UK Food Inflation Hits Record High As Discretionary Income Evaporates Ahead Of Dark Winter
Brits have watched double-digit inflation wipe out any wage gains in one of the worst cost-of-living crises in a generation. Many have gone into debt, paying for things such as food, energy, and shelter. Others have been left with little or no discretionary income ahead of a very dark and cold winter.
Research company Kantar published a new survey Tuesday that revealed startling food inflation numbers for October that soared at the fastest pace in 14 years.
Kantar said annual grocery prices rose to 14.7% last month, the fastest since the research firm began tracking prices.
Consumers are expected to pay an additional £682 in their annual grocery bill if they continue buying the same items.
The survey found that 27% of all households are “struggling financially,” double the amount from last November. Nine in ten respondents said food inflation is a top concern, while energy bills were second.
“So it’s clear just how much grocery inflation is hitting people’s wallets and adding to their domestic worries,” Kantar said.
Kantar revealed consumers are switching from name-brand items to cheap private-label store brands to save money:
Own label sales have jumped again by 10.3% over the latest four weeks, as shoppers adopt different strategies to manage their budgets. The branded goods market grew far slower at 0.4%.
In a separate study, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found a whopping 7 million families have given up on heating, showers, and toiletries this year due to the cost-of-living crisis squeezing discretionary income.
The Centre for Economics and Business Research, which publishes the Asda tracker, found that after paying taxes for housing, heating, and food, 20% of earners in the second lowest income have nothing left to spend, according to Bloomberg.
Walid Koudmani, the chief market analyst at online investment platform XTB online trading, told Financial Times:
“[Food price inflation] when compounded with the massive energy spending increases has been seen by many as a significant risk to the economic stability of the UK.
“It is likely that food inflation will continue to increase as macroeconomic indicators have shown little sign of a slowing down in price growth while consumers continue to struggle with the ongoing cost of living crisis.”
Socioeconomic turmoil is only growing in the UK as it morphed into a political crisis. Government handouts might not cushion all households as inflation remains sticky at four-decade highs.
Uk’s new Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has a lot on his plate as he must suppress inflation while preventing social unrest, which will be a tricky balancing act as the cold season begins.
Demand for oil tankers carrying oil products is set to soar next year to heights not seen in three decades, according to new research from Clarkson Research Services, Ltd., cited by Bloomberg.
The research organization is forecasting that the number of ton-miles will increase next year by 9.5%–the largest annual increase since 1993.
Ton miles—the volume of cargo multiplied by the distance that cargo traverses—is a common gauge that the shipping industry uses.
Part of the reason behind the anticipated demand surge for ton miles for oil products is the change in routes due to Russia’s soon-to-be restrictions on exports. Russia will need to redirect crude product flows to buyers not involved in price capping or sanctions, such as Asia—but this rerouting is expected to increase the distance that Russian cargos are shipping.
“It could easily be five or six times the distance and that means that you’ll need much more ships to transport the same volume that you imported previously,” said Anders Redigh Karlsen, an analyst at Kepler Cheuvreux, told Bloomberg.
“That is going to drive demand for product tankers.”
In September, Danish shipping company Torm told Bloomberg that “The EU ban on Russian oil products from February 2023 will spark a recalibration of the oil trade ecosystem. Some of this trade recalibration has already started.”
Another factor are new refineries in Asia and the Middle East, which are expected to begin to exporting.
The oil tanker market is already having a good year earnings-wise, as rates for carrying refined fuels on medium-range voyages increase to levels not seen since 2008.
Demand for tankers has been on the rise ever since the EU sanctioned Russia, and shipping companies were left scrambling to get ahold of ice-class tankers ahead of the embargo. Few tankers have been built in the past few years, and since this is not something the industry can reverse overnight, supply will probably remain tight, pushing the cost of transporting oil and fuels higher.
10s of 1000s of nurses across the majority of National Health Service trusts and health boards in the UK have voted to strike over pay for the first time ever in an action that threatens major disruption to an already strained health system.
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN), which has more than 300,000 members, said industrial action would begin before the end of the year following the first ever strike vote in its 106-year-old history.
