Society

I get a Google alert for ‘colony collapse disorder’ and today I got these two alerts:

18-Year Study Links Neonicotinoids to Bee Colony Decline
Discover Magazine (blog)
… Harvard environmental scientist, was also hit with a wave of criticism after he published a study in 2014 “definitively” linking colony collapse disorder …

and

Honey Bees Healthy, Taxpayers Stung
The New American
The problem is a syndrome first identified in 2006 and dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). It’s characterized not by a hive full of dead bees, but …

The ’18-Year Study’ Article

The article in Discover Magazine cited in the first item,links to the main article in Nature Communications and it’s a study of wild bee populations in the UK over an eighteen-year period.

I believe the results of the study were on the BBC news a couple of nights ago.

The crux of the study is that neonicotinoid pesticides affect bee health. I have been writing about this for several years.

Know Your Sources

Do you know what I do first when I see an article arguing one way or another over CCD and the role that this or that agent plays in the decline?

I look at who did the study.

The authors are Ben Woodcock, Nicholas Isaac, James Bullock, David Roy, David Garthwaite, Andrew Crowe, and Richard Pywell

Under one of the sub-pages of affiliations and competing financial interests it mentions that
Richard Pywell, James Bullock, and Ben Woodcock are

…currently funded by Syngenta and Bayer CropScience to perform a large-scale field study investigating the impacts of neonicotinoid insecticides on honeybees. This research presented in this paper was not funded by either company, nor were they consulted about this analysis and interpretation.

This may be a terrific scientific paper, but knowing that the authors are funded by the very firms that make and market the insecticides, how far do I trust this scientific paper?

Knowing that Syngenta is involved in funding, how can I trust this paper?

It was Syngenta that got the UK Government to allow continued use of neonicotinoid pesticides against the European Union Food Standards Agency’s European-wide ban on neonicotinoid pesticides.

I have to wonder whether the paper has been set up as a stalking horse to conceal the authors’ real intentions.

I have to wonder whether at some point in the future the results will be exposed as falsified or erroneous and cast doubt on all the good work done on CCD and crop sprays.

I am not saying that’s what the authors have done. I am saying that when the money and the allegiances are tugging in two directions, then I have to wonder how far I can trust the results.

OK, it’s a long shot: Who would set up an argument to prove neonicotinoid pesticides are bad with the intention of later proving the argument wrong? Probably no one.

But I still wonder, and it’s a crying shame because this paper supports the argument that pesticides damage bees.

The ‘Taxpayers Stung’ Article

OK, on to the second item in the Google alert and an article in New American. Skimming a few articles tells me where the site is coming from. And the article follows form in that in basically says that the Obama Administration has taken money out of the pockets of the general population to no effect.

It has done so to fund a useless program to combat CCD. It’s a useless program, says the article, because bees are healthy and anyway, keepers simply buy in new bees when they need them.

It’s a flat out lie about bee health, but someone will read the article and form an opinion and never read anything else.

It’s A Crying Shame

Now that we are capable of turning this planet into a dustbowl, it is a crying shame that even precious things can be politicised and twisted for profit.

As I have commented before, when a bee forages and finds plants with a good amount of nectar, it goes back to the hive and does a dance. Several foraging bees come back and dance. The dance describes the direction of the plants, the distance, and the amount of nectar. The other bees look at the dancing bees and see who is dancing the most enthusiastically. That’s the bee they follow.

Look at the bees – they act for the benefit of the community. They do not lie. They do not send everyone off in the wrong direction for some ulterior motive. What a lovely example. And how do they get repaid – we zap them with spray.

Sometimes I think the real motive of some people is not profit but jealousy. Maybe they couldn’t get over how they weren’t the favourite in the playground at school. Maybe they are just rubbish people. And now they want to spoil the party for everyone.

A small number of people made a fortune out of the financial crash of 2007-08.

Among those who made money were Mike Burry and Steve Eisman. They weren’t working together. They each used their own approach to conclude that the system was going to fail.

After the crash, the Government set up the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. The Commission interviewed more than 700 witnesses and concluded that there were

…widespread failures in financial regulation; dramatic breakdowns in corporate governance; excessive borrowing and risk-taking by households and Wall Street; policy makers who were ill prepared for the crisis; and systemic breaches in accountability and ethics at all levels.

