|
|
By Jo Nova
Strange things are happening in the calm before the storm…
Thanks to NewZeroWatch
This week the financial world balances on the edge, and all the old rules have broken. Joe Biden is signing off on an oil drilling program on US soil which he said he’d never do — and it’s one of the largest ever — like building “66 new coal plants”. At the same time the Bank of England is apparently cutting the sacred climate change spending, and has leaked this news to the world.
As someone said on Twitter, “last week was a different country”.
After all these years, climate change has fallen out of the Weekly Hit Parade of Panic.
Bank of England Headquarters, London, photo by Елена Пехчевска
Bank of England Will Cut Spending for its Work on Climate Change
By Ellen Milligan and Philip Aldrick, Bloomberg
Climate programs will slip lower on the central bank’s agenda so officials can focus more on the core operations such as financial stability…
As Dr Benny Peiser of NetZeroWatch says “the risk of costly climate and Net Zero policies have become a bigger threat to the UK’s economy and […]
By Jo Nova
SVB or Silicon Valley Bank is the US’s 17th biggest bank, or it was until last week when it became the US’s second biggest bank failure instead.
Interest rate rises are supposed to squeeze out the dumbest investments, so it is fitting that one of the first casualties of this boom-bust cycle is a green banker, mostly doomed by loaning half their cash to the same bankrupt Big-Government that created the green improbable fantasy industries which SVB was largely serving.
SVB was a “Green” Banker. We know this, not because newspapers are saying that now, but because of the emergency flares released on behalf of the victims. The New York Times tells us that the collapse of SVB is going to hit green tech hard because SVB clients included 1,550 companies dedicated to “fighting climate change”.
If only SVB had served coal miners or gas frackers instead they might still be in business? The deposits they needed would have kept on coming as the profits flowed in.
David Gelles, New York Times, naturally, misses the whole point:
Silicon Valley Bank Collapse Threatens Climate Start-Ups
In reality, climate start-ups threaten the bank, and climate finish-ups threaten […]
By Jo Nova
By forcing people to put money into pension funds in a form of investment that they weren’t necessarily comfortable with, governments created vast piles of money that was essentially left unguarded on the beach in a bay with a hundred pirate ships. Sure, there were regulatory agencies and accountants up the kazoo, but money is also power: the paper dollar would get returned to the owner, but the whole time it was out of his hands, its power was being used against him.
In a free market, millions of voters can vote with their wallet. It’s a form of democracy. But for hapless sleepy investors in a pension plan — sometime in the 1980s that power to choose the kind of industries and values they wanted to support was silently given away to a guy called Larry Fink and a few of his colleagues.
Snoozing-at-the-wheel, citizens voted for cheap energy every two years, while their money voted for “ESG” every day. And ESG is the expensive Environmental, Social, Governance kind of electricity which freezes your peas AND corrects the weather (in theory).
The size of the pension funds managed by the likes of BlackRock, Vanguard […]
By Jo Nova Vanguard abandons the UN led Net-Zero Climate Finance monster group
Only a week after Ron de Santis pulled $2 billion in Florida funds from BlackRock, Vanguard, the second biggest asset manager in the world, has abruptly pulled out of GFANZ.
Vanguard has $7 trillion in assets under management, and GFANZ is a conglomerate cabal of bankers insurers and asset managers that has snowballed into a 550 member cabal with a jawdropping, obscene, 150 trillion in assets. Together, for a moment, they almost created the illusion of a One World Government by Bankers. After all, the GDP of the United States of America is only $23 trillion. So when an organization with six times the pulling power tells the world to go Net Zero, which company, which government would say “No”? Well, Ron de Santis did — and 18 other US states are working on it too.
The key weakness to the $150,000 billion dollar GFANZ monster is — as I said last week — that it’s an illusion. They are wielding other people’s money — using their clients own pension funds to indirectly punish their own clients, and the good guys […]
So much for stranded assets then.
Is there any better proof that “believing” in climate action is just a fashion statement? For all the talk of the end of fossil fuels, the biggest and most powerful funds in the world sign up for their “Net Zero” clubs but pour money into oil, gas and coal, hither thither, anyway.
The 30 biggest funds in the world manage €42.5 trillion in assets. These funds are so big, they can move markets if they want too…
Soak in that hypocrisy
Larry Fink starred at Davos and other events pontification for years on the importance of “tackling climate change”, how it’s an investment risk, and on how “climate change will upend” the way we do business, and how we need to do “long termism“. But he’s the CEO of BlackRock, the largest asset management fund in the world and they don’t mind at all they profit from all the fossil fuels. They joined the Net Zero Asset Manager Alliance, but do almost nothing. Indeed, vocalizing about what bad investments fossil fuels are while investing in them, is like a reverse pump and dump. They’re just scaring off the competition.
