I am being a bit self indulgent with the title for this blog post, which most means something like ‘The Year That Was And The Year That Will Be’ in Latin.

[I assume I have mentioned at some point during the nigh on three and a half years life of this blog that I studied Latin for four years at the Centre for Adult Education in Flinders Lane in a vain (in both senses of the word) attempt to make up for the failings of my no-thrills state secondary schooling.]

At the start of this year, I made some vague predictions about what we would see in 2022. Two of my predictions – the outcomes of the Victorian State Election and The Australian Federal Election – were both dead on the money. But anyone could have predicted those.

The other three things I wrote about were Communist China, Irredentist Russia, and financial stuff in general. I expect that I was sufficiently vague in those that I did not get them wrong.

I must say though that I am an optimist. I was hoping that there would not be a war involving Russia, and despite that, we have got something very nasty going on in the Ukraine right now.

I am relieved that there is no war involving China. I was more worried about that, to be honest.

With money predictions, if I knew anything, I would know the six numbers to tonight’s $40 million Tattslotto draw, and then I would not have to care about any of that.

Looking at what to expect in 2023, I think I will limit myself to what might happen in the environment, China, Russia, and financial markets.

We will do nothing, or so little as to be grossly inadequate, to address environmental concerns in the coming year. I believe, despite my love for free market capitalism, that we need to give the planet the benefit of the doubt, so I am rather concerned about plastic waste, global warning, and pollution generally. I am also skeptical about herding the cats who comprise humanity in a direction where we will give up on our standards of living sufficiently to make a difference.

We will, however, talk about it a lot.

Looking at China next, I do not see an invasion of Taiwan happening. There are too many problems facing China domestically, such as the demographic time bomb, the ripple effect of its Covid policies across society and the economy, and the high likelihood that its military forces are simply not up to the task of taking on several cutting edge militaries at once.

Russia and the Ukraine war…. What can any of us say? It is sad and unnecessary, yet probably the result of policies during the Obama era to install a pro-Western Ukrainian leader which have piqued the existing paranoia of an extremely paranoid nation. You do not poke a bear with a long stick without getting it rather angry at the goat in the same cave.

I don’t think that the war is going to end until Putin either achieves his aims, dies a welcome death, or is overthrown (probably with a welcome death tossed in for good measure).

Financial markets next. I am very leery of pundits and experts telling us what is going to happen in the year to come. After all, I have inadvertently subscribed to a financial advisory newsletter which uses astrology as one of its tools for predicting the property market.

I have no idea about whether the markets will go up or down, although right now I have no spare money to invest anyway (saving for a trip to Italy), but I am inclined to just let my abundantly sized share portfolio of mostly ETFs and LICs sit for now and to harvest the dividend stream.

Interest rates going up is not a bad thing, and nor are house prices coming down – at some point there will be a happy medium where houses can become affordable for people in Gen Y and Z. My house is paid off, so I don’t really worry too much there.

And then there is Bitcoin. 18 months ago novice Gen Y investors were dipping their feet into cryptocurrency as their first ever investment outside a term deposit. How clever does that seem now? I see Bitcoin as a form of Magic Beans. It is not a Ponzi scheme, but it is very possible that some of those who sell you those Magic Beans, eg that crypto exchange which collapsed last month, are running such schemes.

Anyway, I am looking forward to many good things in the new year, not least taking a very large amount of long service leave prior to retiring young. Now I will leave you, gentle reader, and go and check whether the cheap bottles of Rose and Sauvignon Blanc in the freezer are cold yet.

www.theage.com.au/sport/soccer/three-men-charged-over-violent-melbourne-derby-pitch-invasion-20221219-p5c7jm.html

I bet they have as few teeth too!

I remember, circa 1991 or 1992, during the troubles in what was then called Yugoslavia, going with a Greek friend down to South Melbourne to watch the soccer team then known as South Melbourne Hellas play against the team then known as Melbourne Croatia.

I think that the game was then in the national league, although my interest in soccer was and still in more in observing the buffoonish behaviour of members of the crowd than in what happens on the pitch.

After all, scoring happens so rarely that the game is exceedingly boring.

At one point early on the game, the Croatian team kicked a goal and the South Melbourne Hellas supporters all started chanting ‘Serbia! Serbia!’

This sort of behaviour is why, when the A-League was formed, ethnic based nomenclature and symbolism was banned from A-League clubs, leading to the formation of new clubs supposedly lacking in ethnic affiliations.

Mind you, I have been told by a now former friend who mindlessly embraced Melbourne Victory that the team’s theme song is ‘Scotland The Brave’, which shows up a degree of hypocrisy in the A-League’s efforts to stamp out ethnic identity and the related hooliganism.

