Tim Worstall

With real interest rates close to 0% people Hunh? Nominal interest rates on bank deposits are close to zero. CPI annual inflation – the Government’s target measure – was 3.1 per cent in September, unchanged from August……RPIX inflation – the all items RPI excluding mortgage interest payments – was also 4.6 per cent in September, [...]

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Is there any reason why, if you got a room full of monkeys with a room full of typewriters, they wouldn’t produce the works of Dan Brown instead of Shakespeare? Because a room full of monkeys write better than Dan Brown.

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It’s truly outrageous that banks are lending more money to the U.S. government than they are to all commercial and industrial borrowers combined; Don’t we normally call this crowding out?

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Monbiot: Environmentalism is not just about replacing one set of technologies with another. Technological change is important, but it will protect the biosphere only if we also tackle issues such as economic growth, consumerism and corporate power. Quite, that really is the argument in a nutshell. All the reasonable people are arguing that replacing carbon [...]

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“For example, firms that produce cheap labour-intensive goods or that exploit natural resources may not want a more educated workforce and may care little about their workers’ health if there is an abundant pool of labour. Err, yes. That’s why we like to encourage lots of sweatshops, so that the capitalists are competing for access [...]

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Today for one day only The Today programme is off air today due to industrial action. As a service to the nation, the Guardian is offering this substitute live blog. It may be brilliant – or the best argument for the licence fee yet put forward In what way is this not The Guardian being [...]

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The G’s got a Q&A about what it all means. Here’s the real worry: Aviation experts believe that as well as the engine losing its protective cowling, sections of turbine blade sheared off. A photograph taken by a passenger from inside the plane shows a small hole in the left wing, possibly caused by flying [...]

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A revolutionary change planned for Spain‘s birth registration laws will end the father’s automatic right to hand his surname down to his children before their mother’s. Spaniards have two surnames, and under current law either can come first. Traditionally, however, it is the father’s, and in cases of a dispute the father’s name automatically takes [...]

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But Laxton, with its 14 working farms, is a historical anomaly, the only village in Britain still to practise the medieval open-field system. Yer what? Seems to be true though. The strips within the fields have also changed significantly, with changes in technology. Originally, a single strip would have represented approximately a single day of [...]

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Yes, yes, all very new, no knowledge yet of whether it will work in humans etc. Yet: The vaccine would not be administered as a prevention in advance but only when cancer is identified in a patient, he said. For which there’s a good reason: The team found a protein known as FAP (fibroblast activation [...]

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Stephen Fry returns to Twitter Bet that shocked everyone, eh?

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About the abolition of the Sustainable Development Commission. Far more eloquently and reasonably than I could possibly manage (still being more than a bit pissed off about what happened earlier in the year), it lays out exactly what it is that the SDC does, exactly how it gets it done, and exactly what the outcomes [...]

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The problem with this idea that is: The trouble is, as Paul Mason has noted, no one knows if QE1 worked, so what’s the chance of QE2 doing so? In my opinion, not high unless the UK approach is radically transformed. I don’t want to premeditate the forthcoming Green New Deal publication on this issue. [...]

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This is an interesting little observation by our favourite retired accountant from Wandsworth. Quantitative easing has indeed meant that gilts prices have risen (yields fallen, same thing). It’s even possible that banks have been the major beneficaries of this. For the BoE buys the gilts from the banks, and old gilts will have been bought [...]

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He’s finally noticed it: That’s the problem at the International Accounting Standards Board. A few of us have dared to see that world could be different. But they’ve been captured by the principal actors as they see them – the Big 4 and their clients – from whose ranks they come. That’s the inherent failing [...]

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Yes, prices do get out of line. The interesting question is, what sort of system might we wish to have to correct such out of line prices? That would be a market system, wouldn’t it? One where it is possible to purchase goods and or services in one market and then sell them again in [...]

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From Dizzy. I don’t actually agree with it for as is well known, my views on this subject are well outside the mainstream (for the avoidance of doubt, killing people is wrong except in immediate self defence or the course of a Just War and yes, this is killing people). But it is a very [...]

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One of the strange ways that Amazon works is that the more popular a book becomes (as measured by rising sales) the more money they take off the price. So as the world gears up for the debut (hotly awaited!) of the book in which I insult all and sundry in the environmental movement, the [...]

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I think Hopi might have found it. I always find it amazing how far these fraudsters can get. Years back one of my competitors had a big bond issue (well, big by the standards of my part of industry) and they stuck the proceeds into a Prime Bank Guarantee fund. PBGs of course do not [...]

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I have to admit that I don’t understand all this fuss: For the sake of democracy, Vince Cable must intervene over BSkyB National interest demands that News Corp’s bid to take total control of BSkyB is scrutinised by Ofcom Because as far as I’m aware, they already have control. They’ve got management control, certainly. The [...]

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