Guido was more than sceptical when politicians and Labour luvvie economists like Gavyn Davies started talking up the bogeyman of deflation at the same time as the government was running up massive fiscal deficits.  It seemed too handy a coincidence that they would print money on a scale never seen before at the same time as issuing debt on a scale never seen before.  They subsequently, coincidentally, bought the debt using the money they had just printed.

This we were told was to stave off deflation which it was emphasised was very bad.  Goods becoming less expensive was somehow worse than goods becoming more expensive.  If we got deflation it would be the end of the good times for ever according to even monetarist economists.  Guido was sceptical that deflation was necessarily bad, history shows that there have been times of increasing prosperity that coincided with deflation.  Deflation happened several times in the nineteenth century.  During that era of rapid economic development there were no central banks and money was calculated as a certain quantity of gold or silver.

Deflation was not necessarily a threat to our prosperity, in a situation where the money supply is stable it is the manifestation of prosperity and pensioners know that their standard of living would have improved.  With inflation now upticking this experiment in Mugabenomics* has to be reversed without setting off hyper-inflation or collapsing the government debt market.  The policy authorities have figured out how to prop up the gilt market – they are changing the regulations to force banks to buy government debt to the tune of hundreds of billions. It remains to be seen if they can avoid an inflationary catastrophe, surging record gold prices suggest the markets suspect not…

*©Vince Cable, who was against QE before he was in favour of it.  God knows what he thinks now.

Yesterday in the chamber Cameron made a jibe that Tony Blair’s campaign to become EU president was going well until the moment the Prime Mentalist backed him, ensuring the “curse of the one eyed son of the manse” doomed Blair’s ambitions.

The more significant evidence of the curse and something that is symbolic of the end of the twentieth century Anglo-American dominance of the world, is the purchase by the Indian Central Bank of  200 tonnes of gold from the IMF.  The Indian Central Bank paid an average of $1040 per ounce, Gordon and Balls sold the Bank of England’s gold at an average of $275 an ounce.  So cack-handed were the gold sales that Brown and Balls gave advance notice to the gold market and the trade is now famously known as “the Brown Bottom”.  It was an act of short-term, self inflicted imprudence that has cost untold billions.

As quantitative easing drives the dollar and pound down in value the cost of that blunder becomes clearer.  India is heading towards becoming the new English speaking superpower and Britain is heading towards becoming a bankrupt state with a devalued currency.   Gordon has jinxed generations to come with government debt…

George Osborne is off to Canary Wharf this morning to make anti-Banker noises at the Reuters HQ.   His speech will call for the successful to be penalised as an act of collective punishment for the mistakes of senior management.  No word as to what punishment the Bank of England Governor and Chairman of the FSA will face, Guido suspects none.

The argument is that now the government is the owner of banks it should set the pay and conditions of staff to satisfy the democratic will.  Shareholders are of course entitled to exercise control.  However if Guido was a proprietary trader at RBS contractually promised 10% of the profits he wins for the firm, only to be told that the Chancellor wants to breach the contract and unilaterally cut the bonus, Guido would first call his lawyer.  Secondly, Guido would start looking at renting office space in Dubai or another financial centre with a zero rate of income tax.

Bonuses are taxed, so next year half the £6 billion bonus pool could be lost to the exchequer.  The successful traders who make profits for their firms help the banks re-build their balance sheets, why drive them overseas?   Punishing successful City folk after the event is a displacement activity when they should be punishing those responsible for the crisis – central bankers, regulators and those few bankers who actually had direct responsibility for the crisis.

Bonuses are a form of deferred performance related pay, no profit, no bonus.  The easiest way to clamp down on bonuses is to have a moribund economy…

UPDATE : Labour’s Lord Myners, who really ought to know better, is now (Thick of It style) pushing a rival plan this morning.  Forcing investment banks to reduce their fees for capital raising.  He seems to want to further erode bank profits. How are the banks expected to rebuild their balance sheets?

The pound is getting whacked after Mervyn King implicitly admitted that despite printing £175 billion of he might still need to cut rates or even effectively charge banks for putting cash on deposit with the central bank.

