Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya @Tsihanouskaya I addressed President Zelenskyy today & proposed to build an alliance between Ukraine & democratic Belarus. To establish political & diplomatic relations. Because the fates of our nations are intertwined. We are ready for cooperation & we #StandWithUkraine🇺🇦
Belarus has long felt like the solution to the Ukraine war. A revolution and a new anti-Russian leadership, domino effect on Russia and its republics, and in due course another newly prosperous EU-facing country. If and when Russia does implode it should be fairly easy for Moldova to kick the soldiers out of transnistria too.
Before the invasion, one theory was that Putin was massing his troops in Belarus as a precursor to annexing it and that threatening Ukraine was just a sideshow. It would be ironic if Belarus instead ended up being the first domino to fall.
It must be tottering on the brink. In 2020 many thought Lukaschenko managed to hold on because of the fear Russian intervention could follow any fall of the government.
Russia currently has no means to hold back the tide in Belarus. It is focussed on Ukraine.
OK I am lost now. Tsikhanouskaya is the PM, yes?
There's this wonderful resource called Wikipedia which can sometimes help in such moments of confusion. You should try it.
Fuck me, that is so devastating I am going to flounce for the evening and watch the Argento cut of Dawn of the Dead.
The question behind my question was, is she just a figurehead, and Lukashenko calls the shots? Not much help from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/is Sviatlana_Tsikhanouskaya just a figurehead, and Lukashenko calls the shots?
You should try to get a greater allowance of non-violent programming in your daily viewing habits. You'll rot your brain.
NBC News: U.K. authorities have arrested one of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaksa's alleged money-men, Graham Bonham-Carter, after the DOJ's Task Force KleptoCapture charged him with sanctions violations and wire fraud crimes.
The U.S. says they will seek to extradite him.
Disgraceful. None of their damned business if people in Britain choose to violate their sanctions.
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya @Tsihanouskaya I addressed President Zelenskyy today & proposed to build an alliance between Ukraine & democratic Belarus. To establish political & diplomatic relations. Because the fates of our nations are intertwined. We are ready for cooperation & we #StandWithUkraine🇺🇦
Belarus has long felt like the solution to the Ukraine war. A revolution and a new anti-Russian leadership, domino effect on Russia and its republics, and in due course another newly prosperous EU-facing country. If and when Russia does implode it should be fairly easy for Moldova to kick the soldiers out of transnistria too.
Before the invasion, one theory was that Putin was massing his troops in Belarus as a precursor to annexing it and that threatening Ukraine was just a sideshow. It would be ironic if Belarus instead ended up being the first domino to fall.
It must be tottering on the brink. In 2020 many thought Lukaschenko managed to hold on because of the fear Russian intervention could follow any fall of the government.
Russia currently has no means to hold back the tide in Belarus. It is focussed on Ukraine.
OK I am lost now. Tsikhanouskaya is the PM, yes?
There's this wonderful resource called Wikipedia which can sometimes help in such moments of confusion. You should try it.
Fuck me, that is so devastating I am going to flounce for the evening and watch the Argento cut of Dawn of the Dead.
The question behind my question was, is she just a figurehead, and Lukashenko calls the shots? Not much help from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/is Sviatlana_Tsikhanouskaya just a figurehead, and Lukashenko calls the shots?
She’s the opposition leader in exile who stood against Lukashenko last time and most likely had the election stolen from her.
One of my recollections from 2008 is reading the musings of Allister Heath, then the editor of City AM. Before he went completely mad, joined the Telegraph and tried to become a right-wing polemicist, he could write cogently on economics albeit from the perspective of a dry-as-dust Thatcherite.
His first thought was it wasn't a question of any business being "too big to fail" bit of nobody knowing what to do if the eventuality arose. He proposed every firm had a form of "corporate will" outlining what should happen in the event of business failure. Yes, it would be bad for the shareholders but it need not, with careful management, be too bad beyond that.
He was also strongly opposed to QE and, with the centre-left still struggling to come to terms with what was happening, was a staunch opponent of Osborne post 2010 and providing a right-wing critique of the Chancellor's policies.
My other recollection was the "crash" wasn't just the culmination of increased spending in previous years - it occurred because of problems on the other side of the balance sheet. While expenditure remained, income dried up as economic activity failed leading to a widening deficit.
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya @Tsihanouskaya I addressed President Zelenskyy today & proposed to build an alliance between Ukraine & democratic Belarus. To establish political & diplomatic relations. Because the fates of our nations are intertwined. We are ready for cooperation & we #StandWithUkraine🇺🇦
Belarus has long felt like the solution to the Ukraine war. A revolution and a new anti-Russian leadership, domino effect on Russia and its republics, and in due course another newly prosperous EU-facing country. If and when Russia does implode it should be fairly easy for Moldova to kick the soldiers out of transnistria too.
Before the invasion, one theory was that Putin was massing his troops in Belarus as a precursor to annexing it and that threatening Ukraine was just a sideshow. It would be ironic if Belarus instead ended up being the first domino to fall.
It must be tottering on the brink. In 2020 many thought Lukaschenko managed to hold on because of the fear Russian intervention could follow any fall of the government.
Russia currently has no means to hold back the tide in Belarus. It is focussed on Ukraine.
OK I am lost now. Tsikhanouskaya is the PM, yes?
There's this wonderful resource called Wikipedia which can sometimes help in such moments of confusion. You should try it.
Fuck me, that is so devastating I am going to flounce for the evening and watch the Argento cut of Dawn of the Dead.
The question behind my question was, is she just a figurehead, and Lukashenko calls the shots? Not much help from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/is Sviatlana_Tsikhanouskaya just a figurehead, and Lukashenko calls the shots?
You should try to get a greater allowance of non-violent programming in your daily viewing habits. You'll rot your brain.
Railway Children up next.
Did you know that Sally Tomsett (the buck toothed one) was actually 20 and a smoker?
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya @Tsihanouskaya I addressed President Zelenskyy today & proposed to build an alliance between Ukraine & democratic Belarus. To establish political & diplomatic relations. Because the fates of our nations are intertwined. We are ready for cooperation & we #StandWithUkraine🇺🇦
I wonder whether Poland might end up attacking Belarus’s western flank if Luka drives south to Ukraine.
No.
Besides which, if the Russian Federation can't hold off Ukrainian counter-attacks on two fronts then puny Belarus hasn't a prayer of making a decisive intervention. Lukashenko has a few thousand special forces troops that are purported to be quite effective, but they're part of the state apparatus of internal repression that he'll probably need to clamp down on dissent if he attacks Ukraine. The remainder of the Belarusian army consists very largely of half-trained reservists equipped with old Soviet equipment and is no match for battle hardened Ukrainian formations with western training and western kit.
NBC News: U.K. authorities have arrested one of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaksa's alleged money-men, Graham Bonham-Carter, after the DOJ's Task Force KleptoCapture charged him with sanctions violations and wire fraud crimes.
The U.S. says they will seek to extradite him.
US Dept of Justice news release - U.K. Businessman Graham Bonham-Carter Indicted for Sanctions Evasion Benefitting Russian Oligarch Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska
Deripaska’s Property Manager Arrested in U.K. for Funding U.S. Properties for Deripaska’s Benefit and Attempting to Expatriate Deripaska’s Artwork from U.S. through Deception
. . . According to court documents, Graham Bonham-Carter, 62, of the United Kingdom, worked for entities controlled by Deripaska from July 2003 through the present. . . . Even after OFAC designated Deripaska, Bonham-Carter continued to work for Deripaska and refer to Deripaska as his “boss.” . . .
As alleged in the indictment, after Deripaska’s designation, Bonham-Carter engaged in over $1 million of illicit transactions to fund real estate properties in the United States for Deripaska’s benefit. Between in or about 2005 and in or about 2008, Deripaska purchased three residential properties in the United States, two in New York City and one in Washington, D.C. (the U.S. Properties). The properties were managed by a company named Gracetown Inc. After OFAC imposed sanctions on Deripaska on or about April 6, 2018, Gracetown Inc. continued to manage the properties Deripaska’s benefit. . . . On or about May 25, 2018, Bonham-Carter wrote in an email that “OVD [i.e., Deripaska] wants me to set up my own company to run the [Belgravia Square] house and to possibly include Japan, Italy, China and more.” Less than two months later, on or about July 17, 2018, Bonham-Carter incorporated GBCM Limited.
Between in or about March 2021 and in or about December 2021, while in Deripaska’s employ, Bonham-Carter transmitted payments for the upkeep of the U.S. Properties. Bonham-Carter wired payments totaling $1,043,964.30 from a bank account in Russia. . . .
As alleged, Bonham-Carter also attempted to unlawfully transfer artwork purchased by Deripaska from an auction house in New York City to London through misrepresentations concealing Deripaska’s ownership of the artwork. In May 2021, when advised by the auction house that it had reason to believe that the artwork belonged to Deripaska, Bonham-Carter falsely stated that the artwork and a payment of $12,146 that Bonham-Carter had made to ship the Artwork do not belong to Deripaska. . . .
Bonham-Carter is charged in a three-count indictment with one count of conspiring to violate and evade U.S. sanctions, in violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), one count of violating IEEPA and one count wire fraud, each of which counts carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors. . . .
On topic. It’s not a surprise that three members of the BOE are seeking to blame the govt. The Bank was not only asleep at the wheel at its prudential responsibilities but was incontinent with its actions since 2020 and far far too slow to pivot to tightening. That they didn’t match the Fed (and ECB) the week of the fiscal statement is incredulous, until you look at the voting record and past statements and mediocre cvs of some of the individuals.
This is not to absolve the government from blame. They should of course have announced the tax cuts at the same time as fiscal cuts and supply side reform in a proper budget with appropriate oversight, as you say. Not in a period when we were already seeing the QE and rock bottom yields experiment unwinding on both sides of the Atlantic.
The comi-tragedy is that in broad strokes Truss is right. High tax has no doubt impeded growth and low interest rates have been among the most ruinous policies for wealth equality of the last century (special mention to 1990s Russia privatisation process). The Labour Party should have been screaming blue murder for a decade that it must end but perhaps it found it hard because a) it started on their watch, b) they didn’t want to make the hard choices either.
We seem now to be stuck in a loop where spending can’t be cut, tax rises aren’t going to increase the take much, and the bank doesn’t dare raising rates or unwinding QE (in part because of the liquidity crisis it has overseen with DB pensions).
The reckoning from 2008 is almost upon the world and a lot of people are going to be substantially poorer as a result. The only quibble now is how that pain is shared and to make sure boneheaded politicians and officials don’t make it worse than it needs to be.
QT absolutely was the BoE policy and they would have sold bonds that week if the Government hadn't crashed the market requiring the Bank to step in to prevent further catastrrophe in complete contradiction to its policy. The only incredulous thing is the galactic negligence of our so called government.
We can argue whether QT is the right policy, but we can't argue that the Bank's policy is indeed QT, as it is for almost all its much more sensibly run peer countries. The BoE doesn't deserve this shower of incompetents. Neither do we.
