I am not a musician, but if I were a guitarist, I might fancy one of these. I like the one with the teeth.
(Via Gizmondo).
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As a counterweight to the doomongers out there, this is a spendid talk on global economic and population trends that one hopes reaches a wide audience. Something pleasant for a Sunday. The video runs for about 20 minutes or so, if my memory serves. It is always refreshing to come across an academic who is not only thought-provoking but also very funny. August 19th, 2007 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Obituary of Bill Deedes, newspaper editor, reporter, humanitarian campaigner and soldier. Rest in peace. August 18th, 2007 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ruth Lea (thanks to Perry for pointing this out to me) has what is a pretty good analysis of the upcoming regulatory juggernaut to hit the City out of Brussels. I won’t expand much further other than to say that without the City, the UK economy would be a shadow of what it is now. Of course, in the short run, the UK government has been content to let financiers make their big bucks because it pulls in so much taxable revenue. More fundamentally, however, London’s position as a great finance capital on the planet is not secure; while regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley have driven some US businesses to the UK, Brussels-generated laws could hamper the UK and drive that business outside the EU, although natural inertia and the benefits of London’s accumulated legal and financial expertise are strong assets. Never forget the Swiss. The weather is okay, the trains work, the Swiss mountains are great for skiing in the winter and although I am happily married, I have always rather admired their women. If you are a 30-something banker with no ties, London is not necessarily superior. Of course, if the Scottish nationalists were not such lefties, they’d be playing the Adam Smith card and campaign to turn Edinburgh into a sort of tartan low-tax paradise, and take a leaf out of the Irish book on how to revive an economy (no, the Irish economy is not all about EU grants, in case anyone brings that one up). August 17th, 2007 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well, the Fed has cut the cost of borrowing to avert what many see as a financial crisis. There are several ways to view this move, I guess. One view, as expressed here, is that central banks created the current asset price bubble and appetite for dubious credit products like collateralised debt obligations – bundles of bonds and loans – by cheap interest rates. Central banks caused this state of affairs, so they should let hedge funds and other institutions go bankrupt as part of the natural, if painful Darwinian process of the market. It sounds harsh, but a few casualties, while not much fun for the immediate investors, are a useful warning about how investments can go awry. On the other hand, the fall in stock market prices since late July has been so fast that it threatens to cause a wider, systemic economic problem, and the rate cut was justified. I take the former view, by and large. The underlying state of the UK economy, for example, is reasonable, if not great (thanks to the taxes and regulations of our current prime minister, Gordon Brown). But corporate earnings have been strong, consumer spending is okay – it has weakened a bit but hardly fallen off a cliff – and the cost of equities, when set against expected corporate earnings, are pretty cheap by long term standards. (The FTSE 100 index is priced on a multiple of about 12 times earnings, the cheapest since the early 1990s). The Fed, by cutting rates in this way, is more or less saying that stock market bears cannot make money, that the only way to bet is for stocks to rise. This ultimately creates a serious moral hazard by encouraging risky borrowing and lending behaviour. I think we’ll regret what the Fed did today. Whoever said August was dull? August 17th, 2007 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
I did not want to write about this at the time when the article came out, since I thought why should I give any more publicity to the fascist – that is surely an accurate description – Neil Clark than he already got. But having thought things through and seen some commentary, such as by Stephen Pollard, I decided to give my two pence on the matter. Clark is clearly fascinated by and attracted to, tyrants. He has defend Milosovic, for example, with a gusto that goes beyond whatever reasonable doubts one might have about who were the bad guys in the Balkan conflict. He has now argued that Iraqi interpreters trying to seek asylum should be left to their often violent fates. I wonder how he would have felt about the German interpreters who worked with the Allied armed forces in the latter stages of WW2, for instance? Clark is a truly strange beast. It is hard to think of him as “left-wing”, still less “progressive” in any coherent sense whatever. He is a socialist in his attachment to state central planning and hatred of capitalism, but then that was a trait of the far right (but then again, do the words left and right in this political sense make any sense whatever?). The unifying trait of this character is a love of violent leaders, so long as they are