Tag: economics

Economics is Fake

Like everything else about Clown World, mainstream economics, as reported by the financial media, is not only false, but known to be false by the serious professionals. Which is why what passes for the “real numbers” are recorded in a separate set of books by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for release to their fellow clowns.

A little over a month ago, a scandal erupted among the (relatively small( group of economists who keep a close eye on the monthly inflation data reported by the Biden Department of Labor, when they learned that there is an even smaller, and much more exclusive group of economists called “super users” who get preferential treatment from the BLS, including wink-wink-nudge-nudge explanations of where the data may diverge from expectations. That was the case for the January CPI when as Bloomberg first reported, the BLS sent an email to a group of data “super users”, which “explained suggested a surge in a measure of rental inflation — which left analysts puzzled — was caused by an adjustment to how subcomponents of the index are weighted”.

Once it became public knowledge that there was a super secret group of preferential “accounts” receiving economic data, immediately following the Bloomberg report, a recipient of the email said that BLS Statistics “tried to retract it and that they were told to disregard its contents.”

The irony is that even those “real numbers” are also based on an incorrect, outdated, and misleading economics model, but they are sufficiently better than the publicly-released numbers to give the favored group of insiders an advantage vis-a-vis everyone else who is active in the financial markets.

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Not So Good for the Economy

Migrants took €17 billion more out of the Dutch welfare state than they contributed on average, every year, for a quarter of a century.

The idea that immigration “is good for the economy” is based on a false assumption and an incomplete equation. Moving every single person from China would “increase US GDP” too, but it most certainly would not be good for the economy. Or for the people who are already resident in the USA.

At around $20 billion per year for the Netherlands, that indicates an annual net loss of around $300 billion in the USA.

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The Comprehensive Failure of Milton Friedman

The author of Princes of the Yen, which presciently predicted the 2008 financial crisis, the current one, and the global currency goal as far back as 2005, was methodically demolishing all of the key narratives supporting Clown World’s economic structures eight years ago:

The first four pillars of the central banking narrative have collapsed: Banks create money out of nothing and thus reshape the economy in their image. Markets are rationed and the key factor is the quantity of bank credit. Bank credit creation for GDP transactions boosts GDP growth, no matter what interest rates do (they will follow GDP growth). Developing countries do not need to borrow from abroad, and in fact should not borrow from abroad, as this puts them unnecessarily at mercy of the foreign creditors.

As these pillars revolve around banks and money and credit, some economists may agree, but argue that economics has long focused on the real economy and purposely chose to ignore all the financial factors. In this real economy, they will argue, the most important principle is to allow market forces to act without being hampered by governments – then we will see economic growth and stability. Should this fifth pillar of the central banking narrative at least be true?

Judging by the publications of the central banks, as well as the IMF or the World Bank, one would expect so: When these Washington-based institutions send their teams of staff and hired consultants to developing countries, their job can usually be completed very quickly. Without much ado, a new country report complete with major policy conclusions is drafted. The secret of such efficient work: even before these foreign experts had travelled (first class) to the respective countries, the conclusions of their study had already been pre-determined, because they are always the same, no matter which country is concerned: The goal of the axiomatic-deductive neoclassical belief system is to find ex post justifications for the argument that government intervention is bad, and markets need to be unfettered by any form of intervention. This predetermined conclusion is then presented, in the form of ‘research reports’ or ‘studies’, to the leadership of many nations across the world, only vaguely connected to local facts and institutions.

In order to reach such conclusions, neoclassical and central bank economists worked backwards: What kind of model comes to such conclusions? Answer: A model that operates in a dream-like idealized world. What are the features that define such a world? A long list of assumptions needs to hold, creating a bizarre theoretical Neverland: perfect information, complete markets in equilibrium, perfect competition, zero transaction costs, no time constraints, perfectly flexible prices that adjust all the time, everyone is very selfish and does not care about others, and people are not influenced by others. Why do all these assumptions matter? Because neoclassical economists have proven that they all need to jointly hold true, for market equilibrium and efficient markets to exist, and for government intervention to be ineffective.

The next step in the sequence of using such models is the most important one: present in reverse order, by pretending that no pre-determined conclusions existed. Start by listing the assumptions – for sake of argument. Then present the model. Then pursue it to its conclusions, which happen to be… let’s see… Oh, amazing: this model happens to conclude government intervention is bad and only free and deregulated markets will work! Well, in that case, ladies and gentlemen, we shall need to recommend deregulation, liberalization and privatization!

