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Mr Congdon said the dominant voices in US policy-making – Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz, as well as Mr Summers and Fed chair Ben Bernanke – are all Keynesians of different stripes who “despise traditional monetary theory and have a religious aversion to any mention of the quantity of money” – This is the, er, money quote, so to speak, from an article by the erratic Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, quoting Tim Congdon May 27th, 2010 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Here’s the problem: the global economy has gone tits up. We are doomed. And nowhere is more doomed than Europe whose Monopoly-money currency is going the way of the Zimbabwe dollar and the Reichsmark, and whose constituent economies are so overburdened by sclerotic regulation and so mired in corruption, waste and the kind of institutionalised socialism which might work just about when the going’s good but definitely not now sir now sirree. And what, pray, is the European Union’s solution to this REAL problem which has already led to riots and death in one country and which could well lead to many more in the horror years to come? Why, to impose on its already hamstrung, over-regulated, over-taxed businesses yet further arbitrary CO2 emissions reductions targets, which will make not the blindest difference to the health of the planet, but which will most certainly slow down economic recovery and make life harder and more miserable for everybody. In Britain, David Cameron is wedded to the same suicidal policy – on the one hand brandishing £6.5 billion cuts in government spending as though this were a sign of his maturity and his commitment to reducing Britain’s deficit, while on the other remaining committed to a “low carbon” economy set to destroy what’s left of our industry and cost the taxpayer at least £18 billion (yep – almost THREE times as much as the pathetic cuts announced so far by his pathetic chancellor) a year. – James Delingpole explains why he keeps banging on and on about Global bloody Warming. May 26th, 2010 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The core problem over the past few decades was not bankers’ greed or the complex financial instruments that enabled them to satisfy it. It was the immense pyramids of debt built up by the Anglo-Saxon half of the world, and the equally massive mountains of savings created in the other. Almost everything that occurred in the past couple of years was, directly or indirectly, a consequence of this.” – Ed Conway, Daily Telegraph. He has not bought the whole free market line on what is wrong with finance today, but this is pretty good. May 25th, 2010 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book. – Groucho Marx May 22nd, 2010 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
History and ordinary prudence dictated that the union might be broad and shallow (a free-trade area, with embellishments, capable of taking in all-comers) or else narrow and deep (an evolving political union, confined to countries willing to be led there). Of the two, I always believed that the first was better. But the architects did not even have the brains to choose the second. They recognized no limits to their ambitions. They set about creating a union that was both broad and deep. A federal constitution, a parliament, a powerful central executive, one central bank, one currency – all with no binding sense of European identity. As for scale, well, the bigger the better. Today Greece, tomorrow Turkey. And why stop there? Madness. – Clive Crook ponders the excessive ambitions behind the EUropean project. May 15th, 2010 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Yes, we might all think that sending a virtual red rose over Facebook is silly but those sending them (and presumably to some extent those receiving them) do value them. And that value is what we measure when we talk about GDP and it is the creation of that value that allows people to make profits. There is absolutely nothing at all in the capitalist system, the free market one (these are two different things please note), the pursuit of profits or even continued economic growth that requires either the use of more limited physical resources or even the use of any non-renewable resource.” Tim Worstall, nicely skewering the idea that economic growth is the same as ever rising consumption of finite resources. Not the same thing at all. May 14th, 2010 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
The election has dealt a major blow to the political class, though it hasn’t been a catharsis; we still hate them. – Raedwald May 8th, 2010 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
… the Greens won an MP in the enclave of Brighton, but their share of the vote fell. I find this quite amazing, really. After five years of relentless environmental yakkery in the mass media, bombarding us on all channels at once, the Greens received a lower share of votes than the BNP. All that most Greens can now look forward to is to return to their yurts, and prepare for recycling. – Andrew Orlowski, writing in the Register, and reaching the fairly sensible conclusion that the reason every political party did badly was because they are all intellectually bankrupt, and the public is starting to get this. Read the whole thing. May 7th, 2010 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
The $146 billion bailout package approved this weekend for Greece is advertised as a move to “stop the worst crisis in the [euro]’s 11-year history,” but it is having exactly the opposite effect. … So you have politicians defying the will of the voters to pour more water into a leaky bucket; transnational economic planners destroying a currency in order to save it; markets responding to those actions with predictable horror; and the few recipients of all the largesse too dumb to say “Thank you.” This is apparently what EU stability looks like. – The start and the finish (I recommend the stuff in between as well) of a piece by Tim Cavanaugh about the Greek Bailout May 3rd, 2010 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
“After trying to watch the first debate Maggie said, ‘they irritate me’. She is particularly angered by the way all three do their utmost not to answer questions.” – Margaret Thatcher’s apparent view of the recent election debate. Attributed to her by Katie Hind May 2nd, 2010 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Amazing isn’t it? Not that Labour slimed an ordinary member of the public who disagreed with them. They’ve been doing that since before they were elected in 1997. The lucky ones only found their reputations traduced in the press. The not so lucky ones found themselves dead in a field. No, what’s amazing is that is was caught live and bang to rights.” If I were this Mrs Duffy person who was slimed by Brown, I’d be thinking of watching my back for a few months. One thing we have learned over the past 13 years is that NewLabour are vindictive bastards. Update: Janet Daley draws a certain parallel – as well as noting a key difference – in another famous example of a leftist politician blurting out certain comments during an encounter with an ordinary member of the public, the famous Obama/Joe The Plumber exchange. As this Joe character found, Obama’s attack dogs tried to make life hard for him and as I said above, it may already be happening to the lady who was slagged off by Mr Brown. April 29th, 2010 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Gordon is cyanide on the doorstep. – Rachel Sylvester gets lucky quoting a Labour candidate in what used to be a safe Labour seat, just before Gordon Brown calls a core Labour voter a bigot. I reckon he’s cyanide everywhere. April 28th, 2010 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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