And I mean turned on its head from top to bottom: what was once up is now down, what was once right is now left and for many what was once ‘a fact’ is now ‘fake news’. Furthermore, it will carry on for some years yet before the world returns to a period of comparative stability and calm. The most recent development [and this occurred just
two nights ago, and after I first began writing this post] is Donny Trump bombing parts of Caracas and having a hit-squad ‘extract’ Venezuela’s president.
Folk who read history will perhaps not be quite as surprised as most by this series of global developments as some might be: they know that nothing, but nothing is certain in this world except, of course, death.
Throughout history such upheavals, in fact, occur regularly: from the point of view of an ordinary Jill and Joe celebrating the the New Year on January 1, 1914, they will have had no inkling of the cataclysm that was to come just eight months later and ending four years later in what a middle-brow historian composing a piece for one of the weekend paper supplements might call ‘the new world order’.
World War I was – again the line our middle-brow historian might use – ‘a watershed’, but there have been any number of such watersheds over the millennia, many of which we might now in the smug ol’ West be unware.
For example, anyone a tad surprised by the latent hostility of China and its leaders to the West should understand that country, with a proud history going back several millennia was utterly humiliated in the 19th century, not least by Britain when in order to ‘create a market’ cynically set about getting more or less all of China hooked on opium.
The lack of any certainties in life is something we are all obliged to learn sooner or later – some soon learn it sooner, others later. That lesson might well upset us when we finally realise – and the wise accept – that truth of the lack of innate stability and certainty in this world.
As toddler we will be upset when we realise and accept that, for example, Santa doesn’t exist, a little later in life that Mum and Dad – though it’s usually Mum – can’t put everything right as we once believed they could and would.
Then there’s that horrible moment when we develop our serious first crush – and chose to call it ‘being in love’ – but discover that inexplicably the object of our ardour simply does not feel the same as about us. That is when – I should imagine most of us – start to write truly dreadful verse (and chose to call it ‘poetry’).
These are trivial examples, of course, but those certainties are as unavoidable as sprouting our first pubic hairs. Were I writing for the Sunday Times or the Observer – if you live elsewhere in the world, please substitute the name of the middle-class, middle-brow Sunday paper of your choice on which you rely for your opinions – I would describe them and the other such shocks of ‘growing up’ as ‘rites of passage’.
But thank the Lord I’m not writing for one of our ‘serious broadsheets’ because as I’m writing a post for this ‘ere blog it allows me to show off a little less and still hope to be cut a dash.
If you live in Sudan, Ethiopia, parts of Nigeria, Gaza, Southern Ukraine, Myanmar, the Congo, in one of the less salubrious parts of the United States (of which in that fabled land of milk and honey there are rather more than the American national myths care to acknowledge), in Russia or in one of the many, many other global spots where life is not exactly a bowl of cherries, your certainties might be considerably harsher.
So you will have quite enough on your plate than to take time off to read my witterings, and your troubles will be a great deal more pressing than to cope with the distress discovering that Santa doesn’t exist – and what might that say about the Tooth Fairy? No, surely not, not the Tooth Fairy!
. . .
The problem is that all of us, including me, still can’t let go of some central beliefs, however much we like to think we can. So, de facto, do believe there are certainties, to the point that in the still comparatively safe old Western world, we are certain that in the long run ‘it’ll all work out – there might be a hiccup or two, but don’t fret!’
That is rubbish, of course, quite apart from how ‘long’ the ‘long run’ is. I wonder how certain German Jews were in 1933 that the danger had passed when at the November general election the number voting for the NSDAP had declined by just over 2 million compared to three months earlier, from 13,745,800 on July 31 to 11,737,000 on November 6.
Phew, they might have thought, rather too well aware of the murderous anti-semitism of rather too many National Socialist sympathisers, who finally got to give officially sanctioned expression for their hatred on the Kristallnacht.
What will then have been certain to them that they had to get the hell out of Germany and Austria if they wanted to stay alive, though of course, that was not easy all. The few who had already sold up and tried to do so fell victim to the greed of their fellow Germans, many friends and neighbours who knew of the desperation of the Jewish sellers and acquired many a valuable business at a snip.
So I wonder how certain Germany’s Jews were even in 1933 that they would still be alive and as free as their fellow Germans in 1938? Completely, I should think – did any ever think they might be murdered? Of course they didn’t.