Courthouse News.com - Audio leak of profane, racist remarks leaves LA City Hall in disarray LA City Council President Nury Martinez has stepped down as president, after the audio recording of her making racist remarks surfaced.
LOS ANGELES (CN) — A leaked audio recording of an expletive-filled meeting between three Los Angeles City Council members and a labor leader, who can be heard making numerous racist slurs, some about their City Hall colleagues, has sent shockwaves through LA's political establishment.
On Monday, the day after the news broke, City Council President Nury Martinez announced she was stepping down as president. Many Southern California politicians, including Mayor Eric Garcetti, U.S. Senator Alex Padilla and both mayoral candidates have called for the three council members — Martinez, Kevin de Leon, and Gil Cedillo — to resign from office, as has the Los Angeles Times editorial board.
The 80-minute audio clip, which has been uploaded to YouTube by the progressive news site KnockLA, provides a rare peak into the coarse, cynical and mean ways in which the city's elected officials relate to one another. The four Latino officials speak openly and cynically about defending their political turf from their enemies — namely, from Black and white politicians.
Referring to progressive District Attorney George Gascón, Martinez says, "Fuck that guy. He's with the Blacks."
Martinez calls progressive City Councilman Mike Bonin, a white gay man, a "little bitch." Perhaps the most shocking part of the conversation is when it turns to Bonin's adopted [Black] son . . . .
"They're raising him like a little white kid," Martinez says. "I was like, this kid needs a beatdown. Let me take him around the corner and then I’ll bring him back.” Martinez . . . describes the child as "parece changuito," or "like a monkey." . . .
"It's the white members on this council that will motherfuck you in a heartbeat," Martinez says, referring to the potential of City Controller Ron Galperin to stop paying suspended City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas' salary — which he did do. "That's what they do."
De Leon agrees, comparing the situation to when his former colleague in the Legislature, Tony Mendoza, was accused of sexual harassment.
"The white folks will cut you in a heartbeat," De Leon says. "And then when it's them, they figure out some shit." . . .
"They get a PR firm," Martinez agrees. "They get the best attorneys."
The council members go on to insult Armenians, a few other City Council members, even a reporter for the LA Times, whom Martinez calls a "fucking little piece of shit."
SSI - Los Angeles Times & many others calling for these clowns to resign. My guess is that they will indeed be forced to walk the plank. Certainly hope so!
Sounds like a pleasant political culture they have there.
I recall TV shows set in LA being pretty cynical about its politics (as most are of course), and wheeling dealing between white, black and brown, in those terms.
NBC News: U.K. authorities have arrested one of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaksa's alleged money-men, Graham Bonham-Carter, after the DOJ's Task Force KleptoCapture charged him with sanctions violations and wire fraud crimes.
The U.S. says they will seek to extradite him.
US Dept of Justice news release - U.K. Businessman Graham Bonham-Carter Indicted for Sanctions Evasion Benefitting Russian Oligarch Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska
Deripaska’s Property Manager Arrested in U.K. for Funding U.S. Properties for Deripaska’s Benefit and Attempting to Expatriate Deripaska’s Artwork from U.S. through Deception
. . . According to court documents, Graham Bonham-Carter, 62, of the United Kingdom, worked for entities controlled by Deripaska from July 2003 through the present. . . . Even after OFAC designated Deripaska, Bonham-Carter continued to work for Deripaska and refer to Deripaska as his “boss.” . . .
As alleged in the indictment, after Deripaska’s designation, Bonham-Carter engaged in over $1 million of illicit transactions to fund real estate properties in the United States for Deripaska’s benefit. Between in or about 2005 and in or about 2008, Deripaska purchased three residential properties in the United States, two in New York City and one in Washington, D.C. (the U.S. Properties). The properties were managed by a company named Gracetown Inc. After OFAC imposed sanctions on Deripaska on or about April 6, 2018, Gracetown Inc. continued to manage the properties Deripaska’s benefit. . . . On or about May 25, 2018, Bonham-Carter wrote in an email that “OVD [i.e., Deripaska] wants me to set up my own company to run the [Belgravia Square] house and to possibly include Japan, Italy, China and more.” Less than two months later, on or about July 17, 2018, Bonham-Carter incorporated GBCM Limited.
Between in or about March 2021 and in or about December 2021, while in Deripaska’s employ, Bonham-Carter transmitted payments for the upkeep of the U.S. Properties. Bonham-Carter wired payments totaling $1,043,964.30 from a bank account in Russia. . . .
As alleged, Bonham-Carter also attempted to unlawfully transfer artwork purchased by Deripaska from an auction house in New York City to London through misrepresentations concealing Deripaska’s ownership of the artwork. In May 2021, when advised by the auction house that it had reason to believe that the artwork belonged to Deripaska, Bonham-Carter falsely stated that the artwork and a payment of $12,146 that Bonham-Carter had made to ship the Artwork do not belong to Deripaska. . . .
Bonham-Carter is charged in a three-count indictment with one count of conspiring to violate and evade U.S. sanctions, in violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), one count of violating IEEPA and one count wire fraud, each of which counts carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors. . . .
NBC News: U.K. authorities have arrested one of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaksa's alleged money-men, Graham Bonham-Carter, after the DOJ's Task Force KleptoCapture charged him with sanctions violations and wire fraud crimes.
The U.S. says they will seek to extradite him.
Disgraceful. None of their damned business if people in Britain choose to violate their sanctions.
Horseshit.
Addendum - Read the DOJ indictment (relevant parts just posted on this thread).
On topic. It’s not a surprise that three members of the BOE are seeking to blame the govt. The Bank was not only asleep at the wheel at its prudential responsibilities but was incontinent with its actions since 2020 and far far too slow to pivot to tightening. That they didn’t match the Fed (and ECB) the week of the fiscal statement is incredulous, until you look at the voting record and past statements and mediocre cvs of some of the individuals.
This is not to absolve the government from blame. They should of course have announced the tax cuts at the same time as fiscal cuts and supply side reform in a proper budget with appropriate oversight, as you say. Not in a period when we were already seeing the QE and rock bottom yields experiment unwinding on both sides of the Atlantic.
The comi-tragedy is that in broad strokes Truss is right. High tax has no doubt impeded growth and low interest rates have been among the most ruinous policies for wealth equality of the last century (special mention to 1990s Russia privatisation process). The Labour Party should have been screaming blue murder for a decade that it must end but perhaps it found it hard because a) it started on their watch, b) they didn’t want to make the hard choices either.
We seem now to be stuck in a loop where spending can’t be cut, tax rises aren’t going to increase the take much, and the bank doesn’t dare raising rates or unwinding QE (in part because of the liquidity crisis it has overseen with DB pensions).
The reckoning from 2008 is almost upon the world and a lot of people are going to be substantially poorer as a result. The only quibble now is how that pain is shared and to make sure boneheaded politicians and officials don’t make it worse than it needs to be.
QT absolutely was the BoE policy and they would have sold bonds that week if the Government hadn't crashed the market requiring the Bank to step in to prevent further catastrrophe in complete contradiction to its policy. The only incredulous thing is the galactic negligence of our so called government.
We can argue whether QT is the right policy, but we can't argue that the Bank's policy is indeed QT, as it is for almost all its much more sensibly run peer countries. The BoE doesn't deserve this shower of incompetents. Neither do we.
Complete nonsense.
Well, in your defence, at least at the end there you have a flash and self-awareness and pass an accurate verdict on your own post.
NBC News: U.K. authorities have arrested one of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaksa's alleged money-men, Graham Bonham-Carter, after the DOJ's Task Force KleptoCapture charged him with sanctions violations and wire fraud crimes.
The U.S. says they will seek to extradite him.
Disgraceful. None of their damned business if people in Britain choose to violate their sanctions.
The allegations, at least in part, stem from activity that it is alleged to have taken place in New York City. Are you saying we should be a safe haven for criminal suspects? Huge if true
I am not watching the Supreme Court hearings, but my personal view is that even an advisory referendum on constitutional matters falls outside the Scottish government’s remit.
As would, for example, advertising in support of independence.
I think on balance I agree, although you end up at a thorny situation. In 19th century USA, I believe that the southern states had the right to secede from the union. Does Scotland have the right to do the same from the UK? I assume there was no article 50 in the act of Union?
You only have to read the words of the statute. 'Reserved' means reserved to the UK parliament and therefore not delegated.
"General reservations The Constitution 1 The following aspects of the constitution are reserved matters, that is—
(a) the Crown, including succession to the Crown and a regency,
(b) the Union of the Kingdoms of Scotland and England......"
A referendum (whether binding or not) as to whether the balance of opinion in Scotland favours change in the constitutional matter of the union, and organised according to law (ie not a large opinion poll but a legislated matter) is so plainly a reserved matter that I would say the Scottish government's case has virtually Zero chance of success.
BTW by parity of reasoning if the Scottish government can do this, they can also hold a referendum on abolishing the monarchy for Scotland, and removing all armed forces.
I would put it as 66/1 the Scots to win this case.
Even the Lord Advocate clearly does not believe that this falls within the competence of the Scottish Parliament. The SNP's own written submissions really failed to address the wording of the legislation which the SC has to apply, relying instead on inherent rights to self determination which in some way require the SC to ignore the law as it is and recognise some amorphous, overwhelming principle. It's an offer they have declined before and they will do so this time too.
I don't think that's what their written submission does at all.
Their written submissions seems to me to suggest
That the legislation could be interpreted broadly (anything even remotely connected to the reserved matter is reserved, even if it doesn't affect the law on reserved matters) or narrowly (only legal changes on reserved matters are reserved). This referendum being advisory only doesn't change any reserved matters, so would be legal under a narrow reading. That under international law Scotland should have a right to self-determination. UK law is normally interpreted where it can be to be consistent in both national and international law. Therefore the narrow interpretation should be used.
Seems to me to be a reasonable argument. Where is the flaw on that, how is a narrow reading of the legislation inappropriate?
If this from the BBC Coverage earlier is accurate then surely SC precedent would say that an advisory-only referendum is not reserved? Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain continues to cite case law in reference to whether provisions in legislation "relate to" reserved matters.
She speaks about the European Union (Continuity) Bill which was passed by the Scottish Parliament as a result of Brexit.
She says the Supreme Court placed considerable emphasis on the need for there to be some form of practical or legal effect on the law on the reserved matter.
The lord advocate says it is implicit in the reasoning of the Supreme Court when it dealt with the reference on the European Union (Continuity) Bill that it would be reasonable to suggest that holding an advisory referendum on an issue of international affairs would not relate to a reserved matter by the Scottish Parliament.
I can only speak as a layman, but as someone who thinks the government should grant a referendum as that is the will of the elected representatives of the Scottish nation, the UK government's case does seem pretty persuasive to me.
Whilst the draft of any bill is unlikely to change, as even a Justice pointed out, it seems as though it is the job of the Lord Advocate to take a view on the competence, and she is simply reluctant to do so. If she is not willing to offer a firm view that it is or is not, then surely it falls by default? Why is it the job of the court to provide an answer to a question she is not even willing to answer? (I know there's a whole bunch of arguments about when she is able to refer a matter and what on as well, but at its heart this seems to be her job is to take a view, and she is unwilling to offer one at the moment).
