But what Brittan does not say is why we have that savings glut when the world is full of people living on the edge of despair about making ends meet and far too many are in real poverty. By failing to address that question Brittan misses the point which is that unless we address the very real inequality in this world and positively redistribute wealth we won’t get out of this crisis.

The strangeness is that it’s the poor globally who are doing the saving. The savings rate here in the UK, or in the US, is trivial. The savings rate in China, a hugely poorer place, is massive.

Redistributing wealth from the UK and US to China would therefore, ceteris paribus, increase the savings rate, not reduce it.

And there is not a hint of inflation, at all

From the BBC:

Inflation fell sharply in December on the back of lower fuel and clothing prices.

Consumer Prices Index (CPI) inflation in the UK fell to 4.2% in December, down from 4.8% in November, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Retail Prices Index (RPI) inflation – including mortgage interest payments – fell to 4.8% from 5.2%.

Some of us consider 5% to be more than just a hint of inflation. But then that would be being both numerate and observant, wouldn’t it?

We’ll never sell those gilts back. The IFS says we have £280bn of new gilts to sell over the next three years to fund the deficit. There is not a hope we’ll add £350 billion of resale of gilts on top of that. The only likelihood is in fact of more QE: over that period there is no way the market can absorb £280 billion of new debt.

That means that the reality is that QE will lead to cancelled debt. Every single penny of the gilts repurchased will, I am sure, be cancelled. Nothing else is possible. It’s just a matter of time before the lightbulb gets universally switched on to that fact that the debt repurchased under QE is no longer debt at all. There’s just new cash, and given that the economy needs that cash we’re not going to cancel it now, or in five years time. So let’s get real about it.

And let’s also remember there’s nothing odd about cancelling gilts: it happens all the time. They’re time limited loans. All we’d be doing by cancelling them is declaring time early. Let’s not overstate the fact that this is completely possible, and more than that, it’s desirable, and bar being early, totally normal. Then we can have a real economic debate.

The first point is that he’s still not grasping that we know all about this idea of cancelling the gilts. It’s called monetizing the debt. This isn’t new and it’s not clever. It’s so not new and so not clever that, just as one example, it’s actually written into the basic operating statutes of the ECB that the ECB is not allowed to do this.

It may be a good or a bad idea that the ECB isn’t allowed to do this (I think it a bad one that it cannot do it in the short-term) but the very existence of the rule shows that mainstream economics is well aware of the argument, has been for decades and thinks that there might be just a tad more to it than Ritchie is saying.

The second is this:

And let’s also remember there’s nothing odd about cancelling gilts: it happens all the time. They’re time limited loans. All we’d be doing by cancelling them is declaring time early.

Eh? We cancel gilts all the time do we?

I know we roll them over (for actual periods of debt repayment, reducing the national debt, are rare as rocking horse shit), I know we retire particular issues. But cancel them?

When? How?

@RichardJMurphy Richard Murphy

The NHS is far too important to be left at the mercy of ideological and incompetent intervention

Quite so, quite so, which is why we need to remove it from the control of politicians. You know, those incompetents who gain their position of power over us and the NHS through ideology?

Do long as the banks do not lend this situation will persist. Bank lending has been the way we’ve made the money that the country needs to keep the economy going. As long as banks don’t lend, and that looks likely to be for some time to come since without an increase in one of consumer demand, business investment or net exports their lending is bound to fall, then it will fall to government to both fill the gap in the economy that they create by their inaction and at the same time create the money that’s needed to keep the economy going. So, I can pretty confidently predict that if, as the IFS suggest, the government deficit will be £120 billion next year, £99 billion the year after that and £79 billion in 2014-15 then you can be pretty sure that quantitative easing in those years will be £85 billion, £65 billion and £45 billion respectively leaving net borrowing at around £35 billion a year. Total government debt despite the deficit will, therefore, be no more than about £750 billion or so in 2015 which will be, give or take, about 50% of GDP, a figure that will be vastly lower than elsewhere in the Eurozone in particular. And we won’t have inflation as a result because, as a consequence of the actions of this government which have pushed almost 3 million people now o9nto unemployment, with that figure bound to rise over these years, wage inflation pressure will be virtually non-existent whilst the collapse of demand in the Eurozone will tkae the pressure off other prices too.

