2023-02-02

Inflation as a tax

Jeremy Hunt is saying that he can’t pay nurses any more money because doing so will cause inflation to go up and that inflation is a tax (with an implication that it’s an unalloyed Bad Thing).

Well, in my humble opinion, there is …

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2023-02-02

Green subsidies

Martin Sandbu wrote a piece arguing that the US ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ which lards subsidies on ~~lobbyists~~ companies that invest in green things is a good thing, and that we should be doing it in Europe. Read it here.

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2023-02-01

Corruption in the UK

UK records lowest-ever score in Corruption Perceptions Index. This is perhaps unsurprising. The raw stats are pretty depressing:

• £100 billion of dirty money passes through UK systems and services every year.[i]

• 87,000 land titles in England and Wales are owned by opaque corporate …

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2023-01-31

I’ve just finished reading The True Believer by Eric Hoffer (pub. 1951). You can read an excellent summary here. To be honest, the summary is more understandable than the original book, although maybe if I’d read them in a different order I wouldn’t be saying that …

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2023-01-27

Unemployment and inflation

I wanted to write about the Phillips Curve, and put together this chart to illustrate it. The post will have to wait, but I’ll leave the chart. It might not display properly: I don’t normally embed scripts into posts.

Weekly wrap

USD up against …

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2023-01-26

Automation is coming for your (professional) job next

I grew up in the 1970s. The zeitgeist then was the battle between skilled manual labour and capital. The miners, the steelworkers, the power workers, the railway workers, the guys who worked in car factories were all in a life-or-death struggle …

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2023-01-24

Commodities

I’m late with ‘a year in review’ post, but I think it’s worth looking back a year from now, to see what’s happening in commodities markets.

The winners

Coal

The dirtiest, most carbon intense source of energy has had a stonking year! US coal is …

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2023-01-23

Milton Friedman used to say “No good was ever done by spending other people’s money.” Most people don’t agree with him, at least when it comes to charity giving: we hand over our money to Oxfam or Amnesty International hoping that they’ll spend it wisely.

The …

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China is back, baby

China has been hurt by Covid. The response of the national government has been a catastrophe, and the capabilities of the healthcare sector in China have been shown to be extremely feeble, both the capability of developing vaccines, and the ability of the country to deliver …

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Optimism is us

Eric Blair (better known as George Orwell) said “Any life, when viewed from the inside, is simply a series of defeats.” An old friend of mine, somewhat given to pessimism, always used to argue that only people who were clinically depressed had a realistic view of the …

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