Take the Rest of Your Life Off

The biggest change in the world is not the distribution of wealth (and don’t forget to those outside the First World we are all the 1%), but the distribution of leisure time and ‘unearned’ income. Governments and institutions are slow to recognise the need for change. Most people are not visionaries, and in politically stable countries the population rarely embraces change.

Trades Unions will probably be the biggest problem as we go forward. Desperately in need of reform as it is, in the UK they’ve been an adversarial force that has probably done more harm than good over the years. The reason that they started is now more or less an obsolete one: we have so much legislation to protect workers on the statute books; they are little more then jumped up tribunalists nowadays. Either that, or as in the case of the RMT, an almost paramilitary mafia gaining exorbitant and entirely unreasonable pay rises for their members by holding the public to ransom.

In China, as you may have read, 60,000 robots were brought in to replace workers at a cost of around half a billion dollars. The plain fact is that robots are less trouble than workers, but unions will fight tooth and nail to keep their members in paid slavery rather than admit that the longer they deny progress the worse it will be for their members. They should be forward-thinking and willing to negotiate, not with companies for minuscule improvements in conditions and pay, but with government for a solution to what will soon be 25% permanent unemployment and then 50% and 80%.

Governments need to see that children today are being educated to be able to handle lifelong unemployment because, make no mistake, the first kids have been born that will never work ever, though they are willing to.

The first thing we need to do is stop calling what is in fact man made leisure time ‘unemployment’. We need to decide who is going to be paid to do nothing and benefit from this free time. They said you couldn’t buy time and yet we have. This is brilliant. Jobs are slavery. It’s a complete game changer. For centuries we’ve wanted to sit around and do nothing. It’s here and people are going to fight against it!

I’m looking at Michael Page International (MPI) today as they’re in the business of jobs – actually the sort of jobs that won’t be replaced by robots any time soon, but it’s an interesting chart. There’s a really pronounced five-year support level at just a under 360p. There’s also a five-year resistance level at 560p. The question is will it fail here (in which case we’d be looking at a significant drop), or is this going to be a measured move upwards? Well, I might think so if that level hadn’t twice failed to reach the ATH from ’07.

This is another fairly typical British stock: not really performing as well as the US stocks. There we’ve seen new highs and real gains, largely because they can print money without proper consequences, because the dollar is the global reserve currency. Each time they print a dollar, everyone outside shares the cost of doing so which is a massive advantage for the US and part of the reason why their stock market is doing so well, relatively speaking. Here we’re just shuffling money and bits of paper around and not creating any real growth. This is the result: lacklustre stocks that can’t even do well from a global market with low interest rates at home.

The important thing is not to be like the average unionist and deny reality because we don’t want to believe what we can plainly see is happening. Of course this stock could go either way and we must try not to create a preconception. The stock will tip its hand sooner or later. But that is a big range and when it breaks out we can expect a good trading opportunity. A measured move would have an upside of 200p making a target of around 750p.