Every day’s a good day to hide bad news

 

 

The BBC trumpeted the IMF’s support for the EU during the referendum, making no mention of course that Lagarde owes her job, not once, but twice, to Osborne’s support, but now, now the BBC has decided all things IMF are not worth bothering about really.

Way, way down on the World page, didn’t make it to the frontpage, we have this small story:

Business

Doesn’t give much away does it that title?  Doesn’t give away that the IMF has been savaged in an excoriatinig report that utterly undermines its competence and credibility.  The BBC instead produces a very anodyne analysis and ends up saying all is well with the world….and utterly fails to note that the IMF comes in for serious criticism about its unthinking and highly damaging support for the EU.  Who can doubt that a body that produces “superficial and mechanistic” analysis and is a unquestioning supporter of the EU is not one that can be trusted to pronounce on anything as complex and controversial as Brexit….no wonder the BBC doesn’t want to talk about it too much.

What the BBC fails to do the Telegraph thankfully does:

IMF admits disastrous love affair with the euro, apologises for the immolation of Greece

The International Monetary Fund’s top staff misled their own board, made a series of calamitous misjudgments in Greece, became euphoric cheerleaders for the euro project, ignored warning signs of impending crisis, and collectively failed to grasp an elemental concept of currency theory. 

This is the lacerating verdict of the IMF’s top watchdog on the Fund’s tangled political role in the eurozone debt crisis, the most damaging episode in the history of the Bretton Woods institutions. 

It describes a “culture of complacency”, prone to “superficial and mechanistic” analysis,  and traces a shocking break-down in the governance of the IMF, leaving it unclear who is ultimately in charge of this extremely powerful organisation. 

Asia and Latin America are clearly incensed at the way EU insiders used the Fund to rescue their own rich currency union and banking system.

The three main bail-outs for Greece, Portugal, and Ireland were unprecedented in scale and character. The trio were each allowed to borrow over 2,000 percent of their allocated quota – more than three times the normal limit – and accounted for 80pc of all lending by the Fund between 2011 and 2014.

The report said the whole approach to the eurozone was characterised by “groupthink” and intellectual capture. They had no fall-back plans on how to tackle a systemic crisis in the eurozone – or how to deal with the politics of a multinational currency union – because they had ruled out any possibility that it could happen.

“Before the launch of the euro, the IMF’s public statements tended to emphasize the advantages of the common currency, “ it said. Some staff members warned that the design of the euro was fundamentally flawed but they were overruled.

“After a heated internal debate, the view supportive of what was perceived to be Europe’s political project ultimately prevailed,” it said.

This pro-EMU bias continued to corrupt their thinking for years.

At root was a failure to grasp the elemental point that currency unions with no treasury or political union to back them up are inherently vulnerable to debt crises. States facing a shock no longer have sovereign tools to defend themselves. Devaluation risk is switched into bankruptcy risk.

 

Last month is so last year

 

Remember when the PMI figures came out and the BBC screamed from the rooftops about a ‘dramatic deterioration’ in the economy since Brexit?…

Brexit causes dramatic drop in UK economy, data suggests

Britain’s decision to leave the EU has led to a “dramatic deterioration” in economic activity, not seen since the aftermath of the financial crisis.

What is interesting about the BBC’s little report is that the IFS’s Paul Johnson doesn’t figure in it.  Normally the goto guy for the BBC.  Why doesn’t he figure?  Because earlier on the BBC he stated that these figures tell us nothing yet, there is no significant data about the effect of Brexit available yet.  Just why would the BBC not repeat that message throughout the day as they normally would with a soundbite from the IFS instead opting for ‘dramatic deterioration of the economy’?

Curiously the BBC has reined back on the hyperbole for the latest economic data.  We must be more careful how we interpret it….here’s the news….

UK economic growth sped up ahead of Brexit vote

And here’s the views from Ahmed who did a splendid job during the run up to the referendum in pushing the Remain message….

Take care over these economic figures

Looking in the rear view mirror doesn’t always tell you much about the road ahead.

And that is essentially what today’s second quarter economic growth figures are about – a health check on the road behind us, not a snap shot of the here and now.

That does not mean that positive figures should be dismissed, just so much pre-referendum chaff.

What does he mean ‘we’ shouldn’t dismiss them….it’s the likes of Ahmed who does the dismissing and indeed seems to be doing his best to spread the doubt.  Funny how I seem to remember the BBC headlining in the run up to the referendum that the uncertainty was effecting businesses even then and that lack of confidence was damaging the economy.  So now that seems not to be the case as the economy in that period ‘boomed’ and anyway, apparently, the figures show us nothing about the future…one month is so last year isn’t it Ahmed?

