Sean Stratton 〓〓💚〓〓

“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.” – William Shakespeare

[Sean Stratton 〓〓💚〓〓 @Sean_A_Stratton]

The Storm is upon us, few saw it coming and fewer know we stand on its fringe.
And when it passes over it will be so immense you won’t even know it is all the same Storm
A Storm created when a butterfly fell to earth twenty four years ago.
And the World will be forever changed.

[The Caterer @Caterertweets]

Hospitality Voices gears up for fresh MP ban as VAT anger grows

@HospoVoices @wonky_table @andyjlennox

➡️ https://t.co/db3ZOoUeVO
https://t.co/db3ZOoUeVO

[查百万 @chakmillion]

德国拥有全球排名第二的官方黄金储备，总量高达3300多吨。但在冷战时期，德国人为了防止苏联坦克一天之内推平西德抢走国库，把全国家底里将近一半的黄金（约1500吨）全运到了大西洋彼岸，锁进了美国纽约美联储银行地下25米深的花岗岩金库里。

可从1950年代存进去之后的半个多世纪里，美国人只给德国央行发过一张纸质的黄金存折账单，从来没允许德国官员真正走进金库把自家的金砖一块块点数过秤；

到了2012年，德国议会和民间突然炸了锅，议员们公开质疑纽约联储金库里的德国黄金早就被华尔街拿去租借套现甚至偷偷熔掉了，强烈要求派审计官去纽约开库验货，结果美联储以安全保密规章为由，只让德国官员在金库铁门外隔着栅栏看了看外间样品，拒绝让他们进内库清点。

被逼急了的德国央行在2013年干脆拍板启动了二战后最大规模的黄金搬家行动：不跟你查账了，我直接把金子拉回自己家。

德国人动用绝密装甲车队、特种货运包机和军警押运，在四年时间里蚂蚁搬家一样从纽约和巴黎硬生生运回了整整674吨纯金金砖（其中从纽约运回300吨），运到法兰克福机场后第一件事就是用X光机挨个切开抽检成色，确认美国人没往里面掺钨块才锁进自家金库。

[James Savage @SavLocal]

Jesus, this is a horrific read.

[Moving Home with Charlie @moving_charlie]

This is a very important article as it addresses one of the key reasons sellers’ price expectations are so removed from reality.

[Catherine McBride OBE @CeeMacBee]

For the many UK politicians @UKLabour and journalists @BBC who don't know anything about UK trade, here are the highlights:

1. The UK is now predominantly a service exporter. 57% of UK exports are services, which are not affected by EU 'red tape'.

2. UK goods exports have dropped from almost 70% of our total exports in 1997 to just 43% in 2025. This trend began long before Brexit and is tied to Net Zero mandates, high UK energy prices, and EV mandates.

3. Machinery and transport goods, such as cars and aircraft parts, are 42% of all UK goods exports. This is by far the UK's largest export sector, although it is also falling. It was 50% of UK exports in 2000. But if the UK joins the EU's CBAM, companies in this sector will see their imported material costs rise, making their exports even less competitive.

4. Chemicals are the UK's second-largest export sector. They account for 19% of UK goods exports, but this share is shrinking due to UK and EU energy costs and Net Zero regulations. These will increase if the UK joins the EU ETS.

5. Miscellaneous Manufactures account for 11% of UK goods exports. This is still the UK's third-largest export sector, even though it includes many goods the UK no longer makes because of our high Carbon taxes, which will increase if the UK signs up to the EU's even higher ETS on November 20th.

6. Fuels account for 9% of UK exports. This is still the UK's 4th largest goods export sector, even though the current and previous governments are/were trying to destroy it with bans on new exploration and ultra-high taxes.

7. Material Manufactures account for 8% of UK goods exports. This sector includes iron, steel, aluminium, ceramics, and glass manufacturing - industries that have gone, or are going, out of business in the UK because of high UK energy costs, which will rise if the UK joins the EU ETS.

