A speech so good he was sacked: HSBC head says investors don’t need to worry about “Climate Risk”

Hopefully Elon Musk will give him a job.

Stuart Kirk, head of “responsible investing” for HSBC let rip at the doommongers of finance with a speech called “Why investors need not worry about climate risk”. He was speaking at A Moral Money Europe Summit, held by the Financial Times and is clearly fed up with listening to hyperbole and being told to analyze and worry about trivial long term future events. “Last night Target fell 25% — twentyfive!” … but I’m being told to worry about something coming 20 – 30 years down the track.” Other speakers were unceremoniously dispatched. He complained climate risk has become so hyperbolic no one knows how to outdo it. “Sharon [a speaker from Deloittes] said “we’re not going to survive!” But no one even looked up and ran from the room.”

Dangerously (for him) he also explained how the central banker models bury massive GDP and interest rate shocks in their economic forecasts of climate risk, otherwise they can’t generate bad news and headlines. Apparently, it’s all in the fine print that nobody mentions. They’re sounding more and more like climate models all the time.

That was last week. This week he’s been suspended.

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2022: The Year of Inflation

The most dangerous Big-Government Qango of all may well be the Central Banks (not the NIH). Money drives all the incentives across national economies, but one small unelected group decides the price of money, and all corruption flows downstream from there. Ponder how they set the temperature that drives the global currents of goods, resources and opportunity. They feed Big Government, Big Pharma and Big Tech.

Saddle Up: There is no hiding inflation. Despite the global economy grinding to a halt in a pandemic, house prices set surging records and paradoxically the Dow hit all times highs.

It is just supply and demand. As more dollars are printed, a bigger supply of money competes for the same number of goods. And boy, have they been printing money.

It’s a temporary spike they say:

This is the money base of USD, a rough measure of “how many dollars there are”.

US St Louis Federal Reserve, Money Base graph 1918-2008 | Source

For perspective, below is the history of the growth in US Dollars since 1918 up until the GFC. The US left the Gold Standard in stages between 1913 and 1971, and the growth in money supply since then […]

Goldman Sachs pledges $750 billion on climate change — bankers just want to save the world too

Just when you think banks are only in it for the money, along comes Goldman Sachs to advise us on the planetary atmosphere:

“Goldman Sachs released a 34-page analysis of the impact of climate change. And the results are terrifying.”

All these nice banks want to save Earth too.

Yusef Kahn, Business Insider, Sept 2019

For some reason (what could it be?) a few months ago the Goldman Sachs investment bank was gripped with a sudden urge to repackage the IPCC report. Perhaps they were afraid their clients didn’t watch CNN, the BBC, or, pick-any-channel, maybe they couldn’t afford a television?

A Goldman Sachs report on the impact of climate change on cities across the world makes for grim reading. The bank warned that “consequences of a warming world may well play out over several decades to come, even if efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions are successful today.” Rising temperatures would lead to changing disease patterns, more intense and longer-lasting heatwaves, more destructive weather events, and pressure on the availability and quality of water for drinking and agriculture.

“Despite the uncertainty around the timing and scale of the impact, it may be prudent […]

Volatility from Vega – Why math models can’t predict the future

Guest post by Eric Worrall

How can we predict the climate, when we can’t even predict financial markets?

US Subprime House Price Crash

Financial markets are a high stakes battle between teams of skilled traders, armed with powerful computers. [In a perfect market] The factors that affect market prices are well known, and for mathematicians, surprisingly simple to describe. Yet with all this underlying simplicity, traders don’t attempt to predict the future, because they know from bitter experience that predicting the future is futile. Instead, they use their models to gain a deeper understanding of the present.

Say you are trading financial options. Options are a right to buy or sell an underlying commodity (gold, shares in a company, tons of beef, whatever) at a future point in time, for an agreed price. The exact rules vary in different places, but essentially – your option gives you the right to buy an ounce of gold in one month, say, for $1000.

If so, and the price of gold is $1,200 per ounce, then your option is worth $200, right?

Wrong. In one month, the price of gold might be $800, in which case your option is worthless […]

Inflation: the creeping hand of corruption

UPDATE May 27, 2011: While the inflation information here is correct, be aware news has just come out that the NIA (who made the video) is a pump and dump group, doing potentially fraudulent work. So enjoy their videos but beware of their stock recommendations. We wondered who was behind this video — at least it finally makes sense.

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Background Joanne occasionally writes about the science and corruption of monetary systems. She summed up the connection between the two dismal sciences (climate and economics). If you are new to this theme see the explanation and links at the bottom of the article.

You might think inflation and climate science are only linked metaphorically. But the corruption in science is fed by the corruption in our currencies.

The monetary system that allows a privileged few to print money from nothing is the same system that allows massively misdirected spending. When there are so few controls on the growth of money, there is less negative feedback, fewer brakes, and virtually no limits. If the system is swimming with easy money, people can “afford” to build wildly extravagant and unproductive things — like wind-farms, carpets of solar panels, or symbolic rivers […]

Helicopter Ben at work

Not many people realize just how utterly unprecedented the Global Financial Crisis was.

To see just how singularly anomalous those months were, let’s revisit an article I wrote for 321 Gold in November 2008.

The graphs below are extraordinary, jaw-dropping plots. At the time I was watching them grow week by week, and was amazed that they were not “everywhere”. I still remember the chill I got in mid October when I first saw the ballistic spike. We’re talking about the money supply of the worlds largest economy. The rescue package blew away the scale — the second graph below covers 90 years. It’s not often you see any graph which is a true hockey stick. This was originally published at 321Gold on Nov 25th 2008. Remember this money (your money if you hold US dollars) was “injected” as a temporary fix (in theory), the plan was to neutralize it, or sterilize it, or insert-your-favourite-euphemism-here-for-getting-it-back-to-normal.

So where does the Money Base graph stand now? It’s not back down to $900 billion (where it was in August 2008), it’s not even stable at $1500 billion, it’s $2000 billion. Our markets run on ever increasing injections of new money. The people […]

Two dismal sciences (climate and money)

Maybe you are already au fait with the deep flaws in our financial system, or maybe you are like I was ten years ago, too bored to read “economics”–knowing it was all human vagaries and surrounded with jargon. If your eyes glaze at the thought of bonds, yields, debt and GOFO’s–bear with me, I understand. But history books will be written about this year. No one can afford to be not interested in the science of money.

Economics is known as The Dismal Science, and the reason it’s dismal is the same reason that official climate science is — too many dollars at stake. (If we can treat psychology scientifically, why not economics too?)

Those who want to falsely alarm us benefit from confounding issues, confusing statements, argument from authority and bureaucratese

But the unscientific nature of some subjects is no accident. Clear thinking, transparency, and rigorous logic benefit the majority, just as jargon, elitism, gatekeepers and censorship do not. Those who want to falsely alarm us benefit from confounding issues, confusing statements, argument from authority and bureaucratese, and so too do the people who control our money — central bankers, the banking aristocracy, and some politicians. (Though instead of […]