Odd how the BBC is refusing to publish any information about trade deals that looks good for Britain at the moment…..where’s the headlines about huge investments in Britain?  From Guido:

Everybody’s Investing in Brexit Britain

Three huge businesses have announced major UK investments in the space of 24 hours – in some cases contrary to what their officials claimed prior to the referendum vote. GlaxoSmithKline has announced £275 million of fresh investment, London’s City Airport is getting a £344 million expansion, and Deutsche Börse’s shareholders overwhelmingly approved its merger with the London Stock Exchange. A vote endorsing London as the enduring financial capital of the world post-Brexit.

Undoubtedly there will be businesses that flee but also ones that come in…..the BBC only highlights the ones that flee.

Liked this from the BBC that it tacked onto the end of its ‘good news’ story:

The economy seems to be heading towards a “significant deterioration” in the second half of 2016, according to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.

Connor Campbell, an analyst at Spreadex, agreed, saying: “Just because predictions of a slowdown pre-referendum appear to have been false, last week’s early glimpse at the Markit PMIs shows that the post-Brexit impact is in no way a bogeyman conjured by bitter Vote Remainers.”

The PMI figures show nothing just yet, they were the result not of post-Brexit bitterness conjured up by Remainers but by massive alarm and uncertainty conjured up by arrogant, scaremongering Remainers who didn’t really give a dman about the country’s economy as long as it stayed in the EU.

The next set of PMI figures, and the set after, will be the significant ones that may indicate a direction of travel for the economy…but we always knew that short term the economy would take a hit and long term things would bounce back and may be even better…with the added bonus of not having the EU deciding our politics for us and presiding over us with the ECJ.  The BBC always concentrates on economics and manages to forget the real purpose of Brexit…to take back political control with a major target of reducing immigration.

 

 

 

 

 

TODAY, THE SAME YESTERDAY, TOMORROW AND FOREVERMORE

An enraged Biased BBC reader sent me this regarding the BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning;

27/7/16 BBC Today programme. Discussing the murder of Father Jacques Hamel.

“John Humphries played back a recorded interview he did with a French philosopher who blamed Israel for creating the motivation for the cowardly murder. Humphries had editorial discretion on airing this pre-recorded interview and by his doing so reinforced the deliberate political correctness narrative of ‘terrorists are the victims’. Never once in 10 minutes of his broadcast did Humphries mention the word Islam let alone its teachings as a motivator of the murders. [Quran (8:12) – “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them”]

Humphries went onto challenge, in the same interview, a French government minister about the banning of face coverings in public places in France as being in part responsible for the terrorism.

The BBC yet again is putting our lives in danger with their left wing denial of terrorist cause and motivation.”

I agree with this entirely. The BBC are pushing the bizarre narrative that when Hollande “declared war on Islamic extremism” he has triggered Islamic extremism. Only the BBC could find this a logical conclusion but then again, and as I repeatedly point out, they really are Islam’s little helpers. Agree?

Religious motivation?

 

The BBC graciously admits there might be an Islamic angle to the murder of a priest in France today…

President Francois Hollande said the men claimed to be from so-called Islamic State (IS).

Speaking in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, he said the attackers had committed a “cowardly assassination” and France would fight IS “by all means”.

Fraank Gardner isn’t 100% convinced…

The selection of a church by the attackers, whatever their motives turn out to be, crosses a new red line in the grim history of recent attacks on continental Europe.

I’m sure he has a psychiatrist on standby to talk us through the issues…on hold just now because ‘There was no immediate word on the identity of the hostage-takers.’

Certain to find they are poor lads from a Muslim ghetto abandoned by the French state, alienated and angry at the way Muslims are treated….I could get a job as a BBC journo..no?

However it can’t be long before the equivocations start….the BBC  [Frankie boy] are already looking to point the finger of blame…

News that one of the attackers was on the French government’s terror watch-list, known as the S list, will prompt many to question its purpose if he can remain at large to carry a knife into a church.

Always looking for a new angle on a story…except the obvious one.

 

 

NOTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM….

I suppose this item on the BBC was inevitable. From the TODAY schedule earlier..

“The right wing German party Alternatif fur Deutschland says the German Chancellor Angela Merkel is responsible for bringing terror to Germany through her open door refugee policy. But most other German politicians have stopped short of linking the recent attacks to the Middle East. Dr Peter Ammon is the German Ambassador to the UK.”