We are entering into a monetary policy twilight zone where the governor of the Bank of England, in the words of the FT, has to “entertain more outlandish concepts like negative rates”.  The QE disaster unfolds…

The FT reckons the Tories are eyeing up a shares sale of some of some of the UKFI Ltd portfolio, this follows Myners on the weekend claiming to Adam Boulton that the taxpayer was sitting on a little nest egg investment in the banking system.  Perhaps, if you ignore the financial black hole that is Northern Crock.

Don’t get too excited.  Moodys has just released research suggesting we will see further losses of around £130 billion from the loan books and securities portfolios of rated UK financial institutions.  The UK economy is nowhere near out of the hole yet:

• We are in a fifth consecutive quarter of recession.
• Real GDP fell 0.8% quarter-on-quarter.
• Output has fallen 5.6% year-on-year, the worst since records began in 1955.
• The Bank of England base rate at 0.5%, is the lowest rate since the central bank was founded in 1694.
• The Old Lady has eased £125 billion of new electronic money into the economy to create a false market in government gilts.
• Nevertheless, the efforts thus far have met with little success: net bank lending to individuals fell to a fresh record low in June, net lending to U.K. businesses has slipped into negative territory in recent months, as repayments exceeded new loans. Sid is saving to pay down debt – unlike Gordon.

Guido’s advice to Sid: buy a little gold for insurance, invest in inflation linked securities  and neither the great British pound or the U.S. dollar are great places to be. Pop one of Gordon’s happy pills, we ain’t out of it yet…

The Bank of England and most consensus economists, including most right-of-centre monetarists, are stoking deflation fears. The MPC voted to print £50 billion more this month.  Which is very convenient for Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling, it allows them to justify printing money, which they can then use to buy their own escalating government debts.  Which is a little like eating your own leg to stop you starving.

The economic debate on this is confusing, the data is mixed and to some extent depends on your time frame.  The drop in oil prices and other commodities post-crunch had a deflationary effect.  Against this you have U.S. and U.K. government debt levels which are extraordinary.  Terrifying.  Gilt yields (interest rates) are being held down by the Bank of England printing billions of pounds to buy gilts from the Treasury and artificially hold up gilt prices.

The Bank of England’s own pension fund however is heavily invested in inflation protected securities – which is odd given their public stance is that deflation, not inflation is the threat.  Consensus economists are sheep and we need not worry too much about their bleating, more surprisingly some right-wing monetarist economists, such as those on the IEA’s shadow monetary policy committee (who tend to work in the City for investment banks) are also believers in deflation.  Guido’s theory is that the reason they have supported expanding the money supply so drastically is they panicked, remember all those articles in the Guardian and the FT about the “end of capitalism”and the end of investment banking as we know it?  Their morale was low, they were afraid.  Printing money and flooding the market with liquidity would be a short term fix that would shore up the banks and save their jobs.  Hence all these right-wing economists became born again Keynesians and could be found all over the Square Mile screaming at the Bank of England to turn on the printing presses.

Well capitalism survives and thrives.  Some of those economists are now wondering about the wisdom of printing all that money.  Nigel Lawson’s biographer, Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, changed his mind on quantitative easing a few months ago, the IEA’s shadow MPC is no longer unanimously in favour of quantitative easing.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb yesterday warned of the inflation threat, Cameron conceded the possibility of a British debt crisis.  Guido thinks it highly unlikely Britain would ever default on it’s debt so long as it has a sovereign currency – we would just devalue and pay foreigners in devalued pounds.  Though Britain could have, as Cameron said, foreign investors demanding higher risk premia, higher yields.  That could see mortgage rates above 10% again – both here and in the U.S.

Warren Buffet yesterday was quoting John Maynard Keynes’ road map for political survival amid an economic disaster of just this sort: “By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens…. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

Protect yourself from the coming inflation.  Like the Bank of England’s pension fund…

Guido had lunch a couple of weeks ago with a reader who had promised to buy him a decent bottle for slotting Damian McBride.

