Next weeks blog is early because of topicality and grandchildren. It is probably a failed attempt at transforming raw anger into meaningful prose.Both the Financial Times and Timeshave good accounts of what the former calls Boris Johnson’s money network, following earlier analysis in Open Democracy. (See Peter Geoghegan’s bookDemocracy for Sale in particular.) I have talked before about the ‘Leaders Group’, a longstanding club for Tory donors who enjoy monthly lunches with ministers, but there is also an even more select ‘Advisory Board’. This, according to the Times, “granted privileged access to the prime minister, ministers and advisers at the top of government.” Before linking this to policy over Covid, it is important that we are clear about what is going on here. The… [Read More...]

Contrast public perception in the UK of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine with the US and UK invasion of Iraq. There is, rightly, no attempt to balance the reality of what is going on in Ukraine with Putin’s propaganda. National self-determination for Ukraine is being overridden by the use of lethal force based on the fantasies of empire by one man, or a small group of men around him. But the reality of the Iraq war was not so different. The invasion was the project of one man, George Bush, or a small group of men around him, with the UK following because our Prime Minister thought he should. Yet with Iraq public perceptions were different, because the misinformation was coming from our own governments. We were… [Read More...]

“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back” For those new to this blog, mediamacro is a term I coined for how macroeconomics is generally talked about in the media, particularly when discussing the general direction of fiscal policy. By implication it is very different to what economics students are taught. What I mean by mediamacro will become clear in this discussion.The famous quote from Keynes is relevant, because with mediamacro the practical men were the vast majority of journalists who were convinced after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) that governments… [Read More...]

When ministers, in response to demands for more public spending, declare there is no magic money tree they are in literal terms lying. One of the things that make governments that use their own national currency quite different from households is their unique ability to create money. This is no great economic revelation, as it has been taught to first year economics students for as long as there were first year economics students. There is a very simple relationship between spending, taxation, borrowing and money creation. If we include paying the interest on its debt as part of government spending, then we can express that relationship in the form of an equation: Government spending – taxes = new borrowing + new money creation A great deal of confusion… [Read More...]

http://www.wtibfm.com/single-post/2016/09/13/Watch-Talk-of-the-Town-91216 [Read More...]

A comparison of the extent of energy price increases for consumers in the UK and France has attracted a lot of attention. The French government, in a presidential election year, has been quick to limit the extent of any increase for the consumer resulting from massive increases in wholesale prices following the recovery from the pandemic and, more recently, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. In contrast in the UK the regulator, Ofgem, has set a very large increase in its price cap, which will be painful for all UK consumers from this Spring. (On the origins of the price cap see Giles Wilkes here.) This in turn has reopened the debate between two different styles of relationship between the government and parts of the energy industry: nationalisation… [Read More...]

As I wrote over a month ago Boris Johnson, in an attempt to gain support among at least half of his MPs, the newspaper oligarchs and his party donors, threw science to the wind and all but declared the pandemic was over. No more compulsory masks in public spaces, no more free testing, no more having to self isolate, and a cut back in how we monitor Covid. It was a decision of utmost stupidity, and that stupidity has now become clear. We knew about the BA.2 variant at the time Johnson made his decision, but he ignored it. The media, and the broadcasters are as much to blame here as the right wing press, translated Johnson’s politically motivated edict as a proclamation that the pandemic was… [Read More...]