That such economic charlatanry passes for ‘economics’ in leading journals, textbooks and university lecture rooms is a sad indictment not only of the economics establishment, but of academia and society at large.

But what about economies in our world, on the planet we live – as opposed to the bizarre planet described by the economic charlatans? Since none of these assumptions hold, we know that we can neither expect equilibrium nor will deregulation, liberalization and privatization trigger improved economic growth.

If our theoretical assessment of the theoretical claims is correct, we should also be able to muster empirical support for it. And it exists in abundance. In order to test these neo-classical policy recommendations of deregulation and market supremacy, we can compare the market-oriented and shareholder value-focused US and UK economies with those economies known to have always placed an emphasis on government intervention, non-market forms of resource allocation combined with social welfare systems, namely Germany, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China. Of course we should not be influenced by the business cycle, and thus need to consider a longer time period, such as half a century. Considering therefore the half-century from 1950 to 2000, we would expect the best performance in those economies that are more market-oriented, and the worst performance in economies that have chosen to practice intervention, ‘guidance’ and the use of production cartels. What is the empirical result?

The neoclassical thesis has been rejected by the empirical evidence. In the 1950s, the designers of the Japanese economic system intentionally increased the number of cartels, in order to improve economic performance (Werner, 2003a). As we can see, as the number of cartels almost doubled to over 1000 by the late 1960s, while economic growth accelerated to double-digit figures. When, under US pressure, the number of cartels was reduced in the 1970s, growth dropped. The drop in cartels is accompanied by weaker and weaker economic growth. The deregulation drive culminated in the entire abolition of cartels by the end of the 1990s – and economic growth equally reached zero. A similar picture has been painted by the performance of many developing countries, including Argentina and African nations, which followed the economic advice of the Washington-based institutions. We conclude that the fifth of the central bank claims – that deregulation, liberalization and privatization enhances economic growth – has also been revealed to be fraudulent.

Do we Need Central Banks? RICHARD WERNER 15 January 2017

What’s intriguing about both his book as well as his paper is that it explains why both China and Russia are economically routing the bank-controlled economies of the West as well as why Japan is behaving so erratically and in such an uncharacteristic manner of late.

The great deception of liberals, libertarians, conservatives, and independence-minded Americans in general is the idea that corporate management is good and government management is bad. But the so-called Invisible Hand not only doesn’t exist, it perpetuates a gargantuan lie that directly serves the interests of the globalists, who delight in transnationalist unaccountability.

I haven’t read the book yet. But I will, especially since he is obviously far ahead of the game on the realities of how money is actually created in a modern credit economy. Ian Fletcher and I have proven Ricardo was completely wrong. Steve Keen has proven Smith was generally incorrect. So, it should come as no surprise that someone of our intellectual generation would eventually prove that Friedman was wrong as well.

At this point, it’s hardly arguable that none of us are actually free to choose very much of anything at all.

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A Brief History of Clown World

An Italian economic historian appears to have inadvertently exposed the way in which Clown World migrates The Empire That Never Ended from a declining power to its successor empire:

It pays to revisit the work of the Italian political economist and historian of global capitalism Giovanni Arrighi (1937-2009). Arrighi, who is often simplistically pigeonholed as a Marxist historian, a label far too constricting given the breadth of his work, explored the origins and evolution of capitalist systems dating back to the Renaissance and showed how recurrent phases of financial expansion and collapse underpin broader geopolitical reconfigurations. Occupying a central place in his theory is the notion that the cycle of rise and fall of each successive hegemon terminates in a crisis of financialization. It is this phase of financialization that facilitates the shift to the next hegemon.

Arrighi dates the origin of this cyclical process to the Italian city-states of the 14th century, an era that he calls the birth of the modern world. From the marriage of Genoese capital and Spanish power that produced the great discoveries, he traces this path through Amsterdam, London and, finally, the United States.

In each case, the cycle is shorter and each new hegemon is larger, more complex and more powerful than the previous one. And, as we mentioned above, each terminates in a crisis of financialization that marks the final stage of hegemony. But this phase also fertilizes the soil in which the next hegemon will sprout, thus marking financialization as the harbinger of an impending hegemonic shift. Essentially, the ascending power emerges in part by availing itself of the financial resources of the financialized and declining power.

