Tim Worstall

Fun piece about a particular band of nutters. Statutory law doesn’t apply to me because I’m a freeman on the land, woo, woo. But in the comments this: Joe November 17, 2011 at 7:56 pm Incidentally, this touches on a particular fascination of mine: WHY THE HELL ARE NUTTERS ALWAYS ENGINEERS? They seem to be [...]

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David Cameron is to announce plans to build as many as 450,000 mainly affordable homes between now and 2015. A long-awaited, and much delayed, housing strategy paper is expected to give details of how state-owned brownfield sites will be released for construction. The prime minister is also expected to back plans, supported by the Confederation [...]

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But, as even ministers now acknowledge, it is too little finance, not too much planning, that is preventing housebuilding. Developers are already sitting on enough land, with planning permission, to build a terrace of homes from John O’Groats to Land’s End, and – as a Campaign to Protect Rural England report showed last week – [...]

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It’s been going on for years: Grant Thornton, the accountancy firm, says that if wages increase at the rate predicted by government economists there will be a record 5.5 million higher rate taxpayers by 2015. Even if wages grow at a more conservative 2.5 per cent, more than 700,000 people will become higher or additional [...]

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At the ASI. Why solar might not be a good investment.

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Herr Ministerpräsident, sprechen Sie Deutsch? Ich kann nur „guten Tag“ sagen, aber meine Kinder lernen Deutsch. English here.

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Neoliberal economics assumes a) we’re rational b) consistent c) all knowing of the future (despite Tom Worstall’s denials that this is so – and I explain why in the book) and are therefore, in effect  d) automatons. I simply cannot work out where Ritchie has got this from. Unless, well, unless he’s just completely misunderstood [...]

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Excellent piece of argumentation from The Guardian: A fair amount of nonsense was talked yesterday about the Northern Rock deal, most of it from the two parties involved. George Osborne was touting the sale of the first casualty of the credit crunch as “value for money”. The description makes one wonder just how the chancellor [...]

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Now it’s Germany going bust: Jean-Claude Juncker, Eurogroup chief, fueled the fire by warning that Germany is no longer a sound credit with debt of 82pc of GDP. “I think the level of German debt is worrying. Germany has higher debts than Spain,” he said. …. Germany’s exposure to the crisis is already huge, and [...]

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EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration Brussels bureaucrats were ridiculed yesterday after banning drink manufacturers from claiming that water can prevent dehydration. This is, as Sr. Barroso has told us, what stops the panzers rolling through the Ardennes again. If we do not bind Germany with such rules the Kreigsmarine will be inseine [...]

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@PutneyDebates PutneyDebates @RichardJMurphy The Courageous State would prosecute rigorously the fraudulent who created and sold CDS based on sub-prime mortgages. To which the retired accountant from Wandsworth replied “Indeed!”. What they both mean of course is that those who created CDOs based on sub-prime mortgages should be prosecuted. You know, like the Directors of Fannie [...]

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He’s having a go at the FT’s economics editor now. Oh dear: there’s a believer in the confidence fairy at large, which is unsurprising given that Giles is yet another of the ex Institute for Fiscal Studies, BBC cohort who have done so much the spread neoliberal dogma through the media. No doubt Giles was educated [...]

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But whilst the public sector is being subjected to a massive upheaval, talk of breaking up the banks, regulating them more effectively or even imposing a tiny financial transaction tax remains, largely, talk.  These men may have Goldman Sach’s vote, but I doubt they have that of the European people.  The European project is reaching [...]

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The price being paid in wasted lives and broken public services is the direct result of the City’s uncontrolled derivatives trading Err, no. It wasn’t derivatives trading that caused any problems at all. It wasn’t futures or options or swaps or anything of the kind that fell over. It was housing finance: bonds and mortgages. [...]

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Meanwhile Britain has been undergoing one of the biggest industrial declines seen in postwar western Europe. When Thatcher came to power, manufacturing accounted for almost 30% of Britain’s national income and employed 6.8 million people. By the time Brown left Downing Street last May, it was down to just over 11% of the economy, with [...]

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Horrors, I know, absolutely bloody evil. Then, buried at the bottom of this Guardian piece is this little nugget: Like Reilly, Rayburn was not told that he had a week to refuse the placement. He was working at Tesco with two other young unemployed people who did get a job at the end of their [...]

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Major storms could submerge New York City in next decade Sea-level rise due to climate change could cripple the city in Irene-like storm scenarios, new climate report claims My word, gosh, that’s terrible. How will this happen? The report, commisioned by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, said the effects of sea [...]

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Former Bank of England MPC member David ‘Danny’ Blanchflower tells Robert Miller that the Government must cut National Insurance contributions for two years to help all young people under the age of 25 to find jobs. And why would anyone want to do that? Because, obviously, Blanchflower thinks that young people are too expensive to [...]

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There’s an alarmingly large number of people who think that banks just create money out of nothing. You pitch up for a loan and they just magic the cash out of thin air, hand it over then charge you. The eurozone crisis has left UK banks unable to raise the funding they need to make [...]

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Is the government adopting my pension proposals? No, they’re really not. There is a remarkable similarity between  what I wrote on pension investment there (and in the Green New Deal) and in what is being proposed. No, actually there isn’t. There’s a good reason for this too: Vince Cable’s SpAd is an economist whose view of you [...]

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