In 2020 BlackRock virtuously promised […]
Hands Up: It’s Net Zero now or a 1.5% interest rate hike?
So Australia is adopting Net Zero because the Global Financiers, who only want to save the world, would have refused to lend us money without jacking up our interest rates by 1.5%. The banker punishment would have meant a “17% investor exodus”. Fancy a stock market collapse?
This remarkable admission comes in the modeling released today by the Morrison government. No one is even trying to hide it.
At least we can stop pretending this has anything to do with science or the voters. Just cut out the IPCC and go straight for the BlackRock Temperature Tax, eh?
Note the “penalties” are imposed by global financiers:
Modelling shows real cost of no net-zero carbon emissions
Greg Brown and Geoff Chambers, The Australian
Businesses and households would have faced interest rate hikes of up to 1.5 per cent under expected penalties imposed by global financiers if the government had failed to adopt net zero emissions by 2050, modelling for the Glasgow climate package shows.
The penalty regime would have sparked a 17 per cent investment collapse by the middle of the next decade, […]
Much of the Media’s true business model is probably not ads or customers or even profits. Controlling the narrative is power in itself. Those who hold the strings that give a party or candidate a ten point advantage, to some extent, control the party.
If it serves an industry to get one candidate elected, those that control the megaphone can describe said candidates flaws with the best possible spin, or not at all. If this is the major driver of media ownership it explains the Fox paradox. Tucker Carlson and Fox are scoring super high ratings, and competing on uncontested territory. Why does no one seems to want to mimic that and compete for those viewers?
Probably because Big Business doesn’t want “Power for The People” or small government or, euwh, competition.
So Big Business owns Big Media, and they both like Big Government. Nearly every big business benefits from big regulation by “friendly” regulators. They get a net of red tape that catches little fish competitors and a river of subsidies that make life sweeter for Big Fish.
And if Big Media hold the key to swing voters, then Big Government likes Big Media, so it’s a perpetual self […]
How to incense whole industries ANZ style The ANZ bankers declared this week that they are really in the business of saving the Earth, even if Australians didn’t vote for it. They declared some law abiding businesses were unworthy of their loans, and thousands of Australians in the steel industry, farming, and manufacturing are livid. The bank is now telling its customers that interest payments are not enough, and those with 50% or more of their operations in coal must diversify. They may well diversify right out of ANZ — a boycott is being discussed. And for shareholders this preening would seem like a dumb way to lose customers. But in Australia it’s worse than that. The right to earn interest by loaning money they mostly don’t have (by creating paper currency from thin air) is a glorious gift bestowed on them by an Australian banking license. It’s a perpetual money making machine, granted by a government group called APRA. ANZ is one of The Big Four Banks in Australia. It is supposed to provide an essential service, and in return APRA protects it by using the power of the state to run any new competitors off the ranch and […]
Because Big Bankers really want to save the Earth, right?
BlackRock, the 10 trillion dollar “global investment fund” is urging the Australian company AGL to shut Bayswater and Loy B Yang Coal Plants much sooner than planned. BlackRock is a NY based and as wikipedia says “Due to its power, and the sheer size and scope of its financial assets and activities, BlackRock has been called the world’s largest shadow bank.”
The move only got 20% support from investors. Australian investors largely said “no thanks”. Where are The Greens in exposing multinational powers that want to influence Australia — they’re part of the Big Banker Promotion Team.
BlackRock turns up the heat on AGL’s coal exit plans
Nick Toscano, Sydney Morning Herald
AGL faced an investor revolt on Wednesday, as more than 20 per cent of the company’s shareholders backed a resolution for the board to align the retirement of the Loy Yang A power plant in Victoria and its Bayswater station in New South Wales with a strategy to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.
This would mean shutting Loy Yang A, the largest brown coal fired power plant in Victoria, […]
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 […]
This absolutely definitely is not about profits or money.
Giant Spanish bank announces €100 billion plan to fight climate change
BBVA, the second largest bank in Spain, has launched a major new financing initiative to support sustainable development and combat climate change in the coming years.
Only gas and oil companies are “vested interests” seeking to profiteer from our demise. Banks are charities:
BBVA Group Executive Chairman Francisco González said, “At BBVA, we want to play a key role in mobilizing resources to halt climate change and promote sustainable development. It is an ambitious, long-term goal in line with our purpose of ‘bringing the age of opportunity to everyone.’”
