Is Inflation winding down? What happened to gold? And the Decline of the English Murder.
November 7, 2022 Volume 3 # 31
Inflation has peaked
A sure sign that inflation has peaked is television news covering it non-stop. Almost every night they find some poor soul who is paying too much for food, a real problem if you don’t make much, or a commuter whining about the price of gasoline. The same news outlets ignored all the signs of inflation rising a year and a half ago and considered it mean spirited to point out that governments might have been a tad generous during Covid.
My best source on inflation says it will be down to four per cent in two months or less. He is seldom wrong. There will probably be a recession. People are holding back on spending because it’s too expensive to borrow and they keep hearing there is going to be a recession. Housing prices are collapsing in rich countries. Good.
Jobs, Jobs Jobs
There is no shortage of work. Official statistics in Canada and the United States this week show jobs are growing. “.. the economy continues to add workers at a reasonable clip, defying recessionary concerns,” says analyst Hubert Marleau in his newsletter.
The real world, or anecdotal evidence , is everywhere you look. A friend is moving from rural Quebec to Montreal this week. She had no trouble finding a job. Driving down the the highway there are signs saying We Are Hiring. Shop windows have help wanted signs. I keep mentioning this, but McDonald’s is paying Canadian workers C$17 to flip burgers.
What on Earth is up with Gold?
Gold jumped $54.80 on Friday, up 3.36%. Why? Depends on who you listen to. One theory is that the economic news in the United States has some people rushing to gold. Another is people betting against the gold price— short selling — had to cover.
Hare today….Canadian pure gold coin.
Only gold bugs seem to care. When I was covering this decades ago, the gold price was big news. A $55 jump and not a mention in the Wall Street Journal and the FT.
In the first quarter of 1980 gold went to $800 and change an ounce and I reported on it at least once a week on CBC’s National News. That was the record price for gold. Like now, it was an era of high inflation. Today’s gold price is $440 in 1980 dollars.
Oil is another matter
“US oil producers reap $200bn windfall from Ukraine war price surge” was the weekend headline in the Financial Times.
Oil was up $4.43 (5%) to $92.60 in Friday and that will translate into higher gasoline prices on Monday, the day before the US midterm elections. For some reason American voters seem to blame the price of gasoline on the US President. Dumb. The world oil price depends a lot more on Putin than Biden.
Take a look at that map. Only tiny Denmark can rely on wind power. France is relatively safe with nuclear power. The countries that use oil and natural gas could be in big trouble. Europe hopes it isn’t a cold winter. Newspapers are carrying items about how to live when energy prices jump. Things such as take one minute showers. In Britain, where energy bills will double there is a long list of little things to do from only filling the kettle with only the water you need to energy saving light bulbs.
There is a surge in Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) shipments to Europe as Russia cuts back on supplies. The LNG ships, with their odd looking pressurized globes, are filling up in Qatar and Louisiana. Canada has oodles of natural gas but it has no pipelines to ship it to ocean ports. The Canadian prime minister says he would like to support the likes of Germany, but he hates pipelines, as do some provincial governments, such as hydroelectricity rich Quebec, which won’t allow pipelines or LNG ports on the St. Lawrence Ricer. Canada has only one LNG port in Saint John, New Brunswick, which is not connected to Canada’s gas surplus out west.
Top Five Selling Beatles Albums, or Why The Two Still Alive (Paul & Ringo) are So Rich
Sgt Pepper’s lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) – 32 million copies sold
2-Abbey Road (1969) – 19.9 million copies sold
3- The White Album (1968) – 14 million copies sold
4- Rubber Soul (1966) – 8.6 million copies sold
5- Revolver (1966) – 7.2 million copies sold
The King who travelled 11,600 kilometres from Delhi to Toronto
This statue of the Emperor of India was first put up in Delhi in 1922 to honour Edward VII who reigned from 1901-1910. Not surprising that India was happy to get rid of it. A Canadian businessman, Harry Jackman, paid the shipping costs. "I was not after Edward VII, I was after the horse.” His son, Hal Jackman, became Lieutenant Governor of Ontario. He liked horses too; he had a huge toy soldier collection, some of them mounted on horses. They are now in a museum about a five minute walk from the statue his father brought from India.
Essay of the Week
There were 33 Hercule Poirot recordings on the PVR when I returned to my Toronto apartment after a long absence in rural Quebec. There we are recording episodes of Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s other sleuth. Different PBS stations run their favourites. For some reason in Quebec, we get a Detroit station, in Toronto, Buffalo.
Exercising the little grey cells.
Sir David Suchet— he was knighted by Prince William this year— is by far the best Poirot ever. Even the way he takes those tiny steps. The 1930’s art deco theme includes Poirot’s flat, Whithaven Mansions which in reality is Florin Court, and houses and factories in the same style. Supporting characters add to it all, especially the clueless upper crust Captain Hastings, a WW1 veteran who drives a magnificent Lagonda and has his service revolver handy when needed.
More than a dozen actors have played the Belgian detective; Albert Finney is thought by some to be the best, since he was nominated for an Academy Award in 1975 for Murder on the Orient Express. I thought Peter Ustinov was corny and over top as Hercule.
The current Miss Marple, Geraldine McEwan, is first rate. But I remember going to the movies with my girlfriend in the sixties and seeing Dame Margaret Rutherford play Miss Marple. We loved her. She is, by far, number one.
At the moment I am going through the novels of Peter Robinson, whose obituary I wrote for the Globe and Mail a few weeks ago. He writes about murders in North Yorkshire. It helps that I am reading this on my Kindle, since Peter uses a lot of Yorkshire words, like berk for stream or snicket for narrow laneway. I can highlight the word and it will tell me what it means, though I had to go to full OED for snicket.