Michael Lewis in The Big Short explains how Mike Burry and Steve Eisman saw it. It was simple: Mortgage companies lent money to people to buy homes on mortgages they couldn’t afford. They lent at low interest rates that would skyrocket after a honeymoon period.

They either didn’t ask for or they fiddled the income information to support the mortgage payments. And the borrowers didn’t need to put down a deposit so they had no financial stake in the properties.

And if things got out of hand, the borrowers could remortgage because prices were always going up, weren’t they?

Why The Mortgage Companies Didn’t Care

So why didn’t the mortgage companies care that the mortgages were going to go bad on them?

First, they made their money out of the deal in commissions and fees.

And if the borrowers wanted to remortgage, the mortgage companies were happy to oblige because they got a whole new set of commissions and fees.

Second, they mixed some good mortgages with risky mortgages, bundled them up and sold them on to investors as a basket of mortgages.

The only time they held the risk was in the short time between lending the money and selling on the basket of mortgages.

Of course, some didn’t handle that very well and got caught at the wrong time holding the mortgages, but mostly they just passed on the risk.

So why didn’t everyone see that it couldn’t go on and that a tsunami was coming?

Who’s Got The Sandwiches

The answer is that it was a bit like the picnic where everyone thinks someone else brought the sandwiches. I haven’t got them – I thought you had them.

The investors just couldn’t conceive of more than a small percentage of the loans going bad.

They figured someone else would pick up the risk and it would all go on forever.

What they didn’t do, which they should have, was to examine the baskets of mortgages they were holding.

Some had a mix of good and bad mortgages, but a lot had a mixture of bad and even worse mortgages.

What Mike Burry, Steven Eisman and a couple of others did was to do the analysis.

Shorting The Market

They saw things couldn’t go on and they shorted the market.

Short selling works with three parties – a short seller, a broker, and the owner of the shares. The short seller borrows shares from a broker against a promise to complete the sale later. The short seller is credited with the value of the sale.

If the price of the shares drops when he completes the sale, he keeps the difference between the price he borrowed at and the current price.

The broker is happy because he makes a commission on the transaction. The original holder of the shares is not happy if the share value drops because he has to make up the shortfall so the broker can pay the short seller.

Of course, the short seller is not going to make any profit if the original owner of the shares goes bust when the shares fall in value.

So Mike Bury and Steve Eisman took out insurance against the mortgages going bad. The beauty of it was that they could take out insurance at low rates against an event they were certain would happen.

If the companies who ultimately carried the risk had analysed the risk they would never have offered the insurance at such low rates.

The insurers saw mortgages that were set up to run thirty years. So they figured they were going to get thirty years of insurance premiums. That’s how they set the premiums. And they listened to the rating agencies who said the baskets of mortgages were safe.

But mortgages don’t run that long. People sell within a few years. And if the house was foreclosed then the mortgage wouldn’t even run that long.

If the ratings agencies had understood the risks, they would never have rated the mortgages companies so highly.

What Mike Burry And Steve Eisman Saw

What Mike Burry and Steve Eisman saw was that the people who carried the risk didn’t understand it and that neither did the rating agencies.

What they wanted to know was – where did the buck stop? They needed to know that because if the ultimate institution that would have to pay them out went bust itself, then they would not get the payouts they were due.

Eisman shorted everyone he could until he knew who had the risk. He shorted Bank Of America, UBS, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch.

When asked why the shorted Merrill Lynch, Eisman said he had a simple thesis. Goldman Sachs was the big kid who ran the games in the neighborhood. Merrill Lynch was the little fat kid assigned to take the less pleasant roles, just happy to be part of things.

And it paid off. Merrill Lynch went bust and got taken over by Bank Of America. But they paid out.

Of course the aftermath was that Eisman and the other winners were unhappy with what happened. The system fell apart and everyone in the country and beyond suffered.

It wasn’t something you could walk away from and laugh about how Wall Street had screwed itself.