The BBC live text updates also then includes a lot of stuff about how this is important, and a festering sore, which are both true, but doesn't seem like it would overrule matters of legislative procedure and whether that has been followed properly - you see that sort of argument at much much lower levels with things like public sector equality duty, or duty of care, meaning (people argue) any other rules are not relevant. And its the sort of thing the government lost, when trying to argue Brexit was really important and thus little things like parliamentayr consent were not necessary.
I hope they go big. It's not as though going slimmed down will turn republicans into monarchists, and being over the top silly is part of the brand.
I presume (and tell me if I’m wrong) SNP party members think that they were well behind in the polling and then did better in the first referendum, but now they’re only a bit behind in the polling, so one more heave will do it. However, I believe that reasoning is wrong. There was a first referendum and most people made up their minds on the issue. It’s going to be much harder to shift views now.
I think the moral approach for the SNP would be to stop pushing for an imminent referendum and set themselves the task of getting consistent polling leads supporting independence. If polling consistently showed 60%+ supporting independence, they’d be in a stronger position to demand a vote and (obviously) have more confidence of winning it. To achieve this goal, they need to make their case, which probably means answering the tricky questions around currency, government finances, and the border.
Or maybe Scottish nationalism should follow the Quebec route: step back from independence, but go for maximum possible autonomy and sovereignty while still, just, remaining in the UK. Quebec has done this and achieved all sorts of opt-outs from national policy that once seemed unachievable, yet while still retaining the benefits of being part of Canada. I don’t think this would be a good thing for the UK (and I don’t think it’s been a good thing for Canada), but I’m not Scottish or Quebecois!
NBC News: U.K. authorities have arrested one of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaksa's alleged money-men, Graham Bonham-Carter, after the DOJ's Task Force KleptoCapture charged him with sanctions violations and wire fraud crimes.
The U.S. says they will seek to extradite him.
Disgraceful. None of their damned business if people in Britain choose to violate their sanctions.
Horseshit.
Addendum - Read the DOJ indictment (relevant parts just posted on this thread).
As we have also sanctioned him, it seems a pretty baseless objection. Just reflexive anti-US sentiment ?
NBC News: U.K. authorities have arrested one of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaksa's alleged money-men, Graham Bonham-Carter, after the DOJ's Task Force KleptoCapture charged him with sanctions violations and wire fraud crimes.
The U.S. says they will seek to extradite him.
Disgraceful. None of their damned business if people in Britain choose to violate their sanctions.
The allegations, at least in part, stem from activity that it is alleged to have taken place in New York City. Are you saying we should be a safe haven for criminal suspects? Huge if true
That would depend on the nature of the 'crime'.
The link is hilarious:
'Even after OFAC designated Deripaska, Bonham-Carter continued to work for Deripaska and refer to Deripaska as his “boss.”'
Shock horror, someone based in London who works for someone doesn’t turn around and resign because the USA has decided to sanction them. Who the fuck do these people think they are?
I have been able to access a portal today which gives me sight of the current situation in respect of the pension fund of which I am a trustee. At our last official valuation, after some pretty cautious assumptions, we had 105% of the funding required. By the time of the Kamikwase budget that had gone up to 110%. Today it is at 140%. This is because although the value of our investments have fallen sharply the value of our liabilities, based upon gilt rates, have fallen much more quickly still.
Basically, the death of our DB pension system came from artificially low interest rates over very long periods of time which multiplied the capital required to pay those pensions when they became due. Increased government gilt yields will have massively (because they are so highly geared) increased pension solvency.
We have lived with a deeply distorted economy since 2008. We have encouraged debt by making it cheap, we have inflated asset prices benefiting the better off and companies which frankly should have gone to the wall have continued a zombie existence using up assets that could have been put to better use. We absolutely need to get interest rates back to something like normal, that is roughly 2% above inflation. Doing this is going to be very painful for those who borrowed large sums for mortgages on the basis that borrowing was cheap. But not doing this has increased inequality, pulled up the rungs of the housing market for our youth and completely distorted our tax system, increasing the burden on earnings but allowing massive gains to effectively go untaxed.
Yep.
We should have done an Iceland in 2008.
14 stupid, wasted years of financial repression with huge consequences for the young.
As someone who graduated in July 2008, into the great financial crisis, I feel really sorry for my contemporaries - those in their late 20’s and 30’s who have had to swim against an incredible tide, for the last decade and a half and have had to load themselves up with massive mortgages, just to get some kind of stability and raise a family.
They’re now left holding the can.
Political choices have made life very unfair for my generation.
It all could have been so different.
Personally I think the entire generation under 50 have been sacrificed.
You either can’t afford to buy a house, or you’ve bought with heavy leverage and even then are unlikely to have been able to afford a standard of accommodation accessible to the generation before you.
Even QCs now live in Archway, not Hampstead. And so on, all the way down the ladder.
The only winners are those who’ve inherited or been gifted by their parents.
Also if you are the beneficiary of house price inflation. Some people who bought houses around 2010 will have seen the prices triple. So if you bought at £200k terraced house in parts of the south east it is now worth £600k, etc. Wealth is either going to come through via inheritance/gifts or house price inflation, or a combination of both. There are lots of people under 50 who are 'winners'.
But not enough attention is paid to the fact that life is close to impossible for a large number of people. If you are in debt and only get offered precarious 30 hour a week 'part time' work, you are just never going to get on the ladder to anywhere and will be dependent on the state for the whole of your life. There just seem to be millions of people in this position. I would say that many of the families in my son's school class are in this position. Who exactly in the government is looking out for these people and trying to solve this problem? I don't think anyone is.
Interesting thread on the (non)availability of air defence systems.
https://mobile.twitter.com/GresselGustav/status/1579416337809829888 1/ As 🇷🇺 missiles rain down on civilian targets all over 🇺🇦, I get questions what to do now. Some thoughts as a former air defence officer on this. But beware, information about the attacks is limited, and I would not say it is over yet. Air alarms are still ongoing
Basically, unless western armed forces take some systems out of active service (which I think we should nonetheless consider, FWIW), we don’t really have very much to send very quickly.
NBC News: U.K. authorities have arrested one of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaksa's alleged money-men, Graham Bonham-Carter, after the DOJ's Task Force KleptoCapture charged him with sanctions violations and wire fraud crimes.
The U.S. says they will seek to extradite him.
Disgraceful. None of their damned business if people in Britain choose to violate their sanctions.
The allegations, at least in part, stem from activity that it is alleged to have taken place in New York City. Are you saying we should be a safe haven for criminal suspects? Huge if true
That would depend on the nature of the 'crime'.
The link is hilarious:
'Even after OFAC designated Deripaska, Bonham-Carter continued to work for Deripaska and refer to Deripaska as his “boss.”'
Shock horror, someone based in London who works for someone doesn’t turn around and resign because the USA has decided to sanction them. Who the fuck do these people think they are?
Your retort is also hilarious. Or rather ludicrous.
I have been able to access a portal today which gives me sight of the current situation in respect of the pension fund of which I am a trustee. At our last official valuation, after some pretty cautious assumptions, we had 105% of the funding required. By the time of the Kamikwase budget that had gone up to 110%. Today it is at 140%. This is because although the value of our investments have fallen sharply the value of our liabilities, based upon gilt rates, have fallen much more quickly still.
Basically, the death of our DB pension system came from artificially low interest rates over very long periods of time which multiplied the capital required to pay those pensions when they became due. Increased government gilt yields will have massively (because they are so highly geared) increased pension solvency.
We have lived with a deeply distorted economy since 2008. We have encouraged debt by making it cheap, we have inflated asset prices benefiting the better off and companies which frankly should have gone to the wall have continued a zombie existence using up assets that could have been put to better use. We absolutely need to get interest rates back to something like normal, that is roughly 2% above inflation. Doing this is going to be very painful for those who borrowed large sums for mortgages on the basis that borrowing was cheap. But not doing this has increased inequality, pulled up the rungs of the housing market for our youth and completely distorted our tax system, increasing the burden on earnings but allowing massive gains to effectively go untaxed.
Yep.
We should have done an Iceland in 2008.
14 stupid, wasted years of financial repression with huge consequences for the young.
As someone who graduated in July 2008, into the great financial crisis, I feel really sorry for my contemporaries - those in their late 20’s and 30’s who have had to swim against an incredible tide, for the last decade and a half and have had to load themselves up with massive mortgages, just to get some kind of stability and raise a family.
They’re now left holding the can.
Political choices have made life very unfair for my generation.
It all could have been so different.
Personally I think the entire generation under 50 have been sacrificed.
You either can’t afford to buy a house, or you’ve bought with heavy leverage and even then are unlikely to have been able to afford a standard of accommodation accessible to the generation before you.
Even QCs now live in Archway, not Hampstead. And so on, all the way down the ladder.
The only winners are those who’ve inherited or been gifted by their parents.
Also if you are the beneficiary of house price inflation. Some people who bought houses around 2010 will have seen the prices triple. So if you bought at £200k terraced house in parts of the south east it is now worth £600k, etc. Wealth is either going to come through via inheritance/gifts or house price inflation, or a combination of both. There are lots of people under 50 who are 'winners'.
But not enough attention is paid to the fact that life is close to impossible for a large number of people. If you are in debt and only get offered precarious 30 hour a week 'part time' work, you are just never going to get on the ladder to anywhere and will be dependent on the state for the whole of your life. There just seem to be millions of people in this position. I would say that many of the families in my son's school class are in this position. Who exactly in the government is looking out for these people and trying to solve this problem? I don't think anyone is.
Has there been house price inflation, or is it like gold - the value of the asset has remained roughly the same, but the money is now worth less?
I have been able to access a portal today which gives me sight of the current situation in respect of the pension fund of which I am a trustee. At our last official valuation, after some pretty cautious assumptions, we had 105% of the funding required. By the time of the Kamikwase budget that had gone up to 110%. Today it is at 140%. This is because although the value of our investments have fallen sharply the value of our liabilities, based upon gilt rates, have fallen much more quickly still.
Basically, the death of our DB pension system came from artificially low interest rates over very long periods of time which multiplied the capital required to pay those pensions when they became due. Increased government gilt yields will have massively (because they are so highly geared) increased pension solvency.
We have lived with a deeply distorted economy since 2008. We have encouraged debt by making it cheap, we have inflated asset prices benefiting the better off and companies which frankly should have gone to the wall have continued a zombie existence using up assets that could have been put to better use. We absolutely need to get interest rates back to something like normal, that is roughly 2% above inflation. Doing this is going to be very painful for those who borrowed large sums for mortgages on the basis that borrowing was cheap. But not doing this has increased inequality, pulled up the rungs of the housing market for our youth and completely distorted our tax system, increasing the burden on earnings but allowing massive gains to effectively go untaxed.
Yep.
We should have done an Iceland in 2008.
14 stupid, wasted years of financial repression with huge consequences for the young.
As someone who graduated in July 2008, into the great financial crisis, I feel really sorry for my contemporaries - those in their late 20’s and 30’s who have had to swim against an incredible tide, for the last decade and a half and have had to load themselves up with massive mortgages, just to get some kind of stability and raise a family.