In just five years, hundreds of thousands of Germany’s half a million Jews who had not had the foresight to sell up move abroad found themselves banged up in Oranienburg, Esterwegen or Dachau, along with any number of homosexuals.
As I see it and as I fear for the worst in 2026, the world is again to find out just how fast it can be turned on its head, and for that America’s Cretin-in-Chief, Donald J. Trump, can’t be blamed.
Certainly – no word play at all intended – his idiotic behaviour is perhaps accelerating and exacerbating the coming change, but the growing troubles which will hit the world in 2026 can’t all be laid at his door however much I’d like to do so. Most of it has been long brewing.
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but in a sense ‘history’ does not happen overnight and – every development is a development of previous ‘developments’ in a long chain of such developments since mankind first fucked up the world.
In theory, a clever historian (and one with way, way too much time on his hands) might convincingly be able to trace the collapse of the Soviet Union thirty-five years ago and thus the eventual rise of Vladimir Putin to the signing of the English Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215.
That is a ridiculous example, of course, chosen because it is ridiculous. Bit it is not quite as ridiculous as at first blush it might seem: we can quite clearly trace various legal and political principles back to the signing of the Magna Carta and King John being forced to sign to avoid growing trouble with his barons.
Note, being the stupid dick John Lackland was, he more or less then ignored the promises he had made when signing up within months, leading to further trouble. As it was, he died suddenly just sixteen months later, but I don’t doubt that had he not died, the barons would have kicked him out sooner or later.
To flesh out my point, although the Magna Carta did not directly mention the principle of habeas corpus – that if someone is arrested and held, he or she must be brought before a court and to demonstrate what they have done to warrant their detention. But that principle, a central tenet in all legal systems in non- authoritarian countries can easily be derived from what was set down in the charter.
A similar ‘development’ of the kind that pockmark history and are seen as a ‘cause’ of later developments might be, in no order at all, the dismissal of Otto von Bismarck in 1880 by Kaiser Wilhelm II, allowing that rather stupid,
tactless, arrogant and self-regarding man – a kind of German Donald Trump – to take over running Germany directly and make all the mistakes Bismarck would most certainly have avoided.
Bismarck was not necessarily a good egg, but he was canny, cynical, manipulative and intelligent, all attributes which Kaiser Bill wholly lacked, and we all know what a mess he made of Germany and Europe.
Historians outlining ‘developments’ leading to the crap which is about to unfold and hoping to establish a chain of cause and effect’ will certainly mention the mania of barmy investors of several centuries ago piling into Dutch black tulips.
It was simple: Holland’s black tulips suddenly became the ‘must-have’ of folk with rather more money than sense so as more bought them, the price rose.
In just five years, hundreds of thousands of Germany’s half a million Jews who had not had the foresight to sell up move abroad found themselves banged up in Oranienburg, Esterwegen or Dachau, along with any number of homosexuals.
. . .
As I see it and as I fear for the worst in 2026, the world is again to find out just how fast it can be turned on its head, and for that America’s Cretin-in-Chief, Donald J. Trump, can’t be blamed.
Certainly – no word play at all intended – his idiotic behaviour is perhaps accelerating and exacerbating the coming change, but the growing troubles which will hit the world in 2026 can’t all be laid at his door however much I’d like to do so. Most of it has been long brewing.
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but in a sense ‘history’ does not happen overnight and – every development is a development of previous ‘developments’ in a long chain of such developments since mankind first fucked up the world.
In theory, a clever historian (and one with way, way too much time on his hands) might convincingly be able to trace the collapse of the Soviet Union thirty-five years ago and thus the eventual rise of Vladimir Putin to the signing of the English Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215.
That is a ridiculous example, of course, chosen because it is ridiculous. Bit it is not quite as ridiculous as at first blush it might seem: we can quite clearly trace various legal and political principles back to the signing of the Magna Carta and King John being forced to sign to avoid growing trouble with his barons.
Note, being the stupid dick John Lackland was, he more or less then ignored the promises he had made when signing up within months, leading to further trouble. As it was, he died suddenly just sixteen months later, but I don’t doubt that had he not died, the barons would have kicked him out sooner or later.
To flesh out my point, although the Magna Carta did not directly mention the principle of habeas corpus – that if someone is arrested and held, he or she must be brought before a court and to demonstrate what they have done to warrant their detention. But that principle, a central tenet in all legal systems in non- authoritarian countries can easily be derived from what was set down in the charter.