Dissenting Views

I read the dissenting views to the conclusions of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

One view was that the root of the problem was easy access to cheap capital coming into the country. The majority view as per the quote at the top of this article is that the crash was because of a failure of regulation, and a prevelance of unethical behaviour.

I favour giving the minority view some credit. When the cat’s away, the mice will always play. So giving the mice a big piece of cheese to play with was bound to cause problems. And regulation will only catch some of the bad behaviour.

That said, it was a loosening up of regulation that allowed the system to operate at all.The moment that investment banks were allowed to risk capital on ventures like baskets of sub-prime mortgages, the doors were open to abuse.

Were you here for the aftermath of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union?

Edinburgh, where we live, had one of the highest turnouts and votes to Remain in the whole of the UK. Scotland as a whole voted overwhelmingly to Remain.

So the mood on the street in Edinburgh in the aftermath – the few days to a week after the vote – was palpably strange. When you looked around, you could say almost for certain that most of the people you could see had voted to Remain.

So where were the people who had voted to Leave? They weren’t in Northern Ireland, that was for sure. They were in England and Wales. That’s where they were.

So in Edinburgh, the mood on the street was quiet. People stayed off the streets. When they came out, they dragged themselves around. The buzz of chatter was gone. There were listless movements. Where was the energy?

A post-apocalyptic mood. The mood after Brexit.

If people weren’t on the street, where were they? We sat in rooms, staring into space or wandered about aimlessly making another cup of tea. Our brains wouldn’t function.

We tried to claw themselves into getting on with things, but it would take a few days. Meanwhile, we were drained. So unhappy – and over such a senseless self-inflicted thing.

Bigots To The Left Of Me, Bigots To The Right

Not everyone, but a lot of the Leave voters were narrow minded and closed off to ideas. The deeper polls and analyses said that was what it was. We gobbled up the news. That was it!

It didn’t matter whether you were rich or poor – what mattered in the end was whether you were open minded or close minded. That’s what decided which way you voted.

Well that would be in keeping with the slide to the Right across Europe. The great experiment was falling apart.

Le Pen in France, a re-run of the Presidential election in Austria where the far-right candidate might still win, the rise of the Right in Eastern Europe. Was history going to repeat itself?

Stick It To The Man

Of course, not everyone who voted to Leave was a bigot. That would be too hard on people. There were those who thought we would do better economically out of Europe. And those who thought we would make a fairer society outside of Europe.

And there were those who just wanted to ‘stick it to the Man’, just because he was the Man. Resentful of the widening gap in wealth – anything was better than that.

Anything that would upset the apple cart and take us back to ground zero was better than plodding along and getting a bit deeper in debt.

The Cost Of Housing

This might not be the time to talk about it, but there is a huge, seemingly insurmountable problem in the UK.

It costs too much to buy a home. The asset value in the banks’ books couldn’t handle a huge fall in prices, so the market has every reason to keep the prices propped up.

But it is all, surely, unsustainable. Or are we heading back to serfdom?

People sticking it in Cameron’s eye as payback for all the hurt and pain he showered on them. People not knowing that the other eye was theirs and they just struck themselves blind.

Or was it Middle Englanders, sure of the way we can forge a new path. Ha!

Cameron – well he got his comeuppance. And that tiny spark of pleasure is no pleasure at all compared to the pain he meted out with his last gasp.

I should have known. For years I said that I didn’t want to involve myself in any social or political movement in England because I didn’t think it would do any good because people just seem to want to be mean-spirited. What is it with them?

I should have known. This is the people that complained about the Tories and then elected them for a second term. I’m alright Jack, I’ve got mine.

Everyone wants to know ‘why’. Well it’s the same reason they voted the Tories in. The English voted in the meanest people to do their dirty work for them.

Does no one recognise that it’s just a bloody accident of opportunity as to which minority group gets it in the neck? It’s the scroungers ruining the country. It’s the immigrants. It’s the scapegoats. It’s always their bloody fault.

That’s Britain to a T. Sweep it under the carpet and pretend the place is clean.

I keep coming back to the class system. Look at Cameron and Corbyn. They could be characters from the Two Ronnies. “I look down on him because he’s working class…”

Is that where the pain comes from? Is that what they heard in the ‘Take our country back’ message?