On ISAs more generally, I'm concerned about the pressure to abolish or severely restrict cash ISAs (leaving stocks and shares ISAs untouched).
This pressure is coming from the financial services industry surprise surprise. I'm hoping that Reeves is not fooled but I don't have high hopes.
I think she sees it as a chance to artificially boost growth.
How? The change would divert savings from the banking sector to the financial services industry. More tax would be raised from those who will not expose their money to risk and therefore have increased taxable savings interest.
By driving sentiment i suppose and the massive fortune everyone is guaranteed to make flooding the economy. She's not shown much aptitude for nailing it thus far
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
On ISAs more generally, I'm concerned about the pressure to abolish or severely restrict cash ISAs (leaving stocks and shares ISAs untouched).
This pressure is coming from the financial services industry surprise surprise. I'm hoping that Reeves is not fooled but I don't have high hopes.
I think she sees it as a chance to artificially boost growth.
How? The change would divert savings from the banking sector to the financial services industry. More tax would be raised from those who will not expose their money to risk and therefore have increased taxable savings interest.
Last place on earth I would want to put money in is UK equities
The financial services industry is actually trying to persuade Reeves that the UK public take insufficient risk with their savings.
There are different types of financial asset - savings, investments, pensions pots.
It would be interesting to know what the average numbers and proportions are.
Of course if Reeves want people to risk more of their money she needs to stop any talk of restrictions on DC pensions.
Would you really want Rayner, Lammy, Reeves and all the other socialist idiots acting like they had a majority of 174?
The country can just about cope with their incompetence and spite as long as they are timid. We'll stagnate or gradually decline for a few years and then maybe choose more wisely next time.
A bolder Labour government would probably bankrupt us all - see Venezuela or Cuba.
Excellent header - the politicians have yielded power to The Process State. Strangely, this means that increasing numbers of people think the politicians are powerless.
The paradox of democracy - in Switzerland the voters have control. To the point they can remove laws against the wishes of the political class. And create laws, likewise.
Yet the result is *more* stable. Because they have power, the voters of Switzerland have to be responsible.
Given a Swiss setup, the first thing., in the U.K., would be a visit to the IMF. Then people would learn
Switzerland is one of the wealthiest and most educated nations on earth.
Swiss voters are only trusted to have more referendums therefore as they won't use them mainly as populist protest votes as most voters elsewhere often do
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
On ISAs more generally, I'm concerned about the pressure to abolish or severely restrict cash ISAs (leaving stocks and shares ISAs untouched).
This pressure is coming from the financial services industry surprise surprise. I'm hoping that Reeves is not fooled but I don't have high hopes.
I think she sees it as a chance to artificially boost growth.
How? The change would divert savings from the banking sector to the financial services industry. More tax would be raised from those who will not expose their money to risk and therefore have increased taxable savings interest.
By driving sentiment i suppose and the massive fortune everyone is guaranteed to make flooding the economy. She's not shown much aptitude for nailing it thus far
If money is diverted from cash ISAs to stockmarket ISAs then demand for shares rises and therefore so does share prices. These shares are ,of course, traded in a second-hand market so the receivers of the cash are those selling the shares that the ISAs investors are buying. This is just money changing hands between individuals nothing to do with growing the economy; except in the sense that leech fees are paid to brokers, advisers, fund managers, stamp duty. Meanwhile, the banks and building societies lose out massively and have less funds available to lend for company loans and mortgages.
On ISAs more generally, I'm concerned about the pressure to abolish or severely restrict cash ISAs (leaving stocks and shares ISAs untouched).
This pressure is coming from the financial services industry surprise surprise. I'm hoping that Reeves is not fooled but I don't have high hopes.
I think she sees it as a chance to artificially boost growth.
How? The change would divert savings from the banking sector to the financial services industry. More tax would be raised from those who will not expose their money to risk and therefore have increased taxable savings interest.
By driving sentiment i suppose and the massive fortune everyone is guaranteed to make flooding the economy. She's not shown much aptitude for nailing it thus far
If money is diverted from cash ISAs to stockmarket ISAs then demand for shares rises and therefore so does share prices. These shares are ,of course, traded in a second-hand market so the receivers of the cash are those selling the shares that the ISAs investors are buying. This is just money changing hands between individuals nothing to do with growing the economy; except in the sense that leech fees are paid to brokers, advisers, fund managers, stamp duty. Meanwhile, the banks and building societies lose out massively and have less funds available to lend for company loans and mortgages.
