Tim Worstall

Gambling, or placing bets on the movement of exchange rates, interest rates, price of wheat, oil, gold, commodities and even rates of death, is ingrained in the world of finance. We’ve a couple of ways of describing that gambling on the rates of death. “Life insurance” is one, “annuities” another. Strange to see a Professor [...]

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Or, on a personal level, I had a weeks-long battle with Optical Express to order in the correct contact lenses. I won’t inflict the details on you – partly because reliving the trauma will end up with my keyboard as collateral damage – but needless to say, after having been their customer since the age [...]

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Yup, that money you’ve got squirreled away to pay for your old age, it’s to be spent on what R Murphy thinks it should be spent upon, not what might provide you with that pension you’re saving for. Robert Skidelsky and Felix Martin call for the creation of a National Investment Bank in the FT [...]

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Mr Osborne also plans to merge income tax with National Insurance to show more clearly how much tax people are paying. By merging the two rates, the basic rate of tax will rise from 20p in the pound to 32p and for higher rate earners from 40p to 52p. That’s good but not great. For [...]

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New-style league tables are to be created showing how many children at each state secondary go on to graduate with an honours degree. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, said the move would encourage schools to make pupils “university-ready” and ensure they are given decent advice to pick the [...]

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Doesn’t that mean that we have all already been murdered in our beds? Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, said a recent ruling in Brussels means that shipments of GM contaminated with unauthorised seeds could be allowed into the EU. This means that GM that has not been safety tested in Europe could end up in [...]

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Nowt so foolish as Willy Hutton. So how about opening up the market for residential, mortgage-backed securities to stimulate the property market This is arguing for a revival of the collateralised debt obligation market. You know, the CDOs? Hutton has form on this of course. We are looking disaster in the face. A British version [...]

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Here. You know  the score, business rates are currently collected centrally and then doled out according to need. The coalition is proposing to change this, so that business rates are collected by the council and spent by the council. Polly’s agin’ this. Odd really, for the whole idea of centralising the collection and distribution of [...]

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Here’s a fun little calculation. So, according to the latest from Tokyo, drinking the radiation poisoned milk from the Fukushima plant there might give you, if you drank it for the entire year, the same radiation dosage as a CT scan: Edano said the amount of radiation detected in the milk was the equivalent to [...]

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So, this web thing then. If there’s lots out there for free then we shouldn’t be needing to use money, should we? Hmm. Then we get a sociologist on the case. And as sociologists often do she’s leapt on one part of what economists say about money and ignored all the rest. Yes, as Simmel [...]

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Suleiman ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1520 to 1566 at the height of its glory and is still revered as Kanuni, or Lawgiver. This has led to the series attracting a wave of protests from irate viewers and even government officials. Critics said it was disrespectful to the sultan because it showed him drinking alcohol [...]

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At the ASI. If the fiscal multiplier doesn’t multiply, then Keynesianism doesn’t work, does it? And empirical work seems to suggest that in an open economy with a floating exchange rate that the fiscal mutliplier is around zero. Hmm….

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So, out next little adventure is Algarve Golf. Obviously, still a work in progress but getting there. The idea is that we’re a golf association (actually, the Southern Golf Association) and a linked for profit organisation, Algarve Golf LLP. If you join the association (€125 a year) then you get a card which gives you [...]

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The same predictions are made about every disaster – that once the lid of a tightly policed civilization is knocked off for a second, humans will become beasts. But the opposite is the case. It sounds grotesque to say we should see reasons for hope as we watch in real time while the earth is [...]

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Yup, Ritchie’s managed to get the wrong end of the stick again. Just when banks thought they might be getting away with things again along comes a new line of attack. There has been massive speculation in the Yen since the Japanese earthquake / nuclear disaster began to unfold just over a week ago. A [...]

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So here’s the Greenie reaction to a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami: There have always been natural disasters, and there always will be. Yes, yes, that’s true. We might decide that the human enterprise (at least in the west) has got big enough, that our appetites need not to grow, but to shrink a little, [...]

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That’s the photo to go with Jet Harris’ obituary. I’m not entirely convinced that it actually is Jet Harris. But even if it were, bit odd to illustrate the obit of an iconic bass player with him holding a regular guitar, eh?

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I wouldn’t take everything here as gospel: Rare earths are not only essential for civilian life; the world’s hi-tech armies also need rare earths for a host of applications from toughening tank armour to guiding smart-bombs and powering night-vision goggles. Night vision goggles, not so much. Might be used in the glass lenses (pretty much [...]

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But it puts up little defence of a design flaw that does appear to be at the heart of the crisis at Fukushima – the extraordinary practice of putting the pool where the highly radioactive used fuel is stored on an upper floor of the reactor building, instead of, as is normal, having it at [...]

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Japan has now upgraded the accident at Fukushima from level four to level five out of seven on an international scale of nuclear accidents, putting it on a par with the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in the US in 1979. They have indeed upgraded the accident to a level 5. But then the [...]

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