He really doesn’t seem to realise that none of this is new. Yes, this is Wikipedia but it outlines the point nicely.

When government deficits are financed through this method of debt monetization the outcome is an increase in the monetary base, the money supply. If a budget deficit persists for a substantial period of time, the monetary base will also increase, shifting the aggregate-demand curve to the right leading to a rise in the price level.[3] When governments intentionally do this, they devalue existing stockpiles of fixed income cash flows of anyone who is holding assets based in that currency. This does not reduce the value of floating or hard assets, and has an uncertain (and potentially beneficial) impact on some equities. It benefits debtors at the expense of creditors and will result in an increase in the nominal price of real estate. This wealth transfer is clearly not a Pareto improvement but can act as a stimulus to economic growth and employment in an economy overburdened by private debt[citation needed]. It is in essence a “tax” and a simultaneous redistribution to debtors as the overall value of creditors’ fixed income assets drop (and as the debt burden to debtors correspondingly decreases). If the beneficiaries of this transfer are more likely to spend their gains (due to lower income and asset levels) this can stimulate demand and increase liquidity. It also decreases the value of the currency – potentially stimulating exports and decreasing imports – improving the balance of trade. Foreign owners of local currency and debt also lose money, Fixed income creditors experience decreased wealth due to a loss in spending power. This is known as “inflation tax” (or “inflationary debt relief”). Conversely, tight monetary policy which favors creditors over debtors even at the expense of reduced economic growth can also be considered a wealth transfer to holders of fixed assets from people with debt or with mostly human capital to trade (a “deflation tax”).

A deficit can be the source of sustained inflation only if it is persistent rather than temporary, and if the government finances it by creating money (through monetizing the debt), rather than leaving bonds in the hands of the public.

I’m afraid this is another example of Ritchie working from first principles and not realising that many have chewed over the same question before.

A temporary monetisation of the debt when the money multiplier has fallen is a good thing. That’s why we do QE after all. A permanent monetisation of the debt just feeds through into inflation.

And booming house prices of course.

That he’s paid by the taxmens’ union is of no matter for of course he is The One.

An internal review of HM Revenue & Customs’ ‘Business Records Checks’ initiative found that it had been poorly targeted, overstated how much it would collect for the Treasury and damaged the taxman’s relationship with accountants and business groups.

Oh. It would appear that it’s not all quite that simple.

The review also slashes HMRC’s projection of how much the initiative will collect for the Treasury over four years from £600m to £124m.

It really isn’t. And that’s without counting the loss of the time the businesses themselves are answering HMRC questions instead of actually doing something.

As I’ve pointed out before, there’s an acceptable level of tax dodging. A level which it really isn’t worth trying to stamp out. Not that The One agrees with me, but then I’m not paid by the taxmans’ union either.

All of which has always left me thinking that an essential component of a GAAR is a change to the basis on which tax law is interpreted from a legal (literal) basis to an equitable (common law) basis.

This is after he complains about the Duke of Westminster and Partington cases which are, as any fule kno, the application of the Common Law to tax legislation.

Sigh.

Mr Miliband’s burgeoning post-ministerial income is siphoned into the company owned with his wife, called The Office Of David Miliband Limited.

Tsk, eh, tsk!

Financial analysts say the tactic is usually deployed to reduce a joint tax bill by taking income in the form of share dividends and exploiting both partners’ tax-free allowances.

Well, no, it’s not really about personal allowances, not for a two professional family. It’s about employers’ national insurance.

If the money goes into a company, pays corporation tax, that c tax is imputed to the dividends and then income tax is topped up to higher rate then it’s all much of a muchness for the total inome tax bill as against just declaring it as income in the first place.

However, take it as dividends and the employers’ NI does not have to be paid, saving some 13 or 14%.

So we look forward to the Ritchie piece denouncing this egregious tax abuse. For that’s how he so described these actions in a report for (I think) the TUC.

Of course, when Ritchie was earning well he used this dodge himself but now he’s on a grant from the Rowntree folk he’s pure and so above criticism.

But consistency does mean that he should condemn this behaviour, no? And so we wait…..

Essentially, we don’t have a girt big national debt because we can just ignore 20-30% of it.

However, it should be noted that the government has done something else at least as significant. Through the quantitative easing programme the Bank of England has repurchased or will be soon repurchasing near enough £275 billion of that debt (I’ve shown the last £75 billion as happening in Q3 of 2011 as that’s near enough when it was authorised).