Well my few pounds will remain split between a credit union and a post office cash isa. Nice and simple
Would you really want Rayner, Lammy, Reeves and all the other socialist idiots acting like they had a majority of 174?
The country can just about cope with their incompetence and spite as long as they are timid. We'll stagnate or gradually decline for a few years and then maybe choose more wisely next time.
A bolder Labour government would probably bankrupt us all - see Venezuela or Cuba.
Excellent header - the politicians have yielded power to The Process State. Strangely, this means that increasing numbers of people think the politicians are powerless.
The paradox of democracy - in Switzerland the voters have control. To the point they can remove laws against the wishes of the political class. And create laws, likewise.
Yet the result is *more* stable. Because they have power, the voters of Switzerland have to be responsible.
Given a Swiss setup, the first thing., in the U.K., would be a visit to the IMF. Then people would learn
Switzerland is one of the wealthiest and most educated nations on earth.
Swiss voters are only trusted to have more referendums therefore as they won't use them mainly as populist protest votes as most voters elsewhere often do
It’s more that politicians in Switzerland have to sell their policies or follow what the voters want. “All the respectable parties agree that you can’t have X” isn’t a plan.
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
Would have been good for swaps traders, that said.
"...It is 2024. The UK Government is finding it more and more difficult to exert control, and the 2010-2024 governments lost control more than once. It cannot manufacture consent to win an argument because the Internet will counter-argue whatever the cause. It cannot deliver the public services demanded by the public because private bodies will defy them. It cannot define justice externally and internally because international and national courts will override them. It cannot govern the Celtic nations because they are self-governed. It promises everything and delivers nothing..."
The 'bumps' people suggest are the result of matters outside the government's control - GFC and QE, Covid and lockdown, Ukraine and Energy costs etc. Other countries have managed these crises without government intervention - Iceland, Sweden, Taiwan and Uruguay for Covid. Iceland (again) for the banks.
So to pose the question? Are Western governments so afraid of their populace that they will simply pay-up to avoid confrontation with media-induced frenzies and pass the cost onto future generations?
Have we all reached the 'bread and circuses' stage?
Have we all reached the 'bread and circuses' stage?
Yes - throwing money at the problem both makes it go away and makes the politician look good for the next couple of years because repayment only becomes a problem when you've left power.
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
Would you really want Rayner, Lammy, Reeves and all the other socialist idiots acting like they had a majority of 174?
The country can just about cope with their incompetence and spite as long as they are timid. We'll stagnate or gradually decline for a few years and then maybe choose more wisely next time.
A bolder Labour government would probably bankrupt us all - see Venezuela or Cuba.
Excellent header - the politicians have yielded power to The Process State. Strangely, this means that increasing numbers of people think the politicians are powerless.
The paradox of democracy - in Switzerland the voters have control. To the point they can remove laws against the wishes of the political class. And create laws, likewise.
Yet the result is *more* stable. Because they have power, the voters of Switzerland have to be responsible.
Given a Swiss setup, the first thing., in the U.K., would be a visit to the IMF. Then people would learn
Surely, isn't it a case that because the voters have power, the politicians of Switzerland have to be responsible. You wouldn't have had Brexit because they wouldn't have felt impotent to power.
We might have been like Switzerland and not joined the EU in the first place, because it is incompatible with Swiss direct democracy.
In fact, a main difficulty with direct democracy is that it's virtually impossible to run a serious foreign policy.
Switzerland is small and surrounded by stable democracies so that doesn't really matter at the moment, but for a country with pretensions to great power status like our own, it is difficult to see how it would work - statesmen could not negotiate credibly if every action were subject to unpredictable referenda.
It would be like the US system, where every treaty has to be approved by 2/3 of the Senate, on steroids.
(The context is that I need an accessible cattle grid to point the National Trust at that still works acceptable well.)
Cattle grid not properly built….
Any progress on the idea of a gate that meets the requirements of holding livestock back but lets people with mobility issues through? And stops fuckwits letting the animals out, because “it’s a laugh”.