They’re now left holding the can.
Political choices have made life very unfair for my generation.
It all could have been so different.
Personally I think the entire generation under 50 have been sacrificed.
You either can’t afford to buy a house, or you’ve bought with heavy leverage and even then are unlikely to have been able to afford a standard of accommodation accessible to the generation before you.
Even QCs now live in Archway, not Hampstead. And so on, all the way down the ladder.
The only winners are those who’ve inherited or been gifted by their parents.
Also if you are the beneficiary of house price inflation. Some people who bought houses around 2010 will have seen the prices triple. So if you bought at £200k terraced house in parts of the south east it is now worth £600k, etc. Wealth is either going to come through via inheritance/gifts or house price inflation, or a combination of both. There are lots of people under 50 who are 'winners'.
But not enough attention is paid to the fact that life is close to impossible for a large number of people. If you are in debt and only get offered precarious 30 hour a week 'part time' work, you are just never going to get on the ladder to anywhere and will be dependent on the state for the whole of your life. There just seem to be millions of people in this position. I would say that many of the families in my son's school class are in this position. Who exactly in the government is looking out for these people and trying to solve this problem? I don't think anyone is.
I agree strongly about those at the very bottom (or near bottom), but I don’t think even those who got on the property market in 2010 are really winners.
They tended to buy already over-valued properties, and as I said, had to over-leverage themselves to do so. House price inflation of course has flattered them..until they need to move house…
Hence my main argument; the entire under 50s have been blighted, even if the bad fortune is unevenly distributed.
Very strange interview on Ch.4 with the deputy rep of Russia to the UN. He said the damage to civilian targets in Ukraine was probably from stray Ukrainian missiles. Further that Russia was not a pariah state because UN members were being intimidated by the West to vote against them. I know diplomats are people employed to lie for their country but this is taking it to extremes.
I have been able to access a portal today which gives me sight of the current situation in respect of the pension fund of which I am a trustee. At our last official valuation, after some pretty cautious assumptions, we had 105% of the funding required. By the time of the Kamikwase budget that had gone up to 110%. Today it is at 140%. This is because although the value of our investments have fallen sharply the value of our liabilities, based upon gilt rates, have fallen much more quickly still.
Basically, the death of our DB pension system came from artificially low interest rates over very long periods of time which multiplied the capital required to pay those pensions when they became due. Increased government gilt yields will have massively (because they are so highly geared) increased pension solvency.
We have lived with a deeply distorted economy since 2008. We have encouraged debt by making it cheap, we have inflated asset prices benefiting the better off and companies which frankly should have gone to the wall have continued a zombie existence using up assets that could have been put to better use. We absolutely need to get interest rates back to something like normal, that is roughly 2% above inflation. Doing this is going to be very painful for those who borrowed large sums for mortgages on the basis that borrowing was cheap. But not doing this has increased inequality, pulled up the rungs of the housing market for our youth and completely distorted our tax system, increasing the burden on earnings but allowing massive gains to effectively go untaxed.
Yep.
We should have done an Iceland in 2008.
14 stupid, wasted years of financial repression with huge consequences for the young.
As someone who graduated in July 2008, into the great financial crisis, I feel really sorry for my contemporaries - those in their late 20’s and 30’s who have had to swim against an incredible tide, for the last decade and a half and have had to load themselves up with massive mortgages, just to get some kind of stability and raise a family.
They’re now left holding the can.
Political choices have made life very unfair for my generation.
It all could have been so different.
Personally I think the entire generation under 50 have been sacrificed.
You either can’t afford to buy a house, or you’ve bought with heavy leverage and even then are unlikely to have been able to afford a standard of accommodation accessible to the generation before you.
Even QCs now live in Archway, not Hampstead. And so on, all the way down the ladder.
The only winners are those who’ve inherited or been gifted by their parents.
The winners are the international global elite. They're the ones buying the houses in Hampstead.
NBC News: U.K. authorities have arrested one of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaksa's alleged money-men, Graham Bonham-Carter, after the DOJ's Task Force KleptoCapture charged him with sanctions violations and wire fraud crimes.
The U.S. says they will seek to extradite him.
Disgraceful. None of their damned business if people in Britain choose to violate their sanctions.
The allegations, at least in part, stem from activity that it is alleged to have taken place in New York City. Are you saying we should be a safe haven for criminal suspects? Huge if true
That would depend on the nature of the 'crime'.
The link is hilarious:
'Even after OFAC designated Deripaska, Bonham-Carter continued to work for Deripaska and refer to Deripaska as his “boss.”'
Shock horror, someone based in London who works for someone doesn’t turn around and resign because the USA has decided to sanction them. Who the fuck do these people think they are?
It’s not that he was working for Deripraska but the fact that he allegedly has committed crimes against US laws in the US.
I have always had to be careful through my career that anyone I have worked for/with is not on any sanctions list or that anything I do is absolutely legally fine because even the most innocuous situation in most peoples’ minds such as sending an email via a system that uses US servers or where part of a transaction is in US Dollars falls under US criminal net and so someone like Bonham-Carter has been reckless, stupid or criminal of the alleged charges are proven.
On topic. It’s not a surprise that three members of the BOE are seeking to blame the govt. The Bank was not only asleep at the wheel at its prudential responsibilities but was incontinent with its actions since 2020 and far far too slow to pivot to tightening. That they didn’t match the Fed (and ECB) the week of the fiscal statement is incredulous, until you look at the voting record and past statements and mediocre cvs of some of the individuals.
This is not to absolve the government from blame. They should of course have announced the tax cuts at the same time as fiscal cuts and supply side reform in a proper budget with appropriate oversight, as you say. Not in a period when we were already seeing the QE and rock bottom yields experiment unwinding on both sides of the Atlantic.
The comi-tragedy is that in broad strokes Truss is right. High tax has no doubt impeded growth and low interest rates have been among the most ruinous policies for wealth equality of the last century (special mention to 1990s Russia privatisation process). The Labour Party should have been screaming blue murder for a decade that it must end but perhaps it found it hard because a) it started on their watch, b) they didn’t want to make the hard choices either.
We seem now to be stuck in a loop where spending can’t be cut, tax rises aren’t going to increase the take much, and the bank doesn’t dare raising rates or unwinding QE (in part because of the liquidity crisis it has overseen with DB pensions).
The reckoning from 2008 is almost upon the world and a lot of people are going to be substantially poorer as a result. The only quibble now is how that pain is shared and to make sure boneheaded politicians and officials don’t make it worse than it needs to be.
But you present no analysis here of how Truss’s broad strokes will deliver growth. What’s the logic model? How do you go from rich people have a bit more money —> growth? We’ve had periods of lower tax and growth wasn’t consistently any higher.
I think much growth ultimately comes from innovation, which comes from people. The more people you can empower to get their ideas out there, the better. Rich people are not fundamentally better people: they’re not the only ones who can have good ideas. So how do you empower the large middle of the population?
If someone earning £150,000 has a bright idea for growth, they’re already in a position to act on their idea. A bit of a tax cut isn’t going to make a difference. But if someone on £25,000 has a bright idea for growth, they’re too busy struggling with the cost of living crisis, paying their rent, paying their energy bills, to be able to do anything with that idea.
What empowers entrepreneurs is a strong safety net (not a failing NHS and insufficient benefits), good education (not rising student debt), a strong civil society (law courts without massive backlogs, a stable financial sector).
I have been able to access a portal today which gives me sight of the current situation in respect of the pension fund of which I am a trustee. At our last official valuation, after some pretty cautious assumptions, we had 105% of the funding required. By the time of the Kamikwase budget that had gone up to 110%. Today it is at 140%. This is because although the value of our investments have fallen sharply the value of our liabilities, based upon gilt rates, have fallen much more quickly still.
Basically, the death of our DB pension system came from artificially low interest rates over very long periods of time which multiplied the capital required to pay those pensions when they became due. Increased government gilt yields will have massively (because they are so highly geared) increased pension solvency.
We have lived with a deeply distorted economy since 2008. We have encouraged debt by making it cheap, we have inflated asset prices benefiting the better off and companies which frankly should have gone to the wall have continued a zombie existence using up assets that could have been put to better use. We absolutely need to get interest rates back to something like normal, that is roughly 2% above inflation. Doing this is going to be very painful for those who borrowed large sums for mortgages on the basis that borrowing was cheap. But not doing this has increased inequality, pulled up the rungs of the housing market for our youth and completely distorted our tax system, increasing the burden on earnings but allowing massive gains to effectively go untaxed.
Yep.
We should have done an Iceland in 2008.
14 stupid, wasted years of financial repression with huge consequences for the young.
As someone who graduated in July 2008, into the great financial crisis, I feel really sorry for my contemporaries - those in their late 20’s and 30’s who have had to swim against an incredible tide, for the last decade and a half and have had to load themselves up with massive mortgages, just to get some kind of stability and raise a family.
They’re now left holding the can.
Political choices have made life very unfair for my generation.
It all could have been so different.
Personally I think the entire generation under 50 have been sacrificed.
You either can’t afford to buy a house, or you’ve bought with heavy leverage and even then are unlikely to have been able to afford a standard of accommodation accessible to the generation before you.
Even QCs now live in Archway, not Hampstead. And so on, all the way down the ladder.
The only winners are those who’ve inherited or been gifted by their parents.
The winners are the international global elite. They're the ones buying the houses in Hampstead.
There are always winners and losers in life, international global elite sounds a bit like rootless cosmopolitans.
NBC News: U.K. authorities have arrested one of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaksa's alleged money-men, Graham Bonham-Carter, after the DOJ's Task Force KleptoCapture charged him with sanctions violations and wire fraud crimes.
The U.S. says they will seek to extradite him.
Disgraceful. None of their damned business if people in Britain choose to violate their sanctions.
The allegations, at least in part, stem from activity that it is alleged to have taken place in New York City. Are you saying we should be a safe haven for criminal suspects? Huge if true
That would depend on the nature of the 'crime'.
The link is hilarious:
'Even after OFAC designated Deripaska, Bonham-Carter continued to work for Deripaska and refer to Deripaska as his “boss.”'
Shock horror, someone based in London who works for someone doesn’t turn around and resign because the USA has decided to sanction them. Who the fuck do these people think they are?
Someone broke the law in the US - there also being a similar law in place in the UK - and you’re objecting to their extradition.
I note you also put your judgment above that of the Bank of England and the financial markets. One might ask the same mildly rude question that you pose of you yourself.
I have been able to access a portal today which gives me sight of the current situation in respect of the pension fund of which I am a trustee. At our last official valuation, after some pretty cautious assumptions, we had 105% of the funding required. By the time of the Kamikwase budget that had gone up to 110%. Today it is at 140%. This is because although the value of our investments have fallen sharply the value of our liabilities, based upon gilt rates, have fallen much more quickly still.
Basically, the death of our DB pension system came from artificially low interest rates over very long periods of time which multiplied the capital required to pay those pensions when they became due. Increased government gilt yields will have massively (because they are so highly geared) increased pension solvency.