A similar ‘development’ of the kind that pockmark history and are seen as a ‘cause’ of later developments might be, in no order at all, the dismissal of Otto von Bismarck in 1880 by Kaiser Wilhelm II, allowing that rather stupid,
Bismarck was not necessarily a good egg, but he was canny, cynical, manipulative and intelligent, all attributes which Kaiser Bill wholly lacked, and we all know what a mess he made of Germany and Europe.
. . .
Historians outlining ‘developments’ leading to the crap which is about to unfold and hoping to establish a chain of cause and effect’ will certainly mention the mania of barmy investors of several centuries ago piling into Dutch black tulips.
It was simple: Holland’s black tulips suddenly became the ‘must-have’ of folk with rather more money than sense so as more bought them, the price rose.
And as the price rose, greedy investors thought they might turn a pretty penny by investing in them, them selling down the line once the price had risen ever further.
As investors bought, the price just carried on going up and up, leading to more greedy investors deciding they could not lose out. They did lose out, of course, when the price did collapse (and I cannot establish why but suspect that like all fashions, black tulip stopped being ‘must-haves’ but ‘awfully last year!’).
As the price began to drop, the process went into reverse, with owners sitting on a stock of tulips (actually, probably buy contracts which they no longer wanted) selling up while they could, and so the price fell even more.
The same process was repeated a little later when stock in the South Sea Company caught the wind, started going up and everyone wanted it. They bought and bought until suddenly no one wanted it so they sold and sold and many were ruined. At root, of course, was naked greed, that desire of ‘something for nothing’.
A similar greed and neurotic fear of ‘losing out’ occurred in America in the mid-to-late 1920s when all stock
went up and up, then up even more as everything sold. Pretty much any stock they could lay their hands on was bought until of a sudden the market collapsed.
The same scenario played out at the turn of the millennium when ‘the information superhighway’ was sexy (and doesn’t that phase sound very, very silly just 30 years on?) and America experience the ‘dot com’ boom. That stock bubble also ended in bust and many losing a lot of money
Then came the 2008 ‘financial crash’. At the heart of this was not a stock price bubble, but still there was greed galore, and financiers and investors also lost the plot entirely. This consisted of banks, financial institutions and greedy jokers of every stripe turning a dollar by collecting a commission for every sale of debt they made. Come again, you ask?
Well, it had occurred so some wiseacre that there was a market in buying and selling debt, of which ordinary, boring old mortgages. Those who held the debt did not really want to hang on for months, years and tens of years to collect their moolah, so they simply sold that debt to someone else – a dollar in the hand was worth two in the bush.
Then, of course, the various ‘debts’ thus bought were also sold on, and folk began to sell them in ‘debt packages’, naturally collecting their commissions every time it was sold – the whole sodding point of the exercise.
All went well, house prices were shooting up, more and more folk want a mortgage and many folk got rich. Then is suddenly all went pear-shaped.
Why? Because house prices stopped shooting up, and many folk had taken on a mortgage could only settle if their house went up in price. When the equity they had in the house fell below tier buying price they were screwed and defaulted on their mortgage premiums. The market in debt ‘packages’ collapsed.
The central problem was simple (and global given the global nature of financial institutions): the various debts in the various ‘packages’ being sold were of several kinds – some were ‘top-quality’ debts in that the debtor was most certainly bound to settle when the time came.
But other debts were garbage – the borrower had gone way out on a limb, calculating that by the time they had to repay, they could sell up, pocket the profit and settle up. But now house prices were collapsing.
The central problem was that when all the sharks had bundled up and packaged the various debts they had bought to sell, no one knew which of the debts in the package were ‘good’ debts and which were garbage. So the trade stopped from on minute to the next as no one trusted anyone else to buy debt.
That brings us up-to-date when we have a new stock bubble: everyone and his god with a bit of spare cash is hoovering up stock in about just ten or twelve companies muddling in the AI industry. AI is the future, see, and AI will pay off.
The trouble is that to date none of these AI companies has turned a profit, let alone a worthwhile profit. So far it is not exactly junk stock, but it might any day be a whisker away from being awarded that honorific.
A side irony is that ostensibly Walls St is doing fine – ostensibly. Take a closer look, however, and all the stock price ‘gains’ are being made that small handful of tech companies at the centre of that bubble.
And because the ‘valuation’ of those companies is sky-high, it is skewing the actual state of health of the S&P 500 – the other 488/90 in the S&P are just bumping along in a pretty mediocre way, but ‘overall’ Wall St is doing fine.
