Tim Worstall

What did he do to deserve all that money? Becht became chief executive as a result of 1999′s merger of Britain’s Reckitt & Colman with Benckiser of the Netherlands. Since then, he turned a £3bn company into a £23.5bn juggernaut, helped by the £1.9bn acquisition of Boots’s over-the-counter medicines wing in 2006 and last year’s [...]

[Read more →]

OK, so he does at least agree that there is a Laffer Curve now. That’s something I guess. However, he then brings to our attention this paper which leads to him making the following statement: I but that: it accords with the world as I observe it. So for all practical purposes the answer to the Laffer [...]

[Read more →]

A full copy of this paper would be much appreciated. http://www.jstor.org/pss/93028 “On Scandium” by Sir William Crookes, 1908. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. I’ve read bits and pieces of this. Would like to read the whole thing though. From what I’ve read so far it holds up remarkably well. And the New Year [...]

[Read more →]

Creasy said: “This isn’t broken Britain, but broke Britain – and it is being bled dry by the legal loan shark industry and their interest rates of 1,700% or more. R3 highlight how in the next six months alone, a whopping 3.5 million Britons expect to take out a payday loan. Sixty-seven per cent say [...]

[Read more →]

Think you might be a little confused dear. We call it prostitution when women’s bodies are rented out and slavery when they are sold, not fashion.

[Read more →]

At its peak in 2008, the funding gap of the British banking system, the difference between loans and deposits, stood at £720bn. No, really, no. The difference between loans and deposits was £0.00. As it always is at the end of the business day when the banks balance their books. There can be, as indeed [...]

[Read more →]

So, I did a little blog post for Forbes. Which got picked up by Yahoo Finance (for which sadly I get not a single penny). And there are, as of right now, 288 comments on the piece. I think it would be fair to say that very few indeed of the comments are complimentary. And [...]

[Read more →]

Then your conclusions are obviously going to be wrong. In real terms, Americans are on average no better off than they were 30 years ago; That simply is not true. The way you get to a figure which seems to show that it is is by looking at median household income. And median household income [...]

[Read more →]

Apparently there’s a new movie called Puss in Boots coming out. Isn’t that a variation on Dick Whittington? So it’s about Boris again?

[Read more →]

The foreign ownership of UK companies has increased and 41.6% is held abroad by oligarchs, sheikhs, sovereign funds and foreign entities…….It is difficult to see why oligarchs, sheikhs and other foreign owners would be bothered by high levels of executive remuneration as their main concern is the returns on their investment rather than any sense [...]

[Read more →]

New York murders fell dramatically when hospitals were compelled to admit critical cases irrespective of insurance cover, cutting the lag before treatment and thus the chance of survival by a crucial 20 to 23 minutes. And whether or not it’s an entirely true one is another matter. Yet there is a truth in it: some [...]

[Read more →]

If so, could you get him to contact me? For somewhere in the PWC system there is a gremlin conspiring to make him look like an idiot. Rare earth metals scarcity: A ‘ticking timebomb’ for the world, asks PwC? This has gone out over the wires, as the previous post shows picked up by the [...]

[Read more →]

Rare earth metal shortage a ‘ticking time-bomb’ A “ticking time-bomb” looms over several core manufacturing industries, experts have warned, due to a growing shortage of “rare earth” metals. Hmm, that’s strange, given that there are several large rare earth mines due to come online in the next couple of years. What shortage? Accounts PricewaterhouseCoopers said [...]

[Read more →]

He went on to serve as head of station in Bonn, and during the 1960s in Beirut, where he enjoyed skiing at The Cedars, a resort where, as he recalled, discipline in the lift queues improved dramatically after an attendant shot dead the two worst queue jumpers.

[Read more →]

The annual study of how people’s lives are changing by the National Centre for Social Research showed that despite widespread concern over economic disparity, the public does not believe greater government intervention is justified. Britons are increasingly looking to themselves for solutions to social problems rather than the Government, it found. Seventy five per cent [...]

[Read more →]

The American Airlines plane was forced to turn back to the departure gate so the 53-year-old actor could be removed from the aircraft, delaying the early morning flight from LAX airport to New York. The 30 Rock star, who could be fined over the incident, had been playing a computer game on his iPad, Words [...]

[Read more →]

It is claimed that giving profit-making companies access to state funding will create a system in which institutions pursue short-term financial gains at the expense of a decent education. In a letter to The Daily Telegraph today, professors say that proposals spelt out in a recent higher education White Paper will “condemn generations of students” [...]

[Read more →]

Eurozone debt crisis: safeguard the City or I’ll veto new EU treaty, warns David Cameron He’ll do no such thing. This is a domestic piece of willy waving, aimed at some 80 Tory MPs. He’s no more going to veto a treaty change than he is to swap Samantha for Edwina Currie. Fake right, run [...]

[Read more →]

Something about recycling in London I believe. Boris on other peoples’ wives maybe?

[Read more →]

In the Scottish Mail. Not, as far as I know, online. ‘Some recycling is an extraordinarily good idea – but not when it’s the latest new state religion,’ says the economist Tom Worstall, a Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute and the author of Chasing Rainbows: Economic Myths, Environmental Facts. ‘The concept of zero waste [...]

[Read more →]