Island. 

It’s time to ignore them, focus on the textbook in front of me, and do my best to dodge the indirect rubber-band artillery fire.

We are where we are. It’s 9:14am. Chaos is coming.  

Mrs Heater isn’t coming back.

If I were you, I’d get your desk barricade ready.

 

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*Or quarantining entire populations of completely healthy people for the first time in history, completely destroying our economy and millions of people's lives in the process for no apparent benefit, with no empirical real-world evidence lockdowns actually reduce the spread of the virus and plenty to the contrary, and in any case, no appreciable risk posed by COVID to anyone remotely healthy under the age of 80...ok, ok, I know none of you agree with me on this - and to be fair, it is a completely unprecedented epidemic (if you ignore previous epidemics), so that's not my beef here. Even if the ONS have already shown, beyond any reasonable doubt, that more people have and will die as a result of the lockdown than would've died from COVID, which oddly received zero coverage, and Prof Ferguson predicted 85,000 people would die from COVID in Sweden and 6,000 did and in 2005 he predicted 200 million people would die from bird flu and 282 people did and yet we still take his predictions seriously and don't mind that we have destroyed the country's future because of them...and if you think this has all been completely rational and appropriate and the economy has nothing to do with people's lives and we must protect the NHS by locking down for three weeks and flatten the sombrero sorry I meant six months and then suddenly actually no we didn't mean that we meant extend ineffectual restrictions for another six fucking months and maybe forever until your business is completely destroyed and until the vaccine arrives which might take years and actually might not arrive at all or even work and we should definitely not lift these insane restrictions until a vaccine arrives, then whatever. That's just my opinion. You have yours, I have mine. And I am right.