We have lived with a deeply distorted economy since 2008. We have encouraged debt by making it cheap, we have inflated asset prices benefiting the better off and companies which frankly should have gone to the wall have continued a zombie existence using up assets that could have been put to better use. We absolutely need to get interest rates back to something like normal, that is roughly 2% above inflation. Doing this is going to be very painful for those who borrowed large sums for mortgages on the basis that borrowing was cheap. But not doing this has increased inequality, pulled up the rungs of the housing market for our youth and completely distorted our tax system, increasing the burden on earnings but allowing massive gains to effectively go untaxed.
Yep.
We should have done an Iceland in 2008.
14 stupid, wasted years of financial repression with huge consequences for the young.
As someone who graduated in July 2008, into the great financial crisis, I feel really sorry for my contemporaries - those in their late 20’s and 30’s who have had to swim against an incredible tide, for the last decade and a half and have had to load themselves up with massive mortgages, just to get some kind of stability and raise a family.
They’re now left holding the can.
Political choices have made life very unfair for my generation.
It all could have been so different.
Personally I think the entire generation under 50 have been sacrificed.
You either can’t afford to buy a house, or you’ve bought with heavy leverage and even then are unlikely to have been able to afford a standard of accommodation accessible to the generation before you.
Even QCs now live in Archway, not Hampstead. And so on, all the way down the ladder.
The only winners are those who’ve inherited or been gifted by their parents.
The winners are the international global elite. They're the ones buying the houses in Hampstead.
NBC News: U.K. authorities have arrested one of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaksa's alleged money-men, Graham Bonham-Carter, after the DOJ's Task Force KleptoCapture charged him with sanctions violations and wire fraud crimes.
The U.S. says they will seek to extradite him.
Disgraceful. None of their damned business if people in Britain choose to violate their sanctions.
The allegations, at least in part, stem from activity that it is alleged to have taken place in New York City. Are you saying we should be a safe haven for criminal suspects? Huge if true
That would depend on the nature of the 'crime'.
The link is hilarious:
'Even after OFAC designated Deripaska, Bonham-Carter continued to work for Deripaska and refer to Deripaska as his “boss.”'
Shock horror, someone based in London who works for someone doesn’t turn around and resign because the USA has decided to sanction them. Who the fuck do these people think they are?
Your retort is also hilarious. Or rather ludicrous.
The BBC report from March suggests that (the British) NCA has investigated Bonham-Carter. Six months from March takes us to now-ish and the US action. Hmm. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-60623026
Iceland's banking debts were a giant multiple of its economy, and foreigners bore the brunt of bank failures. Letting all the UK banks fail would have devastated depositors and left UK banking as a political state-owned sector, under even more pressure to service zombie firms, pensioners and other Tory vote blocs.
This is a crucial point: the Icelandics had borrowed from foreigners - in particular lots of Brits who thought Icesave's 9-11% was a great opportunity.
Iceland protected domestic depositors, and screwed foreign ones. And they could do that.
Not something that I am involved in, though there may be some collateral damage to markets that I am in, but surely the reason that pension companies invest in gilts is to ensure safe, albeit low returns.
Surely creating gilt derivatives, leveraged by borrowing defeats the whole intent? Those Pension Trustees have questions to answer.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63211743 …The Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association, which represents schemes managing about £1.3tn of retirement money, said many funds wanted the bond-buying programme to last until the chancellor delivered his economic plan on 31 October….
NBC News: U.K. authorities have arrested one of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaksa's alleged money-men, Graham Bonham-Carter, after the DOJ's Task Force KleptoCapture charged him with sanctions violations and wire fraud crimes.
The U.S. says they will seek to extradite him.
Disgraceful. None of their damned business if people in Britain choose to violate their sanctions.
The allegations, at least in part, stem from activity that it is alleged to have taken place in New York City. Are you saying we should be a safe haven for criminal suspects? Huge if true
That would depend on the nature of the 'crime'.
The link is hilarious:
'Even after OFAC designated Deripaska, Bonham-Carter continued to work for Deripaska and refer to Deripaska as his “boss.”'
Shock horror, someone based in London who works for someone doesn’t turn around and resign because the USA has decided to sanction them. Who the fuck do these people think they are?
It’s not that he was working for Deripraska but the fact that he allegedly has committed crimes against US laws in the US.
I have always had to be careful through my career that anyone I have worked for/with is not on any sanctions list or that anything I do is absolutely legally fine because even the most innocuous situation in most peoples’ minds such as sending an email via a system that uses US servers or where part of a transaction is in US Dollars falls under US criminal net and so someone like Bonham-Carter has been reckless, stupid or criminal of the alleged charges are proven.
Indeed. Apparent point of establishing that Deripaska was Bonham-Carter's boss, is to also establish that, in aiding & abetting D's violations of US law with respect to property investments & transactions within the US, B-C was NOT an unwitting dupe, but instead an active participant & co-conspirator.
On topic. It’s not a surprise that three members of the BOE are seeking to blame the govt. The Bank was not only asleep at the wheel at its prudential responsibilities but was incontinent with its actions since 2020 and far far too slow to pivot to tightening. That they didn’t match the Fed (and ECB) the week of the fiscal statement is incredulous, until you look at the voting record and past statements and mediocre cvs of some of the individuals.
This is not to absolve the government from blame. They should of course have announced the tax cuts at the same time as fiscal cuts and supply side reform in a proper budget with appropriate oversight, as you say. Not in a period when we were already seeing the QE and rock bottom yields experiment unwinding on both sides of the Atlantic.
The comi-tragedy is that in broad strokes Truss is right. High tax has no doubt impeded growth and low interest rates have been among the most ruinous policies for wealth equality of the last century (special mention to 1990s Russia privatisation process). The Labour Party should have been screaming blue murder for a decade that it must end but perhaps it found it hard because a) it started on their watch, b) they didn’t want to make the hard choices either.
We seem now to be stuck in a loop where spending can’t be cut, tax rises aren’t going to increase the take much, and the bank doesn’t dare raising rates or unwinding QE (in part because of the liquidity crisis it has overseen with DB pensions).
The reckoning from 2008 is almost upon the world and a lot of people are going to be substantially poorer as a result. The only quibble now is how that pain is shared and to make sure boneheaded politicians and officials don’t make it worse than it needs to be.
But you present no analysis here of how Truss’s broad strokes will deliver growth. What’s the logic model? How do you go from rich people have a bit more money —> growth? We’ve had periods of lower tax and growth wasn’t consistently any higher.
I think much growth ultimately comes from innovation, which comes from people. The more people you can empower to get their ideas out there, the better. Rich people are not fundamentally better people: they’re not the only ones who can have good ideas. So how do you empower the large middle of the population?
If someone earning £150,000 has a bright idea for growth, they’re already in a position to act on their idea. A bit of a tax cut isn’t going to make a difference. But if someone on £25,000 has a bright idea for growth, they’re too busy struggling with the cost of living crisis, paying their rent, paying their energy bills, to be able to do anything with that idea.
What empowers entrepreneurs is a strong safety net (not a failing NHS and insufficient benefits), good education (not rising student debt), a strong civil society (law courts without massive backlogs, a stable financial sector).
Those things help, but what really empowers entrepreneurs is access to capital & people.
That individual with a bright idea on £25k can’t do anything if they don’t have the capital to get from idea to implementation.
Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, says that the emergency intervention in the bond markets WILL come to an end on Friday
He tells pension funds, which are heavily invested in UK debt: 'You've only got three days left now. You've got to get this done'
It is creating huge downward pressure on the market becuase liquid portfolios are being realised to meet current margin calls when so many assets are tied up with these LDI derivatives. I can see why Bailey doesn't want the liquidity of pension funds to be his problem but this seems to me to be creating an artificial market. The FTSE and 250 will sell off big time tomorrow.
I have been able to access a portal today which gives me sight of the current situation in respect of the pension fund of which I am a trustee. At our last official valuation, after some pretty cautious assumptions, we had 105% of the funding required. By the time of the Kamikwase budget that had gone up to 110%. Today it is at 140%. This is because although the value of our investments have fallen sharply the value of our liabilities, based upon gilt rates, have fallen much more quickly still.
Basically, the death of our DB pension system came from artificially low interest rates over very long periods of time which multiplied the capital required to pay those pensions when they became due. Increased government gilt yields will have massively (because they are so highly geared) increased pension solvency.
We have lived with a deeply distorted economy since 2008. We have encouraged debt by making it cheap, we have inflated asset prices benefiting the better off and companies which frankly should have gone to the wall have continued a zombie existence using up assets that could have been put to better use. We absolutely need to get interest rates back to something like normal, that is roughly 2% above inflation. Doing this is going to be very painful for those who borrowed large sums for mortgages on the basis that borrowing was cheap. But not doing this has increased inequality, pulled up the rungs of the housing market for our youth and completely distorted our tax system, increasing the burden on earnings but allowing massive gains to effectively go untaxed.
Yep.
We should have done an Iceland in 2008.
14 stupid, wasted years of financial repression with huge consequences for the young.
As someone who graduated in July 2008, into the great financial crisis, I feel really sorry for my contemporaries - those in their late 20’s and 30’s who have had to swim against an incredible tide, for the last decade and a half and have had to load themselves up with massive mortgages, just to get some kind of stability and raise a family.
They’re now left holding the can.
Political choices have made life very unfair for my generation.
It all could have been so different.
Personally I think the entire generation under 50 have been sacrificed.
You either can’t afford to buy a house, or you’ve bought with heavy leverage and even then are unlikely to have been able to afford a standard of accommodation accessible to the generation before you.
Even QCs now live in Archway, not Hampstead. And so on, all the way down the ladder.
The only winners are those who’ve inherited or been gifted by their parents.
Also if you are the beneficiary of house price inflation. Some people who bought houses around 2010 will have seen the prices triple. So if you bought at £200k terraced house in parts of the south east it is now worth £600k, etc. Wealth is either going to come through via inheritance/gifts or house price inflation, or a combination of both. There are lots of people under 50 who are 'winners'.
But not enough attention is paid to the fact that life is close to impossible for a large number of people. If you are in debt and only get offered precarious 30 hour a week 'part time' work, you are just never going to get on the ladder to anywhere and will be dependent on the state for the whole of your life. There just seem to be millions of people in this position. I would say that many of the families in my son's school class are in this position. Who exactly in the government is looking out for these people and trying to solve this problem? I don't think anyone is.
I agree strongly about those at the very bottom (or near bottom), but I don’t think even those who got on the property market in 2010 are really winners.
They tended to buy already over-valued properties, and as I said, had to over-leverage themselves to do so. House price inflation of course has flattered them..until they need to move house…
Hence my main argument; the entire under 50s have been blighted, even if the bad fortune is unevenly distributed.
Are you suggesting that people shouldn't have gone in to the property market in 2010 and rented for the last 13 years instead? We bought a flat because we didn't want the uncertainty of renting, and with no expectation of prices rising. But the valuation has doubled. With our current earnings and low fixed rates we could pay most of the mortgage off in the next 5 years. Even if the forthcoming crash halves the value of the flat, we could sell it and afford almost any house we want instead, assuming they also halve in value, whereas we can't afford them now due to the amount of borrowing we'd need to do. How are we not winning? It just seems to me like we are winning in every scenario, and I know many people well under 50 in a similar position. This is not to boast but to point out the problem is that the situation is deeply uneven.