Arrighi detected a first wave of financialization starting around 1560, when the Genoese businessmen withdrew from commerce and specialized in finance, thereby establishing symbiotic relations with the Kingdom of Spain. The subsequent wave began around 1740 when the Dutch began to withdraw from commerce to become “the bankers of Europe.” The financialization in Great Britain, which we will examine below, emerged around the end of the 19th century; for the United States, it began in the 1970s.

Hegemony he defines as “the power of a state to exercise functions of leadership and governance over a system of sovereign states.” Central to this concept is the idea that historically such governance has been linked to the transformation of how the system of relations among states functions in itself and also that it consists of both what we would call geopolitical dominance but also a sort of intellectual and moral leadership. The hegemonic power not only rises to the top in the jockeying among states but actually forges the system itself in its own interest. Key to this capacity for the expansion of the hegemon’s own power is the ability to turn its national interests into international interests.

Observers of the current American hegemony will recognize the transformation of the global system to suit American interests. The maintenance of an ideologically charged ‘rules-based’ order – ostensibly for the benefit of everyone – fits neatly into the category of conflation of national and international interests. Meanwhile, the previous hegemon, the British, had their own version that incorporated both free-trade policies and a matching ideology that emphasized the wealth of nations over national sovereignty.

Returning to the question of financialization, the original insight into its epochal aspect first came from the French historian Fernand Braudel, of whom Arrighi was a disciple. Braudel observed that the rise of finance as the predominant capitalist activity of a given society was a sign of its impending decline.

Arrighi adopted this approach and, in his major work called ‘The Long Twentieth Century,’ elaborated his theory of the cyclical pattern of ascendency and collapse within the capitalist system, which he called the ‘systemic cycle of accumulation.’ According to this theory, the period of ascendency is based on an expansion of trade and production. But this phase eventually reaches maturity, at which point it becomes more difficult to profitably reinvest capital in further expansion. In other words, the economic endeavors that propelled the rising power to its perch become increasingly less profitable as competition intensifies and, in many cases, much of the real economy is lost to the periphery, where wages are lower. Rising administrative expenses and the cost of maintaining an ever-expanding military also contribute to this.

This leads to the onset of what Arrighi calls a ‘signal crisis,’ meaning an economic crisis that signals the shift from accumulation by material expansion to accumulation by financial expansion. What ensues is a phase characterized by financial intermediation and speculation. Another way to think about this is that, having lost the actual basis for its economic prosperity, a nation turns to finance as the final economic field in which hegemony can be sustained. The phase of financialization is thus characterized by an exaggerated emphasis on financial markets and the finance sector.

Financialization is the first stage of decline and fall, but because it looks like an economic boom, it confuses everyone as to the fact that the mantle of hegemonic power is already being passed on. And part of the chaos of today’s world likely stems from the apparent fact that China belatedly rejected both financialization as well as its role as the next seat of the travelling empire, while both China and Russia are systematically destroying every attempt to expand the hegemon to global proportions.

It’s a long piece, but read the whole thing. The Long Twentieth Century is definitely going on the reading list.

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The Retreat from Japan

Goldman Sachs reverses course and exits the Japanese market:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is exiting transaction banking in Japan, less than a year after announcing plans to enter the business of managing cash flows for big companies in the country.

“We are stepping back from building out this business here in Japan,” Tokyo-based spokesperson Hiroko Matsumoto said in an emailed statement. “Consequently we are closing Goldman Sachs Bank USA Tokyo Branch whose sole function was to support transaction banking in this market.”

The bank will remain focused on growing its transaction banking operations in the US, UK and European Union, Matsumoto said.

I don’t know what this might signify, but I assume it is something important, perhaps even on the level of China’s 2015 decision to spurn Clown World’s invitation to become the new headquarters of The Empire That Never Ended.

What we know is that a decision by the Japanese government, or its replacement, to change sides and support China instead of the United States would be a global shift of tectonic proportions.

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Spengler and the Clowns in the Bunker

David Goldman, the Asia Times columnist formerly known as Spengler, was invited to an elite conclave of Clown Worlders to discuss the current state of their war with Russia. And if he is to be believed, there is no Plan B for Clown World:

Somewhere last weekend a few dozen former Cabinet members, senior military officers, academics and think tank analysts met to evaluate the world military situation. I can say that I haven’t been so scared since the fall of 1983, when I was a junior contract researcher doing odd jobs for then Special Assistant to the President Norman A Bailey at the National Security Council…

Russia’s economic resilience in the face of supposedly devastating sanctions is only one reflection of a great transformation of world trade. China’s exports to the Global South doubled during the past three years and China now exports more to the South than to developed markets. China’s unprecedented exporting success, in turn, stems from the rapid automation of Chinese industry, which now installs more industrial robots per year than the rest of the world combined.