I'm probably inclined to go with "not maintained properly" on that one. The sheep has a great expression.
In terms of cattle grids, we have the type used in Cambridge to keep the sheep on the collage backs and off the road. I've seen a couple of outraged-tabloid "pandering to a few bloody cyclists" reports where the sheep got out, and the actual cause seems to be around getting an artist not a professional designer to design it, so it leaves loopholes.
There's also an issue whether these are structurally strong enough to take motor vehicles, but they should be OK for public footpaths, multiuser trails etc.
There's this type of thing, which is sold as "wheelchair-friendly" (my photo quota), but imo is not thought through and designed following the assumptions of a third party. It is risky because wheelchairs can come off it, looks like sheep could cross it, and would struggle with eg 3 wheeler wheelchairs or carriages.
No grid is 100% - there were reports in Yorkshire of sheep rolling across 8ft wide traditional grids on their backs.
I'm working up some ideas to get my local NT estate to start them thinking about this, as a more controlled environment than out in the countryside, for a place to start. They let sheep mingle with the public and keep cattle fenced off (risk to people in the breeding season), and I think the answer to start with for accessible walks (alongside the traditional circuits on their map, and possibly a legal responsibility to provide) is to start inside the cattle grid zone around the property, and go from there.
For such places I'm interested in a sheep-resistant grid that can be laid across a traditional cattle grid as a possible trial, in the centre of a single track grid so most heavy vehicles would go either side. We'll see.
There's also the possibility that landowner should keep the livestock off the public highway - whether it is a public footpath or a public road. Certain landowners would be unhappy, but it's an issue that needs more thinking.
I don't see how we stop effwits letting them out for a laugh. But that applies to any gate anywhere, just as scrotes can ring your doorbell and run away, and is a policing thing.
The 'bumps' people suggest are the result of matters outside the government's control - GFC and QE, Covid and lockdown, Ukraine and Energy costs etc. Other countries have managed these crises without government intervention - Iceland, Sweden, Taiwan and Uruguay for Covid. Iceland (again) for the banks.
So to pose the question? Are Western governments so afraid of their populace that they will simply pay-up to avoid confrontation with media-induced frenzies and pass the cost onto future generations?
Have we all reached the 'bread and circuses' stage?
An interesting question for the big western countries arises. They are basically all in the potential over large debt to GDP problem. If all the big western countries are in the same boat, whose problem is it?
It is similar to the bank loan question: if you owe the bank £1000 but have no assets, you have a problem. If you owe the bank £1,000,000,000 and have no assets the bank has a problem. Whose problem is the joint huge indebtedness of western nations?
The 'bumps' people suggest are the result of matters outside the government's control - GFC and QE, Covid and lockdown, Ukraine and Energy costs etc. Other countries have managed these crises without government intervention - Iceland, Sweden, Taiwan and Uruguay for Covid. Iceland (again) for the banks.
So to pose the question? Are Western governments so afraid of their populace that they will simply pay-up to avoid confrontation with media-induced frenzies and pass the cost onto future generations?
Have we all reached the 'bread and circuses' stage?
The interesting thing here, for me, is how much bigger the impact was from GFC than from Covid. I'm not sure we fully appreciated the impact at the time of the GFC (I didn't!)
Would you really want Rayner, Lammy, Reeves and all the other socialist idiots acting like they had a majority of 174?
The country can just about cope with their incompetence and spite as long as they are timid. We'll stagnate or gradually decline for a few years and then maybe choose more wisely next time.
A bolder Labour government would probably bankrupt us all - see Venezuela or Cuba.
Excellent header - the politicians have yielded power to The Process State. Strangely, this means that increasing numbers of people think the politicians are powerless.
The paradox of democracy - in Switzerland the voters have control. To the point they can remove laws against the wishes of the political class. And create laws, likewise.
Yet the result is *more* stable. Because they have power, the voters of Switzerland have to be responsible.
Given a Swiss setup, the first thing., in the U.K., would be a visit to the IMF. Then people would learn
Surely, isn't it a case that because the voters have power, the politicians of Switzerland have to be responsible. You wouldn't have had Brexit because they wouldn't have felt impotent to power.
