Unhappy old Year….Happy New Year?

Welcome formally to the new-look Slog going forward, the option to go backwards not being available….unless of course you belong to Momentum, Antifa, the Socialist Workers’ Party or the US ‘post-liberal’ Democrats.

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On this, the last day of a year that will die from chronic infamy in very short order, a pretty phoney distraction called Impeachment is, in the US, rumbling on in the manner of the Brexit doom promised to the UK by Remoanoids after 2016.

But on 19th December last, the unjustly accused President Trump signed the Secure Act into law. It follows the Donald’s tax “reform” of 2017 that doubled the Giga-rich’s immunity from wealth taxes.

As a sort of political balancing act, the new Law (“Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement” Act) enables small businesses to, in theory, be more generous to their employees in terms of retirement plans. But when one takes the young and upper ends of blue-collar workers into account, the Secure Act in 2019 is a little like constructing a large snowman as a counterbalance to the Mount Everest given away in 2017.

29,000 for the rich and 6 for the poor isn’t going to even up the appalling US wealth inequality any time soon. Especially in the light of the New York Fed’s money-chucking championship designed to shore up frontal-lobe challenged Wall Street bankers. The hundeds of billions in taxpayer-funded liquidity have minded the stock market to rocket up to new peaks: but the JPMorgan Chase bank the NYFed is trying to save has in turn seen the firm’s “value” zoom into the stratosphere. As a result, Jamie Dimon (the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase) is now personally a quarter of a billion dollars richer.

It’s high finance….or pie in the sky finance, depending on your pov. And Donald Trump – the man who presented himself as the enemy of ‘rigged markets’ – is all for it. The last thing the Prezz wants is a mega bank collapse in election year.

Whose side in Trump on? The case continues….as it does in relation to Boris Johnson, and several other flawed diamonds out there whoring for votes.

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I tend to think of Trump, for example, as the enemy of the US Unelected State comprising Texas oil, globalist big business, the Pentagon and the State Department. But the Donald isn’t making too big a dent in that either.

The military industrial complex (MIC) christened by Dwight Eisenhower has become rich beyond the dreams of avarice by militarily and secretly policing close to 200 régimes across the globe: as I write, 200,000 US troops are stationed in 177 countries throughout the world, with troops reportedly carrying out an average of 10 military exercises and engagements daily.

The MIC’s wealth has been at the expense of the citizen: US infrastructural investment is a basket case – the interest alone on the funds borrowed by Washington to become Global Robocop is now a mind-boggling $8 trillion per annum.

Yet another reason why “normalisation” of interest rates is a bitter fantasy wrapped in an artificially sweetened fairytale.

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The EU’s ambitions are no less financially debilitating….but at least Deutsche Bank is relinquishing its ambitions to be a global investment bank, cutting 18,000 jobs, closing equities trading and creating a €280bn “bad bank” to “run down” unwanted assets. If like me you wonder how calling something bad and then running it down could possible make anything better, then you won’t be greatly reassured by the rest of this segment.

Yes, it’s ‘Save Deutsche, This Time We Mean It’ take 17.

Leading this turn around plan is Christian Sewing, who started out with Deutsche 30 years ago as an apprentice. This makes for the bank’s fifth strategic overhaul in seven years, and Herr Sewing is talking things up bigtime, revising upwards the 2022 targets, signalling that the investment bank will again become Deutsche’s fastest-growing business. At 2% per annum, he insists, it will generate a return on tangible shareholder equity of up to 8% by 2022.

Less than six months ago, however, the bank had said that the unit’s revenue would be flat over the coming three years. Hmm.

Goldman Sachs bought the DB Asian derivatives portfolio earlier this month. So the bank’s derivatives exposure is now only…..a mere $22 trillion.

The bank owes nearly three times as much as the interest on the US national debt.

Let’s see now, 18,000 people fired at half a million a year each equals $9 million. Did I write about snowmen and Everest a few paras ago? When it comes to Deutsche Bank, think Mont Blanc and snowflake.

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In our own backyard, things are little better.

The UK’s six richest people control as much wealth as the poorest 13 million, according to research into the gaping inequality in British society.

Six billionaires at the top of the UK wealth league have a combined fortune of £39.4bn, which, according to analysis by the Equality Trust, is roughly equal to the assets of 13.2 million Britons. 1.5 million of those Brits are now defined as destitute.

On the other hand, always look on the brigheet sayeed of life, dadoo dadumdadum dadum….even if you shared out the entire riches of the Big Six, those 13.3 million folks would still only get £2984.84 each. Just enough to pay off their credit cards. I mean, if you gave them the money, they’d probably put it in the bath or something, along with the coal.

That’s not very funny is it? No, not really. Of the 1.5 million living from hand to mouth, I’d wager a fair proportion of them are 1950s born women cheated out of their pensions, aged on average 66 years. A combination of all three UK Parties created that situation over a quarter of a century, and at the end of the period a Hard Left Labour leader ignored their plight until he was on the verge of an infamous election defeat.

But the equally disturbing thing about the UK wealth disparity numbers is that they emerged from the Equality Trust, and were written up by a Guardian journalist. So yet again, the spin on them is – shall we say – open to doubt.

This is a terrible shame, because the only point worth making about these statistics is that they demonstrate compellingly how British government has utterly failed to harness and help realise the fulfilment of our greatest resource, the citizenry. And that lights up the fuse of people like Dr Wanda Wyporska, the Trust’s Executive Director.

My suggestion is that you go to Linkedin, and type in her name. The entry she makes there about herself is easily the most overt example of engorged ego I’ve seen since reading Elizabeth Schwarzkopf’s autobiography 45 years ago. (Schwarzkopf went on the popular radio programe of the time Desert Island Discs, and chose all her own records).

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So chuck out the old and ring in the new. What point am I making in this post, with the end of 2019’s pointless life only four hours away?

Merely this: IABATO – It’s all bollocks and that’s official. The one thing we know about all the people featured in this Slogpost is that they care mainly about themselves, and they don’t work for us.

But we’re not sure at all about whoTF they do work for.

Trump, the DNC, Jamie Dimon, Christian Sewing, Boris Johnson and Wanda Wyporska…and a whole bigger crowd making Noises Off: Dominic Raab, Emily Thornberry, Steve Baker, Liz Truss, Max Keiser, George Galloway, Zero Hedge, Nigel Farage….it’s not that I don’t trust any of them; it’s more a case of expecting them to do one thing, at which point they promptly do another.

If somebody tomorrow took over the United Kingdom, put Kate Hoey in charge and allowed her to put together a Cabinet composed of John Redwood, Dennis Skinner, David Davies, Johnny Mercer, Caroline Flint and others of similar clarity, I do not doubt that it would underperform all expectations.

But at least we’d know they cared more for all British citizens than either (a) themselves or (b) some sleazy shape in the shadows.

I wish you all a lot of fun tonight. I’m off over to Twitter to see how many ideologues I can irritate. It only remains for me to thank all of you who stuck with The Slog and added value to it in 2019.