A new public funding model – politicalbetting.com
A new public funding model – politicalbetting.com
With UK government borrowing at an estimated £120 billion a year it is clear that tax-and-spend will no longer work in terms of investing in order to generate growth.
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There appears to be two issues with the amount of debt being run up. The first is badly drafted laws - applied at pace as they say. And extremely poor administration of the rules that flow from the legislation. Which is also why there are so many issues with the likes of Thames Water (piss poor oversight) and the Student Loan Company (piss poor audit of applications)
IMHO the blame lies at Westminster.
One thing which struck me over the weekend was Reeves declaring "the world has changed" - and ploughing on with the same straitjacket policies.
UK mulls big tech tax changes to avoid US tariffs
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8j0dgym8w1o
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0eg39e01w8o
The Prime Minister demonstrates his commitment to local democracy.
As we saw with the COVID splurge, if you get it wrong, living with the results will be painful for a very long time.
The other obvious point is that a large dedicated infrastructure fund would lift a lot of pressure on existing government spending - and potentially allow another series of undisciplined spending mistakes.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c07zyrjrkvro
Rudakubana wiped much of his internet search history before the attack and it is not known whether he ever viewed material linked to Mr Tate.
It makes the "it wasn't terrorism" claims even more bizarre.
Fresh doubt has been cast over the race to find a white knight buyer for Thames Water as it struggles to provide details of its labyrinthine network of pipes, sewage works and reservoirs.
Thames Water has stepped up the hunt for new investors willing to pump in billions of pounds of emergency capital after the Court of Appeal approved a £3bn emergency debt bailout from its existing creditors.
However, prospective suitors fear the search will be held up by the company’s failure to keep an accurate record of the mountain of assets that it has accumulated over the decades.
Thames Water has just weeks to hammer out a deal or one of the country’s most vital utilities faces a prolonged hand-to-mouth existence in which lenders drip-feed the company enough money every month to pay its bills.
“The board has to advance to the due diligence quickly but this makes that much harder. How do you put a value on the company if you don’t know what it owns?” a source close to the talks said.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/03/23/thames-water-rescue-deal-threatened-by-missing-assets/
It seems mainly crypto bro’s on it at the moment and they always have an agenda.
Is the BOE quietly bailing out pension funds or is it something more benign.
https://x.com/moving_charlie/status/1903933599688052822?s=61
Our employment rate is pretty good by international measures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_employment_rate
https://x.com/Tony_Scott11/status/1903780819086245985
But that's not what I'm getting at. We don't know what he'd be searching. Presumably he looked up the Al-Qaeda manual, but we're told he wasn't an Islamist terrorist.
The police should have been saying "we're keeping an open mind as to the motivation for this attack".
Let me give you an example. I am a researcher. Most of my stuff is theoretical, but I do the odd empirical paper. My mode of working would be unrecognizable. Spend enormous time alone in front of a white board. Do naps and walk the dog, fiddle around in the garden mulling ideas over. Then time on long zoom converstions with coauthors followed by intense bursts of writing on my lap top in various public locations. All this leads up to submission. Put me in my office (where I do for meetings and work in the organization) my research pipeline would die. I couldn't have a single research idea there. My teaching is from September to January where I am in the auditorium.... the value I create is just not compatible with a factory or survellied office environment. So you could come across me in the middle of the day walking around with a far away look in my eye... that is me working 🤣🤣🤣
That purpose being to direct money to the owners.
(Look, I'm all for capitalism and businesses finding new ways to do well by doing good. But a lot of our current problems seem to come from businesses finding cheat codes in the system, so they can do even better by doing bad. The shadier end of Private Equity. Buy-to-let. Those franchised "university" courses.)
- Demographic profile - not as bad as people think
- Inactivity rate - middling to good. Been roughly flat for decades.
- Unemployment rate - very good
- Hours worked per week - down about 4% over the last 25 years. Down a bit since COVID. Not sure how we compare internationally, but 31.8 hours for all workers doesn't seem too bad.
- Productivity growth - flat since COVID. Very slow between 2008 and 2020.
It's also worth reminding ourselves that GDP per capita growth was decent after 2008. It's really just after COVID that things have flatlined.Starmer has done well walking the Trump--Europe tightrope, enabling him to exercise influence so far, but going so far as to say he likes and respects Trump is his first major misjudgement , or also of those advising him.