This post is already at 2,500 and getting rather too long. So I shall call it Part I of a post which was intended to witter on about the tide going out on ‘liberal democracy’ and the global rise of the right.
It’s my fault because I kept side-tracking myself and then, getting back to writing it again committed my usual sin of adding bit here and there as I re-wrote it. So if you want to, come back in a few days / weeks for Part II.
As investors bought, the price just carried on going up and up, leading to more greedy investors deciding they could not lose out. They did lose out, of course, when the price did collapse (and I cannot establish why but suspect that like all fashions, black tulip stopped being ‘must-haves’ but ‘awfully last year!’).
As the price began to drop, the process went into reverse, with owners sitting on a stock of tulips (actually, probably buy contracts which they no longer wanted) selling up while they could, and so the price fell even more.
The same process was repeated a little later when stock in the South Sea Company caught the wind, started going up and everyone wanted it. They bought and bought until suddenly no one wanted it so they sold and sold and many were ruined. At root, of course, was naked greed, that desire of ‘something for nothing’.
A similar greed and neurotic fear of ‘losing out’ occurred in America in the mid-to-late 1920s when all stock
On Black Tuesday in October 1929, this was the safest job on Wall St |
went up and up, then up even more as everything sold. Pretty much any stock they could lay their hands on was bought until of a sudden the market collapsed.
The same scenario played out at the turn of the millennium when ‘the information superhighway’ was sexy (and doesn’t that phase sound very, very silly just 30 years on?) and America experience the ‘dot com’ boom. That stock bubble also ended in bust and many losing a lot of money
Then came the 2008 ‘financial crash’. At the heart of this was not a stock price bubble, but still there was greed galore, and financiers and investors also lost the plot entirely. This consisted of banks, financial institutions and greedy jokers of every stripe turning a dollar by collecting a commission for every sale of debt they made. Come again, you ask?
Well, it had occurred so some wiseacre that there was a market in buying and selling debt, of which ordinary, boring old mortgages. Those who held the debt did not really want to hang on for months, years and tens of years to collect their moolah, so they simply sold that debt to someone else – a dollar in the hand was worth two in the bush.
Then, of course, the various ‘debts’ thus bought were also sold on, and folk began to sell them in ‘debt packages’, naturally collecting their commissions every time it was sold – the whole sodding point of the exercise.
All went well, house prices were shooting up, more and more folk want a mortgage and many folk got rich. Then is suddenly all went pear-shaped.
Why? Because house prices stopped shooting up, and many folk had taken on a mortgage could only settle if their house went up in price. When the equity they had in the house fell below tier buying price they were screwed and defaulted on their mortgage premiums. The market in debt ‘packages’ collapsed.
The central problem was simple (and global given the global nature of financial institutions): the various debts in the various ‘packages’ being sold were of several kinds – some were ‘top-quality’ debts in that the debtor was most certainly bound to settle when the time came.
But other debts were garbage – the borrower had gone way out on a limb, calculating that by the time they had to repay, they could sell up, pocket the profit and settle up. But now house prices were collapsing.
The central problem was that when all the sharks had bundled up and packaged the various debts they had bought to sell, no one knew which of the debts in the package were ‘good’ debts and which were garbage. So the trade stopped from on minute to the next as no one trusted anyone else to buy debt.
. . .
That brings us up-to-date when we have a new stock bubble: everyone and his god with a bit of spare cash is hoovering up stock in about just ten or twelve companies muddling in the AI industry. AI is the future, see, and AI will pay off.
The trouble is that to date none of these AI companies has turned a profit, let alone a worthwhile profit. So far it is not exactly junk stock, but it might any day be a whisker away from being awarded that honorific.
A side irony is that ostensibly Walls St is doing fine – ostensibly. Take a closer look, however, and all the stock price ‘gains’ are being made that small handful of tech companies at the centre of that bubble.
And because the ‘valuation’ of those companies is sky-high, it is skewing the actual state of health of the S&P 500 – the other 488/90 in the S&P are just bumping along in a pretty mediocre way, but ‘overall’ Wall St is doing fine.
. . .
This post is already at 2,500 and getting rather too long. So I shall call it Part I of a post which was intended to witter on about the tide going out on ‘liberal democracy’ and the global rise of the right.
It’s my fault because I kept side-tracking myself and then, getting back to writing it again committed my usual sin of adding bit here and there as I re-wrote it. So if you want to, come back in a few days / weeks for Part II.
