Sunday, March 14, 2010

Small food from China.

Small food. Small quality food. That is my beef.

Does everything have to come from China, a place where they had to shut down 30,000 factories so the air would be clear enough to host an Olympic event, a place where people were tasked with clearing the green slime from the waterways by hand, so the rowers could compete?

I do not want my food to come from China. 80% of store bought fish is processed in China. China is a place where fish farms can exist in a seemingly endless chain, where the excess feed, antibiotics, and poop from the fish farm upstream are injested, then expelled downstream to the next farm.

I buy things at the 'Dollar Store'. A place in which I know just about everything is made in China, and what isn't, is made in India.

Still, that doesn't mean I am without taste. I like Oysters, Mussels, Clams...lots of stuff from the sea. The stuff I am used to, produced in Canada or the US, tastes good and comes in whole morsels of seafood.

One day, I noticed the Dollar Store had some for sale. A can of mussels, a can of oysters....

The seafood was broken, miscellaneous pieces that could have been from any sea animal. A lot of it consisted of parts of the oyster some people leave out, like the intestines. They are small animals, so eating those parts by accident won't kill you, but they are not the tastiest or meatiest parts.

Several months ago I noticed the disappearance of Snow Peas from the grocery shelves. What took the place of one of my favourite raw foods was labelled Snap Peas. They look the same, but these ones, only from China, are smaller, a grey-green (think tired), and are bitter, even after cooking.

Wasn't China until the last few years a recipient of food aid? Someone could help me here. What are they doing exporting food to us? I thought we had an abundance of food to sell to others.

Look, I will buy a crappy ladle that will break after 100 uses, or a frying pan that will fry itself after 50 uses. I will buy the cheap batteries, the pack of pens that will each spontaneously explode or stop working after a week.

I will NOT buy my food from China, a polluted wasteland where expertise in government supersedes expertise in any form of engineering.

Is THIS the country we want free trade with?

Making private debt public.

Iceland, tiny Iceland, did what all other countries should have done.  They denied the economic raptors their unjust rewards.  And they can and will do it for several reasons.

A vote to deny repayment to Britain and The Netherlands the monies they gave to jilted depositors of Iceland's failed internet bank, Icesave, so that they could recoup 100% of their losses.  No responsible government guarantees 100% of losses for the simple reason that personal and corporate wealth is in any country larger by almost an order of magnitude.

Let's go back here for a second though.  People in Britain and The Netherland's deposited money in an INTERNET bank that, by virtue of its not having physical branches, was able to offer higher interest rates than the average stodgy brick-and-mortar bank one can visit simply by walking down the street.  I will venture a guess that as long as those higher off-shore interest rates were being earned, year after year, nobody complained.

I know, the idea is too stupid to even contemplate.  Of course nobody complained.

There was a run on the banks influenced by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and typical of governments who should know better, The Iceland Government quickly offered guarantees on private banking debt to try to stabilize their currency.

I'm not one to brag about my knowledge in such matters, but look, if you grew up with very little, and you end up with very little, what have you lost?

Iceland used to be a poor place, occupied by whalers and fisherman, and little else.  And no, whales are not fish for anyone who asks. It is a small country blessed by natural sources of energy that are the envy of the world.  I can't remember the exact number, but 40-60% of Iceland's heating needs are met by geothermal sources.

So what happened?

Little Iceland was poor once, and saw itself as poor.  With few exportable commodities, and looking at what their neighbours across the sea were doing in Ireland, the idea of making money by dealing in money must have seemed appealing.  And it worked for several years.

When my current bank is offering 2% on a savings account, and another bank comes along offering 5%, I might be tempted to be honest with you.  But in my world, a solid 2% matters, whereas 5% seems very speculative.

Basically, the story I am seeing over and over, from all around the world, is one of people who should have known better, betting the farm on something that always smelled wrong.  I swear that I saw the housing bubble in 2004, when home prices seemed to magically go up 10-20% per year, while wages went up 1-2%, and inflation was pretty much at 0%. I didn't need a degree in economics to see the problem.

But maybe an understanding of basic arithmetic was better to have, than a blind faith in any financial advisor.  How many people who claim to now have nothing profited from Madoff?  Hundreds of people who should have known better, who should have questioned the unfailingly strong returns.

I'm not a Cassandra.  My RSP was tanking in a good year (-5% average) so I dumped the company.  They were a little snippy when I told them I wanted to close my account because of performance issues, but noted that management costs never seemed to change.  It really is karma that I have no money invested with them, but I can still log in to my account to see how their various funds are doing...same as ever, -5% of market.

But back to the point.

Iceland allowed several business entities to be set up, as any sovereign country can do, to offer their services for sale.

One of these businesses, Icesave, a high-interest bearing savings vehicle, was so popular that in 5 months it attracted 125,000 depositors from The Netherlands.  It's really a guess, but probably accurate, that most of those 125,000 put most or all of their money into one bank - Icesave.

Then they lost all their money.  I'm sorry, but I have a hard time believing in the sophistication of anyone when they do something so utterly stupid.  And even less faith in a system that bails out their loss, merely because they ran like lemmings to the same cliff.

I am no financial wizard, but I found something that explains things nicely, and why people who should have known better got themselves into trouble:

PART 1:



PART 2:

Contacting me made easy.

It was recently noted that I should make it easier for people to contact me.

r_pratt@ fastmail (dot) fm
rpratt039@ gmail (dot) com

I look forward to your responses.