We need a total ban on Etonians until we can figure out what’s going on.
What’s odd is I’ve come across a few old etonians over the years and in general found them to be intelligent, modest and in some cases intellectually brilliant (wider than academically, across the board). Perhaps I’ve been lucky and the country has been unlucky.
My best mate in my 20s was an Etonian. He was so uncomfortable with his privilege that he could barely function a lot of the time. Very sweet and deeply uneasy in his own skin. Great guy. Soulmates.
Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, says that the emergency intervention in the bond markets WILL come to an end on Friday
He tells pension funds, which are heavily invested in UK debt: 'You've only got three days left now. You've got to get this done'
Whoever is doing the BOE's PR needs a massive pay-rise. They caused this shit with their ridiculously poorly-timed bond sell-off, and now they are claiming their modest resumption of the bond-buying they've been doing for the last 10 years is them helping us all with an 'emergency intervention'. It's really too good. Next week, BOE to steal your lunch money and give you back 10p as an 'emergency grant'.
I don’t get the conservatives anymore. They’re bragging about giving people a tax cut of 300 quid odd a year whilst others now have to deal with 600-700 quid extra a month on their mortgages soon. Friggin wonderful
On topic. It’s not a surprise that three members of the BOE are seeking to blame the govt. The Bank was not only asleep at the wheel at its prudential responsibilities but was incontinent with its actions since 2020 and far far too slow to pivot to tightening. That they didn’t match the Fed (and ECB) the week of the fiscal statement is incredulous, until you look at the voting record and past statements and mediocre cvs of some of the individuals.
This is not to absolve the government from blame. They should of course have announced the tax cuts at the same time as fiscal cuts and supply side reform in a proper budget with appropriate oversight, as you say. Not in a period when we were already seeing the QE and rock bottom yields experiment unwinding on both sides of the Atlantic.
The comi-tragedy is that in broad strokes Truss is right. High tax has no doubt impeded growth and low interest rates have been among the most ruinous policies for wealth equality of the last century (special mention to 1990s Russia privatisation process). The Labour Party should have been screaming blue murder for a decade that it must end but perhaps it found it hard because a) it started on their watch, b) they didn’t want to make the hard choices either.
We seem now to be stuck in a loop where spending can’t be cut, tax rises aren’t going to increase the take much, and the bank doesn’t dare raising rates or unwinding QE (in part because of the liquidity crisis it has overseen with DB pensions).
The reckoning from 2008 is almost upon the world and a lot of people are going to be substantially poorer as a result. The only quibble now is how that pain is shared and to make sure boneheaded politicians and officials don’t make it worse than it needs to be.
But you present no analysis here of how Truss’s broad strokes will deliver growth. What’s the logic model? How do you go from rich people have a bit more money —> growth? We’ve had periods of lower tax and growth wasn’t consistently any higher.
I think much growth ultimately comes from innovation, which comes from people. The more people you can empower to get their ideas out there, the better. Rich people are not fundamentally better people: they’re not the only ones who can have good ideas. So how do you empower the large middle of the population?
If someone earning £150,000 has a bright idea for growth, they’re already in a position to act on their idea. A bit of a tax cut isn’t going to make a difference. But if someone on £25,000 has a bright idea for growth, they’re too busy struggling with the cost of living crisis, paying their rent, paying their energy bills, to be able to do anything with that idea.
What empowers entrepreneurs is a strong safety net (not a failing NHS and insufficient benefits), good education (not rising student debt), a strong civil society (law courts without massive backlogs, a stable financial sector).
Those things help, but what really empowers entrepreneurs is access to capital & people.
That individual with a bright idea on £25k can’t do anything if they don’t have the capital to get from idea to implementation.
OK, so was there a particular shortage of capital pre-Truss? I don’t recall that being the case. Has Truss’s first draft policy of cut lots of taxes helped in this regard? No, borrowing costs are way up.
We need a total ban on Etonians until we can figure out what’s going on.
What’s odd is I’ve come across a few old etonians over the years and in general found them to be intelligent, modest and in some cases intellectually brilliant (wider than academically, across the board). Perhaps I’ve been lucky and the country has been unlucky.
My best mate in my 20s was an Etonian. He was so uncomfortable with his privilege that he could barely function a lot of the time. Very sweet and deeply uneasy in his own skin. Great guy. Soulmates.
Rory the no longer a Tory is also an Etonian. Just saying ...
Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, says that the emergency intervention in the bond markets WILL come to an end on Friday
He tells pension funds, which are heavily invested in UK debt: 'You've only got three days left now. You've got to get this done'
It is creating huge downward pressure on the market becuase liquid portfolios are being realised to meet current margin calls when so many assets are tied up with these LDI derivatives. I can see why Bailey doesn't want the liquidity of pension funds to be his problem but this seems to me to be creating an artificial market. The FTSE and 250 will sell off big time tomorrow.
I am struggling to understand how the LDI derivatives work and how they’ve made things worse for pension funds. Isn’t the point of them to reduce risk?
Also, I keep thinking back to 2008 when there were lots of complex derivatives to minimise risk, which somehow all failed catastrophically.
In another post, I was singing the praises of innovation. Maybe not innovation in the financial sector that never seems to work out how it’s meant to…?
I have been able to access a portal today which gives me sight of the current situation in respect of the pension fund of which I am a trustee. At our last official valuation, after some pretty cautious assumptions, we had 105% of the funding required. By the time of the Kamikwase budget that had gone up to 110%. Today it is at 140%. This is because although the value of our investments have fallen sharply the value of our liabilities, based upon gilt rates, have fallen much more quickly still.
Basically, the death of our DB pension system came from artificially low interest rates over very long periods of time which multiplied the capital required to pay those pensions when they became due. Increased government gilt yields will have massively (because they are so highly geared) increased pension solvency.
We have lived with a deeply distorted economy since 2008. We have encouraged debt by making it cheap, we have inflated asset prices benefiting the better off and companies which frankly should have gone to the wall have continued a zombie existence using up assets that could have been put to better use. We absolutely need to get interest rates back to something like normal, that is roughly 2% above inflation. Doing this is going to be very painful for those who borrowed large sums for mortgages on the basis that borrowing was cheap. But not doing this has increased inequality, pulled up the rungs of the housing market for our youth and completely distorted our tax system, increasing the burden on earnings but allowing massive gains to effectively go untaxed.
Yep.
We should have done an Iceland in 2008.
14 stupid, wasted years of financial repression with huge consequences for the young.
As someone who graduated in July 2008, into the great financial crisis, I feel really sorry for my contemporaries - those in their late 20’s and 30’s who have had to swim against an incredible tide, for the last decade and a half and have had to load themselves up with massive mortgages, just to get some kind of stability and raise a family.
They’re now left holding the can.
Political choices have made life very unfair for my generation.
It all could have been so different.
Personally I think the entire generation under 50 have been sacrificed.
You either can’t afford to buy a house, or you’ve bought with heavy leverage and even then are unlikely to have been able to afford a standard of accommodation accessible to the generation before you.
Even QCs now live in Archway, not Hampstead. And so on, all the way down the ladder.
The only winners are those who’ve inherited or been gifted by their parents.
Also if you are the beneficiary of house price inflation. Some people who bought houses around 2010 will have seen the prices triple. So if you bought at £200k terraced house in parts of the south east it is now worth £600k, etc. Wealth is either going to come through via inheritance/gifts or house price inflation, or a combination of both. There are lots of people under 50 who are 'winners'.
But not enough attention is paid to the fact that life is close to impossible for a large number of people. If you are in debt and only get offered precarious 30 hour a week 'part time' work, you are just never going to get on the ladder to anywhere and will be dependent on the state for the whole of your life. There just seem to be millions of people in this position. I would say that many of the families in my son's school class are in this position. Who exactly in the government is looking out for these people and trying to solve this problem? I don't think anyone is.
I agree strongly about those at the very bottom (or near bottom), but I don’t think even those who got on the property market in 2010 are really winners.
They tended to buy already over-valued properties, and as I said, had to over-leverage themselves to do so. House price inflation of course has flattered them..until they need to move house…
Hence my main argument; the entire under 50s have been blighted, even if the bad fortune is unevenly distributed.
Are you suggesting that people shouldn't have gone in to the property market in 2010 and rented for the last 13 years instead? We bought a flat because we didn't want the uncertainty of renting, and with no expectation of prices rising. But the valuation has doubled. With our current earnings and low fixed rates we could pay most of the mortgage off in the next 5 years. Even if the forthcoming crash halves the value of the flat, we could sell it and afford almost any house we want instead, assuming they also halve in value, whereas we can't afford them now due to the amount of borrowing we'd need to do. How are we not winning? It just seems to me like we are winning in every scenario, and I know many people well under 50 in a similar position. This is not to boast but to point out the problem is that the situation is deeply uneven.
Certainly not.
You see some arguing on here that mortgage holders should not have borrowed and I hold that idea in contempt.
My belief though is that, as well as you’ve done, you are probably not living in the same “style” the previous generation did.
For one thing, you’ve been in your place 12 years already and a previous generation would have moved “up” already. People can’t afford to move as often as those over 50 did.
Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, says that the emergency intervention in the bond markets WILL come to an end on Friday
He tells pension funds, which are heavily invested in UK debt: 'You've only got three days left now. You've got to get this done'
Whoever is doing the BOE's PR needs a massive pay-rise. They caused this shit with their ridiculously poorly-timed bond sell-off, and now they are claiming their modest resumption of the bond-buying they've been doing for the last 10 years is them helping us all with an 'emergency intervention'. It's really too good. Next week, BOE to steal your lunch money and give you back 10p as an 'emergency grant'.
Obviously I don’t agree with you on anything.
But I do agree that, from afar at least, the BoE’s communications have been…sub-optimal.
Iceland's banking debts were a giant multiple of its economy, and foreigners bore the brunt of bank failures. Letting all the UK banks fail would have devastated depositors and left UK banking as a political state-owned sector, under even more pressure to service zombie firms, pensioners and other Tory vote blocs.
If the banking system had seized up, it would have been worse than a few shareholders taking a haircut. How would you withdraw cash? How would your salary be paid? How would you pay in shops with a credit or debit card? It doesn't bear thinking about. Luckily, Gordon Brown stepped up and saved the world.
The true hero was Alistair Darling for bailing out the greedy fuckwits with much more money than was sensible on deposit with Iceland Bank, Gawd bless him.
Yes, I recall Kent County Council was heavily invested in Icelandic banks. Note - the population of Kent is over four times that of Iceland.
I have been able to access a portal today which gives me sight of the current situation in respect of the pension fund of which I am a trustee. At our last official valuation, after some pretty cautious assumptions, we had 105% of the funding required. By the time of the Kamikwase budget that had gone up to 110%. Today it is at 140%. This is because although the value of our investments have fallen sharply the value of our liabilities, based upon gilt rates, have fallen much more quickly still.