Many of the biggest hospitals in England, all NHS employers in Northern Ireland and Scotland, and all but one NHS employer in Wales voted to join the action while some hospitals in England “narrowly missed the legal turnout thresholds to qualify,” the nurse union said.
The RCN said experienced nurses’ salaries are 20 percent worse off in real terms compared to ten years earlier, demanding a pay rise of 5 percent above inflation.
“Anger has become action — our members are saying enough is enough,” RCN General Secretary Pat Cullen said in a statement.
“This action will be as much for patients as it is for nurses. Standards are falling too low.”
The RCN’s demands would amount to combined pay rises costing £9 billion ($10.25 billion) which would be “simply not deliverable,” the spokesperson said, adding there were contingency plans in place for any “staff impact.”
As Lily Zhou reports at The Epoch Times, the union said the government must “signal a new direction” in its autumn budget announcement scheduled for Nov. 17.
Health Secretary Steve Barclay expressed disappointment in the union’s announcement, saying the nurses’ demands are “out of step” with the current economic circumstances the UK faces.
“We accepted the recommendations of the independent NHS Pay Review Body in full and have given over one million NHS workers a pay rise of at least £1,400 this year on top of a 3 [percent] rise last year,” the minister wrote on Twitter.
Barclay said he is “hugely grateful” for the hard work and dedication of NHS staff, including nurses, but said the “union demands for a 17.6% pay settlement are around three times what millions of people outside the public sector will typically receive and simply aren’t reasonable or affordable,” adding, “Labour have also refused to back this.”
Speaking to Sky News earlier, Education Secretary Gillian Keegan said another problem with ”massive above-inflation rises” is that it would in turn fuel inflation.
Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting accused the government of “unacceptable negligence,” saying Labour would have been “talking with the RCN and doing everything we can to prevent these strikes going ahead” if they were in government.
But he told BBC Radio 4’s “PM” programme he wouldn’t be able to meet the nurses’ demands either in current circumstances, saying, “the Conservatives [have] crashed the economy.”
Barclay, who got the job for the second time on Oct. 25 after being put in the role between July 4 and Sept. 6 owning to the recent shuffling of prime ministers, told broadcasters that he offered a meeting during his first week on the job.
RCN Scotland Board formally rejected an offer from the Scottish Government to give lower-earning nurses an 11 percent pay rise.
Britain has seen a wave of industrial unrest this year across a range of professions as pay hikes fail to keep up with inflation running at 10%.
The 234 people on board the Ocean Viking vessel have been granted permission to disembark in Marseille…
An NGO humanitarian vessel carrying hundreds of migrants picked up in the Mediterranean has been granted permission to dock in the French port of Marseille after the newly elected Italian government repeatedly refused it permission to offload passengers in Sicily.
A call took place on Tuesday between Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and French President Emmanuel Macron where the former emphasized the Italian government’s hard-line approach to immigration in no uncertain terms; this prompted the French president to authorize the docking of the Ocean Viking, operated by the SOS Méditerranée NGO, in France.
There are currently 234 migrants on board the vessel, which has been anchored off the Italian coast for over two weeks awaiting a safe place to dock.
The Italian government has in recent days allowed the docking of humanitarian vessels in Italian ports in order to allow vulnerable people, namely women, children, and those with medical conditions, to disembark. Italian authorities have then ordered the captains to leave Italian territory with a number of adult males still onboard, urging the ships to port in the countries responsible for operating the vessels, including Germany and Norway.
In a press release on Tuesday, the SOS Méditerranée NGO criticized the Italian government’s new approach, claiming “maritime and humanitarian laws were blatantly violated in Sicily, with the implementation of selective and discriminatory disembarkation processes of people rescued by the NGO vessels Humanity 1 and Geo Barents.
“Such a measure is not in line with the provisions outlined by the applicable international maritime and humanitarian conventions and resolutions,” said Nicola Stalla, Search and Rescue coordinator on board Ocean Viking.
Meloni, however, did not appear apologetic in a Facebook post published late on Tuesday.
“In terms of security and the fight against illegal immigration, Italians have expressed themselves at the ballot box, choosing our program and our vision,” the Italian prime minister wrote.