This is evident, I added, in China’s newfound dominance in the world automotive market but it also has critical military implications. China claims that it has automated plants that can make 1,000 cruise missiles a day—not impossible given that it can manufacture 1,000 EVs a day, or thousands of 5G base stations.

The implication is that China can produce the equivalent of America’s inventory of 4,000 cruise missiles in a week while American defense contractors take years to assemble them by hand.

No one disputed the data I presented. And no one believed that Russia is taking 25,000 casualties a month. Facts weren’t the issue: The assembled dignitaries, a representative sampling of the foreign policy establishment’s intellectual and executive leadership, simply couldn’t imagine a world in which America no longer gave the orders.

They are accustomed to running things and they will gamble the world away to keep their position.

Success always plants the seeds of failure. The current set of Clown Worlders are the third generation in the West, and like every third-generation heir, they are well along the generational pattern of build-crusie-lose that so often produces the rags-to-riches-to-rags-again story so witnessed in once-successful families over time. The current elite no longer understands the differences between the situation they face and the historical challenges surmounted by their predecessors, and they are trying to use the same tactics and techniques that worked for their predecessors in a different time and on a very different set of people.

What we’re witnessing on a grand scale across the West is no different than watching the founder’s grandson resolutely steering the family company onto the rocks even as his siblings, wives, and children blithely spend away the family’s resources in imitation of the second-generation’s unproductive champagne lifestyles. Not only do they have no idea how to go about succeeding, but they can’t imagine failure, not even when it is simultaneously staring them in the face and biting them in the behind.

No wonder Spengler is terrified. The comeuppance for the corrupt clowns who destroyed the wealthiest and most successful societies in human history is almost certainly going to be one for the history books.

UPDATE: The Europeans are finally beginning to figure out that the clowns have abandoned them and they are on their own. But they obviously aren’t smart enough to accept defeat, give up their pretensions, and negotiate a settlement with Russia while they can still get very reasonable terms.

Washington has sent a clear message to European NATO members that they can no longer rely on its military protection, the head of German defense giant Rheinmetall has claimed. For decades, the EU has taken it for granted that the US would come to its rescue in case of war, but “that will no longer happen,” CEO Armin Papperger told The Financial Times. He cited the failure of the US Congress to approve continued military assistance to Ukraine as a signal to Europe that the Americans are not willing to pay for its security.

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They Know They Will Lose

Although many of their pet politicians, corporate executives, and talking heads in the media don’t realize it yet, the top globalists already know that they have already lost WWIII, as Col Douglas Macgregor points out:

This war has become financial as well as military. And the globalists understand that they’re going to lose this war. And what will come of this is that the BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, are going to be increased by 81 additional members. And all of these people are going to go to a currency that is backed by gold.

And once they go to that currency backed by gold, whether it is one currency or a basket of currencies, it doesn’t make any difference. Yes, we are in a lot of trouble. The globalists know that, and it is why they are so desperate right now. And the greatest fear that I have is that when the Russians do attack and it becomes abundantly clear that Ukraine is finished, I mean, it’s already obvious to anybody who visits the place for any length of time. It’s in ruins.

But once that occurs, I fear that there will be pressure to commit US forces in Poland and Romania, along with Polish forces and potentially Romanian ones, to western Ukraine. And if that occurs, the gloves will come off, because truthfully, thus far, Putin has exercised tremendous restraint, tremendous patience. He does not want a war with the West. If he wanted that, we’d already have it. But if we intervene in western Ukraine, it’s over. We’ll be in a full-fledged war.

You know, I think we grossly miscalculated. Putin had made several speeches over the last 20 years, repeatedly saying, please do not advance the border to Russia. Do not try to transform Ukraine into a hostile actor, an actor with hostile intentions towards Russia. What happens in Ukraine is of existential strategic interest to us, just as theoretically, what happens in Mexico is of existential strategic interest to us. Although this administration has decided to ignore it. He expected that we would negotiate, that he would demonstrate that this was serious, and that Russia wanted its population in eastern Ukraine, which is really Russian, to have equal rights before the law. He wanted to end the oppression of the Russians that lived there, and he wasn’t going to surrender Crimea.