Basically, the death of our DB pension system came from artificially low interest rates over very long periods of time which multiplied the capital required to pay those pensions when they became due. Increased government gilt yields will have massively (because they are so highly geared) increased pension solvency.
We have lived with a deeply distorted economy since 2008. We have encouraged debt by making it cheap, we have inflated asset prices benefiting the better off and companies which frankly should have gone to the wall have continued a zombie existence using up assets that could have been put to better use. We absolutely need to get interest rates back to something like normal, that is roughly 2% above inflation. Doing this is going to be very painful for those who borrowed large sums for mortgages on the basis that borrowing was cheap. But not doing this has increased inequality, pulled up the rungs of the housing market for our youth and completely distorted our tax system, increasing the burden on earnings but allowing massive gains to effectively go untaxed.
Yep.
We should have done an Iceland in 2008.
14 stupid, wasted years of financial repression with huge consequences for the young.
As someone who graduated in July 2008, into the great financial crisis, I feel really sorry for my contemporaries - those in their late 20’s and 30’s who have had to swim against an incredible tide, for the last decade and a half and have had to load themselves up with massive mortgages, just to get some kind of stability and raise a family.
They’re now left holding the can.
Political choices have made life very unfair for my generation.
It all could have been so different.
Personally I think the entire generation under 50 have been sacrificed.
You either can’t afford to buy a house, or you’ve bought with heavy leverage and even then are unlikely to have been able to afford a standard of accommodation accessible to the generation before you.
Even QCs now live in Archway, not Hampstead. And so on, all the way down the ladder.
The only winners are those who’ve inherited or been gifted by their parents.
Also if you are the beneficiary of house price inflation. Some people who bought houses around 2010 will have seen the prices triple. So if you bought at £200k terraced house in parts of the south east it is now worth £600k, etc. Wealth is either going to come through via inheritance/gifts or house price inflation, or a combination of both. There are lots of people under 50 who are 'winners'.
But not enough attention is paid to the fact that life is close to impossible for a large number of people. If you are in debt and only get offered precarious 30 hour a week 'part time' work, you are just never going to get on the ladder to anywhere and will be dependent on the state for the whole of your life. There just seem to be millions of people in this position. I would say that many of the families in my son's school class are in this position. Who exactly in the government is looking out for these people and trying to solve this problem? I don't think anyone is.
I agree strongly about those at the very bottom (or near bottom), but I don’t think even those who got on the property market in 2010 are really winners.
They tended to buy already over-valued properties, and as I said, had to over-leverage themselves to do so. House price inflation of course has flattered them..until they need to move house…
Hence my main argument; the entire under 50s have been blighted, even if the bad fortune is unevenly distributed.
Are you suggesting that people shouldn't have gone in to the property market in 2010 and rented for the last 13 years instead? We bought a flat because we didn't want the uncertainty of renting, and with no expectation of prices rising. But the valuation has doubled. With our current earnings and low fixed rates we could pay most of the mortgage off in the next 5 years. Even if the forthcoming crash halves the value of the flat, we could sell it and afford almost any house we want instead, assuming they also halve in value, whereas we can't afford them now due to the amount of borrowing we'd need to do. How are we not winning? It just seems to me like we are winning in every scenario, and I know many people well under 50 in a similar position. This is not to boast but to point out the problem is that the situation is deeply uneven.
Certainly not.
You see some arguing on here that mortgage holders should not have borrowed and I hold that idea in contempt.
It's a question of whether risk is correctly priced. Do you think the state should be guaranteeing mortgages over 80% LTV?
Need some restaurant recommendations for a long romantic weekend.
You can probably get an OK meal on the DFDS ferry to Holland or on the train to Edinburgh.
20 odd years since I left that fine city, but I recall a decent Tapas place by the Castle - and you could always go for a pint at the Bridge beforehand.
I have been able to access a portal today which gives me sight of the current situation in respect of the pension fund of which I am a trustee. At our last official valuation, after some pretty cautious assumptions, we had 105% of the funding required. By the time of the Kamikwase budget that had gone up to 110%. Today it is at 140%. This is because although the value of our investments have fallen sharply the value of our liabilities, based upon gilt rates, have fallen much more quickly still.
Basically, the death of our DB pension system came from artificially low interest rates over very long periods of time which multiplied the capital required to pay those pensions when they became due. Increased government gilt yields will have massively (because they are so highly geared) increased pension solvency.
We have lived with a deeply distorted economy since 2008. We have encouraged debt by making it cheap, we have inflated asset prices benefiting the better off and companies which frankly should have gone to the wall have continued a zombie existence using up assets that could have been put to better use. We absolutely need to get interest rates back to something like normal, that is roughly 2% above inflation. Doing this is going to be very painful for those who borrowed large sums for mortgages on the basis that borrowing was cheap. But not doing this has increased inequality, pulled up the rungs of the housing market for our youth and completely distorted our tax system, increasing the burden on earnings but allowing massive gains to effectively go untaxed.
Yep.
We should have done an Iceland in 2008.
14 stupid, wasted years of financial repression with huge consequences for the young.
As someone who graduated in July 2008, into the great financial crisis, I feel really sorry for my contemporaries - those in their late 20’s and 30’s who have had to swim against an incredible tide, for the last decade and a half and have had to load themselves up with massive mortgages, just to get some kind of stability and raise a family.
They’re now left holding the can.
Political choices have made life very unfair for my generation.
It all could have been so different.
Personally I think the entire generation under 50 have been sacrificed.
You either can’t afford to buy a house, or you’ve bought with heavy leverage and even then are unlikely to have been able to afford a standard of accommodation accessible to the generation before you.
Even QCs now live in Archway, not Hampstead. And so on, all the way down the ladder.
The only winners are those who’ve inherited or been gifted by their parents.
Also if you are the beneficiary of house price inflation. Some people who bought houses around 2010 will have seen the prices triple. So if you bought at £200k terraced house in parts of the south east it is now worth £600k, etc. Wealth is either going to come through via inheritance/gifts or house price inflation, or a combination of both. There are lots of people under 50 who are 'winners'.
But not enough attention is paid to the fact that life is close to impossible for a large number of people. If you are in debt and only get offered precarious 30 hour a week 'part time' work, you are just never going to get on the ladder to anywhere and will be dependent on the state for the whole of your life. There just seem to be millions of people in this position. I would say that many of the families in my son's school class are in this position. Who exactly in the government is looking out for these people and trying to solve this problem? I don't think anyone is.
I agree strongly about those at the very bottom (or near bottom), but I don’t think even those who got on the property market in 2010 are really winners.
They tended to buy already over-valued properties, and as I said, had to over-leverage themselves to do so. House price inflation of course has flattered them..until they need to move house…
Hence my main argument; the entire under 50s have been blighted, even if the bad fortune is unevenly distributed.
Are you suggesting that people shouldn't have gone in to the property market in 2010 and rented for the last 13 years instead? We bought a flat because we didn't want the uncertainty of renting, and with no expectation of prices rising. But the valuation has doubled. With our current earnings and low fixed rates we could pay most of the mortgage off in the next 5 years. Even if the forthcoming crash halves the value of the flat, we could sell it and afford almost any house we want instead, assuming they also halve in value, whereas we can't afford them now due to the amount of borrowing we'd need to do. How are we not winning? It just seems to me like we are winning in every scenario, and I know many people well under 50 in a similar position. This is not to boast but to point out the problem is that the situation is deeply uneven.
Certainly not.
You see some arguing on here that mortgage holders should not have borrowed and I hold that idea in contempt.
It's a question of whether risk is correctly priced. Do you think the state should be guaranteeing mortgages over 80% LTV?
No. The government have effectively been guaranteeing house price inflation though, which amounts to something similar.
Oregon seem interesting from a betting perspective. The Republican candidate for Governor is extremely competitive (ahead in some polls) and OR-6 which should be a slam dunk Dem seat seems to be lean GOP at the moment.
Need some restaurant recommendations for a long romantic weekend.
You can probably get an OK meal on the DFDS ferry to Holland or on the train to Edinburgh.
Assuming the North Sea does not intervene.
My mum's ferry-going career ended very abruptly after a North Sea storm on an overnight DFDS ferry from Harwich to Esbjerg in the 1980s. The washbowls throughout the ship overflowed with the sea-sick from the 90% of passengers who were affected.
At the time she was in her mid-40s, and never went on another ferry. The most ambitious it was after that was European river cruises.
I do wish you all the best, however. But I wouldn't overindulge heroically until on dry land - just in case.
And you know what? Russia might still gain Ukraine (I cannot really see it as a 'win' for them, given the amount of treasure they would have spent getting it). The paths to that 'victory' are getting fewer, although I fear the effect that Belarussia joining in might have on Ukraine. It's routine to laugh at Belarussia and Putin's Puppet who runs the country, but a second major front could really cause Ukraine hassle.
Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, says that the emergency intervention in the bond markets WILL come to an end on Friday
He tells pension funds, which are heavily invested in UK debt: 'You've only got three days left now. You've got to get this done'
Whoever is doing the BOE's PR needs a massive pay-rise. They caused this shit with their ridiculously poorly-timed bond sell-off, and now they are claiming their modest resumption of the bond-buying they've been doing for the last 10 years is them helping us all with an 'emergency intervention'. It's really too good. Next week, BOE to steal your lunch money and give you back 10p as an 'emergency grant'.
Obviously I don’t agree with you on anything.
But I do agree that, from afar at least, the BoE’s communications have been…sub-optimal.
On the contrary, their communications have been brilliant. They're delivering a sadistically unecessary shit sandwich, and the media and assorted tits are going after Truss and Kwasi for it.
Not something that I am involved in, though there may be some collateral damage to markets that I am in, but surely the reason that pension companies invest in gilts is to ensure safe, albeit low returns.
Surely creating gilt derivatives, leveraged by borrowing defeats the whole intent? Those Pension Trustees have questions to answer.
Boosting return on the basics via leverage and derivatives in a low yield environment was one of the behaviours behind the 08 crash. Maybe looking at similar here. But not, let's pray, on anything like the same scale. On top of the Pandemic and Putin, that might tip us over.
Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, says that the emergency intervention in the bond markets WILL come to an end on Friday
He tells pension funds, which are heavily invested in UK debt: 'You've only got three days left now. You've got to get this done'
Whoever is doing the BOE's PR needs a massive pay-rise. They caused this shit with their ridiculously poorly-timed bond sell-off, and now they are claiming their modest resumption of the bond-buying they've been doing for the last 10 years is them helping us all with an 'emergency intervention'. It's really too good. Next week, BOE to steal your lunch money and give you back 10p as an 'emergency grant'.
Obviously I don’t agree with you on anything.
But I do agree that, from afar at least, the BoE’s communications have been…sub-optimal.
On the contrary, their communications have been brilliant. They're delivering a sadistically unecessary shit sandwich, and the media and assorted tits are going after Truss and Kwasi for it.
Truss and Kwasi are more to blame. Their “performance” is zero out of ten. Bailey more of a “solid 3”. But I agree, they are successfully playing a game of deflection.