No, they will all result in a one-off increase in output. Economic growth requires continuing increases in output. The POPPY fund would itself also have to grow continuously.
Do one-off jumps in output spur further growth? There's no evidence of that. But a one-off shift in technology which opens up a range of new opportunities can do that. However that is not in any government's powers.
Meanwhile Labour is sounding increasingly desperate in sending people onto the airwaves to try and insist that New Austerity is somehow different from Austerity....
Water privatisation is a four decade saga of taking the piss.
Edinburgh should really have a small team of local engineers builds a tram network slowly, rather than these one-off projects. The same problem exists for cycle infrastructure, so you go through the same expensive design and planning process for each mile.
(I also think government does have a role to play with new technology, especially when it can take on some of the risk or when it has positive externalities that don't provide a return to private investors - eg CfD constracts for offshore wind.)
Allow tenders for private sector management of the assets, if you really must.
£2 trillion poorer than previously thought? Assessing changes to household wealth statistics
https://ifs.org.uk/publications/ps2-trillion-poorer-previously-thought-assessing-changes-household-wealth-statistics
The total wealth of Britain’s households in 2018 to 2020 was approximately £2.2 trillion less than was previously believed – a 14% reduction. That, at least, is the implication of a recent change in methodology made by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to the UK’s leading official measure of household wealth. The revision makes three changes to previous methodology for valuing households’ pension wealth. Two are clear improvements. But the third change – by far the biggest, by itself subtracting a staggering £2.3 trillion from recorded wealth – is a mistake, stemming from faulty economic reasoning. It is quite possible that the ONS’s revised estimates of household wealth are actually further from the truth than the estimates it started with (themselves undoubtedly flawed). The result is that policymakers lack a reliable set of household wealth statistics on which to base policy...
..Two welcome changes have been made to the survey’s methodology. One corrects a serious error in how inflation is accounted for when valuing pensions – an error that has been impacting official wealth estimates for a decade, though the ONS still does not acknowledge explicitly that it was an error. Correcting it increases estimates of total household wealth by around £500 billion. The second welcome change improves estimates of the age at which individuals can start to draw their full pension – subtracting around £300 billion from previous estimates of total household wealth. Unfortunately, the ONS has not gone back and made these two adjustments to estimates for earlier periods.
The biggest change made by the ONS relates to how the value of future pension income is converted into today’s terms, and subtracts £2.3 trillion from estimates of total household wealth in 2018 to 2020. This change is a mistake, making an already flawed methodology substantially worse. ..
know it isn't), doesn't that mean the people you are seeing could be like you, eg working, but there for other reasons eg between jobs, on a break, WFH, shift work, etc.
By the way how is the new job going, or haven't you started yet. I hope the new adventure goes well for you.
To my ignorant mind a few issues of clarification arise;
1) Is there a difference between QE and printing money, and if so what is it?
2) All money represents in some way cost and benefit, and using it involves choices. As to the £500bn made available, the proposal doesn't tell me what it would have been spent on otherwise. What is the answer?
3) Why would anyone not charge interest when they can make a greater return by doing so?
4) If it works, why don't all states do it all the time and for ever and with ten times as much cash input?
5) In my experience so far, if an action looks as if it is inflationary, it always is. What reason have I got to feel differently about this one?
https://x.com/RepJackKimble/status/1903491740176195884
When the BOE buys government debt it finances the purchase through issuing bank reserves, ie by borrowing from the banking system. It pays interest on these reserves at Bank rate. So if the Bank receives no interest on these bonds then it faces a cash flow problem and becomes insolvent. This is just another way of saying that the interest rate faced by the consolidated public sector is Bank rate, the interest paid on those Bank reserves. Saying that the bonds are zero coupon does not remove the borrowing cost. You could of course pay no interest on reserves, but then you would be funding the spending via an implicit tax on banks (financial repression). And you would risk having no control over short run interest rates. Or you could simply cut Bank rate to zero. But then you would have no ability to control inflation (economists call this fiscal dominance).