We might have been like Switzerland and not joined the EU in the first place, because it is incompatible with Swiss direct democracy.
In fact, a main difficulty with direct democracy is that it's virtually impossible to run a serious foreign policy.
Switzerland is small and surrounded by stable democracies so that doesn't really matter at the moment, but for a country with pretensions to great power status like our own, it is difficult to see how it would work - statesmen could not negotiate credibly if every action were subject to unpredictable referenda.
It would be like the US system, where every treaty has to be approved by 2/3 of the Senate, on steroids.
I'm not aware that we have pretensions to great power status.
Though tbf Kemi's deputy Mel Stride was upraiding Angela Rayner at PMQ about the UK's inability to control what was happening in the Middle East iirc, so perhaps they have aspirations.
The 'bumps' people suggest are the result of matters outside the government's control - GFC and QE, Covid and lockdown, Ukraine and Energy costs etc. Other countries have managed these crises without government intervention - Iceland, Sweden, Taiwan and Uruguay for Covid. Iceland (again) for the banks.
So to pose the question? Are Western governments so afraid of their populace that they will simply pay-up to avoid confrontation with media-induced frenzies and pass the cost onto future generations?
Have we all reached the 'bread and circuses' stage?
The interesting thing here, for me, is how much bigger the impact was from GFC than from Covid. I'm not sure we fully appreciated the impact at the time of the GFC (I didn't!)
IIRC Alastair Darling's borrowing forecasts increased by over half a trillion between two statements to the House.
Half the people I worked with lost their jobs (through no fault of their own or the business).
While some guardianistas joked about the 'mancession'.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
On ISAs more generally, I'm concerned about the pressure to abolish or severely restrict cash ISAs (leaving stocks and shares ISAs untouched).
This pressure is coming from the financial services industry surprise surprise. I'm hoping that Reeves is not fooled but I don't have high hopes.
I think she sees it as a chance to artificially boost growth.
Easy to adapt quickly though if you want to replicate cash levels of risk and return: most large stocks and shares ISA providers offer access to individual close-to-redemption gilts, and perhaps more usefully to short term money market funds. The latter particularly have served me well over the last few years.
The 'bumps' people suggest are the result of matters outside the government's control - GFC and QE, Covid remember thinking at the d and lockdown, Ukraine and Energy costs etc. Other countries have managed these crises without government intervention - Iceland, Sweden, Taiwan and Uruguay for Covid. Iceland (again) for the banks.
So to pose the question? Are Western governments so afraid of their populace that they will simply pay-up to avoid confrontation with media-induced frenzies and pass the cost onto future generations?
Have we all reached the 'bread and circuses' stage?
The interesting thing here, for me, is how much bigger the impact was from GFC than from Covid. I'm not sure we fully appreciated the impact at the time of the GFC (I didn't!)
IIRC Alastair Darling's borrowing forecasts increased by over half a trillion between two statements to the House.
Half the people I worked with lost their jobs (through no fault of their own or the business).
While some guardianistas joked about the 'mancession'.
I do remember thinking at the time it would take at least a decade, and likely longer, for the nation to fully recover from it in any meaningful sense.
What's very clear is that we couldn't afford a second bailout on that scale - the UK's credit simply isn't good enough now - and that Covid probably added another decade to the time needed to recover.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
My son nearly had a fit when his son, four or five years ago, suggested doing a degree in Golf Management. Turns out it might have been a better bet than that which he actually did, history.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
Reality is I don't think the minimum wage has got to the point where companies are thinking it's going to cost £x to employ someone and even then we have to train them up? Let's wait and see if we really need them..
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
Yep. Plenty of businesses are still in the assessment phase of AI. I would be amazed if (m)any had jumped in to replace humans yet. Yet. Not saying the threat/issue is not one to contend with, but actual businesses are likely to be more cautious.
The 'bumps' people suggest are the result of matters outside the government's control - GFC and QE, Covid remember thinking at the d and lockdown, Ukraine and Energy costs etc. Other countries have managed these crises without government intervention - Iceland, Sweden, Taiwan and Uruguay for Covid. Iceland (again) for the banks.
So to pose the question? Are Western governments so afraid of their populace that they will simply pay-up to avoid confrontation with media-induced frenzies and pass the cost onto future generations?