This is a good moment for me to pause and inform you, gentle reader, that I consider Melbourne Victory supporters generally to be a bunch of tossers and morons, and that I marginally prefer Melbourne City, even though it is part of a sports washing conspiracy. [Of course, whether you call it Soccer or Association Football, I still consider it to be a very boring and tedious sport.]

Soccer fans held a pitch invasion during the Victory-City derby this weekend, which has been described as Australia Soccer’s darkest day. Apparently they were angry about the decision to sell the rights to host the A-League Grand Final for the next few years to Sydney, and decided to hold a protest. [Such people obviously are innumerate, and cannot appreciate that the reason for that rights sale was that the TV rights for soccer were sold so cheaply due to the lack of interest in that pathetic sport that there was a funding shortfall.]

The protest was, as expected, rather farcical, and quickly generated into a pitch invasion, rather like the soccer riot which Groundskeeper Willie led in the episode of The Simpsons where a soccer match is held in Springfield.

Which is to say that soccer in Australia can be taken as seriously as it can be on a cartoon show like The Simpsons. It is a magnet for hooliganism of all sorts, and moronic behaviour.

The CEO of one of the teams said today that life bans on the fans who participate in the pitch invasion would be insufficient punishment.

I agree. I think that both Melbourne Victory and City should be suspended from the A-League for the rest of this season as a penalty, and that they should not be readmitted to the A-League for the 2023-24 season unless they can demonstrate that they can control those pathetic losers whom they count amongst their supporters.

But you would not be surprised to see me write that. Any measure which stifles soccer in Australia sounds good to me, and I can think of heaps more.

I’m still convalescing from the Covid, and isolating is sending me mildly around the twist.

To keep me somewhat sane, I have been paying more attention to streaming TV than usual.

Which led me to start watching The English, a revisionist Western series starring Emily Blunt, an aristocratic Englishwoman setting out in the American West in 1890 on a quest for vengeance, accompanied by an Indian scout.

Once she overcomes the original shock of being in a savage land, Lady Cornelia shows herself to be no mere damsel in distress. She calmly drowns a man in a bucket in the opening episode, and then in the second episode shows that her time spent playing the games of the English country house landed gentry are portable to the West by killing an Indian bush whacker with his own bow and arrow.

In this, I am reminded of one of the early revisionist Westerns from circa 1970, a very dark and self-doubting time in US History, Soldier Blue.

Soldier Blue starred a young (and surprising beautiful) Candace Bergen as the strong willed and self reliant heroine, leading her supposed escort, the eponymous Union Army private played by Peter Strauss, through the American wilderness, right up to the horror of a massacre of unarmed Indians at the end.

It was a naked allegory for My Lai and similar atrocities committed by the US Army in Vietnam.

The English does not seem to have the same urgency of message as Soldier Blue did. The savagery of the people (mostly white) is taken for granted, and the atrocities and breeches of faith by the US Government are wearily accepted as the natural order.

But that perhaps is because in five decades a lot has happened in America and they no longer trust their governments as much as they did at the time when Soldier Blue shocked us, and are far more willing to accept that frequently, they might actually be the bad guys.

What once caused us horror and required some suspension of disbelief, we now realise to be the truth. And perhaps that realisation can help both America, and humanity in general, to seek better ways of dealing with each other.

You know, I was originally going with some friends for lunch today at Arundel Farm Winery somewhere on the far side of Keillor, where the flight path is the only clue that you’re not out in the country somewhere.

My friends are doing lunch as I write. As for me, I am isolating thanks to having finally caught Covid. I won’t be going anywhere before Monday night.

To make it worse, TISM is doing a gig in the city Saturday afternoon and I won’t have a chance to see them.

Hopefully the TISM reunion lasts a few more weeks – they are in their early 60s now and must be looking to top up their superannuation with this series of surprise gigs.

My mother has very sensible instincts. After two decades or so of exposure, as a Maribyrnong ratepayer, to the municipal intrigues of the Cumming family, local landowners and perennial council candidates, she is very cynical about Catherine Cumming.

After all, as a long time councillor and erstwhile mayor of the City of Maribyrnong, ‘Doctor’ Cumming does not seem to have done much good in reducing council rates, which seem disproportionately high compared to other local government areas in Melbourne.

The last straw for my mother was when ‘Doctor’ Cumming got elected at the 2018 election on the Deryn Hinch Justice Party ticket (my mother loves Hinch) and then resigned from that party just after the poll was declared.

That action really showed a deep seated commitment to the principles and policies which Hinch had been espousing (whether or not you find him dogmatic or annoying, Hinch is sincere and courageous, which is more than one can say for many other political figures).

