Tim Worstall

Whether Cameron outloses Brown, or Brown outloses Cameron (for neither is likely to postively win the support of the electorate, although I suppose the wife of one or the other could) Norm.

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Well, yes, but….. The new tax will not be an “insurance fund” for the banking industry, as ministers are concerned that such a measure would simply encourage more risky behaviour of the sort that led to the financial crisis of 2008. I’ve said before that I’m not averse to an insurance levy. I may be [...]

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Now, yes, in one sense I’m anti-union. I don’t see why one form of voluntary association should be legally privileged over another. In another sense I’m very decidedly pro-union. Freedom of association is as much a necessary (but not sufficient) bedrock of a free society as is freedom of speech. So if the Brothers and [...]

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At the ASI. Or, if you prefer, economic liberty, the world’s greatest contraceptive.

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The Foreign Office is being undermined by a “ludicrous” decision to stop protecting its overseas budget from changes in exchange rates, according to MPs Nothing ludicrous about this decision at all. Entirely sensible. For to protect against changes in exchange rates you have to gamble, to speculate. You might even use some combination of futures [...]

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The problem occurred when a government committee which governs the use of computerised 999 software allocated a lower priority to falls of 6ft or more than had been recommended by the system’s makers. As a result, the automated system instructed call handlers to class such calls as category B even if the person was also [...]

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Yes, he’s written the Robin Hood Tax submission for the budget. The first is to raise revenues from banks and related organisations to help pay for the economic crisis they have caused. And yes, as you can see, he’s not been listening to a single word that people have been telling him for weeks. It’s [...]

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At the ASI. On the great flying banana. Thanks to Dave VX for the original idea.

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Two things stand out from my entirely cursory skim of this new report (cursory because my word this really is getting boring having to point to the silliness of much of this research): PRIVATELY HELD, NON-RESIDENT DEPOSITS IN SECRECY JURISDICTIONS The first is this: Furthermore, we find that such deposits have been growing at a [...]

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When you are alone in the house watching serial killer shenanigans with your headphones on (it makes the sound work better somehow) it’s going to make you jump when two Siamese decide to start a mad game of chase behind you. Chase? Siamese? How?

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In the event that our prayers are answered, Boris Johnson will be Editor in Chief of the Telegraph, Tim Worstall its Economics Editor and Jeff Randall its Business Editor. Might be some time before I can cash the paycheques though…..

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Over this Michael Ashcroft, Lord Paul thing and non doms. There’s much heat and light being expended upon whether someone who is a non dom (and thus not paying the same taxes on worldwide income as someone who is dom) can be a member of the legislature. OK. And now the research we’d like to [...]

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The broad outline of what happened to Lehman has been in the public domain for more than a year. The bank, under the leadership of Wall Street’s longest serving boss, Richard Fuld, borrowed too much – it was, in the jargon, “overleveraged” – and made huge bets on the US property market. When that market [...]

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Leave alone the right versus left thing. The bankers’ friends and those fighting for the dignity and rights of the working man. Equality, justice and fairness. Then look at what has actually happened to this country over the last few years: Take the Licensing Act 2003. Apart from opening the way to 24-hour drinking, it [...]

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The “ideal wife“, he once argued, was “a beauty queen from Playboy who spoke no known language, ever.”

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Ambrose EP: Needless to say, it really doesn’t make any difference in the long-term whether Greece gets a bail-out or who provides the money. The country is not facing a liquidity crisis, it is facing an insolvency crisis. Assume he’s correct (as I think he is). This makes all the fuss about speculators, CDSs, hedge [...]

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Someone who actually knows what they’re talking about says: Sorry Richard, but while I don’t agree with Tim Worstall on much stuff – particularly his hatred of the European project, and greater backing of tax evasion than I would support – I have never, ever, ever read an argument of yours that managed to refute [...]

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But good advice all the same: Tip for MPs; when you elect the next speaker, if they’re male, make sure they’re over 5’9″ tall.

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Yes, it’s Our Dennis: There is a deeper rightwing revisionism at play. Stalin’s crimes are being elevated to a par with the exterminations of Jews by those who want to banalise or relativise the Holocaust and reduce its historical centrality to just another example of wartime mass murders. Stalin’s famines of the 1930s or his [...]

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Greece raised the stakes in the row over how to stabilise the euro today when prime minister George Papandreou set European leaders a deadline of next week for unveiling rescue plans for his battered economy and threatened to turn instead to the International Monetary Fund for help. Clearly exasperated by the lack of clarity from [...]

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