against Britain and the evil US. Paul Johnson, in his book Intellectuals, demonstrates how often men who like to paint themselves as being on the side of the little guy are attracted to violence. I sometimes wonder whether Clark falls into the same trap. If I were a Christian, I’d pray for his soul. August 16th, 2007 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a lovely piece in the Telegraph today about Elvis Presley, who died 30 years ago (Christ I feel old as I type those words). A lot of people get very snooty about the Tennessee lad but I do not. I like most of his early material, am not quite so keen on the Vegas year stuff and have not much interest in reading about his later years. But that he had an amazing voice, charisma and impact on the world of music can only be denied by people who have spent the last few years living on Mars. For nearly a year, I lived at the flat of the late Chris Tame, whom I very much miss both as a friend and intellectual influence. Chris was a massive Elvis fan. His house in Bloomsbury would be either vibrating to the music of the King or some surf guitar dude like Dick Dale (no deep classical music was allowed). Chris was an atheist and no believer in the afterlife, but I bet that if there is one, he is up there, rockin’ to the music of his hero. Not everyone shares my generally favourable view, such as Tim Luckhurst in the Guardian. He repeats the old, politically-correct crud that Elvis only was important because he “stole” blues from black people, etc. Oh please. And if I can make a sort of cultural-political “point” here, let’s not forget that Elvis is probably loathed by the sort of people that any self-respecting advocate of the pursuit of happiness would be glad to be loathed by: religious fundamentalists and nanny staters of various persuasions. August 16th, 2007 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
A report in the Times (of London) states that one of the UK’s leading charities, Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO), has told gap-year students (students taking a period of time off between school and university or whatever) not to take part in costly and often useless aid projects. Indeed. Far better to encourage students not to take a gap year off at all, but to work hard, get a job, and then use all their energy and idealism to campaign to scrap all tariff barriers, trade “pacts” and other distortions of the world trade system. As a subject for reading, this I highly recommend. I wonder if any university dons care to put it on their students’ reading lists? August 14th, 2007 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
The simple fact is that advertising doesn’t compel anyone to buy a product. At best, it can create some warm and fuzzy associations. A person can act on those random impulses — or he can choose to think about his purchases. It’s wholly up to him. Diana Hsieh, stating what ought to be bleedin’ obvious as we Brits say. But good on her for saying it anyway. August 13th, 2007 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
David Shayler, the ex-M15 spook, always struck me as being only 90 cents to the dollar. I bumped into this character a few years ago at a bash hosted by Privacy International, a perfectly sensible campaigning group. This item if it is true (via the Register), suggests I am right about the dark-haired one. Methinks M needs to tighten up the recruitment criteria. August 13th, 2007 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Okay, that’s quite enough seriousness. My question for the weekend is, if you were organising a dinner party and could invite six famous people around, alive or deceased, who would you pick? Mine are: Choices are not based on trivia such as looks – Mrs P being very good-looking, however – but on style, wit and elegance. I’d naturally ask Stephen Fry to work as the butler for the evening. August 10th, 2007 | 63 comments - (Comments are closed)
When people start blaming Big Evil Capitalists for the latest SNAFU in the global capital markets – the collapse of many debt products linked to what are called sub-prime mortgages in the US – remember that the problem stems in part from how lenders have been positively encouraged by some states to lend money to risky borrowers and people with a history of debt defaults and late payments (thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link). Of course, ultra-low interest rates in many nations, such as Japan, have also fuelled a vast rise in the levels of global monetary growth, which in the near-term encouraged people to invest in any asset class offering a decent return regardless of risk of assets held, like bundles of sub-prime mortgages repackaged into exotica called collateralised debt obligations (please do not ask me to define these, it is too early in the morning and I have only had one coffee). Low interest rates have cut the price that investors typically demand for shouldering risk; now that rates have risen to curb inflation, the price for that risk has gone up. Milton Friedman and Robert Heinlein may be dead, but the truths they espoused are very much alive. As they said, there is not, and never has been, such thing as a free lunch. August 10th, 2007 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
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