The government can print (base) money from nothing, and they can set interest rates artificially low so as to encourage private banks to create (bank) money from nothing. And governments keep doing it, because it’s so much easier to be elected handing out loaves and fishes, and grants and solar-rooftop-subsidies, in a froth of easy money and rising asset prices. Any fool can spend someone else’s money, especially when the sucker doesn’t even know it was their money.

Thus does inflation steal from all and sundry. Silently.

Watch them print money... say hello to inflation.

In the real world, we have to repay our debts. But the world of the ruling class never has to make ends meet. Alan Greenspan admitted that this weekend — effectively announcing that the US is the United States of Wonderland, where no matter how high the debt is [...]

What a surprise: The free-market-that-is-not-free leaps from one scandal to the next. In a real free market where salesmen sell something real, and buyers buy something they want, people can’t get away with cheating, or not for long.

If someone sold you a bulk carrier of coal, and it turned up empty, you’d notice.

But, if someone sold you two million Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs) that were worthless, how could you tell? They are “certified”. They are real “certificates”, and as long as you believe they exist, perhaps they do? Welcome to the world of fiat currencies, where confidence doesn’t just make or break a market; it’s its sole underwriter.

Times Online reports on the Chaos in the carbon market over recycled permits.

The Hungarian Government, the cheeky sods, figured out that if CERs were issued by the UN (and not the EU), they could use them to write off the obligations of some Hungarian companies, and then, apparently, sell them again, so others could use them to write off their obligations, too.

It’s like reselling a three-course meal after it’s been eaten.

When confronted, the Hungarian Government claimed the used CERs were only sold to non-European [...]

Three years ago Rupert Murdoch was promising to make News Corporation carbon neutral. He implored his staff to personally reduce their footprint, and to be more creative in convincing the world to act too. He created websites specifically to help spread the message about the need to reduce carbon emissions. And he even bought a hybrid car for himself.

Today Quadrant magazine reports what many of us have been speculating behind the scenes: Murdoch has realized the IPCC and the “consensus” are fake.

The Australian has performed best in giving space to sceptics and dissenters but has stuck to the save the planet line in its editorials, some say because Murdoch said so publicly. Yet in a personal communication with Murdoch he indicated his scepticism to me. Last Friday’s editorial moved in the right direction when it called on politicians to question the science used by the IPCC but it has yet to endorse the call for an independent inquiry by a number of Australian scientists.

http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2010/01/des-moore

Rupert Murdoch is unarguably one of the most powerful men on the planet. This is an edited extract of what he said in May 2007 in the first ever [...]