There are lot of murders in Britain on television and in the movies. Robinson joked that he killed off more people that lived in North Yorkshire. I live in the village where the Canadian crime writer, Louise Penny lives. There are many murders in the fictional town of Three Pines, based in part on Knowlton, Quebec; there have, in fact, been only two murders there in my lifetime.
Murder makes for great novels, especially English Murders. It reminds me of the essay by George Orwell, Decline of the English Murder published in 1946. Here it is:
Decline of the English Murder, by George Orwell.
It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?
George Orwell at home.
Naturally, about a murder. But what kind of murder? If one examines the murders which have given the greatest amount of pleasure to the British public, the murders whose story is known in its general outline to almost everyone and which have been made into novels and re-hashed over and over again by the Sunday papers, one finds a fairly strong family resemblance running through the greater number of them. Our great period in murder, our Elizabethan period, so to speak, seems to have been between roughly 1850 and 1925, and the murderers whose reputation has stood the test of time are the following: Dr. Palmer of Rugely, Jack the Ripper, Neill Cream, Mrs. Maybrick, Dr. Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong, and Bywaters and Thompson. In addition, in 1919 or thereabouts, there was another very celebrated case which fits into the general pattern but which I had better not mention by name, because the accused man was acquitted.
Of the above-mentioned nine cases, at least four have had successful novels based on them, one has been made into a popular melodrama, and the amount of literature surrounding them, in the form of newspaper write-ups, criminological treatises and reminiscences by lawyers and police officers, would make a considerable library. It is difficult to believe that any recent English crime will be remembered so long and so intimately, and not only because the violence of external events has made murder seem unimportant, but because the prevalent type of crime seems to be changing. The principal cause célèbre of the war years was the so-called Cleft Chin Murder, which has now been written up in a popular booklet(1); the verbatim account of the trial was published some time last year by Messrs. Jarrolds with an introduction by Mr. Bechhofer Roberts. Before returning to this pitiful and sordid case, which is only interesting from a sociological and perhaps a legal point of view, let me try to define what it is that the readers of Sunday papers mean when they say fretfully that ‘you never seem to get a good murder nowadays’.
In considering the nine murders I named above, one can start by excluding the Jack the Ripper case, which is in a class by itself. Of the other eight, six were poisoning cases, and eight of the ten criminals belonged to the middle class. In one way or another, sex was a powerful motive in all but two cases, and in at least four cases respectability — the desire to gain a secure position in life, or not to forfeit one's social position by some scandal such as a divorce — was one of the main reasons for committing murder. In more than half the cases, the object was to get hold of a certain known sum of money such as a legacy or an insurance policy, but the amount involved was nearly always small. In most of the cases the crime only came to light slowly, as the result of careful investigations which started off with the suspicions of neighbours or relatives; and in nearly every case there was some dramatic coincidence, in which the finger of Providence could be clearly seen, or one of those episodes that no novelist would dare to make up, such as Crippen's flight across the Atlantic with his mistress dressed as a boy, or Joseph Smith playing ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’ on the harmonium while one of his wives was drowning in the next room. The background of all these crimes, except Neill Cream's, was essentially domestic; of twelve victims, seven were either wife or husband of the murderer.
With all this in mind one can construct what would be, from a News of the World reader's point of view, the ‘perfect’ murder. The murderer should be a little man of the professional class — a dentist or a solicitor, say — living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs, and preferably in a semi-detached house, which will allow the neighbours to hear suspicious sounds through the wall. He should be either chairman of the local Conservative Party branch, or a leading Nonconformist and strong Temperance advocate. He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man, and should only bring himself to the point of murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience. Having decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning, and only slip up over some tiny unforeseeable detail. The means chosen should, of course, be poison. In the last analysis he should commit murder because this seems to him less disgraceful, and less damaging to his career, than being detected in adultery. With this kind of background, a crime can have dramatic and even tragic qualities which make it memorable and excite pity for both victim and murderer. Most of the crimes mentioned above have a touch of this atmosphere, and in three cases, including the one I referred to but did not name, the story approximates to the one I have outlined.
Now compare the Cleft Chin Murder. There is no depth of feeling in it. It was almost chance that the two people concerned committed that particular murder, and it was only by good luck that they did not commit several others. The background was not domesticity, but the anonymous life of the dance-halls and the false values of the American film. The two culprits were an eighteen-year-old ex-waitress named Elizabeth Jones, and an American army deserter, posing as an officer, named Karl Hulten. They were only together for six days, and it seems doubtful whether, until they were arrested, they even learned one another's true names. They met casually in a teashop, and that night went out for a ride in a stolen army truck. Jones described herself as a strip-tease artist, which was not strictly true (she had given one unsuccessful performance in this line); and declared that she wanted to do something dangerous, ‘like being a gun-moll’. Hulten described himself as a big-time Chicago gangster, which was also untrue. They met a girl bicycling along the road, and to show how tough he was Hulten ran over her with his truck, after which the pair robbed her of the few shillings that were on her. On another occasion they knocked out a girl to whom they had offered a lift, took her coat and handbag and threw her into a river. Finally, in the most wanton way, they murdered a taxi-driver who happened to have £8 in his pocket. Soon afterwards they parted. Hulten was caught because he had foolishly kept the dead man's car, and Jones made spontaneous confessions to the police. In court each prisoner incriminated the other. In between crimes, both of them seem to have behaved with the utmost callousness: they spent the dead taxi-driver's £8 at the dog races.