Ian Cowie really is plumbing the depths here. I should not read such stuff on so much caffeine. Imagine a starving Jack Russell being electroprodded by a toddler and you are nowhere near the level of irritation. Here is Cowie’s thinking, to put it kindly: The last time a British election failed to produce [...]
Archive for the ‘Economics’ Category
22 Apr
Up-and-coming Washington Think tank peruses Transaction Taxes …
… and dispels the case for the Robin Hood Tax in several elegant paragraphs. A financial transactions tax is not focused on core sources of financial instability. An FTT would not target any of the key attributes—institution size, interconnectedness, and substitutability— that give rise to systemic risk. Its real burden may fall largely on final [...]
21 Apr
Iain Dale’s Misleading Fact of the Day
He says in his title: ‘Unemployment is always higher under Labour’ Well, no. Let’s look at the Claimant Count as a simple measure: My rough averages say: Conservatives since the War have averaged a claimant count of 1.56 million. The Labour party: 900 thousand. Clearly you have to interpret Iain’s post differently from the obvious [...]
21 Apr
Podcast: another quick observation
Dan Roberts and I argued at greater length than is eventually broadcast, about whether the LibDems are introducing too much complexity into the tax system with their 10k proposal. Dan’s argument was, effectively: doing this makes it a nightmare for journalists, commentators and those putting the manifesto under the spotlight, to work out whether it [...]
21 Apr
Podcasting on Goldmans, Libdems and The Volcanic risk to Globalisation
If it’s just my dulcet tones and stuttering delivery you want to hear, go to about 9 minutes in. But Dan Roberts and Ruth Sunderland are both excellent on some clearly very topical matters. The Goldmans case is continuing to dominate the financial chatter. I think questions of justice and the financial system as a [...]
20 Apr
So I get things wrong sometimes …
… or at least, that may be how things look soon if inflation continues doing what it has just done – rise faster than expected. Because while my original points about base effects and so on are correct, it is no good if the actual index rises 0.6 points in a month like this. Perhaps [...]
20 Apr
The Goldmans Sachs Charges: again, when are market decisions uncoerced?
This is something else I feel I ought to know more about. For many, the revelations about how Goldmans and their client Paulson & Co operate will be enough; do people really make a career out of this sort of thing – let alone a fortune? Clearly wicked, clearly wrong. But the debate in [...]
19 Apr
What’s going on
(apologies to those of you who arrived at this site expecting something about a Marvin Gaye record. You will be bitterly disappointed). This graph demonstrates cat out of the bag, Google-style: I had worried slightly that my dismissal of the Conservative dismissal of the Lib Dems was underproven (i.e. a big sulky exaggeration). Perhaps, instead, [...]
19 Apr
Desperately searching for Panic
Since April 14th, the odds of a hung parliament have risen from 40pc to 60pc. I have no reason to doubt the veracity of the FT’s survey of investors: given all they have to worry about, no doubt they would prefer to be able to drop ‘political risk’ from the list, and would prefer undivided [...]
16 Apr
Martin Wolf hits several nails on the head
In today’s column. Above all, the theme: Growth is what is needed to fix the finances. Then he adds his voice to those arguing against the myth of the spending splurge: the explanation for the sudden explosions in the share of public spending in GDP and the fiscal deficit is not that spending is out [...]
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