Tim Worstall

This really is twattish: Halliday Books owner Nicholas Halliday has apologised after a press release was sent out promoting a book about coping with the bereavement of children using the death of David Cameron’s son as the news hook. The publisher has suspended a member of staff after what Halliday called "a very stupid mistake" [...]

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I’m sorry, but I think we’ll need to take that Nobel Prize back Professor Krugman. Really, we will: But both sides, I thought, agreed that the government should provide public goods — goods that are nonrival (they benefit everyone) and nonexcludable (there’s no way to restrict the benefits to people who pay.) The classic examples [...]

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Came out yesterday. What went wrong and how to stop it happening again. There’s a few nice digs at various bits and pieces. Fannie and Freddie certainly get some blame, as does the way in which certain countries had fixed exchange rates vis a vis the dollar. But the bit I like best is this. [...]

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Chancellor Alistair Darling has urged failed banking boss Sir Fred Goodwin to give up his £650,000 pension – threatening legal action if he fails to act voluntarily to end the controversy. Pensions are deferred compensation. This is part of the contract that he signed all those years ago. It may not have been a very [...]

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An excellent piece here. I’m not sure I agree with his conclusion but I do like his argument: Personally, I doubt whether the utilitarian calculus is the right ethical framework in which to think about global warming. It gives us numerical answers, but it just does not feel as though the calculus captures my concerns. [...]

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The New Scientist has decided to scare our pants off. First, assume that temperatures will rise by 4oC by 2050. Then tell us all how appalling it will be. We’ll all have to live in cities for example. Ooooh! However, one nice point: In order to survive, humans may need to do something radical: rethink [...]

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Labour life peer Lord Ahmed has been jailed for 12 weeks Several hundred to go…..

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The number of workers required to supply a good or service is not a benefit of that good or service; it’s a cost. Societies become more prosperous only as they succeed in using fewer workers and other inputs to supply any given amount of output. Only then are inputs made available to produce outputs that [...]

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There’s this great headline in The Times: Zimbabwe’s vice-president foiled in 3,600kg gold deal The way they’ve understood the story is that this is a scam whereby this Zimbabwean politician is trying to breach the sanctions upon them by selling off this gold. Hmmm.. Joyce Mujuru used her daughter as a go-between to seek a [...]

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The complexity of Naomi Klein’s portrayal of the rise of disaster capitalism, The Shock Doctrine, has won its author the inaugural £50,000 Warwick prize for writing. The complexity of the argument in "The Shock Doctrine" being that the argument was entirely wrong. Anyone can see that in times of crisis we have an extension of [...]

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Sad news: Conservative leader David Cameron’s eldest son Ivan has died in hospital. Condolences. We’ll get back to that unimportant politics thing in a few days, eh?

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Ryanair that is. They don’t mess about, they’re known for telling it like it is whatever the fall out. Ryanair calls blogger lunatic Well, yes, of course, but why this blogger specifically? "Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and [...]

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The British tax system urges us to use property as a bank, because it is barely taxed. Property…barely taxed? The actual figures…calculated as the percentage of the total tax tax raised from property: #1   United Kingdom: 11.9%    #2   Japan: 10.3%    #3   United States: 10.1%    #4   Canada: 9.7%    [...]

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Might help to get things in proportion here….. Never mind the anxiety that Victoria Beckham is risking deep-vein thrombosis from the 25,000 air miles she’s clocked up in the last few weeks: what exactly is all that jet-setting doing to our battered old planet? Interesting question. So, what were the emissions? So the grand total [...]

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Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, was warned yesterday that loss-making British vanmaker LDV will collapse within days after the government rejected calls to sanction a loan from taxpayers to keep the firm afloat. Senior executives at Birmingham-based LDV are trying to engineer a management buyout and have been seeking a loan guarantee for a maximum [...]

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We have just experienced an explosion of cheap credit driven by banks’ belief that they could dramatically reduce their vulnerability by taking the loans they had made and selling them on to investors, in a process known as securitisation. What they have now realised is that this securitisation completely failed to spread risk. Securitisation spread [...]

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Canging the rules in mid game….or, if you prefer, violating the law of contract. Bondholders, who have £12bn in Northern Rock, have been spooked because the Government tore up the rule book on traded debt on Friday by unilaterally rewriting creditor contracts with Bradford & Bingley to delay payment of both interest and capital. Following [...]

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Professor Tim Congdon from the London School of Economcs said the contraction of eurozone credit was "extremely disturbing" but inevitable after moves in October to force banks to raise their capital ratios. "It was a catastrophic decision," he said. If you insist that banks raise their capital ratios you are, inevitably, going to constrain the [...]

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For two years, Shashi Bacheta and her partner sailed halfway round the world on their 70ft yacht, sun-kissed and living the lives of millionaires. Able to indulge in her passion for scuba diving, Bacheta and Jeffrey Coles occasionally docked their £100,000 yacht the Kismet, drawing admiring glances from passers-by and hooking up with fellow travellers. [...]

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Here.

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