Tim Worstall

This really is cretinous stupidity. The costs to our economy of productivity lost at work, together with the criminal justice and health bill, put the financial drain as high as £55bn. There is no such thing as a cheap drink; we are all paying a very heavy price. Sigh. Leave aside that this is simply [...]

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The victory of the Republican anti-government ideology over a weakened Barack Obama has locked the US into the prison of fiscal rectitude. ….. The budget deficit of the zone is only about 6% of its GDP, as against the 10-11% of the US and Britain. A budget deficit of 10-11% of GDP is being locked [...]

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Post gone for complicated reasons that have convinced me.

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Now they’ve a letter from 450 “economists” insisting that there must be position limits, a set percentage of commodity markets, above which no more financial speculators can be let in. Because, you see, financial sepculation both increases volatility and increases prices: “Excessive financial speculation is contributing to increasing volatility and record high food prices, exacerbating global [...]

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Oxfam is seeking court action to ban a pensioner from one of its shops, and is asking him to pay a £10,000 legal bill. But Barry Nowlan, 63, of Taunton, says he has a legitimate complaint about Oxfam’s “political campaigning.” The charity banned the retired bank clerk and Lloyds shareholder from its shop at The [...]

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One of the great things about Diamond-Dybvig is that it immediately punctures any superficial notion that a bank can be defined by some traditional appearance — that it basically has to be a marble building with rows of tellers, i.e. a depository institution. Any arrangement that borrows short and lends long, that offers investors claims [...]

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The official view, as articulated by Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, is that both the first Great Depression and the current crisis were caused by a lack of base money. Base money, or M0, is money that the central bank creates. It forms the reserves held by private banks, on the strength of [...]

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Among the approximately 3,250 prisoners on death row in the US, the vast majority will serve years in solitary and crippling conditions, awaiting execution. Of the 34 states that still kill people, at least 25 hold death row inmates in solitary confinement for 23 hours or more a day. Sensory deprivation is prevalent. On death [...]

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APD is a tax, a Pigou Tax, to pay for the emissions damage caused by flying. All, right, all right, leave aside whether you believe any of that or not. Assume you do. So, ew only want to have one Pigou Tax on an activity, we want to tax things at the optimal level, not [...]

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The chairman of the Independent Banking Commission (ICB) insisted that rather than being seen as a warning against his proposals, the downgrades should be seen as “a natural reflection of the taxpayer getting one step further off the hook”. Last week Moody’s cut the ratings of 12 British lenders, including Royal Bank of Scotland and [...]

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A third of all shoppers say that they are cooking with leftover food and scraps more than they were at the start of the year, according to a survey into shopping habits by the IGD, the food and grocery industry body. Won’t WRAP and all the environmentalists be pleased? You know, the people who have [...]

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Ritchie Tweet: Richard Murphy @RichardJMurphy Richard Murphy If Nobel prize macroeconomist’s work has no ‘direct implications for the current situation’ what’s the point of it? http://ht.ly/6SLW1 Erm, celebration of advancement of knowledge maybe? Honouring of those who have advanced human knowledge? Or are we to assume the different argument? That he’s not referring to the [...]

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What is the backing track to this? Every time I hear it I think that I really ought to know what it is but I don’t: and I’d rather like to find it without the chatting over the top of it. Ah, never mind, found it. It’s Count Basie version of Hang on Sloopy

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You know, make it easier to fire them? Today’s Nobel Laureate: Before the 1970’s, similarly short durations but lower flows into unemployment meant that Europe had lower unemployment rates than the United States. But since 1980, higher durations have kept unemployment rates in Europe persistently higher than in the U.S. A general equilibrium search model [...]

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So, George Irvin: This is what economists call the “Ricardian equivalence” hypothesis, first proposed by David Ricardo in the early 19th century and popularised by Robert Barro and other members of the “rational expectations” school of economics which enjoyed brief credibility in the 1970s. Bluntly, there is little empirical support for this hypothesis. Ritchie: This [...]

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Remember, Ritchie expects the companies to just eat these costs. While there may be some indirect benefits for investors, the main purpose of these proposals is to help NGOs badger governments. Governments, in the main, don’t need country-by-country reporting because they have the ultimate sanction – “give us the information we want or we won’t [...]

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She has written a column about the Millenium Villages which gets absolutely, entirely accurately, to the actual problem. It’s something of a shock I can tell you. Nothing wrong with the aim, the amount of money being spent, the desire to enrich the poor. The problem is that the way the experiment has been set [...]

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Choice is an illusion created by people to sell you something. The egalitarian utopian market in which social businesses and the mightiest US private healthcare companies compete and provide health services in a mixed economy is a fallacy. Competition creates mega, monopoly suppliers. Eh? War is Peace? Competition means monopoly? What? Who is this moron? [...]

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