Credit card time bomb & 'aid' to Pakistan

An interesting snippet of news from across the pond yesterday. Apparently Charles Merrill, the cousin of the founder of the Merrill Lynch bank, fears a stock market crash worse than 1929, and is quickly converting all his savings and shares to gold coins.

"Merrill Lynch is crashing, " he told a Palm Springs newspaper. I predict a house of dominoes, and the whole stock market is going to crash."

Merrill Lynch is the world's largest brokerage and has had to write off $8 billion worth of bad debts because of irresponsible mortgage lending. Analysts on Wall Street believe this is only half the story and that another $8 billion loss will be disclosed in the new year. Merrill stated in his Palm Springs interview: "Protect your assets. Buy physical gold and hide it."

Merrill's pronouncements came just after Citigroup, America's biggest bank, also announced $8 billion worth of bad debts from the US housing market. Once again analysts say this is just the tip of the iceberg and that the banks are trying to stagger the announcements of their losses in a desperate effort to shore up confidence in the banking system.

So what does all this mean to us here in the UK. The lead story in The Times this morning helps to put this in perspective.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/money/borrowing/article2814097.ece

And read the related articles, they are equally important.

It's the credit card time-bomb that Freedom has been talking about for the past two years and it is of vital importance to the British National Party because the end of easy credit will help focus the minds of the British people as to what is going on around them. It's the start of the collapse of the retail therapy and holiday escapism comfort zones that individual households have cocooned themselves in for the last ten years.

The BNP is a political party that offers radical change and for the electorate to seek that change they have to be unhappy with the current state of affairs. If you're comfortable, why change things? Easy credit has been Labour and the Tories trump card to keep voters happy.

I, for one, certainly won't be sending a supportive e-mail to Nigel Hastilow. I've seen hundreds of Tories like him over the years and none of them have been worth a second thought. I met dozens of them back in 1979 when I was canvassing in Lewes for the excellent National Front candidate Betty Webb. "Enoch was right," "Maggie will get immigration sorted," "the Tories know what is going on," they would say when I knocked on their door asking for their vote. I wonder what they are thinking now.

Even anti-immigration Tories have a fundamentally flawed outlook. There was a classic example at a BNP ideas weekend at Centre Parcs in Longleat a few years ago. There was a newly recruited ex-Tory there who argued that the BNP should support the off-shoring of British jobs because it helped business! I expect if I had stayed to listen to more he would have also advocated the necessity for migrant workers because that would also help business.

In the Autumn budget, the Government announced £7.9 billion would go on Overseas Aid - an 11% increase. Some of this 'aid' is now being used as 'bargaining power' to try to encourage Pakistan's President Musharraf to hold elections in January. I always thought that the idea of Aid was that it went to countries that didn't have the financial resources to provide for their own people. If Pakistan has the financial resources to maintain a nuclear weapons system, you would have assumed it had the financial resources to provide for its people. So why is Britain giving Pakistan 'aid'? Answers on a postcard . . .