8. These five sectors make up almost 90% of UK exports. The other 5 industry sectors are insignificant. But the government and our journalists think the UK is New Zealand and that the only goods we export are food and live animals to the EU. We don't! UK food and live animal exports to the EU were just 1.3% of the UK's total exports.

9. The government is about to sacrifice all of the export industries listed above to slightly reduce the IMPORT costs of a handful of Supermarkets, at least two of which are privately owned German companies.
These savings will not be passed on to UK shoppers because the government has also increased wages again, and supermarket energy costs will increase if we join the EU's ETS.

10. UK exports of food and live animals will not increase because we are paying farmers to not produce them, this has nothing to do with EU red tape. Instead we are paying farmers to plant trees and wildflowers or plaster their farmland with solar panels. (54% of UK electricity is coming from gas today, 12% from solar and 3% from wind.)

11. Write to your MP and tell him to #StoptheReset.
If you don't stop this, don't complain when all of our goods export industries have closed because of EU higher carbon taxes, EU higher carbon import tariffs, and the cost of complying with the EU's new packaging and process regulations.

[Sean Stratton 〓〓💚〓〓 @Sean_A_Stratton]

@JamesMelville Desperately seeking money

[Benedict J Smith @BenedictSm55625]

Over the past two years, every single one of ONS’s monthly data releases for the UK-wide property market has been revised down 12 months later.

With thanks to @moving_charlie @alexgroundwater and @mrtabrett for highlighting this important subject.

https://t.co/7pQbe0VBuW

[Sean Stratton 〓〓💚〓〓 @Sean_A_Stratton]

@Fat_Jacques @EElikiak @Danjsalt Someone on Benefits:
Landlord“I’m sorry it’s taken.”
Next week, still on the market.
Benefits “I thought you said it was taken?”
Landlord “Yeah it was but they pulled out.”
Benefits “Ohh is it available then?”
Landlord “Nah, got someone about to pay the deposit, sorry.”
And on….

[Sean Stratton 〓〓💚〓〓 @Sean_A_Stratton]

@MattHarperUK @afneil Warren Buffet came uk with a good one to control government spending.

If politicians exceed a 3% of gdp deficit then they are ineligible for re-election.

That’s would stop the pie in the sky projects and Willy billy freebies.

[Andrew Neil @afneil]

This is government gaslighting to a high degree.
1. It’s not a new announcement. The Norfolk East and West offshore wind projects were announced earlier this year as part of the AR7 round of contracts.
2. No way does it bring down prices. Those behind it, energy giant RWE + global investors KKR, were guaranteed an above-market strike price of £91.20/MWh based on 2024 prices — indexed linked for 20 years. That guarantee is already worth £97/MWh in 2026. This is v expensive energy.
3. What is new is that the costs of developing offshore wind have soared. So the government has now had to chip in £1 billion of the £12 billion investment needed from the National Wealth [Destruction] Fund. So more state subsidy on top of the massive subsidies for two foreign companies implicit in the price guarantees embedded in AR7.
4. Far from cheaper electricity this embeds high-cost electricity in the system for 20 years.
5. So much for the Chancellor’s Budget pledge to ‘only build new projects when they lower prices’. This does the opposite — and at enormous expense to the taxpayer and electricity user.
Gaslighting indeed.

[Sean Stratton 〓〓💚〓〓 @Sean_A_Stratton]

@julesw1lko @CityAM In one year they spent £16.5bn with private firms!
Hmm Labour spend £11bn per month on debt repayments on it’s excessive spending.
£16.5 bn is peanuts over a year.
My local council has spends over a Billion a year.

[Sean Stratton 〓〓💚〓〓 @Sean_A_Stratton]

@TheCactus71 @TerraOrBust Unions didn’t want to join back in the 90’s.
Blair & Blunket had to do a lot of convincing to get them to agree to FOM back in the day.
Unions know mass immigration leads to lower wages and higher unemployment.

[Sean Stratton 〓〓💚〓〓 @Sean_A_Stratton]

@julesw1lko @CityAM Please enlighten me.