All of which is a complicated way of saying there is no magic money tree. Modern monetary theory is neither modern, nor monetary, nor a theory. It's simply the old lie that there is such a thing as a free lunch, I'm afraid.
All going well so far. Something of a relief.
Digging the new reservoir required and the new sewage works will require many labourers. With many, small teaspoons.
Vote Malmesbury
It made me laugh.......
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5aH-fb6Iow
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdjy4m0n1exo
We later found out that it may have been the case that Rudakubana had wanted to shoot up his school/college but was prevented from doing so by his father. That may suggest he wanted to shoot people he knew but was prevented from doing so. However, we also know that he had picked out his target before he got in the taxi. He had found that dance class somewhere, most likely the internet.
Ultimately it doesn't really matter because the outcome is the same. But on balance of probabilities, I think the Southport stabbings were an anti-women/girl terrorist attack.
The enquiry report (if one ever happens) will be fun reading.
I can imagine there being some unused Victorian infrastructure that everyone had forgotten about but surely when the company was privatised there was a list of what it actually owned? Anything not on the list should presumably have been retained by the government (ownership/liabilities to be negotiated later)?
At a different utility company I am vaguely familiar with the (GIS based) asset register was taken very seriously indeed.
Someone told me that all their plans had been destroyed on privatization, which sounds believable.
Their asset register might be incomplete, but how can they not have one ?
How will you achieve that? Is it desirable? If nothing else, that sounds like an end run round democracy.
It needs to go bust, default on the loans, wipe out the shareholders and have the core business sold on debt free - at which point problem solved.
All the current wrangling is merely attempts by the idiots who lent them too much money, and the idiots who purchased a business with an unsustainable amount of debt to avoid the inevitable consequences of their stupidity.
The only plausible government involvement might be short term financial loans or guarantes to keep the system running during the period of administration, instead of having a disorderly collapse when suppliers aren't paid.
Which they charge for.
Welcome to Thames Water Property Searches
An official provider of the Law Society’s CON29DW Drainage and Water Enquiry
https://www.thameswater.co.uk/property-searches
The whole thing is a racket but what do you expect? This is how much of the private sector operates in this country - extortion.
F1: Piastri's down to 3.4/3.9 on Betfair. Probably just going to lay enough that I'm not behind if he's other than 1st.
I think he should be shorter. He might be the favourite.
It's a monopoly utility.
If you can guarantee it will be adequately regulated in future, then fine.
You'll also probably deserve the Nobel prize for economics.
"An official provider of the Law Society’s CON.."
The concept is utterly shameful and it is a path we should never have started down.
https://x.com/e_casalicchio/status/1904105476133879950
Many of the pipes which make up the overwhelming majority of their assets were put in when they were nationally or municipally owned and governments don't care much about little things like accounting records, or about maintaining them to decent standards.
I had some professional involvement with the company three times in my career and they have a fairly accurate record of the assets put in or renewed since privatisation, but that's only a proportion of the total.
Another one of its benefits.
There are no easy answers and this looks like another attempt at one.
I've previously had Thames Water demanding I pay them a £20k water bill for the pub property next door so £700 seemed quite reasonable! They are total jokers.
Unlike virtually any other business they don't have a practical need to track what they own: There's basically just a rule as to which pipes they own. If its a sewage pipe or rainwater pipe,the property owner is responsible up to the point where it joins with someone else's, otherwise it's theirs. If its a clean water pipe, it's the property owners responsibility up to the external stop.
The problem is a combination of the Treasury where Green Book / Computer says No and the sheer amount of time it takes to get things done.
A pro-drug of a compound found in sage and rosemary.