Apparently, the bank’s role is to change Earth’s climate, and “bring the age of opportunity to everyone”.
Do their shareholders know, I wonder?
Can anyone see an elephant?
Warning — Meaningless acronym coming — SBTI:
BBVA has also become the first Spanish bank to commit to the Science Based Targets Initiative. The campaign helps major corporates work out how they have to cut emissions to prevent the impacts of climate change.
The group’s new strategy is called Pledge 2025…
If you wanted […]
A survey in Asia found that 69% of financial institutions there don’t bother with assessing climate change risks when considering financing projects. Either these bankers have missed the last 20 years of IPCC messaging (careless inattentive bankers), or they’ve seen it and they know it’s baloney (skeptical bankers). Hmmm. What’s more likely?
Looks like two thirds of Asian banks don’t believe the IPCC:
[The new survey] …undertaken by Asia Research and Engagement with support of Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited, … found that 31 per cent of the institutions factored climate change risks into their financing operations, with 61 per cent of banks referring to green products and 56 per cent providing some quantification of their exposure.
It said financial institution were factoring climate change risks into their policies and offered green finance products. But only over a quarter of banks referred to climate change factors as a reason to limit financing .…
The bottom line is always where the money goes.
So over two thirds of financial institutions couldn’t care less about those forecasts of beachside apartments sinking under the waves, or cities becoming unlivable, nor of coal mines supposedly going broke. Nor […]
It doesn’t have to be this way. The most important price in our economy is set by a bunch of bureaucrats. They are unelected and unaccountable. But your day to day life is affected by their decisions, as well as your ability to buy a house or for your retirement savings to maintain their value. Some people are wiped out by a mere phrase in a memo. There is a deep Soviet style management program at the centre of all Western economies. It’s time we talked about that ogre.
Maurice Newman, former chair of the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX), writes in The Australian about the defining invisible issue which is rarely discussed — our currencies, our central banks:
Vladimir Lenin advocated: “The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.” True or not, we seem hellbent on finding out.
Dark times are coming:
The BIS has rung the alarms. We are warned that the world’s most reckless monetary experiment, which has taken interest rates to the lowest in recorded history, is failing. Central bankers remain silent, not knowing how or when to end what they began, while the political class simply looks […]
The tide of money, the vested interests flows
H/t to Eric Worrall at WattsUp.
The current “green” industry is already around $1.5 Trillion a year. Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England said he expects this to grow to $5-7 trillion.
Financial Post: Climate change a $7 trillion funding opportunity
He said that given the enormous funding needs for clean infrastructure — he estimates at somewhere between $5 trillion and $7 trillion a year — investment opportunities will rebound.
If clean green energy was efficient, cheap and reliable there would be no “funding need” as the market would leap to exploit that opportunity. Instead most leading investors act like they are skeptics. The fact that central bankers are selling it so aggressively says a lot. Perhaps central bankers want to help the poor and save the world, or could it be that the entire financial industry will profit from a fake, forced market and another fiat currency? What are the brokerage fees on a $7T market…
Again we get this “free market” myth:
[Carbon pricing is the cleanest way for markets to judge the tangible exposure to climate change,” said Carney
[…]
The wall of money is enormous, and the media oblivious to the real flow from taxpayers to corporate welfare freeloaders.
The wall of money, part 23
Citigroup promised to spend, invest and loan $50 billion in 2007 and found it so easy, it managed to do it by 2013, three years ahead of schedule. This month it promised to send another $100 billion more towards “sustainability”.
How much of this is about being a green corporate citizen? Not much apparently. Citigroup are making the Citigroup buildings energy efficient, but what they didn’t say was whether they would stop investing in or taking money and profits from their fossil fuel customers. As it happens Citigroup might Big-Green, but they are also Big-Ungreen too, they were one of “the top providers of funding for the most damaging practices of the U.S. coal industry last year. “ Not that any journalist mentioned that when they repeated the press release.
The banks can sniff out a good subsidy — it’s money for jam, and they are happy to feed the machine that feeds them.
Easy money for “sustainability” will also generate thousands of scary press releases from each and every sub-project as they […]
Her speech to the Australian Business Council yesterday:
And the “other Presidential contest”, the Chinese leadership transition is taking place today. In 2015, China should take its pilot emissions trading scheme national.
In total around sixty per cent of the world’s GDP is either subject to a carbon price today, or has one legislated or planned for implementation in the two or three years ahead.
International carbon markets will cover billions of consumers this decade. Ask the bankers at your table whether they want Australia to clip that ticket. We’re going to help them get their share.