Now the Bank of England is owned by the UK government so if, in accounting terms, a consolidated set of accounts were to be prepared the £275bn owed by the Treasury to the Bank of England would simply be crossed out, or ignored. The actual debt would only be £725 billion.

In static terms we could look at it this way, yes. BoE has printed money to buy gilts, that is what QE is. However, static ain’t quite the way to look at it, dynamic is.

It’s all a matter of getting the story right and on this occasion it takes an accountant to do that.

That’s where the problem is, yes. The national debt isn’t quite as amenable to an accountant’s take on it as the accountant thinks.

Nor is there any hint now of this QE causing inflation, all of which can safely be said to have had other causes, not least because as Government accounts also show, the M3 measure of money supply has fallen steadily since 2009, meaning there is no prospect of inflation in the future either as a consequence of this process.

It’s here that we start to get into those problems. QE doesn’t impact directly upon M3. Only indirectly. Now I get as lost as everyone else in these Ms, M0, M3 etc.

But roughly speaking the relationship is that M0 is what the BoE has been creating to buy the gilts. This is money if you like, printing the stuff (or calling it into existence on a computer). M3 is what the money supply is after we’ve gone through the mulitplying effect of fractional reserve banking. You know, all that “banks create credit for nothing” stuff.

Which gives us something of a problem. Imagine, if you will, that the banking system starts to lend again. You know, like all of those plans that Ritchie has to make them lend again? So, that multiplier between M0 and M3 goes back to something like historic levels. At which time we do get inflation, because we’ve got a lot more M0 to be multiplied into M3.

Which means, of course, that the BoE now needs to sell those gilts and cancel the money creation so as to reduce M0 and thus not have inflation.

Just to reiterate, it’s true that M3 ain’t surging: but as soon as the banking system is sorted out it will which is why we need to reverse QE when the banking system is sorted out.

So, we can indeed look at it in the static terms that Ritchie uses but we shouldn’t. For the whole thing must be looked at in dynamic terms, not static.

This is the mistake he makes about Green QE as well: he misses that the whole point of QE is monetary and also needs to be reversible. Getting the BoE to print up £200 billion to go spend on real things doesn’t have the same effect at all: we end up increasing M3 by whatever is the, currently low agreed, multiplier to M3.

As I said above, I can, like most, get lost in those M0 and M3 things. But even if I’ve got the precise definitions of the monetary aggregates wrong the basic argument is still true. QE creates base money, base money is multiplied by the banking system. That mulitplier is currently low as a result of the credit crunch (low multiplier equals credit crunch in fact) and when the multiplier returns to normal we have to reverse the base money creation thing.

So while the BoE does currently own said debt it won’t forever.

And then this, which is simply quite lovely:

And in this case that would be absolutely the right point of view. There is no hope at all that this debt will ever be sold back into the markets: there’s enough new debt to sell to meet all market demand for UK debt without ever re-selling this stuff.

Do you see what he’s said there? We’re already going to be issuing all the debt the market wants. On current plans. Which means that the borrow to do stimulus to get out of recession plan won’t work, will it? Because that would mean issuing more debt: more debt which, as Ritchie says, would be more debt than the market wants. Which would mean that if that more debt (to do the stimulus which Ritchie says we should do) were issued then the price of the debt would fall, yields rise and we’d find any nascent recovery being chocked off by higher interest rates.

Isn’t that lovely? Part of Ritchie’s proof that we’re not in as much debt as we thought is the proof that we cannot issue any more debt than we already are?

Snigger.

Might be why we have bankers not accountants running Central Banks really.

“He conceives that the business of the magistrate is not merely to see that the persons and property of the people are secure from attack, but that he ought to be a jack-of-all-trades, architect, engineer, schoolmaster, merchant, theologian, a Lady Bountiful in every parish, a Paul Pry in every house, spying, eavesdropping, relieving, admonishing, spending our money for us. His principle is, if we understand it rightly, that no man can do anything so well for himself as his rulers, be they who they may, can do it for him, and that a government approaches nearer and nearer to perfection in proportion as it interferes more and more with the habits and notions of individuals.”*

An efficient tax system is:

1. Comprehensive – in other words, it is broad based;
2. Complete – with as few loopholes as possible;
3. Comprehensible – it is as certain as is reasonably possible;
4. Compassionate – it takes into account the capacity to pay;
5. Compact – it is written as straightforwardly as possible;
6. Compliant with human rights;
7. Compensatory – it is perceived as fair and redistributes income and wealth as necessary to achieve this aim;
8. Complementary to social objectives;
9. Computable – the liability can be calculated with reasonable accuracy;

All of which facilitate the chance that it will be:

10. Competently managed.

In combination these are key attributes of a good tax system.

