Tim Worstall

Anthony Ward: Armajaro’s food plans include setting up a private equity fund later this year that will invest in ports and roads, farmland and storage facilities in Africa, as well as schools and other infrastructure. Cocoa will remain a key target commodity, but Mr Ward is also building up his sugar trading operations……… Armajaro, which [...]

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At the ASI. Why we shouldn’t be using biofuels.

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The Sunday Post has a slightly odd website so linking isn’t really possible. But they picked up on a blog post I did at the ASI last week: In Scotland 180 people receive a new kidney each year but 700 are currently registered for a transplant. Tim Worstall, a Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute, [...]

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A British financier who dramatically cornered a huge chunk of the world’s cocoa supply has been dubbed ‘Choc Finger’ by City traders. Anthony Ward, 50, who has amassed a £36 million fortune, is a real-life Willy Wonka and now owns enough beans to manufacture 5.3 billion quarter-pound chocolate bars. The holding is so massive it threatens to [...]

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We can actually see the value of being a monopoly supplier. According to the NHS drugs price list, in October last year a 125ml course cost the NHS around £4 a bottle. Now, the NHS price – which includes the wholesale cost set by the drugs company and a built-in profit for High Street chemist [...]

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Willy lays out his approach to this study he’s doing on pay multiples: My instinct is that the parents’ gut reaction is the one on which to build a consensus. Most of us subscribe to the view that proportional effort deserves proportional reward, even while recognising that luck and other people’s efforts matter – a [...]

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No, not the idea, but the place it’s seen. What we need is a good idea. Lots of good ideas. In this regard, we just may be in luck, because we are higher primates, with enormous frontal lobes, capable of dazzlingly complex thought. And while we wouldn’t even be able to make a pencil if left to our own [...]

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Or at least, a merit: Its work ranges from helping Arabs set up trusts for their daughters (not possible in Saudi Arabia)

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The state is sitting on $10.5 billion that belongs to Angelina Jolie, the fat cats at Goldman Sachs – and maybe even you. It comes from 25 million inactive bank, business and government accounts unclaimed by their owners and in the care of the state controller’s office. Oh aye? State law requires banks, insurance companies, [...]

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At the ASI. On how we might manage to get a little more economic growth out of the system.

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In the 85 days of the leak, the worst oil disaster in history, nearly 184m gallons of crude oil is estimated to have gushed into the Gulf of Mexico, the ninth largest body of water in the world. OK. The oil that gushed also added to natural oil and gas leaks into Gulf waters. These [...]

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Digital services now account for £1 in every £10 produced in Britain You what? Digital services are 10% of the economy? Larger than the entire financial sector? The same size as the NHS? No, that doesn’t quite taste right. I have a feeling that the number being used there isn’t “the digital economy” but that [...]

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The mammoths were suffering from the rising temperatures anyway, say the scientists, but hunting by Stone Age Man made things much worse. As they became scarcer, birch saplings – which the giant beasts used to graze down – grew to maturity, turning grassland into forest in Siberia, Alaska and Northern Canada. This darkened the landscape, [...]

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I was quite liking the idea of a government which was ‘yellow on liberty and blue on anything involving hard cash’: I suspect that would be quite a good description of my kind of government.

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If you will argue with straw men rather than what I say it does not help your cause No, don’t bother guessing.

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I limit myself to one mistress per annum. How would you like to be Miss 2009? Boris Johnson (according to Guido)

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Which is why it is possible to give a woman an orgasm by jiggling her toes in the right way. Really? There’s absolutely got to be a way of incorporating that into a design for shoes.

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Economics is the art of not killing people with your good intentions. Art Carden

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Londonderry will be the first British City of Culture in 2013, it was announced on Thursday night. What percentage of the population of the city aren’t all that certain that it should be a British city at all?

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At the Guardain. Yes, idiot foolishness. A slightly different thought occurs. The homeopathic pills are, quite literally, sugar pills. Ain’t nowt else there. Now they say that they’re made by diluting down. Take a solution, dilute it 100 times with water, shake, take a bit, dilute again 100 times down with water and so on [...]

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