So that’s the work of coming years, that’s what preoccupies my thoughts as I think through the agenda for this country.
I skimmed this line on Andrew Bolts blog, but it didn’t really register until a friend from Europe emailed it to me. (Thanks Stefan). Surely it was a slip, but then she follows it by saying “that’s what preoccupies my thoughts”.
So this is the new-ALP- out goes the workers-party, in comes the bankers-party? Ho Ho Ho
How this for a hypothetical test? What if she knew of poor workers funds going missing, say, being misused through union corruption, would she launch […]
Profit through regulation of markets
Which caring environmentalists are trying to save the world through carbon credits? That would be the Banksters. Watch how the banks are working to “fix” the free market, via intervention and regulation, and milk the system to maximize profit. The so called capitalist pigs are really working in the style of the Soviets.
How sick is the EU carbon market? “It’s a dead man walking” according to Johaness Teyssen, chairman of EON.
The price of carbon hit record lows recently:
Carbon permits plunged to a record after European Union data showed emissions from factories and power stations in the region fell more than expected last year amid milder-than-normal weather.
EU carbon for December dropped 11 percent to close at 6.34 euros ($8.45) a ton, the biggest loss since April 28, 2006 on the ICE Futures Europe exchange in London. The previous low was 6.38 euros on Jan. 4. Power-industry emissions dropped to 2009 levels, said Matteo Mazzoni, an analyst for NE Nomisma Energia Srl in Bologna, Italy.
“That is the elephant in the room,” he said today by e- mail. “And then, of course, you have stagnating industrial production.”
But wait. Isn’t “lower industrial […]
Gillard once lauded the genius of the carbon market. That part of the “free” market which is free to move, is moving — and right out. The smart money is saying that carbon trading is a dead dog. It’s a has-been-tulip, a sick puppy, a sinking ship.
The future of global carbon trading is so “certain” that Barclays Bank is not even bothering to leave one part time guy in the US office with a post box, so they can pretend they still have an interest in it. The mood has so changed, they see an advantage in letting the world know they’re not wasting a single cent more on carbon trading in the United States of America. Well that made my day. :-).
“That is not good news for carbon-dioxide trading, especially not in the US,”
Barclays was the first UK bank to set up a carbon trading desk, and fast to move into carbon trading: “Barclays Capital is the most active player in the emissions trading market, having traded some 300 million tonnes as at February 2007″.
Barclays Closes US Carbon Desk In Latest Cap And Trade Setback
8.9 out of 10 based on 94 […]
Carbon credits: Just another excuse to "print money"
… If this was Exxon pushing a PDF promoting skeptical views, it would be on the front page tomorrow. Where are the front page headlines?
“Bankers feed scare-mongering report”
Instead it’s just Deutsche Bank try to save the world their profit line.
Just in case you are missing your daily dose of being spoon fed propaganda by Bankers who want your money, see Climate Spectator Balancing reason and risk, where Deutsche Bank is helping the skeptics by giving us yet another example of just how desperate they are to get carbon trading running.
Q: When will the bankers worry about whales?
(Ans: When they can trade Humpback Credits.)
The good news is we are getting to them, and we are marking the lines they need to jump over. They now admit it looks bad when they denigrate scientists (they finally “get” that they shouldn’t call scientists deniers):
Although the scientific community has already addressed the sceptic arguments in some detail, there is still a public perception that scientists have been dismissive of the sceptic viewpoint,
Watch how they pretend to care about the science (science-schmaltz), […]
Since time immemorial people have been inventing or exaggerating scares to gain power. I used to think carbon dioxide posed a real threat, and I even used to be an active member of the Australian Greens. Then I discovered all the things we weren’t being told (like this and this), and how much money was involved and I was shocked.
There are many good people among the Greens who will be outraged when they realize how they have been used.
The most selfish aims are always cloaked in “good intentions”
Some Greens really believe a market based trading system is the best way to deal with pollution. But this pollution is not a pollutant, and this “free market” is not free. Last year the carbon market reached $130 billion dollars. It’s projected to reach $2 Trillion, and you can be sure that “sub-prime” carbon is coming too. The market depends wholly on government mandate; it’s “fixed” from beginning to end. Who would buy a carbon credit if they weren’t forced to? In a free market, no one.
Worse, funneling money through fake markets is like inviting corruption to a three course meal.
7.5 out […]
|
JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
Jo appreciates your support to help her keep doing what she does. This blog is funded by donations. Thanks!
Follow Jo's Tweets To report "lost" comments or defamatory and offensive remarks, email the moderators at: support.jonova AT proton.me
Statistics
The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
|
Recent Comments