The reason he went into Crimea is he was afraid it was going to be turned into a US naval base. Biden said. “Our goal is regime change. Our goal is to get rid of Putin, and our goal is ultimately to divide Russia into constituent parts, then exploit it.” All of his supporters, his staffers, everyone in the globalist camp knows this is the truth. The so-called oligarchs Kolomoisky, Soros and others were all part of this. None of this is news.

Finally, he said, enough’s enough. He stopped. They set up a strategic defense. They ran an economy-of-force mission, and now they have a force in place that can go as far as it needs to go, which includes to the Polish border. They have a plan for 31-month war against us if we insist on fighting it and we are in no shape to fight a war.

We can’t even recruit for the United States Army or the Marines. The Marines are running around trying to recruit illegals and are being encouraged to do so by the administration. Is that what you want in the ground force, to fight for this country? Forget it. It’s not going to work.

The difference between the coming war that concerns Col Macgregor and the special military operation of the last two years is that Russia has been keeping most of its primary military forces in reserve from the start. The reason we haven’t been seeing any of the vast and sweeping combined-arms offensives that were utilized in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and Manchuria in the 20th century is because the air force, the navy, and 600,000 army regulars have been preparing for a successful war against NATO that would probably end with the Russian occupation of the entire continent of Europe.

Which, as Macgregor, Martynov, and every competent observer of the last two years very well knows, is something that neither Putin nor any of the Russian generals want. Both the Russians and their Chinese counterparts have witnessed how empire and the foreign occupations it requires destroyed both British and American societies within decades. Even Israel’s micro-empire in Palestine is now causing tremendous rifts in Israeli society due to the current expansionary efforts.

Fortunately, the US is not very unlikely to intervene directly, because its primary concern is now the Southeast Asian front it is desperately trying to shore up in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam. And while it may try to use the Poles, the French, the Finns, and the Germans as a second proxy force in Ukraine, I expect all of the various attempts in this regard to fail as soon as it becomes impossible for the European media to hide the true state of affairs and the complete imbalance of power that currently prevails on the continent from the voters of the European nations. Fear of the Russians might sway the Poles, the Baltics, and the Finns, but the possibility of war won’t increase support for the current governments anywhere else, most of which are already unpopular due to the migrant invasions.

If there is one thing I have learned while living in Europe for nearly 30 years, it is that Europeans are very nearly as clueless about the USA as Americans are about Europe. Much like the US Boomers, even the Millennial Europeans believe that the USA of today is essentially the same as the USA of the 1950s. That’s why the average Finn and the average Swede are genuinely naive enough to believe that the US military can protect them from the Russians when they might as reasonably rely upon Japan or Botswana to do so.

But it’s pretty clear that Putin and his generals have already concluded that only an actual demonstration of sufficient force will serve to impose a more realistic perspective on the delusional leaders of the erstwhile West, which is why I anticipate more unexpected fireworks and major infrastructural collapses this summer.

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If You Thought it was Bad Now

Don’t worry. Those fine minds in government already know it’s going to get worse, even if they’re not prepared to admit it openly yet.

“The coming period of recession will … accelerate the decline in living standards that the younger generations have already witnessed compared to earlier generations,” reads the report, entitled Whole-of-Government Five-Year Trends for Canada. “For example, many Canadians under 35 are unlikely ever to be able to buy a place to live,” it adds.

The report, labelled secret, is intended as a piece of “special operational information” to be distributed only within the RCMP and among “decision-makers” in the federal government.

A heavily redacted version was made public as a result of an access to information request filed by Matt Malone, an assistant professor of law at British Columbia’s Thompson Rivers University, and an expert in government secrecy.

Describing itself in an introduction as a “scanning exercise,” the report is intended to highlight trends in both Canada and abroad “that could have a significant effect on the Canadian government and the RCMP.”

Right from the get-go, the report authors warn that whatever Canada’s current situation, it “will probably deteriorate further in the next five years.”

We always knew that the age of prosperity had to end sometime. And apparently, that time was 2008. Everything since then has merely been positioning and bracing for impact while running up the tab before the bar burns down.

This isn’t necessarily going to be a bad thing for some people, for in chaos there is always opportunity. But the degree of difficulty is increasing, and the old reliable rules for success no longer necessarily apply.

