Tim Worstall

So, back from a day trip to Usti nad Labem to look at a factory (“Yes, that’s a factory OK, I’ve seen one before you know!”) and I’m at the train station waiting for the Hamburg Express. Which is going to arrive/leave from platorm 3. So I am on platform 3. The station has 6 [...]

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The Prime Minister added: “In the spirit of this healthy competition with France… If France goes for a financial transactions tax, then the door will be open and we will be able to welcome many French banks to the United Kingdom and we’ll expand our economy that way.” “If France wants to be so mindbogglingly [...]

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Two bombs planted by Irish Republican Army dissidents detonated on Thursday night in the Northern Ireland city of Londonderry, but no injuries were reported as police quickly evacuated the area following phoned warnings. This is pretty much the way it’s been going for a century now. One group starts to fight for that United Ireland [...]

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Newt Gingrich has pledged that on his first day as president he will set up a constitutional showdown by ordering the military to defy a supreme court ruling extending some legal rights to foreign terrorism suspects and captured enemy combatants in US custody. The Republican contender told a forum of anti-abortion activists ahead of South [...]

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This might not be widespread news over here as yet. But Rick Santorum, while running for President (actually, at present, for the Republican nomination for such) has something of a problem. It’s delicately referred to as Santorum’s “Google Problem“. Nothing illustrates this better than what Mr Santorum calls his “Google problem”, which has been an [...]

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Sarko will lose the presidency to a socialist no one has ever heard of, who will beat Marine le Pen by less than 5% of the (low turn out) popular vote in the run off; No. The result I would want is for Marine Le Pen to win the presidency. No, not because I’m some [...]

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You do have to slightly wonder about things in Russia, even now. Fire brigades are still struggling to put out the fire which quickly engulfed the submarine’s rubber-coated outer hull. OK, nuclear sub, missiles, rubber coating on hull, all terribly advanced technology. Russia’s Defence Ministry said there has been no radiation leak from the fire, [...]

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That’s not quite how Martin Feldstein puts it but it is what he means: The French government just doesn’t seem to understand the real implications of the euro, the single currency that France shares with 16 other European Union countries. French officials have now reacted to the prospect of a credit rating downgrade by lashing [...]

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A piece in The Guardian, of all newspapers, which just nails the point under discussion. In August 1991, when Communist party hardliners tried to wrest back power, fear was the magic component they lacked. Some people got scared, to be sure – but enough did not. Radio journalists continued reporting on the coup and finding [...]

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French president Nicolas Sarkozy, furious that the British were lobbing in their own last-minute demands when everyone else was there to save the euro, told the prime minister: “You can’t have an offshore centre taking Europe’s capital.” 1) It ain’t Europe’s capital. It might belong to copmpanies, individuals, pension funds, whatever, but it doesn’t belong [...]

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A big crowd for something political in Mioscow at least: It was not a chant that many had ever expected to hear, as up to 50,000 Russians from all walks of life stood, the snow falling steadily upon them, a few hundred yards across the Moskva river from the Kremlin. “Russia without Putin! Russia without [...]

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United Russia and Vladimir Putin will form the next government. Oh, so you think they won the election at the weekend then? No, I said that they’re going to be the next government.

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But Paris is almost entirely unanimous on one point: that Epstein’s very readable piece is predicated on an assumption of competence by the UMP dirty tricks department that’s nothing short of fantastic. “That lot couldn’t conspire their way out of a paper bag” is the consensus. It’s not the most flattering of explanations but it [...]

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These Herman Cain shagging women accusations. Actually, in at least one case, an accusation of sexual assault on a white woman. 100 years ago they would have lynched Cain even for the allegation. Today they’re still mulling over whether he should be a Presidential candidate. Yes, it’s still possible to see “black man as voracious [...]

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Trains, planes and ferries were at a standstill today as Portugal held what unions said was the biggest general strike for 20 years, with factories shutting down and the former president Mário Soares urging people to fight “international financial anarchy”. I didn’t actually notice a thing. Nothing around here was any different at all.

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The new right wing government is going to audit the books. And it’s going to have a good look at the regional and local government books. And the utilities. And it’s going to find that there are billions and billions more debt lying around than anyone has yet owned up to. This much is in [...]

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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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the woman quoted just below is a student at Harvard University, one of several of whom recently walked out of Greg Mankiw’s EC10 course: “I’m someone who lives below the poverty line, my family’s extremely poor.  And having a class like this that promotes gaining at the expense of millions of people disturbs me and [...]

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The problem is of course that such ignorant Frenchmen actually have some power over us as well: Michel Barnier, the EU markets commissioner, said he wanted to ban credit rating agencies from rating bonds from bailed-out countries. He told French radio that the agencies could lose the “right to rate certain countries for a certain [...]

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“Playing in the World Cup was a dream and playing in New Zealand was special. What other time are you going to play in New Zealand? The five planes it took us to get there was worth the trip,” he said. “The local people embraced us completely and made us feel at home. In Blenheim, [...]

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