Comprehensible, Computable…..these both mean that it must be the letter of the law, not the spirit, which is obeyed.

Well done Richard, you’ve just undermined one of your basic points.

This was a transaction relating to Indian assets that India wanted to tax, and thought it could tax. But it was recorded ‘elsewhere’ in a tax haven structure. And the result is that the legal form of recording it ‘elsewhere’ has meant that Inida’s laws have been subverted and tax is not due.

Yes, that’s right. A ruling on the law from the Supreme Court is subversion of the law.

Rather than, as most of us would take it, a declaration of what the law actually is.

Vodafone has won a landmark tax dispute in India over its $11bn acquisition of a 67pc stake in Hutchison Whampoa’s Indian mobile unit, which later became Vodafone Essar.

Another Private Eye/Ritchie nonsense ground into the dust.

The Indian Supreme Court ruled that the taxman had no jurisdiction over the British mobile operator’s acquisition.

India’s tax office said Vodafone was liable for $2.5bn (£1.3bn) in tax because most of the assets from the deal were based in India and under local tax law, buyers have to withhold capital gains tax liabilities and pay them to the government.

How the newly enobled Baron Glasman of Stoke Newington railed against this iniquity, how Ritchie leapt aboard the bandwagon and insisted that billions should be confiscated and used for the good of the nation?

Interestingly, a report on how the City’s Cash is collected and how it is spent has recently been posted onto the net.

You can read it here.

This is what that man with the deep, deep, knowledge of banking, economics, taxation and the righteous way of living told us:

They tell him they’ve only got £3 billion of assets.

That’s £3 billion they don’t need to promote banking and £3 billion we need to save libraries, and so much more.

It’s so obvious what needs to be done – and the last thing that this money need do is promote global banking, but that’s what it’s being used for.

It really is time this tax haven within the UK was abolished.

If you read the actual report, they’ve some £126 million coming in a year. Make up your own mind as to whether that’s a decent return on £3 billion of assets.

How does that get spent? £55 million a year on schools, £19 million a year on open spaces (Hampstead Heath, Epping Forest etc), £17 million a year on markets (Billingsgate, Smithfield etc). That’s the bulk of it, right there, in very standard indeed Local Authority type expenditure (why Yes, LAs do pay for schools, parks, markets, in places right across the country).

And, as I pointed out before, The City does have something of a financing problem. There are very few residents (9,000 I think?) meaning that there’s not much to be had in council tax from them. And business rates, which you’d think (in fact you know they are) would be substantial on some of the most valuable business properties in the world, well, that cash doesn’t go to The City Corporation. We’ve a centralised system you see, it goes off to central government where it is then allocated out around the country on the basis of need.

And as the City has City’s Cash it doesn’t have any need for any of the business rates so all of the business rates raised in the City go off to Burnley and the like.

So what we actually have, quite unlike what Glasman, Shaxson and Murphy tell us, is a local authority largely financing itself off land rents and the accumulated surplus from centuries of those land rents. Providing quite standard local authority services from that investment income. And the vast majority of current taxation raised from inside the City’s boundaries is sent off to poorer regions of the country to pay for needed services there.

It is indeed possible to change the law, confiscate the City’s Cash and spend it on libraries elsewhere. But if that is done (quite apart from the effects of changing the law to confiscate the money of a lawfully constituted LA) then there won’t actually be any more money for libraries in Burnley: for the City would now need to be funded from the business rates which would have to be returned to the City rather than sent to Burnley.

In short, everything that Mssrs. Glasman, Murphy and Shaxson have told us is entire bollocks as none of them bothered to do a lick of research. I managed to work it out from first principles,  a bit of internet looking about and logic. Took about an hour. And here’s the confirmation.