diAcCA, a Pro-Drug for Carnosic Acid That Activates the Nrf2 Transcriptional Pathway, Shows Efficacy in the 5xFAD Transgenic Mouse Model of Alzheimer’s Disease
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3921/14/3/293
The antioxidant/anti-inflammatory compound carnosic acid (CA) is a phenolic diterpene found in the herbs rosemary and sage. Upon activation, CA manifests electrophilic properties to stimulate the Nrf2 transcriptional pathway via reaction with Keap1. However, purified CA is readily oxidized and thus highly unstable. To develop CA as an Alzheimer’s disease (AD) therapeutic, we synthesized pro-drug derivatives, among which the di-acetylated form (diAcCA) showed excellent drug-like properties. diAcCA converted to CA in the stomach prior to absorption into the bloodstream, and exhibited improved stability and bioavailability as well as comparable pharmacokinetics (PK) and efficacy to CA. To test the efficacy of diAcCA in AD transgenic mice, 5xFAD mice (or littermate controls) received the drug for 3 months, followed by behavioral and immunohistochemical studies. Notably, in addition to amyloid plaques and tau tangles, a hallmark of human AD is synapse loss, a major correlate to cognitive decline. The 5xFAD animals receiving diAcCA displayed synaptic rescue on immunohistochemical analysis accompanied by improved learning and memory in the water maze test. Treatment with diAcCA reduced astrocytic and microglial inflammation, amyloid plaque formation, and phospho-tau neuritic aggregates. In toxicity studies, diAcCA was as safe or safer than CA, which is listed by the FDA as “generally regarded as safe”, indicating diAcCA is suitable for human clinical trials in AD.
https://news.sky.com/story/bird-flu-detected-in-sheep-in-england-for-the-first-time-13334862
Sometimes I doubt our whole disease-naming methodology.
Where's the £900m of lost revenue going to be recovered from?
What did Lord Mandelbrot advise? He had two stints as Business Secretary and 5 years as European Trade Commissioner, so has relevant background.
It can't be said "we have an agreement with Mr Trump", because Mr Trump's history is to piss on every agreement he has ever made, unless there is a metaphorical gun to his head.
To my eyes Trump and his administration are significantly further to the right than Meloni’s party. Certainly in the conspiracy theory / pro-Russian foreign policy / anti vax / rule of law space.
Government chooses politically sexy, economically illiterate rubbish like HS2, delivers it (or not) decades late and many times over budget, and then moves on to the next expensive disaster, while much more worthwhile schemes with much better cost-benefit ratios are ignored.
Also in many cases it is government that is itself the barrier to infrastructure projects rather than lack of funding - the appalling planning system is the most obvious, but far from the only, example. The reason the new towns referred to in the header aren't being built is not that there isn't enough money to go around, it's because we have simply the worst planning system in the world.
So if we want to build decent infrastructure in this country, prioritising economically beneficial projects (in transport, for example, mostly road-building in the south-east, which often return £6 or £7 in economic benefits for every £ invested, compared to 50p for HS2 under current cost estimates) and above all liberalising planning, would be much better than wasting hundreds of billions more on expensive white elephants.
'On November 12, 2005, Vanessa married Donald Trump Jr. The wedding was held at the Mar-a-Lago club in Florida; the service was officiated by Trump Jr.'s aunt, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry. Trump Jr. had proposed to her with a US $100,000 ring (equivalent to $161,000 in 2024) that he had received as a gift from a jeweler in exchange for proposing to her in front of paparazzi outside of the jeweler's store at the Short Hills mall in New Jersey.'
https://x.com/devahaz/status/1903983926965641594
"No tariffs or we give 100 nuclear weapons to Ukraine. By lunchtime. Say anything and the weapons are on the way. Also, we planted one in an underwater grotto near Mar-a-Lago."
Push back on the ludicrous shit like that, for the love of God.
Tiger Tiger, turning shite.
I've supported his diplomacy so far, and he's managed to exert a lot of influence between Trump and Ukraine so far, but to make a public show of saying he "likes him", with the stakes as they are currently for Europe and Canada, is the wrong tone to strike.
He shoukd have jusf issued the usual, more neutral boilerplate, about having a good working relationship", while buttering him in more personal terms in private, which seems to have been working well.
Trump is not generally someone who is "liked" by foreign leaders, except for autucrats, nor does he usually seek that. It makes Starmer sound even more of a butler than is necessary, and won't go down at all well with those other democratic leaders.
Taken together with the mooted talk of Starrne also offering special tax concessions to U.S. Big Tech, and there are the first concerning signs about Starmer's direction of travel on this topic.
https://obr.uk/box/international-comparisons-of-government-investment/#:~:text=Across the whole period, the,30 countries in every year.
We consistently cock it up, see HS2 or the endless Heathrow saga. We are short termists who can't see the woods fromt the trees unfortunately.