“Our goal is to defend the legality, security, and dignity of each person. This is why we want to put an end to illegal immigration, prevent further deaths at sea, and fight human traffickers. The citizens asked us to defend Italy’s borders, and this government will not betray its promise,” she added.
Conversations were held between Meloni and Macron, as well as between French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin and his Italian counterpart Matteo Piantedosi, during which “Italy remained firm on its position,” according to the Ansa news agency.
According to the French television channel BFMTV, Paris denounced what it perceived to be “unacceptable behavior” by the Italian authorities and eventually offered the port of Marseille for the NGO vessel to offload those on board.
The concept of “fascism” was originally entered into the Encyclopedia Italiana by Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile, who stated that “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” Benito Mussolini would later take credit for the quote as if he had written it himself, but it’s important to note because it outlines the primary purpose of the ideology rather than simply throwing the label around at people we don’t like as a dishonest means to undermine their legitimacy.
Despite the fact that leftists today often attack conservatives as “fascists” because of our desire to protect national boundaries and western heritage, the truth is that all fascism is deeply rooted in leftist philosophies and thinkers.
Mussolini was a long time socialist, a member of the party who greatly admired Karl Marx. He deviated from the socialists over their desire to remain neutral during WWI, and went on to champion a combination of socialism and nationalism, what we now know as fascism. Adolph Hitler was also a socialist and admirer of Karl Marx, much like Mussolini. It is actually hard to find where Marx, the communists and the fascists actually differ from each other – A deeper sense of nationalism seems to be one of the few points of contention.
Though Marx saw the existence of nation states as temporary to the proletariat and to the ruling class, he noted that the industrialists were erasing national boundaries anyway. Marx argues in the Communist Manifesto with some optimism:
“National differences and antagonisms between peoples are already tending to disappear more and more, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, the growth of free trade and a world market, and the increasing uniformity of industrial processes and of corresponding conditions of life.”
Marx saw the development of corporate power as useful and the next necessary step towards socialism, noting that joint-stock companies (corporations) and the credit system are:
“The abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself.”
In other words, corporations are viewed as a tool for the eventual transition to a socialist “Utopia” and the death of free markets. Once again, we see there is very little difference in motive between the political left and the fascists. The natural progression of every form of Marxism, communism, socialism, fascism etc. all ultimately lead to a kind of globalist ideology and erasure of cultural separation. The methods might differ slightly but the end result is the same. Some think this is a good thing, but it is actually quite poisonous.
Globalism requires an overarching social dynamic, a single hive mind, otherwise it cannot survive. If people have the ability to choose or create better options (or different options) for living then globalism loses significance. The existence of choice has to be erased. This is a behavior that the political left has fully embraced and they are more than happy to work hand-in-hand with corporate oligarchs to make their ideal system a reality. Long gone are the days of the anti-corporate progressive – They LOVE corporate dominance, but only if those companies promote and enforce leftist models for society.
Mussolini’s fascism is at the root of the very corporate governance that leftists applaud and lust after today. They have far more in common with fascists than they realize.
The new fascism is a re-branded philosophy best represented by something called “Stakeholder Capitalism.” It is a term often used by globalists at the World Economic Forum and the head of the WEF, Klaus Schwab. The media friendly definition of Stakeholder Capitalism is:
A form of capitalism in which companies do not only optimize short-term profits for shareholders, but seek long term value creation, by taking into account the needs of all their stakeholders, and society at large.
But who are “all stakeholders” in the opinion of the WEF?
Well, according to Klaus Schwab they are all of human civilization, now and in the future. In other words, the goal of SHC is for corporate leaders and globalist bureaucracy to take responsibility for the entire world, not just their own employees, shareholders and profits. And such leaders would not be acting as individuals, they would be acting as a collective. In other words, SHC requires all major corporations to act as a single unit with a single purpose and a unified collectivist ideology – An ideological monopoly.
As Klaus Schwab states:
“The most important characteristic of the stakeholder model today is that the stakes of our system are now more clearly global. Economies, societies, and the environment are more closely linked to each other now than 50 years ago. The model we present here is therefore fundamentally global in nature, and the two primary stakeholders are as well.