But the new that ratings agencies – the discredited Standard & Poors, Moody’s and Fitch – are to rate the success of hospitals in future really says all that needs to be known about The Tories’ objectives: the plan is very clearly to prepare businesses for sale.

Ignore clinical quality, care or any other factor that impacts health outcomes; just look to the financial bottom line.

The proposal actually seems to be asking someone to make sure that the finances of these newly independent hospitals are sound.

But that’s not the interesting question.

We know that Ritchie insists that it would be much much better if everyone invested their pension money in bonds which are used to build things for local authorities, the NHS, social housing providers and the like.

So, err, who is going to rate those bonds?

A plan for #growth: close the tax gap; green quantitative easing; 25% of pension contributions invested in job creation. Go for it #Labour

There it is in all it’s glory.

Reduce fiscal stimulus by collecting more taxes, print money to spend it and mandate that 25% of all pension plans be handed over to venture capitalists.

Anti-Keynesian, highly inflationary and enriching the finance industry. How very left wing of him.

debt is not nearly as high as the Tories claim and the need for debt reduction not nearly as pressing as the Tories say

Who in buggery is saying anything at all about debt reduction?

The current game is about stopping the national debt from spiralling ever upwards out of control. It’s about slowing the rate of increase of it, not actually reducing the level of it.

He’s got confused again between the level of debt, a stock, and the deficit, which is a flow.

And people who get confused between stocks and flows really shouldn’t be writing about matters economic for the national press. They should instead be revising their GCSE economics methinks.

However, two slight problems with his analysis.

The Guardian’s reported that Ed Miliband has said:

What has social democracy been about in Britain and in Europe perhaps since Tony Crosland? It is about tax and transfer social democracy. Crosland said ‘use the proceeds of growth to make society better and fairer’.

It was, I agree.

And it isn’t any more. That’s obviously true. That’s not because of the financial crisis. That’s because we have reached the limits to growth. It is not possible to exploit our planet at the rate we have been and survive as a race. Whatever the reason we come to accept that, it’s a fact.

It’s not a fact that we have reached the limits to growth. Even Herman Daly, he of the steady state economy, doesn’t say that. That’s because as well as being an ecologist fruitcake Daly is an economist. Thus he knows, as Ritchie does not, what economic growth is. An increase in GDP (or GNP, GNI, GDI, any of the variants).

GDP is the value of goods and services produced.

So, let us, arguendo, agree that we have in fact reached the physical limits to growth in the making of stuff. We could even go further and agree with the Deep Greens, that we must place tight limits on the amounts of natural resources that can be abstracted from the biosphere. Even, if you really want to, go really deep Deep Green and say that we must abstract no new resources at all, simply live off what we can recycle.

Does this mean an end to economic growth?

No, of course it doesn’t. Arguendo, again, we can accept that this severely limits the amount of stuff that can be produced. It doesn’t though particularly limit the amount of services that can be produced. And it places no limit at all upon the value of what can be produced. The value can increase through the advance of technology: in two different ways.

1) We can find methods of using less of that limited stuff in each unit of what physical stuff we do make. Take, as they’re rather fashionable things to worry about right now, the gold and tantalum coming from the Congo. Thirty years ago we layered that gold onto computer connectors like an ageing trollop slathering on the make up. 200 nm thick wasn’t unusual. It would be a very high end component today that has more than 2 or 3 nm.

So, out of our available and recyclable gold we can make 100 times the computer boards that we could 30 years ago. Tantalum is a similar story. Around the turn of the millennium capacitors on mobile phone boards used perhaps a gramme of Ta each. Now they’re perhaps 5 or 10 milligrammes. We can make many more capacitors out of the sweated misery of a militia oppressed Congolese. We have had, clearly and obviously, economic growth as a result of technology advancing even if we were to say that resource use must be limited, or even that abstraction of resources must cease entirely.

2) We can invent new things to do with our limited supply of resources. Invent, say, aspirin. As anyone who drinks knows this is an addition of value.

And this is what Daly himself says about it all. That we have indeed come to the limit of the resources we can abstract but this does not mean the end of economic growth. A steady state economy is one in which resource use is static but economic growth continues as technology advances.

