There be a rumbling and a sound of clucking chickens in the air

Or should that be Turkeys? It’s not looking good for citizens of nowhere these days. Although I don’t have their wanderlust, as a rentier I’m now probably part of the managerial aristocracy that’s been doing okay out of the TINA world order up to now. Said world order pretty much destroyed my job by first deskilling it and then exporting it to India, but I was lucky enough to be old enough to escape the rat race by sneaking under the falling portcullis.

I was never convinced by the theory of the lump of labour fallacy, and figured unrestricted low-wage immigration was going to lower wages for the poorer end of First World workers, a fair number of these voted for Brexit. Lo and behold, we seem to be getting evidence of the inverse effect of lower wages from the CIPD once the firehose of low-skilled workers is throttled back a smidgen – to wit

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) said the number of applicants per vacancy had fallen since last summer across all levels of skilled jobs, and said shortages were forcing many companies to raise wages.

[…]

The number of people applying for the average low-skilled vacancy has fallen from 24 to 20 in the past year and from 19 to 10 for medium-skilled posts.

Well I’ll be flippin’ damned. Who’d a thunk it, eh? At least some Brexit voters may get some of what they wanted. The fall in low-end applicants is 20% compared to the 10% fall in higher-end applicants, highlighting who has been taking the sharp end of that shaft. It’s an ill wind…

Perhaps if our welfare and unemployment system hadn’t turned quite so vile and nasty in peddling the chimera that work is the way out of poverty for the unskilled and make them feel so shit about themselves, then we could have come to a better way of divvying up of the spoils of war. And of course these guys will have to spend some of their slightly increased wages on paying a lot more for imported goods and services on WTO terms if they are lucky, our man Jacob Rees-Mogg and the vile shit-stirrer Boris Johnson will see to that. Let’s look on the bright side, though. At least BoJo is no longer in the Foreign Office. British diplomacy used to be envied, while often suspected of perfidy. We will probably need friends in future, the great BJ never was an asset in that line of work.

Charles Stanley Stitch up

Let’s have a doom-break for a minor snarl – Charles Stanley stitch up an Ermine with a nearly 50% hike in charges from 0.25% to 0.35. I really ought to learn from this and go with a fixed-fee supplier as my ISA estate is over the level that variable fees make sense. But there is the diversification issue, and at the moment paying two lots of fixed fees would hurt. But I need to ramp down in CS, reduce my holdings to about 20k, because I do appreciate their flexible ISA, letting me borrow from myself as long as I repay into the same ISA year. I remind myself about what I dislike about funds. I have to issue the sell command by 1pm today, to sell ~30k of L&G Dev world exUK funds at some unspecified price, into a fractious market. I can then ISA transfer the cash to iWeb and buy something similar as an ETF. Thanks a bunch, Charles Stanley. Hopefully it will be a falling market and they will do me a favour for the time I am out of it 😉 I don’t want to shift this in specie because past experience of in specie transfers indicate this is a world of mega delay and hurt, plus iWeb fees are lower for shares and ETFs than funds.

The Ermine’s attempts to be a long-term buy and holder means more of my selling is being done because of provider aggravation than as an investment aim. I envy the simplicity of my Dad’s erstwhile approach to investing, which was to hold certificates, but then you don’t get to have the ISA advantages. Plus corporate actions really stiff certificate holders, because they get to sell a holding not at a time of their choosing, which can give you a CGT hit if you’ve sat on them long enough.

Cthonic forces are moving

There have been endless words written about the rise of Trumpism and Brexit. They aren’t obviously connected in any way I can put a finger on, but they have the same feeling. Sometimes the big picture is one of myth, and the Archdruid’s kek wars series falls squarely into the category of myth, particularly for those of us who aren’t chaos magicians. Myth has value, however, like all the arts, in reflecting a side of ourselves that cannot be related in a linear narrative. So I find something compelling about his description of

At the beginning of 2025, when Donald Trump hands over the presidency to his successor, he’ll look back on a long string of crises that never quite managed to derail him. By that time, furthermore, the nation and the world will have changed irrevocably.

Like the pied pipers of Brexit, Trump  has a job to do, which is to give expression to the unvoiced, who are asking questions about why, if America is doing so great, their lived experience of life is so shit and been declining since the 1970s. Hence the strapline Make America Great Again, and the endless attempts by the liberal cognoscenti to stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the Beast. I’m not so convinced the Donald is on the right track to actually MAGA, but maybe he can make the little people feel a little bit less shit compared to Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Or just punch down on enough people even worse off so they feel better. In studies of perceptions of fairness in social animals, it is not absolute levels that matter, it is relative levels.

Obama put the problem well in his State of the Union speech nearly eight years ago.

“Many people watching tonight can probably remember a time when finding a good job meanthttps://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/no-america-doesnt-control-britains-nuclear-weapons/ showing up at a nearby factory or a business downtown. You didn’t always need a degree, and your competition was pretty much limited to your neighbours. If you worked hard, chances are you’d have a job for life, with a decent paycheck, good benefits, and the occasional promotion. Maybe you’d even have the pride of seeing your kids work at the same company. That world has changed. And for many, the change has been painful.”

10/10 for diagnosis, not so much for effecting cure. I’m not sure I agree with the Archdruid’s prognosis that this will be a success, perhaps the aim is simply to take down what he called the managerial aristocracy. It is not enough necessary to succeed. Others must fail. We’ve all known that feeling.

There is truth in his assertion that the cost of maintaining the Imperium means the rubes are hurting at home. We have the same problem to a lesser degree, with the officer class believing Britain needs to maintain a blue-water navy and a nuclear deterrent¹ along with some interesting delusions of grandeur about Britain’s relative import in the world, which seems to be stuck in a 1950’s time warp. I guess we will get to see soon enough if the officer class is right on this. One thing that the Archdruid seems spot on is that chthonic forces are stirring. I’m not yet sure that the Ermine is reprising Carl Jung ² in his Bollingen eyrie writing for the local paper in 1936

“A hurricane has broken loose in Germany while we still believe it is fine weather”

Coll. W §389

and sadly that essay is oft referred to in some dark places of the Internet. But the direction of travel isn’t good. Let’s hope that things like the 2030 Charles Stanley stitch up are the level of things that exercise the Ermine’s concern in decades hence, rather than the metaphorical equivalent of the imminent approach of the Rough Beast on Bethlehem.

On that note, it’s time to wick up the hi-fi to 7 and spin a track from  student days

 

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1. which is very linked to the Americans for operational readiness, even if they don’t actually hold the keys to the ignition ↩
2. Old Carl finds himself travelling in some exceptionally bad contemporary company these days, I hope the time doesn’t come when appreciating some of his ideas comes to be like saying Genghis Khan had his good side 😉 It’s a long way from the heady days when Dr Jung found himself on the cover of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band  (top row seventh from the left) ↩