[Sean Stratton 〓〓💚〓〓 @Sean_A_Stratton]

@julesw1lko @CityAM Sorry think I’m missing the point your trying to make.

[Daniel Priestley @DanielPriestley]

Why do they hate self employed people so much? …

[City A.M. @CityAM]

"They have to understand, that governments have NO money." Liam Halligan, director of the CPS, tells City AM that Labour needs to appreciate the risk-taking business owners who are funding public spending.

#Economics #Tax #Finance #News

[Sean Stratton 〓〓💚〓〓 @Sean_A_Stratton]

@julesw1lko @CityAM Double S
Double L

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Recently I told you there are two kinds of people in this system: cynics and believers.

Ursula von der Leyen, I put her with the believers. And that's exactly why you need to understand how the machine works.

Because cynics are very rare. Soros, I put him in that category: he knows exactly what he's doing, and he has never hidden it.

He read Popper, he has a theory of change, and he understood early on something the right still hasn't figured out: you don't change a society by winning an election. You change it by funding, for thirty years, the people who will write the reports, train the lawyers, and advise whoever wins the elections.

$24 billion spent by Open Society since its creation. More than 50,000 grants. In 2015, he wrote in plain text that the EU must accept at least a million asylum seekers a year, and mobilize NGOs, churches and businesses to take them in.

All of it is public. That's the most impressive part.

Here's how the system got hacked, in three steps.

Step one: selection.

Nobody recruits idiots. No need. The money does the selecting on its own.

A grant never goes to the person who doubts. It goes to the person who already believes. Repeat that over thirty years and tens of thousands of grants, and you get an entire ecosystem where the free thinker was filtered out at the door. He wasn't fired. He just never got funded.

What's left: people who are sincere, credentialed, conformist, and whose paycheck depends on the cause.

Step two: funding manufactures conviction.

Try explaining something to someone whose paycheck depends on not getting it.

The NGO produces a report. The report gets cited by an expert. The expert testifies before the Commission. The Commission turns it into a directive. And the NGO guy ends up in a cabinet, then goes back to a foundation.

Everyone knows each other, cites each other, funds each other. It's an echo chamber with a budget.

Step three: emotion.

You never debate results. You debate intentions.

One photo beats a thousand statistics. Every objection backed by numbers becomes a moral failing. And when reality contradicts the narrative, the dissonance always gets resolved the same way:

"It's a necessary evil."
"It's collateral damage."
"The real problem is elsewhere."
Immigration is never a problem. The problem is your perception.
The result: the system doesn't produce corrupt people. It produces NPCs. People reciting a script while convinced they wrote it themselves.

Ursula doesn't need to be bought. She has spent her entire career in an environment where every expert, every report, every "civil society" group tells her the same thing. She is convinced she's on the side of good. And that's what makes her immune to facts.

And the best part of the story: Soros isn't even the system's biggest funder anymore.

You are.

Between 2021 and 2023, €7.4 billion in EU funds went to more than 12,000 NGOs. The European Court of Auditors itself says it can't get a reliable picture of who gets what.

The hack worked so well that the machine now runs on your taxes.

This is not a conspiracy. A conspiracy hides. Here, the amounts are public, the op-eds are public, the recipients are public.

It's an incentive system. And you don't fight an incentive system by insulting the believers. You fight it by cutting off the tap and demanding total transparency: who funds whom, to say what.

As long as it stays opaque, they'll keep shipping believers at scale.

[Sean Stratton 〓〓💚〓〓 @Sean_A_Stratton]

@LovellPropguru @moving_charlie TIME is what you’re both missing.
With Bank of England 2% inflation target, overshot on purpose these days but that’s another story, asset prices will over TIME always rise.
1929 US stock bust the TIME it took was 25yrs for DOW to reach the same level.

How much TIME do you have?

[Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico]

The correct objection to Labour's "EU Reset" isn't that it's "undemocratic" (it isn't). It's that the things they are seeking to agree to themselves, as well as the things the EU wants that they appear to be agreeing to, are really really dumb & damaging policies.+