Who will hold the executive to account? (Part 94)
How to challenge your local council’s accounts.
According to Private Eye, this power has been hardly ever used. My feeling is that scrutiny of local councils is woefully inadequate. I don’t know if the current system is workable. It requires uniformed volunteers to take on well-funded incumbents who are paid public money to bat away difficult questions.
A free press is a buttress against tyranny, for sure. But in the age of social media, the mainstream media seems an irrelevance. The Guardian seems to be hemorrhaging cash, and seems a very unhappy ship indeed, with a lot of very unhappy and underpaid journalists. Inevitably, the Daily Mail indulges in an orgy of schadenfreude but you can see why they would gloat.
Wrap
Well, the CPI came in at 5%, but absolutely nobody blinked. DX flat, oil flat (well, up 30bp), equities (SPX) up 44bp (which practically counts as flat), bonds up, 10Y yield now at 1.46%.
The market met the highest inflation print for 13 years with a huge yawn. Jobless claims down to 376K, half the level of April 2020, was shrugged off. Alex Manzara saw this coming: Alex Manzara reckons that whatever the CPI print is, it won’t matter. I think that until the asset bubble bursts, we will not see inflation. People are ploughing every last bean of their spare cash into bitcoin, property, classic cars, wine and even insanely expensive stamps. At some point, someone will blink, or we’ll go fully Japanification of the US economy.
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