Have we all reached the 'bread and circuses' stage?
The interesting thing here, for me, is how much bigger the impact was from GFC than from Covid. I'm not sure we fully appreciated the impact at the time of the GFC (I didn't!)
IIRC Alastair Darling's borrowing forecasts increased by over half a trillion between two statements to the House.
Half the people I worked with lost their jobs (through no fault of their own or the business).
While some guardianistas joked about the 'mancession'.
I do remember thinking at the time it would take at least a decade, and likely longer, for the nation to fully recover from it in any meaningful sense.
What's very clear is that we couldn't afford a second bailout on that scale - the UK's credit simply isn't good enough now - and that Covid probably added another decade to the time needed to recover.
Not helped by all the costs being shifted onto the young.
We're all in this together was a nice slogan but the truth was we weren't and the oldies were give an opt out.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
My son nearly had a fit when his son, four or five years ago, suggested doing a degree in Golf Management. Turns out it might have been a better bet than that which he actually did, history.
Even history is probably more use than Romanticism and the Lakes - which is what twin B did.
She is starting to regret her chose of GCSEs which rather limited her options forever afterwards as I warned her at the time.
The 'bumps' people suggest are the result of matters outside the government's control - GFC and QE, Covid and lockdown, Ukraine and Energy costs etc. Other countries have managed these crises without government intervention - Iceland, Sweden, Taiwan and Uruguay for Covid. Iceland (again) for the banks.
So to pose the question? Are Western governments so afraid of their populace that they will simply pay-up to avoid confrontation with media-induced frenzies and pass the cost onto future generations?
Have we all reached the 'bread and circuses' stage?
The interesting thing here, for me, is how much bigger the impact was from GFC than from Covid. I'm not sure we fully appreciated the impact at the time of the GFC (I didn't!)
IIRC Alastair Darling's borrowing forecasts increased by over half a trillion between two statements to the House.
Half the people I worked with lost their jobs (through no fault of their own or the business).
While some guardianistas joked about the 'mancession'.
The issue isn't that debt heads up during times of crisis; it's that it doesn't look as if it's particularly heading down during the good times. And yes, right now *should* be a good time debt wise with oil prices fairly low, stock markets buoyant and ourselves not directly involved in a major war.
Historically there wasn't a particular debt spike in the 30s for the very late 20s stock market crash either - which suggests perhaps too much state intervention following the GFC... - various large wars (Napoleonic; WW1; WW2) did put the debt up but following those wars we were obviously able to run a surplus to get things back under control again.
The 'bumps' people suggest are the result of matters outside the government's control - GFC and QE, Covid remember thinking at the d and lockdown, Ukraine and Energy costs etc. Other countries have managed these crises without government intervention - Iceland, Sweden, Taiwan and Uruguay for Covid. Iceland (again) for the banks.
So to pose the question? Are Western governments so afraid of their populace that they will simply pay-up to avoid confrontation with media-induced frenzies and pass the cost onto future generations?
Have we all reached the 'bread and circuses' stage?
The interesting thing here, for me, is how much bigger the impact was from GFC than from Covid. I'm not sure we fully appreciated the impact at the time of the GFC (I didn't!)
IIRC Alastair Darling's borrowing forecasts increased by over half a trillion between two statements to the House.
Half the people I worked with lost their jobs (through no fault of their own or the business).
While some guardianistas joked about the 'mancession'.
I do remember thinking at the time it would take at least a decade, and likely longer, for the nation to fully recover from it in any meaningful sense.
What's very clear is that we couldn't afford a second bailout on that scale - the UK's credit simply isn't good enough now - and that Covid probably added another decade to the time needed to recover.
Government is bad at explaining the facts and the strategy for preserving fiscal stability. MPs just don't want to recognise the issue and just talk about spending more on pet projects. So how can you expect most people to comprehend what is going on? This is especially true when the debt is already high and we are continuing to borrow £150 billion pa, with no plan to pay any of it back so far. This requires simple and constant explanation.
It's a parallel to Net Zero by Year X when the planet's CO2 emissions both continue and continue to rise.
(The context is that I need an accessible cattle grid to point the National Trust at that still works acceptable well.)
Cattle grid not properly built….