Thus any argument that begins with “we have reached the limits to growth” is wrong. And any argument that depends upon the statement can safely be dismissed out of hand. For even if it were true that we had reached limits to the amount of physical stuff we can transform, we have not reached the limits of how to transform and thus add value. And as GDP is a measure of value added, as we continue to find new ways of adding value thus we continue to have increases in GDP: economic growth.

So that part of the argument is complete cock.

Then there’s this, which is also complete cock but for a different detailed reason even if the same overall one: that Ritchie simply doesn’t understand economics.

This is where we are now. As a matter of fact real wages in many parts of the private sector have risen over the last 30 or 40 years because of increases in productivity because that sector is fundamentally focused upon producing products or commoditised services that can be easily packaged and sold using technology. On the other hand, a great many of the services supplied by the state, whether they be healthcare, education, support for those in need, one-to-one advice, and so on, cannot be enhanced in this way. You cannot teach a class a 50 minute lesson in 30 min and you cannot do a 10 min consultation with a patient in 7 min without some significant compromise on the quality of service supplied occurring. Productivity gains in a great many of the activities undertaken by the state will therefore always, and inevitably, be low.  The claims of those who argue that these services are inefficient as a result and should be privatised as a consequence are just absurd: they’re simply done in real time one to one, and that’s a fact that will not change unless, of course, we want lower standard services (which privatisation does, invariably, deliver as a result).

He’s got part of Baumol’s work right. The Cost Disease part. But he’s entirely ignorant of the other part, the work on invention and innovation. Invention, using Baumol’s terminology, is the creation of spiffy new things. There’s not a lot of difference between public and private, planned and market, government and corporate, performance in invention.

Innovation is the spread of these spiffy new things out through the economy so that people can do old things more spiffily, do spiffy new things. Here, public, planned and government perform abominably. Corporate and private don’t matter all that much: it is market that works best. That constant struggle to find new ways of doing things, new things to do, from which one can gain filthy lucre on which to gorge, is the best thing we’ve ever found to produce innovation.

And of course, innovation is what leads to productivity growth and thus that economic growth that yes, even within strict resource constraints, we can still have.

All of which leads us to, and I’m sure you’ll be incredibly surprised about this, exactly the opposite conclusion that Ritchie has reached. Yes, many essential services are currently supplied by the State. Yes, increasing productivity in services is more difficult than it is in manufacturing. And markets increase productivity better than planning or government does (there are sensible and serious economists (Krugman, P) willing to assert that the Soviet Union, as an example, did not manage to increase factor productivity at all in its entire existence. All growth came from the consumption of more resources.).

Therefore we must convert the current planned, government, provision of services into market based provision (with government financing if you so desire) because that is the way we know how to increase innovation, thus productivity and thus make our children richer than we are.

Oh, and innovation in services? Remember that aspirin, boon of the drinking man? That replaced the comely maiden bathing your forehead with a damp cloth as a cure for a hangover. Innovation in health care by converting a service into a manufactured product. Happens all the time that sort of thing. Which is fortunate, given the shortage of maidens in our modern society. And the desire of many to have the no longer maidens doing a different form of servicing quite possibly during or after the drinking but before the hangover.

It is precisely and exactly Baumol’s Cost Disease that means we desire market based provision of such services.

Which is the opposite conclusion that Ritchie came to but then you knew that was going to happen right from the start, didn’t you?

Yes, productivity in services increases at a slower rate than productivity in manufacturing. Thus, inevitably, given that average wages are set by average productivity, services become more expensive compared to manufactures.

I’ve made this point around here a number of times.

Ritchie then says that, as a result of Baumol’s analysis, services should be run by the State and we shouldn’t hope or aim for any further productivity increases in the.

Err, well, yes, except that ignores the other half of Baumol’s life work, which has been showing how market systems are better than planned or State systems at improving productivity. Yes, even in services.

Or, as I would put it but Ritchie won’t (‘coz ‘e’s ignorant, see?) the very proof that Baumol’s Cost Disease provides us with is that services must be opened up to competition.

Blair is legitimately taking advantage of laws allowing him to limit what his companies and partnerships must disclose. “It is baffling; these accounts make remarkably little sense,” said accountancy expert Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK, a firm that scrutinises company finances. “This limited disclosure is not within the spirit of the law. “

It’s within the letter of the law which is rather what counts here, isn’t it?

True, it’s not quite what Ritchie would like to be the letter of the law but that’s another matter, isn’t it?