…What was once seen as externalities in national economic policy making and individual corporate decision making will now need to be incorporated or internalized in the operations of every government, company, community, and individual. The planet is thus the center of the global economic system, and its health should be optimized in the decisions made by all other stakeholders.”
The SHC concept is deceptive on its very face because it pretends as if corporations will be held accountable by the public within some form of “business democracy,” as if the public will have a vote on what the corporations do. In reality, it will be corporations telling the public what is acceptable to think and do and corporations in conjunction with governments using their power to punish people who do not agree.
The great magic trick is that these same unified corporations use the shield of “private property” and business rights as a means to control society without repercussions. After all, a primary principle of conservatism and the US constitution is private property rights. So, stepping in to disrupt corporate governance would be violating one of our own beloved ideals. It sounds like a Catch-22, but it’s really not.
As mentioned above, corporations are at their very core a socialist concept: They are created through government charter, handed legal personhood and given special protections from government. They are NOT free market entities, and Adam Smith, the originator of most free market ideals, stood against corporations as destructive and prone to monopoly.
As long as they receive protections from government including monetary stimulus and bailouts, corporations should not enjoy the same private property protections as regular businesses do. They are parasitic creations, alien to the natural business world. In a freedom-based society they would be dismantled to prevent authoritarian outcomes.
Shareholder Capitalism is also an incredibly arrogant premise because it assumes that corporate leaders have the wisdom or objective intelligence to expand their role beyond business and into social and political spheres. This has already happened in many respects with much chaos created, but open corporate governance is the end game and it is anything but objective or benevolent.
What are some examples of this kind of corporate/political governance (fascism) in action?
How about Big Tech social media censorship leaning HEAVILY against conservatives and liberty activists? How about evidence of collusion between Big Tech companies and government, such as the Biden Administration and the DHS working closely with Twitter and Facebook to actively remove voices and viewpoints they don’t like? How about corporate leaders colluding to destroy conservative based social media competitors like Parler?
How about ESG loans funded by corporate backers such as Blackrock or globalist non-profits like the Rockefeller Foundation?
If all corporate lenders applied ESG to their loan practices, all individuals and businesses would have to adopt leftist social ideologies and dubious environmental claims in order to have access to credit. ESG is a monetary incentive created by corporate elites to keep all other businesses in line. If it continues, ESG could wipe out political opposition to globalism in the span of a single generation.
And, what about the Council For Inclusive Capitalism? This is the most blatant expression of open global fascism I have ever seen, with money elites and politicians working in concert with the UN and even religious leaders like Pope Francis. Their goal is to institute a single centralized world governing platform built around the same agendas outlined in ESG and SHC, making corporations members of a new global council which they refer to as “The Guardians.” They aren’t even trying to hide the conspiracy anymore, it’s right out in the open.
Klaus Schwab takes special care to mention often that global crisis events are the “opportunity” that is needed to push the public into the arms of Stakeholder Capitalism through a nexus point called “The Great Reset.” Meaning, he thinks that widespread fear and desperation must exist (or be engineered) to perpetuate the SHC framework quickly.
Obviously, the globalists are on a shrinking timeline, though it’s hard to say why. They are tearing off the mask faster in the past two years than they have in the previous decade. More than likely they understand to some degree that if they go too slow the public will have time to mount a defense against them.
They will conjure all kinds of distractions and scapegoats to prevent liberty minded people from hitting them back. They’ll aim us at Russia, they’ll aim us at China, they’ll aim us at useful idiots among the leftists. They’ll aim Russia, China and the leftists at us. They will try to send us to war, they will call us insurrectionists, they will call us terrorists, they will say we started the whole collapse and that we are to blame for the world’s ills. None of this matters. What matters is that the globalists at the top pay the price for the harm they cause.
When the head of the snake is removed, only then can we sort out who is to blame; who were the heroes, who were the villains, and who were the idiots. Only then can we rebuild with true freedom in mind.
Space 2.0 marks a new wave of space travel.As Statista’s Anna Fleck details below, the boom is primarily being shaped by private companies, including an increasing number of start-ups, which are combining the latest tech innovations with new business models.