[I recall that someone had taken a red Texta to a corflute poster of Cumming on the corner of Gordon Street and Ballarat Road during that election campaign and transformed her to resemble a vampire. Rather apt perhaps.]

Ever since then, my mother has a tendency to put any candidate named Catherine last on the ballot paper in any election, in case that that it might be Catherine Cumming.

I cannot fault her reasoning.

In the middle of last year, I commented on the sudden appearance of a Catherine Cumming MP fridge magnet in my letter box as a sign that she was starting to think about reelection.

Until that point, her main claim to fame in her parliamentary career was providing employment to various of her family and friends.

Since then, to her credit, she has usually voted against the various emergency powers over-reach bills which Dictator Dan has put before the upper house. This gives her slightly more sympathy in my book than those very irresponsible and lazy cross benchers from the Animal Justice Party, the Reason Party and the Transport Matters Party, who were quite happy to abandon their duty as legislative councillors to place strict limits on the length and extent of such powers.

Our Catherine is not really a party girl though. She was recently unsuccessful in getting her own ‘Independence Party’ registered. However, when nominations closed, we find her running for the ‘Angry Victorians Party’, a local franchise for the recently formed ‘Australian Values Party’.

Having a low profile as she has, aside from being resented by Deryn Hinch and Maribyrnong ratepayers alike, ‘Doctor’ Cumming took a stand on the weekend at some rally of the Angry Victorians. She made some very silly comments about Dan Andrews needing to disappear in ‘red mist’ – an allusion to the ‘pink mist’ of a shot to the head.

I dislike Dan Andrews as much as most sane people do, but he does not deserve thinly veiled threats of extreme violence like that. And as a parent, ‘Doctor’ Cumming should see what sort of impact such rants would have on Andrews’ children.

Of course, the Angry Victorians and others at the rally would have lapped it all up.

I am a lot more skeptical than that. ‘Doctor’ Cumming is mostly interested in maintaining her marginal political career. Having started it by exploiting the trust of Maribyrnong ratepayers and then Deryn Hinch, neither of whom have done their due diligence, she then failed to set up her own party (which shows a lack of organisational skills and charisma given one of her fellow local MLCs, once expelled from the ALP, had no problems in getting her own new vehicle set up despite her own colourlessness), and has now grabbed a ride on the Angry Victorian Party.

Personally, I think that ‘Doctor’ Cumming is about as ‘Angry’ as she is a ‘Doctor’ – she has a B.AppSci in alternative medicine, which is a degree of similar length to what a nurse studies.

I would have put her last on my ballot the way that my mother did, except that I think that the Reason Party, Animal Justice, and Transport Matters all revolt me slightly more.

Like many Victorians, I have a deep seated and long standing affection for the long gone State Electricity Commission of Victoria. My father was involved in building its headquarters, Monash House, in William Street in the early 1970s, and then worked in its maintenance team for a decade.

That building still stands, under a shiny new facade, but the only trace of its SEC history is the continued presence of Mervyn Napier Waller’s Prometheus mosaic in the foyer:

The SEC was created in the early 1920s by General Sir John Monash to utilise our abundant sources of brown coal in the Latrobe Valley to provide the people of Victoria with cheap reliable clean electricity for generations.

Sadly, a decade of profligate spending by the Cain-Kirner government from 1982 to 1992 forced the incoming Kennett government to sell off the SEC to pay off the mountain of debt.

And now Premier Andrews is going around wearing a new jacket with the iconic SEC logo on it, having announced his intention of creating a new electrical generating body under the old SEC name.

But this will not be the SEC. It will not be about cheap and reliable electricity. It will be about supposedly renewable energy through solar panels (arguably not a sustainable technology) and wind mills.

This energy will not be cheap, and it will not be reliable. It will represent an irresponsible and doctrinaire overreach by an autocratic leader.

And it is hypocritical. Since becoming Premier, Andrews has not ceased privatisations when it suits him – the land titles office being one which I would expect would be more antithetical to most people than that of utilities infrastructure.

Yet Andrews talks about how the SEC should never have been privatised. A decade of seriously irresponsible financial mismanagement by his predecessors in Labor government forced the privatisation of both the SEC, and the sell off of the much beloved State Bank of Victoria.

I am reminded somewhat of Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward. In order to industrialise Communist China, Mao went and forced all sorts of absurd cottage industries which were unsustainable to start up, such as backyard iron smelters. His economic ignorance ended up (as even Homer Simpson has reminded us) costing some 50 or 60 million lives.