Comments
One of my recollections from 2008 is reading the musings of Allister Heath, then the editor of City AM. Before he went completely mad, joined the Telegraph and tried to become a right-wing polemicist, he could write cogently on economics albeit from the perspective of a dry-as-dust Thatcherite.
His first thought was it wasn't a question of any business being "too big to fail" bit of nobody knowing what to do if the eventuality arose. He proposed every firm had a form of "corporate will" outlining what should happen in the event of business failure. Yes, it would be bad for the shareholders but it need not, with careful management, be too bad beyond that.
He was also strongly opposed to QE and, with the centre-left still struggling to come to terms with what was happening, was a staunch opponent of Osborne post 2010 and providing a right-wing critique of the Chancellor's policies.
My other recollection was the "crash" wasn't just the culmination of increased spending in previous years - it occurred because of problems on the other side of the balance sheet. While expenditure remained, income dried up as economic activity failed leading to a widening deficit.
Need some restaurant recommendations for a long romantic weekend.
Deripaska’s Property Manager Arrested in U.K. for Funding U.S. Properties for Deripaska’s Benefit and Attempting to Expatriate Deripaska’s Artwork from U.S. through Deception
. . . According to court documents, Graham Bonham-Carter, 62, of the United Kingdom, worked for entities controlled by Deripaska from July 2003 through the present. . . . Even after OFAC designated Deripaska, Bonham-Carter continued to work for Deripaska and refer to Deripaska as his “boss.” . . .
As alleged in the indictment, after Deripaska’s designation, Bonham-Carter engaged in over $1 million of illicit transactions to fund real estate properties in the United States for Deripaska’s benefit. Between in or about 2005 and in or about 2008, Deripaska purchased three residential properties in the United States, two in New York City and one in Washington, D.C. (the U.S. Properties). The properties were managed by a company named Gracetown Inc. After OFAC imposed sanctions on Deripaska on or about April 6, 2018, Gracetown Inc. continued to manage the properties Deripaska’s benefit. . . . On or about May 25, 2018, Bonham-Carter wrote in an email that “OVD [i.e., Deripaska] wants me to set up my own company to run the [Belgravia Square] house and to possibly include Japan, Italy, China and more.” Less than two months later, on or about July 17, 2018, Bonham-Carter incorporated GBCM Limited.
Between in or about March 2021 and in or about December 2021, while in Deripaska’s employ, Bonham-Carter transmitted payments for the upkeep of the U.S. Properties. Bonham-Carter wired payments totaling $1,043,964.30 from a bank account in Russia. . . .
As alleged, Bonham-Carter also attempted to unlawfully transfer artwork purchased by Deripaska from an auction house in New York City to London through misrepresentations concealing Deripaska’s ownership of the artwork. In May 2021, when advised by the auction house that it had reason to believe that the artwork belonged to Deripaska, Bonham-Carter falsely stated that the artwork and a payment of $12,146 that Bonham-Carter had made to ship the Artwork do not belong to Deripaska. . . .
Bonham-Carter is charged in a three-count indictment with one count of conspiring to violate and evade U.S. sanctions, in violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), one count of violating IEEPA and one count wire fraud, each of which counts carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors. . . .
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/uk-businessman-graham-bonham-carter-indicted-sanctions-evasion-benefitting-russian-oligarch
We can argue whether QT is the right policy, but we can't argue that the Bank's policy is indeed QT, as it is for almost all its much more sensibly run peer countries. The BoE doesn't deserve this shower of incompetents. Neither do we.
Complete nonsense.
I recall TV shows set in LA being pretty cynical about its politics (as most are of course), and wheeling dealing between white, black and brown, in those terms.
Addendum - Read the DOJ indictment (relevant parts just posted on this thread).
I think the moral approach for the SNP would be to stop pushing for an imminent referendum and set themselves the task of getting consistent polling leads supporting independence. If polling consistently showed 60%+ supporting independence, they’d be in a stronger position to demand a vote and (obviously) have more confidence of winning it. To achieve this goal, they need to make their case, which probably means answering the tricky questions around currency, government finances, and the border.
Or maybe Scottish nationalism should follow the Quebec route: step back from independence, but go for maximum possible autonomy and sovereignty while still, just, remaining in the UK. Quebec has done this and achieved all sorts of opt-outs from national policy that once seemed unachievable, yet while still retaining the benefits of being part of Canada. I don’t think this would be a good thing for the UK (and I don’t think it’s been a good thing for Canada), but I’m not Scottish or Quebecois!
Just reflexive anti-US sentiment ?
The link is hilarious:
'Even after OFAC designated Deripaska, Bonham-Carter continued to work for Deripaska and refer to Deripaska as his “boss.”'
Shock horror, someone based in London who works for someone doesn’t turn around and resign because the USA has decided to sanction them. Who the fuck do these people think they are?
But not enough attention is paid to the fact that life is close to impossible for a large number of people. If you are in debt and only get offered precarious 30 hour a week 'part time' work, you are just never going to get on the ladder to anywhere and will be dependent on the state for the whole of your life. There just seem to be millions of people in this position. I would say that many of the families in my son's school class are in this position. Who exactly in the government is looking out for these people and trying to solve this problem? I don't think anyone is.
https://mobile.twitter.com/GresselGustav/status/1579416337809829888
1/ As 🇷🇺 missiles rain down on civilian targets all over 🇺🇦, I get questions what to do now. Some thoughts as a former air defence officer on this. But beware, information about the attacks is limited, and I would not say it is over yet. Air alarms are still ongoing
Basically, unless western armed forces take some systems out of active service (which I think we should nonetheless consider, FWIW), we don’t really have very much to send very quickly.
They tended to buy already over-valued properties, and as I said, had to over-leverage themselves to do so. House price inflation of course has flattered them..until they need to move house…
Hence my main argument; the entire under 50s have been blighted, even if the bad fortune is unevenly distributed.
I have always had to be careful through my career that anyone I have worked for/with is not on any sanctions list or that anything I do is absolutely legally fine because even the most innocuous situation in most peoples’ minds such as sending an email via a system that uses US servers or where part of a transaction is in US Dollars falls under US criminal net and so someone like Bonham-Carter has been reckless, stupid or criminal of the alleged charges are proven.
I think much growth ultimately comes from innovation, which comes from people. The more people you can empower to get their ideas out there, the better. Rich people are not fundamentally better people: they’re not the only ones who can have good ideas. So how do you empower the large middle of the population?
If someone earning £150,000 has a bright idea for growth, they’re already in a position to act on their idea. A bit of a tax cut isn’t going to make a difference. But if someone on £25,000 has a bright idea for growth, they’re too busy struggling with the cost of living crisis, paying their rent, paying their energy bills, to be able to do anything with that idea.
What empowers entrepreneurs is a strong safety net (not a failing NHS and insufficient benefits), good education (not rising student debt), a strong civil society (law courts without massive backlogs, a stable financial sector).
https://www.blood.co.uk/
I’d also suggest Hibou Blanc, cook house or House of Tides if you really want to splash out.
Stunning views as far as Scotland on a clear day. Lovely countryside, top top pub food.
BREAKING:
Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, says that the emergency intervention in the bond markets WILL come to an end on Friday
He tells pension funds, which are heavily invested in UK debt: 'You've only got three days left now. You've got to get this done'
I note you also put your judgment above that of the Bank of England and the financial markets. One might ask the same mildly rude question that you pose of you yourself.
Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, says that the emergency intervention in the bond markets WILL come to an end on Friday
He tells pension funds, which are heavily invested in UK debt: 'You've only got three days left now. You've got to get this done'
https://twitter.com/Steven_Swinford/status/1579908537974595584
https://news.sky.com/story/politics-latest-sturgeon-gives-snp-conference-speech-kwarteng-brings-forward-debt-reduction-plan-to-halloween-truss-to-listen-to-cabinet-on-benefits-rise-12593360?postid=4638540#liveblog-body
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-60623026
Iceland protected domestic depositors, and screwed foreign ones. And they could do that.
There was no such opportunity in the UK.
Surely creating gilt derivatives, leveraged by borrowing defeats the whole intent? Those Pension Trustees have questions to answer.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63211743
…The Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association, which represents schemes managing about £1.3tn of retirement money, said many funds wanted the bond-buying programme to last until the chancellor delivered his economic plan on 31 October….
That individual with a bright idea on £25k can’t do anything if they don’t have the capital to get from idea to implementation.
Just Stop Oil’s contempt for the masses should come as no surprise
Brendan O'Neill"
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/10/11/why-eco-activists-are-so-hostile-to-humanity/
Also, I keep thinking back to 2008 when there were lots of complex derivatives to minimise risk, which somehow all failed catastrophically.
In another post, I was singing the praises of innovation. Maybe not innovation in the financial sector that never seems to work out how it’s meant to…?
You see some arguing on here that mortgage holders should not have borrowed and I hold that idea in contempt.
My belief though is that, as well as you’ve done, you are probably not living in the same “style” the previous generation did.
For one thing, you’ve been in your place 12 years already and a previous generation would have moved “up” already. People can’t afford to move as often as those over 50 did.
AFAF.
$1.0999
https://mobile.twitter.com/dannyctkemp/status/1579397832481837065
Interesting few days ahead
But I do agree that, from afar at least, the BoE’s communications have been…sub-optimal.
Just look at what happened to the pound when @bankofengland Governor Andrew Bailey told investors its emergency support will definitely end on Friday.
"You've got three days left now," he said. "You've got to get this done." https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1579914091749314561/photo/1
Note - the population of Kent is over four times that of Iceland.
The government have effectively been guaranteeing house price inflation though, which amounts to something similar.
https://twitter.com/gabyhinsliff/status/1579915798566825985
https://twitter.com/SamCoatesSky/status/1579909947370115074
My mum's ferry-going career ended very abruptly after a North Sea storm on an overnight DFDS ferry from Harwich to Esbjerg in the 1980s. The washbowls throughout the ship overflowed with the sea-sick from the 90% of passengers who were affected.
At the time she was in her mid-40s, and never went on another ferry. The most ambitious it was after that was European river cruises.
I do wish you all the best, however. But I wouldn't overindulge heroically until on dry land - just in case.
You said it, we’ll all be doing it.
If Bailey et al keep going.
Is he deliberately trying to spark a crisis?
https://twitter.com/jesserodriguez/status/1579914284527947778?s=61&t=s9nlI7iSjvIIpxuUz6StEA
Perhaps being at sea has the opposite effect.
Does food taste better on the beach?
We’re looking at a complete clear out of our institutions.
Everyone will be angry at everyone.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/markets/bank-of-england-market-operations-guide/results-and-usage-data
That’s a shame.
Ms Lansbury was a bit of a legend chez Gardenwalker.
Thank you.
Life expectancy at age 73 = 12.65 years
12.65*365= 4617 days
Days since the death of the Queen = 20
Financial crises during the reign of Charles III = 231
I may have to revise my estimate. Upwards.
https://twitter.com/IndiaWilloughby/status/1579757661528412162?s=20&t=aw-YA-QTzWNgWihrE5x8sQ
Their “performance” is zero out of ten.
Bailey more of a “solid 3”. But I agree, they are successfully playing a game of deflection.