It’s really amazing to watch the European political establishment and the media, including the BBC of course, deny reality. We see the German Police twist in the wind as they think up all kinds of ludicrous excuses to cover the simple fact that Merkel’s Open Borders policy has been a catastrophic disaster that may engulf Germany into Germanistan.

HAVE YOU SEEN SID?

Well then, last week saw the BBC sneer it’s way through the GOP conference in Cleveland. The Comrades were all over the event, seeking to emphasise division, flag up plagiarism and above all seek to damage Trump. This week sees the Democrat convention in Philly and the coronation of Hillary Clinton, the BBC’s preferred Presidential candidate. The problem is that she is PROFOUNDLY mired in scandal and loathed by those Bernie Sanders radical leftists so  -what to do? The BBC wheels in that loathsome long time Clinton apologist Sidney Blumenthal on BBC Radio 4 Today at 6.55am to inform us that Hillary is the candidate who does not come from privilege (She’s filthy rich) and that she is beating Trump in most of the polls. (She isn’t, he leads her in several, including Ohio) and that everyone will rally behind her when they finally get to see the “real” Hillary on stage. Classic Clintonian denialism and fully embraced by an uncritical cheerleading BBC. In my opinion. If you think the BBC had a melt down when we voted to BREXIT can you imagine their horror at a President Trump?

BBC in complete denial

 

The BBC’s Frank Gardner knows what is wrong in Germany…it doesn’t provide enough mental health services for people…..

What drives individuals to commit mass killings?

Even the headline is disingenuous and intentionally misleading because the real problem is Islamist terrorism and immigration not random, ‘senseless’, murders by individuals…Gardner is trying to claim there is no overarching problem, it is an individual issue compounded by German government neglect.

Gardner has a psychiatrist tell us:

It is possible to find a common thread in the past history of murderers. He believes the clues are all in their dysfunctional backgrounds.

“It is a psychiatric problem,”

Curious how in contrast the BBC has scrubbed from the record that the killer of Jo Cox, Thomas Mair, had a well documented history of mental health problems and that the night before he killed Jo Cox he had sought help and been turned away.  The BBC in that case preferred to ‘report’ that the murder was the result of the Leave campaign’s immigration ‘policy’ that incited a Far Right activist to kill.  Why do they ignore Mair’s problems but tell us ‘mental health’ is the underlying problem for Muslim’s who kill?  Odd how the BBC can link reasoned and measured discussion on immigration to a killing but won’t link an ideology that says kill all non-Muslims to terrorism.

What about all the many thousands that also have mental health issues but don’t go on to be terrorists?  There are many levels of mental health problems…from stress to depression to murderous rages….so when Gardner say they were receiving help just what were they being helped with?  Look at the Syrians on Bute now whinging about their new home and saying they are depressed….should we put them on a watch list? Is there some other contributory factor Gardner might like to consider?

Islam perhaps? Immigration of people who have a totally different culture and outlook on life and so will find it very difficult to integrate into a Western society…leading to self-alienation and possibly radicalisation and terrorism as they decide to revert to their own culture and religion….some choose to wear ever more distinctly Islamic clothing and take the war to the West through the media, law and politics, others will decide violence is the answer…there is no difference between the two other than the methods used…but for some reason the media and politicians thnk only the violent ones are a problem….their aim is the same…more Islam.

Gardner tells us:

Yet initial suspicions of an IS link to last Friday’s shooting rampage in a Munich shopping mall have been replaced by something closer to an individual, non-political grievance by the perpetrator. His killing spree bears a striking similarity to recent gun rampages by disaffected teenagers at US college campuses.

Likewise, investigators have concluded that the killing of a Polish woman by a Syrian refugee in Reutlingen is not connected to terrorism.

So there were ‘initial suspicions of an IS link’ regarding the Munich killings?  Could have fooled me as the BBC absolutely refused to publish those links.

But what about this?:

His killing spree bears a striking similarity to recent gun rampages by disaffected teenagers at US college campuses….Likewise, investigators have concluded that the killing of a Polish woman by a Syrian refugee in Reutlingen is not connected to terrorism.

No mention of immigration or Islam…Gardner diverts us onto Mental health as the main problem when the real problem is immigration…the Munich killer was the son of immigrants and his bullies were all immigrants themselves.

Irnoically Gardner tells us:

“With a detailed look at the history of those perpetrators,” says Mr Aylward, “what we see is a sort of combination-lock of numbers that if arranged in the right sequence then the lock snaps open and a murderous attack takes place.”