Any progress on the idea of a gate that meets the requirements of holding livestock back but lets people with mobility issues through? And stops fuckwits letting the animals out, because “it’s a laugh”.
I'm probably inclined to go with "not maintained properly" on that one. The sheep has a great expression.
In terms of cattle grids, we have the type used in Cambridge to keep the sheep on the collage backs and off the road. I've seen a couple of outraged-tabloid "pandering to a few bloody cyclists" reports where the sheep got out, and the actual cause seems to be around getting an artist not a professional designer to design it, so it leaves loopholes.
There's also an issue whether these are structurally strong enough to take motor vehicles, but they should be OK for public footpaths, multiuser trails etc.
There's this type of thing, which is sold as "wheelchair-friendly" (my photo quota), but imo is not thought through and designed following the assumptions of a third party. It is risky because wheelchairs can come off it, looks like sheep could cross it, and would struggle with eg 3 wheeler wheelchairs or carriages.
No grid is 100% - there were reports in Yorkshire of sheep rolling across 8ft wide traditional grids on their backs.
I'm working up some ideas to get my local NT estate to start them thinking about this, as a more controlled environment than out in the countryside, for a place to start. They let sheep mingle with the public and keep cattle fenced off (risk to people in the breeding season), and I think the answer to start with for accessible walks (alongside the traditional circuits on their map, and possibly a legal responsibility to provide) is to start inside the cattle grid zone around the property, and go from there.
For such places I'm interested in a sheep-resistant grid that can be laid across a traditional cattle grid as a possible trial, in the centre of a single track grid so most heavy vehicles would go either side. We'll see.
There's also the possibility that landowner should keep the livestock off the public highway - whether it is a public footpath or a public road. Certain landowners would be unhappy, but it's an issue that needs more thinking.
I don't see how we stop effwits letting them out for a laugh. But that applies to any gate anywhere, just as scrotes can ring your doorbell and run away, and is a policing thing.
That is not a cattle grid, end of. And whosoever designed it is clearly not fit for purpose. And whosoever sanctioned paying for it is not fit for purpose either. Installing that as a "Cattle Grid" is malfeasance in public office. They should all be sacked, end of.
The 'bumps' people suggest are the result of matters outside the government's control - GFC and QE, Covid remember thinking at the d and lockdown, Ukraine and Energy costs etc. Other countries have managed these crises without government intervention - Iceland, Sweden, Taiwan and Uruguay for Covid. Iceland (again) for the banks.
So to pose the question? Are Western governments so afraid of their populace that they will simply pay-up to avoid confrontation with media-induced frenzies and pass the cost onto future generations?
Have we all reached the 'bread and circuses' stage?
The interesting thing here, for me, is how much bigger the impact was from GFC than from Covid. I'm not sure we fully appreciated the impact at the time of the GFC (I didn't!)
IIRC Alastair Darling's borrowing forecasts increased by over half a trillion between two statements to the House.
Half the people I worked with lost their jobs (through no fault of their own or the business).
While some guardianistas joked about the 'mancession'.
I do remember thinking at the time it would take at least a decade, and likely longer, for the nation to fully recover from it in any meaningful sense.
What's very clear is that we couldn't afford a second bailout on that scale - the UK's credit simply isn't good enough now - and that Covid probably added another decade to the time needed to recover.
Not helped by all the costs being shifted onto the young.
We're all in this together was a nice slogan but the truth was we weren't and the oldies were give an opt out.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
It's cheaper to hire an Indonesian or Malaysian software dev with a couple of years under their belt than an illiterate 18 year old on the minimum wage in the UK.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
“Swerve Uni and learn a trade” might be the best advice for school leavers. For those in London & SE it might be better to relocate up North for couple of years and get on the property ladder with the money you’ll save
The 'bumps' people suggest are the result of matters outside the government's control - GFC and QE, Covid and lockdown, Ukraine and Energy costs etc. Other countries have managed these crises without government intervention - Iceland, Sweden, Taiwan and Uruguay for Covid. Iceland (again) for the banks.
So to pose the question? Are Western governments so afraid of their populace that they will simply pay-up to avoid confrontation with media-induced frenzies and pass the cost onto future generations?
Have we all reached the 'bread and circuses' stage?
