Tim Worstall

The crowds spilled on to the pavement at Ireland‘s first ever auction of “distressed property” today as an estimated 1,200 would-be buyers flocked to the swish Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin in search of a bargain. But with 84 keenly priced lots, ranging from a three-bed semi priced as low as €22,500 (£20,000) to a four-bed [...]

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I’ve seen this mentioned in a couple of places, how appalling it would be is Southern Cross closed all its care homes: Councils are drawing up emergency plans to rehouse up to 31,000 elderly care home residents amid fears that Britain’s largest care home provider could be forced to shut down due to funding cuts. [...]

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You know, that essay saying we should all be working 4 hours a day by now? The question is, why aren’t we? When my grandmother was growing up in the 1920s, the average woman spent about 30 hours a week preparing food and cleaning up. By the 1950s, when she was raising her family, that [...]

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Forty years of systematic de-regulation has inflated the banking sector’s “total balance sheet to more than four times (the UK’s) annual GDP”, according to the commission. Simultaneously, and because of the finance sector’s unrestrained usury, greed and speculation, Britain’s productive, manufacturing and agricultural sectors have systematically shrunk as a share of GDP. I don’t know [...]

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Ritchie tells us that they’re dodging tax in Zambia. Now I’m actually willing to believe pretty much anything at all about Glencore. Personal experience in the metals game plus the delightful long term record of Marc Rich, the founder (although he sold out of it yonks ago). However, I’m not entirely sure about this report. [...]

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Tim Lang: They say that simple attempts to change people’s behaviour ignore the complex range of factors that have led to Britain’s obesity rate rising, from the low price of fatty and sugary food to its availability on every street corner. Their complaint is that by using “Nudge” style policies, the Government isn’t doing enough. [...]

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The answer is: we owe this money, primarily, to the financial sector we went into debt to bail out. Err, yes. That’s what the financial sector does you see, lends money to people.

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Hands up everyone who thinks we should raise interest rates? Right now, today? OK, how much should they rise by? 0.25% maybe, like the ECB has just done? 0.5%? Shake that inflation out of the system? How about let’s raise them from the current 0.2/0.25% level straight up to 12.5%. That’ll be good won’t it? [...]

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So he’s gone to the Beeb with another story about how evil Teh Banksters are and their tax dodging ways. The BBC has reported that HSBC set up a Guernsey-based company to reduce tax on profits from funding National Health Service hospitals provided under the notoriously opaque private finance initiative. What can one say? This happened [...]

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1,000 economists may have signed this letter but that’s just 1,000 economists who are wrong. Even at very low rates of 0.05% or less, this tax could raise hundreds of billions of dollars annually and calm excessive speculation. The UK already levies a tax on share transactions of 0.5%, or ten times this rate, without [...]

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Strange that it’s currently illegal to tell the truth in the UK: A leading actor granted a gagging order by a judge was trying to prevent the public discovering he had cheated on his wife with a prostitute, Helen Wood, whose clients include Wayne Rooney.

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Tim I reiterate my point – all you prove is your inability to comprehend the human condition, blinded as you are by cost-benefit analysis, flawed as it is You expose the weakness of your argument – rational as you think it may be – as a consequence, and it is precisely that rational indifference to [...]

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The government budget for rescuing fallen women* has been awarded to the Salvation Army. This is going to cause huge amusement methinks. For as the Heresiarch says: At least the Salvationists are up-front about their religious motivation. If anything they tend, as individuals, to be considerably less judgemental than their ideologically-driven counterparts in the feminist [...]

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Here’s a thought. May be the problem is not with the maths or stats of macro but with the actual idea of macro itself. May be aggregate economics just doesn’t work, we lose too much valuable information in the process. May be the costs of aggregation are just too high, we need to look at [...]

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There’s a new OECD report out and they’ve a special chapter on something I’ve been banging on about for years. When you talk about working hours you’ve got to add unpaid, domestic, labour to the paid market work that most of us do. So they do exactly this, to give us total working hours: As [...]

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A report from a reader: The BBC was interviewing a very reassuring, even matronly, expert this morning – Professor Gerry Thomas I think – from the Chernobyl Tissue Centre.  She totally surprised the BBC interviewer by estimating that the number of deaths from this reactor incident will turn out to be zero. Not zero now, [...]

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Turning us into a nation of morons. BBC News – Worrying levels of iodine deficiency in the UK A study involving more than 700 teenage girls at nine UK centres found more than two-thirds had a deficiency. Experts say the problem stems from children drinking less milk, which is a good source of iodine. Nearly [...]

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Worth repeating this in full: The Guardian has reported: Japan has raised the severity level of its nuclear crisis to the maximum seven, putting the emergency at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant on a par with Chernobyl. Officials from the nuclear and industrial safety agency (Nisa) confirmed that the crisis level had been raised from [...]

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The Murphmeister has done it again. Entirely glorious. A huge great long post in which, well, in which….. It is my belief that the goal of human life is to achieve one’s potential: to seek to explore the possibilities available to you to the full within the constraints placed upon you. So, logically, you would [...]

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Mr. Chakrabortty reverses the argument. Unnoticed it may be, but Reykjavik now serves as a very different kind of parable, of how to minimise the misery of financial collapse by ignoring economic orthodoxy. Eh? What Iceland did is against economic orthodoxy? These policies were not just controversial; they represented a two-fingered salute to the polite [...]

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