He says far more work needs to be done to identify the signs leading up to such events before they happen.

Yep, let’s have a detailed look at what drives them….first they wouldn’t be there if it hadn’t been for immigration which sumps then in a totally alien environment that they refuse all too often to adapt to, two Islam isolates them and itself is the cause of alienation, and as they identify more with Islam and soak up the anti-West narratives of the Muslim agit-propagandists and of its allies in the Western media who pump out the ‘West is attacking Islam’ and ‘the problems in the Muslim world are all due to Western foreign policy’ narrative, they turn ever more against their host countries and want to do something to ‘help’ Muslims.  Usually by killing as many as possible.

Gardner disengenuously tries to suggest that counter-terrorism officers think mental health issues are the problem…

At a recent meeting of Western counter-terrorism officers in Washington, it was concluded that agencies well-practiced in confronting ideological organisations like IS were ill-equipped to deal with lone individuals bearing murderous personal grievances.

The challenge becomes even harder when a troubled individual with mental problems is cynically recruited by a terrorist organisation, thus blurring the lines between the two.

Gen Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA and NSA, say the phenomenon “allows the truly troubled and the truly dangerous to reach for a broader cause that gives meaning to their alienation”.

The concept of terrorist organisations preying on disturbed people to further their aims is not new.

But that isn’t what they said, Gardner slips in his own thoughts about ‘a troubled individual with mental problems’ and then links the words of Gen Hayden to his own, but Hayden talked of alienation…that’s not a mental health issue, that’s more often than not cultural and social….if you want to live by a certain ideology but it is at complete odds with the surrounding one you are going to be frustrated and as said Muslim activists whip that up into an anti-West narrative which is supported by the likes of the BBC.

The Telegraph has a much more realistic editorial on the problmes that Germany [and the rest of Europe] faces:

Germany is in a dangerous state of denial about immigration, Islam and terrorism

In the past seven days, German civilians have come under attack from four men of Middle Eastern or Asian origin. Three have been linked to Isil. The latest incident saw a Syrian blow himself up outside a Bavarian festival after pledging allegiance to Isil.

Joachim Herrmann, Bavaria’s interior minister, has suggested that such attacks raise questions about an immigration policy that has seen more than one million migrants enter Germany largely unchecked over the past year, many from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Raising such questions may appear logical and sensible, but Germany’s debate about migration issues does not always follow logic or common sense. Thomas de Maizière, the federal immigration minister, attempted to argue that the open door offered to migrants by his boss, Angela Merkel, is not relevant to the recent attacks.

While Mr Herrman’s attitude is more realistic, Mr de Maizière’s is more typical of Germany’s political debate about issues of immigration, integration and security. For many reasons, some of them historical and understandable, many German politicians are wary of acknowledging, first, that there are questions about whether all immigrants can smoothly integrate into Western societies and accept Western values and, secondly, that some voters have legitimate worries about the arrival in their country of people whose attitudes seem far removed from their own. This reticence should end, because it risks doing real harm.

Western democracies are now frequently experiencing political events that were previously considered unthinkable, at least by their political elites. If there is a common theme to Brexit, the candidacy of Donald Trump and the rise of the Front National in France, it is that political establishments which ignore and ridicule voters’ concerns about issues including immigration and cultural cohesion are simply storing up trouble for the future. Such concerns do not go away just because politicians refuse to acknowledge them, instead erupting unpredictably. To avoid these eruptions, those worries must be addressed sensibly and calmly by mainstream politicians. Otherwise the only beneficiaries are fringe factions more inclined to exploit social problems than solve them.

Too many German leaders remain in denial about the questions raised by Mrs Merkel’s open-door immigration policy. They must end that denial and start answering those questions, before less savoury elements offer their own answers.

 

The underlying problems are immigration and Islam….without them the problem wouldn’t exist regardless of the mental health treatments available in Germany.

Gardner and the BBC are not only in denial but are actively working to hide the real problems…..but it’s not just a matter of terrorism or ‘mass killings’, they of course totally ignore the other problem, that of crime…the murders, the rapes, the assaults, the gangs, the drugs, the robberies and frauds carried out by immigrants…all only occuring because they have been allowed into the country…how many people would still be alive if uncontrolled immigration hadn’t allowed in vast numbers of unknown people?

If Gardner was looking for one of the root causes of the problems that Europe now faces he need look no further than his own bathroom mirror or at the big sign above his workplace that says ‘BBC’.