economics
Category archives for economics
I despair sometimes at the stupidity of our politicians. More and more it becomes obvious that the less they have to do with running the economy, the better. The latest stupidity is from Clegg: Clegg calls for RBS and Lloyds giveaway. The idea is that when the government sells its (i.e., our) stakes in RBS…
Some fairly random thoughts on the budget. * VAT up to 20%: excellent. Calculating 17.5% was always so tedious. Score: +1. * Child benefit and public sector pay will be frozen – for no clear reason we (as in, our family) get child benefit, which seems silly. The Economist wanted to means test it, but…
Every cloud has a silver lining, and it looks like Zorita is jockeying for some of the silver: the Future of IPCC apparently is to morph into one of those nice International agencies which pay so well and are headquarted in rather nice cities, staffed by… well, clearly by the likes of independent-minded folk such…
This was an ask stoat question, and probably a fairly easy one, so I’ll have a go. First of all, what is it? AF (ie, Airbo(u)rne Fraction, is the proportion of human emitted CO2 that stays in the atmosphere, the rest being sunk in land or ocean. Now it is important not to confuse the…
Ha. I wimped out of “bonii” cos I wasn’t sure of my grammar. Anyway: Bankers are this year’s terrorists, who were last year’s paedophiles, who were the year before’s witches. Which is to say, everyone appears to be convinced that they are deeply evil and the heavy hand of government is needed (although opinions differ…
Our share price, over the last 5 days. Exciting, isn’t it? No, I have no idea why it is doing this, and (of course) if I did I wouldn’t be able to tell you :-).
One thing that has puzzled me for a bit about the current mess is the intereaction between the Government and the Central Bank (Bank of England or BoE, in our case). So the government is raising money by selling Gilts, in quantities that I forget but of the order of £200b when I last looked.…
At least we are as I write this. What we are when you read this I don’t know. Disclaimer: this post contains no inside information at all.
Well, that was the Beeb headline, to The UK Treasury has failed to sell all its government bonds in an auction for the first time since 2002. But in fact It wanted to sell £1.75bn of 40-year bonds, but investors only bid for £1.63bn of the debt, the Debt Management Office said. so (a) it…
Via Steinn, who got it from CR, this delightful story of how people are now so scared of losing unknown amounts of money they are prepared to sign up to a certain but small absolute loss (and thats neglecting inflation). They should buy our shares, like I did earlier this week, and they actually went…