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The Wicked Generation: British Boomer Edition

A British millennial belatedly realizes that his parents’ spending on their travel addiction is rendering impossible his ability to buy a home and build a family:

As an impecunious 34-year-old millennial in an impossibly expensive property market, I am relying on, at some stage, a handout from them. But all I can see is my money receding into the distance on a long-haul trip to Bali.

With many of my friends in a similar position, and the cost of living crisis still at full throttle, the question troubling us over the generational divide is this. Who is being selfish? Us for wanting them to save their money so we can one day have it? Or them, for splurging it all so freely on themselves?

At the start of their travel spree, about five years ago, I loved the bravery and ambition of it. Growing up, we usually went to Devon or Cornwall once a year. But when there was just the two of them (my younger sister and I have long since flown the nest), they could afford to globe trot. For a bit.

Well, good for them, I thought. Let them, in their late 60s, have a couple of lovely holidays, before settling into a cosy retirement at home.

The problem was it didn’t stop at just one or two. It didn’t even stop at three or four…

How can I ever settle down and give them grandchildren if there isn’t any money in the pipeline to support them? Do they want to go on holiday more than they want me to be able to have and bring up children?

I’m not alone in agonising over where my parents’ hard-earned money is going. According to a survey by an online wealth management advice firm called Moneyfarm, two in five adult children feel their ‘blood boiling’ at the idea their parents are blowing their inheritance on luxury holidays.

Among adult children aged between 35 and 50, 40 per cent thought their parents should provide them with an inheritance (compared with 25 per cent aged over 65) — and 20 per cent had already argued with them about what was going to be left.

Another friend admits she puts phone notifications from her mum on silent when her parents go ‘gallivanting abroad’ — because all the pictures of dreamy destinations make her jealous. And resentful.

‘My inheritance is currently being drunk through a straw in a coconut in the Caribbean,’ she says. ‘It’s going to be slim pickings at this rate.’

These Millennials are not being selfish or ungrateful. And their expectations were not unreasonable. What these parents are doing is flat-out wrong. It is unquestionably evil.

There will be no short of foolish and philosophically-bent individuals who will defend these wicked Boomers as simply “living their best life” or “spending their own money”. But those are both obvious lies. Even setting aside the very different economic climates facing the generations concerned, the Boomers inherited more financial resources from their parents and grandparents than any generation in human history. And, on average, what they are leaving behind them is considerably less than they themselves received.

Nota Bene: 10 percent of the total UK tax receipts are spent funding Boomer state pensions.

And as far as the “it’s their money, not yours”, the Bible is very, very clear on what a good man is supposed to do with regards to providing for his children. The Contemporary English Version even spells it out slowly in simple language for the benefit of even the most retarded reader.

If you obey God, you will have something to leave your grandchildren. If you don’t obey God, those who live right will get what you leave.

We’re spending your inheritance! Tee-hee!

UPDATE: We have definite confirmation that it’s almost entirely Boomers reading The Daily Mail these days. This is the second-worst rated comment, with a highly negative ratio of 38 upvotes and 620 downvotes.

If I was this young man’s parent I would make sure he and sister were on the property ladder and can rent rooms out before going off on Jollies. I sincerely hope the house is left to the two children.

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Always. Use. Cash.

If you’re not using cash every chance you get, you’re literally part of the problem:

Sainsbury’s is battling a major IT meltdown on one of the busiest shopping days of the week and has left customers fuming after suffering an ‘error with an overnight software update’ that has prevented the supermarket from being able to fulfil online orders or accept contactless payments at the tills.

Stores across the UK are battling a major ‘technical issue’ that has left customers ‘disappointed’ and forced to turn to rival Tesco to complete their Saturday shop.

Frustrated customers say they cannot pay at the tills, while company bosses admit the firm is ‘experiencing issues with contactless payments’ and also ‘will not be able to fulfil the vast majority of today’s Groceries Online deliveries’.

Look, there are many situations that one simply has to use electronic payments, such as when one is not in a face-to-face transaction. But this recent payment failure at Sainsbury’s illustrates the absolute need for cash, which is why it is incumbent upon everyone to insist on cash transactions for all of your face-to-face transactions.

I don’t even have a debit card, much less one of those smartphone app payment methods. And this isn’t because I’m a Boomer who hates and fears newfangled technology, but because I understand exactly where all this “contactless” electronic payment tech is ultimately heading.

Don’t help pave the way for the Mark of the Beast. Don’t participate in it. Don’t make it easier for them.

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