Continuing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the way that Andrews is doing, along with the creation of an erstatz SEC to destabilise our electricity supply, is sheer economic vandalism on a Maoist scale. The lobbyists for Communist China whom Andrews was prepared to listen to on the Belt and Road deal must be pleased with their pupil.

But I too am familiar with Maoism, and I am fond of quoting from the Red Book:

“We must see to it that all our cadres and all our people constantly bear in mind that ours is a big socialist country but an economically backward and poor one, and that this is a very big contradiction. To make China rich and strong needs several decades of intense effort, which will include, among other things, the effort to practise strict economy and combat waste, ie the policy of building up our country through diligence and frugality.”

A $200 Billion state debt is a very high price to pay for the likely re-election of this petty autocrat.

Joseph Conrad has been one of my favourite novelists since my late teens, when I first read the novella Heart of Darkness. He could be hit and miss sometimes – Under Western Eyes is brilliant, but the similarly themed The Secret Agent seemed a mere shadow of his greatest works.

His best work is in his Marlovian stories – the ones which feature the sea captain Marlow as narrator. Those are Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Youth, and Chance.

And it was Chance which I was thinking of these past few days. In particular, I was thinking about the part where de Barral, the father of the heroine, is sent to gaol for his mismanagement of Thrift, a financial institution which turns out to have been what we would now call a Ponzi scheme.

After de Barral is sentenced, he cries out in protest at the world: ‘You haven’t given me enough time. If I had been given time I would have ended by being made a peer like some of them.’

As Conrad through his avatar Marlow sadly observes: ‘And this was awful. Just try to enter into the feelings of a man whose imagination wakes up at the very moment he is about to enter the tomb….’

The collapse of FTX, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges during the past week, has had me pondering such matters. There are now considerable accusations being thrown around by both the newly appointed administrator and the main rival to FTX of corporate governance failings and all sorts of irregularities.

It could well turn out that, when everything is done and dusted, FTX was little more than a Ponzi scheme or some other similar financially irregular operation, warranting serious criminal prosecution.

But am I surprised? I regard cryptocurrency as a giant bubble, probably more similar to the Tulip Mania of the Netherlands some 300 years ago than to the various stock market bubbles in the intervening centuries. The only reason why I don’t consider cryptocurrency itself to be a Ponzi scheme is because it is not really being run by any one individual or institution – it is more a madness of crowds and our society, a situation where the Greater Fool Theory has been unleashed to its full destructive insanity.

Which is not to say that Ponzi schemes cannot be run within the realms of cryptocurrency. Anywhere people are going to believe that something has value as an investment is going to be a place where the unscrupulous can run a Ponzi scheme. That is one of the dark aspects of human nature.

I do not really understand Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency, nor do I know how you can store or trade it, so I steer clear of those things. It all seems far too complicated, particularly the encrypted electronic wallets you hold them in.

I suppose that is where exchanges like FTX and Binance come into the picture – to make it possible for mug punters like me to hold onto those magic beans without the stress of having to remember a very complicated password. I might be wrong, but then, I have not paid too close attention to how these things work.

Where the Ponzi element seems to have crept into the picture is the cryptocurrency which FTX itself created – FTT. Where an exchange is creating its own cryptocurrency, it is very similar to when the reserve banks print more money, except that the reserve banks have government backing for what they do. The self-created cryptocurrency only has the backing of its creators and the mass hysteria of that part of the human race who fleetingly ascribe value to it.

And now FTX has collapsed, and the recriminations are flying.

I have one question:

Why have people waited until this institution collapsed to discover that it was all smoke and mirrors?

I get the feeling that everything around cryptocurrency and such exchanges has had more red flags than Moscow on May Day for quite some time. I expect that if anyone had bothered doing some digging into FTX, they would have found out all about the weird polyamorous circle running it and their rather crazy ideas which they expressed online. More importantly, why did someone not call out the creation of FTT and it’s subsequent leveraging as a viable asset base as some sort of seriously dodgy practice which is probably unethical, immoral and illegal?

But that is how Ponzi schemes operate. The red flags are only discovered retrospectively after the failure becomes public. It is just like Bernie Madoff – a man who was able to get away with running a giant Ponzi scheme for decades. Madoff kept reporting consistent high returns year after year to his investors – something which was statistically impossible. Regulators kept hearing rumours of irregularities, but turned selectively deaf. They wanted to believe that it was all real, right up until the whole edifice came crashing down in a major collision with reality.

Just like the fictional de Barral, and the not so fictional Madoff, it appears that there is another figure about to join the Pantheon of Ponzi scheme villains. And there will be more to come, for as long as (to borrow from Joseph Conrad) the old earth keeps rolling!