In the past, space travel was financed almost exclusively by the state and operated by a few established companies such as Boeing, Airbus or Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, among others.
Founded in 2002 by Tesla founder Elon Musk, SpaceX is currently the leading company in terms of number of spacecraft launches. The company is known for a number of projects, including providing supply flights to the International Space Station (ISS), with its first manned flight having docked there at the end of May 2020. SpaceX is also the pioneer of Starlink satellites, which are low orbit satellites intended to provide broadband internet to communities with little or no connectivity. As of August 2022, around 2,800 of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites orbited the earth. This is set to rise to 12,000 in the coming years.
On September 15, 2021, SpaceX took four space tourists into space for three days, marking the world’s first space mission without a professional astronaut. In the long term, SpaceX plans to colonize Mars.
New Chinese Property Support No Match For $456 Billion Hole
By Ye Xie, Bloomberg markets live reporter and analyst
Another day, another measure to support the beleaguered Chinese property sector. Developers rallied Wednesday after Beijing expanded a funding program to support debt sales by private companies, including builders.
It’s a positive that the authorities are doing more to bolster the housing sector. But it’s another bandage that’s unlikely to turn around the market.
Stocks of developers such as Country Garden Holdings and CIFI Holdings surged after the National Association of Financial Market Institutional Investors widened the bond financing program to about 250 billion yuan ($35 billion) for private companies, including developers.
The program, first introduced in late-2018, is one of the “three arrows” that the People’s Bank of China uses to help private companies raise capital. The other two channels include bank loans and equity financing.
In September, Bloomberg reported that policymakers have asked state banks to increase lending to developers to ease their liquidity crunch. After firing the first arrow, Beijing is now pulling the trigger on the second one.
But as Nomura’s economist Lu Ting pointed out, there are reasons to question the effectiveness of the program. First, new home sales revenue is the largest funding source for developers, far more than any other channels. It accounted for 53% of overall funding for developers last year, compared with 12% from bank loans.
In the first nine months, new home sales contracted 31%. At this rate, developers’ funding from home sales will fall by 3.3 trillion yuan ($456 billion) this year, according to Nomura’s estimate. That’s too big of a funding hole.
Secondly, the $35 billion bond financing quota is for all private companies, not just for developers. Builders accounted for 15% of all private bond issuance between 2018 and 2020, before falling to around 9% in 2021, according to Nomura.
Lastly, developers still need to pay off a large amount of maturing bonds in coming months, with about 30 billion yuan worth of onshore debt due by March. The implication is that even if they can access the bond market, the net fundraising would be limited after paying off the debt.
All in all, the second arrow is literally more like an arrow, not a bazooka.
China Revises Military Doctrine To Focus On Troop Deployments Overseas
The Chinese People’s Liberation Army is expected to undergo continued expansion and modernization following last month’s CCP five-yearly national congress, which made key revisions to the Communist Party constitution. This included changes on the nation’s military posture.
One of those revisions stated the need to “elevate our people’s armed forces to world-class standards” – according to an addition to the party constitution, as translated in the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. This is being seen as aimed at expansion of deployed assets overseas, also following widespread reports within the past year that Beijing is seeking to establish a string of bases on Africa’s Atlantic coast.
The revised constitution included an official explanation published alongside it which stated “Overseas safety and security has become a major issue that we must address” – in particular citing the need for beefed-up counterterror forces to better protect against attacks on Chinese institutes and companies in foreign countries.
According to further commentary of the changes via the SCMP:
Drawing on examples from China’s military defeats in the 19th century, it said international politics still followed the “law of the jungle”, with the strong in charge and able to uphold their will. The impact of a lagging military on national security would be fatal, it added.
It remains that compared to the United States or even Russia, China’s oversees military presence is tiny or almost non-existent. China has had a naval facility which opened in 2017 in Djibouti, long considered its main and lone military base abroad – not counting reports of one or possibly two outposts in Tajikistan, and the string of small bases in China’s backyard, on manmade island-bases in the South China Sea.