The interesting thing here, for me, is how much bigger the impact was from GFC than from Covid. I'm not sure we fully appreciated the impact at the time of the GFC (I didn't!)
It's because it's from a lower base. Here are the deficit figures for the year-ending May. Okay, this is all in nominal prices, but we've still seen a big increase in borrowing. The difference is that, whilst the Tories got the deficit down post-2010, the debt didn't come down. So now the debt figure doesn't appear as affected by COVID.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
It's cheaper to hire an Indonesian or Malaysian software dev with a couple of years under their belt than an illiterate 18 year old on the minimum wage in the UK.
You don't even need to go as far as that, even Romania, Latvia or Lithuania work for hiring junior level roles. It's pretty alarming because the talent pipeline in the UK for tech and finance is basically broken, very few people entering at the top in junior roles currently and lots of people exiting at the bottom in lead/head/VP level roles. It will be fine for the next 5-7 years because the middle is still very strong but eventually there's not enough juniors to replace those mids going into senior roles.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
“Swerve Uni and learn a trade” might be the best advice for school leavers. For those in London & SE it might be better to relocate up North for couple of years and get on the property ladder with the money you’ll save
My nieces are nine and six. I'm glad they're not a few years older. Hopefully by the time they are making those big decisions, we'll have a better understanding of the impact of a lot of changes.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
It's cheaper to hire an Indonesian or Malaysian software dev with a couple of years under their belt than an illiterate 18 year old on the minimum wage in the UK.
You don't even need to go as far as that, even Romania, Latvia or Lithuania work for hiring junior level roles. It's pretty alarming because the talent pipeline in the UK for tech and finance is basically broken, very few people entering at the top in junior roles currently and lots of people exiting at the bottom in lead/head/VP level roles. It will be fine for the next 5-7 years because the middle is still very strong but eventually there's not enough juniors to replace those mids going into senior roles.
Also this move for WFH, well doesn't matter if the person is in Basingstoke or Bucharest.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
It's cheaper to hire an Indonesian or Malaysian software dev with a couple of years under their belt than an illiterate 18 year old on the minimum wage in the UK.
You don't even need to go as far as that, even Romania, Latvia or Lithuania work for hiring junior level roles. It's pretty alarming because the talent pipeline in the UK for tech and finance is basically broken, very few people entering at the top in junior roles currently and lots of people exiting at the bottom in lead/head/VP level roles. It will be fine for the next 5-7 years because the middle is still very strong but eventually there's not enough juniors to replace those mids going into senior roles.
Also this move for WFH, well doesn't matter if the person is in Basingstoke or Bucharest.
It didn't matter before WFH. It won't matter if they got rid of WFH. The repo and task tracker is available everywhere.
My feeling is not just LLMs but outsourcing, the old advice of go do x or y course because it sets up for a wide range of possible careers is now the wrong advice. Specialism is where it is at. You need to become very knowledgeable in some niche within a niche.
The 'bumps' people suggest are the result of matters outside the government's control - GFC and QE, Covid and lockdown, Ukraine and Energy costs etc. Other countries have managed these crises without government intervention - Iceland, Sweden, Taiwan and Uruguay for Covid. Iceland (again) for the banks.
So to pose the question? Are Western governments so afraid of their populace that they will simply pay-up to avoid confrontation with media-induced frenzies and pass the cost onto future generations?
Have we all reached the 'bread and circuses' stage?
The interesting thing here, for me, is how much bigger the impact was from GFC than from Covid. I'm not sure we fully appreciated the impact at the time of the GFC (I didn't!)
IIRC Alastair Darling's borrowing forecasts increased by over half a trillion between two statements to the House.
Half the people I worked with lost their jobs (through no fault of their own or the business).
While some guardianistas joked about the 'mancession'.
The issue isn't that debt heads up during times of crisis; it's that it doesn't look as if it's particularly heading down during the good times. And yes, right now *should* be a good time debt wise with oil prices fairly low, stock markets buoyant and ourselves not directly involved in a major war.
Historically there wasn't a particular debt spike in the 30s for the very late 20s stock market crash either - which suggests perhaps too much state intervention following the GFC... - various large wars (Napoleonic; WW1; WW2) did put the debt up but following those wars we were obviously able to run a surplus to get things back under control again.
