Tim Worstall

Take it away professor: People realize that short of socialization or monetization of debts the risk of default is not going away. There are no other solutions possible. Germany pays up and buys the debt or the ECB prints the money and buys the debt. That’s it: your choice now euroweenies.

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This is a bit of a stretch. Even Douglas Carswell, one of the more right-wing MPs among the new Conservative intake, has joined the fray, arguing that “the free market all too often turns out not to be a free market at all, but a corporatist racket for the few”. That judgment was approvingly quoted [...]

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Financial markets are overreacting, says EU president Van Rompuy Assume that markets are overreacting. That doesn’t in fact mean that you can ignore them. Markets are reality: whether markets are right to think that European Governments are run by a bunch of spendthrift drunken sailors who can never repay their debts or not, interest rates [...]

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What happens when you’ve all the money in the world, all the really smart people trying to build an economy from the top down? Haiti. An official from an international aid agency notes that Port-au-Prince is now overflowing with waste, yet 52 disposal trucks that have been imported to handle it are still sitting in [...]

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I know, I know, we think of it as a place where anything goes. And in one manner, that’s entirely true. You can be the surf bunny, the goth, the hippie, Christianist, you can follow whatever path you desire by and large. But within each of those defined paths there’s a very definite pressure not [...]

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I can’t think of anything which would explain this lot today other than ingestion of a goodly quantity of happy pills. In what Ucas calls “the most competitive year ever”, remember how 20 years ago anyone who could scrape together a couple of passes found a place on some university course somewhere, with little to [...]

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At the ASI. Minimum wage up? Check. Teen unemployment up? Check. Yes, we did tell you so you fools.

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And then there is the impact on our own living standards. For comparisons and precedent, we need only look at Japan. Our politicians and central bankers have not learned from Japan’s crisis, which preceded our own. We are, therefore, destined to follow Japan’s disastrous record of lost decades of economic activity. As in Japan, so [...]

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My word, here really is a surprise. Man with cushy academic job complains about being made accountable to his customers.

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Reading these stories of being at Summerhill I realise just how truly libertarian the place is. Do as you please, as long as you’re not buggering it up for anyone else. Even so, I got a book flung at me for talking in class by our inspirational English teacher, an ex-army man. “You don’t have [...]

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She has presented a wealth of studies that show men want to get laid more within their relationship, that celibacy is far more common among women, that masturbation and use of erotic material are far more common among men, that men are more unfaithful and more frustrated, report more sexual desire, across a whole range [...]

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On Friday, the earl contacted The Daily Telegraph to distance himself from his barrister’s comments and insisted he was by no means “down and out”. In fact, he added, he was “merely down to my last stately home”. The Earl of Cardigan.

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Army warns David Cameron on cuts to servicemen’s school fees David Cameron has been warned that the Army will be hit by a damaging wave of resignations if ministers make fresh cuts in allowances for the school fees of servicemen’s children. Now, it’s certainly possible to claim that this is just horrible. Service kiddies getting [...]

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Meanwhile, a report by Open Europe found that the plans by Germany and France to introduce a financial transaction tax (FTT) could raise a total €80.9bn – of which €58.3bn would come from UK-based businesses. That is of course the statutory incidence, not the economic incidence. But I do very much doubt that even Cameron [...]

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Apparently this is the cunning new way of getting you to watch video ads on this blog. I’m told something happens if you wave the mouse over it.

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Those nice people at Unruly Media have asked me to alert you to this new campaign for Heineken Light. It’s all modern and stuff because not only have we got beer being advertised on TV and radio and blogs’n’ things, we’ve even got a brand new hashtag as well. #occasionallyperfect. N’ here’s the video. There [...]

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I’m afraid a bond yield of 2.3% on 10 year UK government debt isn’t the market saying ‘well done you, nice deficit reduction plan you’ve got there mate’ it’s the market screaming ‘for Christ’s sake, everything is fucked and we’re terrified about vanishing growth’. Well, yes, but bond yields of 15% and rising (Greece maybe?) [...]

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One of the things that the Murph bangs on about (and his acolyte, Arnald omments upon here) is the way in which capital outflows from poor countries are much higher than the aid flows into poor countries. It’s occured to me that this isn’t quite telling the whole story. Outflows are of course private sector [...]

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It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim. Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth’s atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep [...]

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