But as Foreign Policy, The Economist, and other Western geopolitical-focused publications have long previewed, China has ambitions for many more, especially in Africa. “Tanzania, Cambodia, and the UAE are on China’s wish list— and now Kiribati, within striking distance of Hawaii,” an FP report stated in summer 2021.
China’s military ambitions abroad, via The Economist
This week President Xi Jinping again reaffirmed his commitment to focusing on “preparing for war” with the country’s security “increasingly unstable and uncertain,” according to his latest declaration.
Russia’s oil production could drop to as low as 9 million barrels per day (bpd) in December when the EU embargo on imports of Russian crude oil enters into force, Russian news agency TASS reported on Wednesday, citing analysts at the Energy Development Center. “We expect that production in December will fall by 1.5-1.7 mln barrels per day compared to the June-October average, or 14%,” according to a report from the Energy Development Center cited by TASS.
The expected sharp drop in Russia’s oil production will lead to a spike in international oil prices, also considering that the OPEC+ group is reducing the target production as of November, the experts said.
Russia’s oil production, excluding condensate, for October came in well below its production quota for the month, at just 9.9 million bpd, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said earlier this month.
Russia’s October production was 1.1 million bpd below its quota of 11 million bpd assigned under the OPEC+ agreement, but mostly in line with Novak’s estimates made last month.
For November, Russia’s oil production quota under the OPEC+ pact will drop from 11 million bpd to 10.5 million bpd.
In October, Russian oil production, including condensate, was 1.47 million tons of oil per day, or 10.78 million bpd. The October production was slightly down from the 10.8 million bpd reported for September
However, the production decline could accelerate from November as the EU prepares to introduce an embargo on imports of Russian crude from December 5, Russian business daily Kommersant reported at the end of October, quoting sources familiar with the situation.
Analysts have estimated that around 2 million bpd-3 million bpd of Russian oil and products may have to find new homes after the EU embargo enters into force. Russia has redirected a large part of its flows eastwards to Asia, but it may not be able to accommodate immediately and find willing buyers for the trade flows previously going to Europe, especially with the ban on services handling Russian oil cargoes unless the oil is sold at or below a certain price cap.
From Riches To Rags: Peloton Co-Founder Starts A Rug Company
After Peloton’s former CEO and co-founder, John Foley, made a series of demand miscalculations for Peloton bikes during the pandemic and eventually resigned as shares in the company cratered, he’s back in the spotlight with a new venture: direct-to-consumer rug business.
Foley’s new company is called “Ernesta.” According to Forbes, he started the custom rug company with two other co-founders from Peloton.
Transitioning from slapping an iPad on a bike or treadmill to selling custom rugs seems like an unlikely path for the former billionaire. But maybe after borrowing millions of dollars worth of stock collateralized with Peloton shares and receiving repeated margin calls from Goldman Sachs, the rug business is his best bet to make a rebound.
On Monday, Ernesta announced $25 million in venture capital funding. The company is stacked with ex-Peloton managers and is hoping to take a slice of the high-end rug market.
Foley told Forbes the company “plans to sell 50 different styles of machine-made, custom-cut rugs in five colors each.”
“With Peloton, we didn’t know if it would be a success or not, but I knew that working with good people was a valuable way to spend my time.
“Rugs might seem like a potentially uninteresting category, but there’s probably at least one in your house. They’re ubiquitous, and people don’t spend a lot of time worrying about them,” Peloton and Ernesta co-founder Hisao Kushi told Forbes.
Custom Market Insights released a report in July that showed more than 100 million rugs are sold in the US yearly. The rug market is expected to expand from $18 billion this year to $25 billion by 2030. Foley said for Ernesta to be successful, it needs to capture only a fraction of such volume.
“I want to show discipline, I want to show profitability and have a real focus on unit economics,” Foley said
“Ernesta won’t attempt to vertically integrate its supply chain. Instead, the company will work with business-to-business partners in Georgia to source rolls of carpet in bulk, then cut them to order in a New Jersey warehouse to ship either directly or through logistics partners,” Forbes said.
At least Foley can now sell Peloton customers a fancy rug for their bike. What a dramatic shift for the former billionaire … from bikes to rugs.