This co-conspirator happens to be one of the most successful traders in the City and a wine buff, so when he says a “decent bottle of wine” we are talking a bottle that you can get a mortgage on.

Over lunch he said that his big break in the early days was trading drunk, a few drinks gave him the confidence to take risk. Guido explained that his drunk trading merely got him carried out the back door of the dealing room by worried co-workers back in his investment banking days.

Anyway, this Friday after a few bottles of rosé* Guido finally steeled himself to short the stockmarket rally via U.S. stock futures. They subsequently rallied into the close taking about 20% of this year’s trading profits with them. Damn the Bloomberg for Blackberry app, damn being able to enter trades from your Blackberry when tipsy.

Anyway the holiday has not been completely blighted, stock markets are going south today. Who knows, Guido might even make a profit…

*People knock rosé wine, including the farmer who is our neighbour here. There are some cracking underestimated varieties which suit Guido’s palate – they go very well with salads. Honestly. Not too bad on their own, in a deck chair, in the shade.

For the seven or so readers who are interested in Guido’s financial market trading (and you seem intensely interested) here is the half-year report.

The portfolio was up 30.6% at the half-way mark for the year, not too shabby considering the FTSE was off some 10% over the same period.  Currently up 46% Year-To-Date.

It has been up as much as 60%.  Alas when trading is going well, Guido pushes his luck – too much.  God knows what the Sharpe ratio is, but basically this is a small amount of capital over-leveraged (up to 20 times) in the futures markets.   With regular 10% swings in net asset value daily, this volatility is not for widows and orphans. When it is going badly Guido de-leverages.  Two big hits were betting heavily gold would break  out over $1000 (it didn’t) and selling into the recent gilt spike and getting stopped out.  Have decided to leave gold alone because of prospective IMF selling, still playing the gilt market from the short side.  Am basically flat, short or double short gilts for the forseeable future.

In the last six months Guido has had 33 positions.  Mrs Fawkes thinks that since blogging is not as lucrative as the bond market she would very much rather that Guido went back to professional bond trading and amateur blogging rather than the other way round. You never know…

Mervyn King’s testimony yesterday was shocking, he made public that the Bank of England was not consulted on Alistair Darling’s plans for the reform of banking regulation.  Call Guido old fashioned, but he somehow thinks that it might be a tad useful if the former student Trotskyite turned Chancellor, Alastair Darling, consulted the professor of economics turned career central banker, Mervyn King.  This is not mere student politics, this is the trillion dollar question of the moment.  Mervyn confirmed that the current tri-partite regulatory regime designed by Balls and Brown “was a mess”.

As if that wasn’t bad enough figures released yesterday showed that Britain has the biggest budget deficit in the world.  The best placed economy to weather the global crisis (© G. Brown) had government borrowing hit £20 billion in May, which means the government is overspending by nearly £30 million an hour. Gordon is spending way beyond our means and putting our children into debt at an unheard of rate.  He actually boasts that he is going to spend, spend, spend…

Mervyn basically testified yesterday that the government needed to cut spending much more dramatically than it is planning to do or else we will be ruined.  If Gordon is hoping for a recovery (as Alastair officially predicts) to save him in time for a general election the news from the OECD will not be encouraging.  The OECD said yesterday that Britain is in “severe recession” and that it was downgrading it’s expectations for the UK economy, predicting it will shrink by 4.3% this year…

You might have got the impression that the economy is turning. In reality the debt crisis is now in phase two and the government can’t easily find buyers for gilts.* In what is a rare shame for a triple-A rated nation, HM Treasury was forced this morning to ask banks for help selling the debt paper.  Barclays, Goldman Sachs, HSBC and RBS are looking for buyers of £5 billion of Gordon’s gilts round the market with generous yields being offered.   Not quite a buy-one-get-one-free offer.  Not yet anyway…

When Gordon set up the Debt Management Office it was supposed to handle gilt sales for the government. The tidal wave of government debt flooding the market has made that more difficult…

See also: S&P Downgrades UK Government Debt

*Full disclosure, Guido sold gilt futures before breakfast this morning.