I saw a really interesting video the other day that North Korea are jumping on the outsourced / remote working training, getting their tech savvy citizens to interview for jobs in the West complete using fake CV and enablers in the West to give them the right IDs.
Cool and very blowy here aboard the Queen Anne. We've just made two aborted attempts to dock in Stornoway. High winds, Rough sea. Now heading out to open water to turn around for our third attempt. Four hours behind schedule. The Company is providing line dancing in the Queens Ballroom to keep our spirits up!
The 'bumps' people suggest are the result of matters outside the government's control - GFC and QE, Covid and lockdown, Ukraine and Energy costs etc. Other countries have managed these crises without government intervention - Iceland, Sweden, Taiwan and Uruguay for Covid. Iceland (again) for the banks.
So to pose the question? Are Western governments so afraid of their populace that they will simply pay-up to avoid confrontation with media-induced frenzies and pass the cost onto future generations?
Have we all reached the 'bread and circuses' stage?
The problem is that recessions are part of the economic cycle and should be accounted for in the cycle. The cycle should be debt rising during and immediately after the recession, then falling afterwards, before the next one hits again.
The problem is Gordon Brown claimed (falsely) to have abolished boom and bust and broke the cycle. He may have abolished booms, but busts still happen, as they inevitably always will.
When the recession hit in 2008 we should have had falling debt-to-GDP and a budget surplus, as we did in 2002. It was a political choice, not economics or a cycle, that meant we had rising debt-to-GDP even before the financial crisis hit.
That was a catastrophic mistake.
In 2020 we didn't have a budget surplus but we at least had falling debt-to-GDP in the preceding years, so the impact of a global pandemic ended up being less than the impact of a fairly routine economic crisis in 2008, as we weren't so horrifically exposed with rising debt even before the crisis hit.
The 'bumps' people suggest are the result of matters outside the government's control - GFC and QE, Covid and lockdown, Ukraine and Energy costs etc. Other countries have managed these crises without government intervention - Iceland, Sweden, Taiwan and Uruguay for Covid. Iceland (again) for the banks.
So to pose the question? Are Western governments so afraid of their populace that they will simply pay-up to avoid confrontation with media-induced frenzies and pass the cost onto future generations?
Have we all reached the 'bread and circuses' stage?
The interesting thing here, for me, is how much bigger the impact was from GFC than from Covid. I'm not sure we fully appreciated the impact at the time of the GFC (I didn't!)
The issue is we entered the two differently.
We entered the GFC from a baseline of already rising debt to GDP.
We entered Covid from a baseline of falling debt to GDP.
If your baseline is debt to GDP is rising by 2% per annum, then the crisis worsens it by 8%, then you now have a 10% increase in debt.
If your baseline is debt to GDP is falling by 2% per annum, then the crisis worsens it by 8%, then you now have a 6% increase in debt.
Our pre-crisis deficit and change in debt-to-GDP matters as much, if not more, than the crisis itself. Most crises actually end up with fairly similar amounts of countercyclical expenditure, but the difference is what that countercyclical expenditure is being added to.
I saw a really interesting video the other day that North Korea are jumping on the outsourced / remote working training, getting their tech savvy citizens to interview for jobs in the West complete using fake CV and enablers in the West to give them the right IDs.
I recently sifted for a couple of jobs at my place. I reckon half of the applications were AI generated. What gets me is, they were very obviously AI generated. I guess companies sift with AI, so perhaps the sifting AI doesn't pick up that they are dealing with AI applications and just likes all the buzzwords.
Cool and very blowy here aboard the Queen Anne. We've just made two aborted attempts to dock in Stornoway. High winds, Rough sea. Now heading out to open water to turn around for our third attempt. Four hours behind schedule. The Company is providing line dancing in the Queens Ballroom to keep our spirits up!
Preparation for the lines for the lifeboats - to music of course.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
“Swerve Uni and learn a trade” might be the best advice for school leavers. For those in London & SE it might be better to relocate up North for couple of years and get on the property ladder with the money you’ll save
For all but the top 10% of leavers by grade maybe but the top 10% will still provide the lawyers, doctors and bankers and engineers and teachers and academics we need and except for those in education still earn more on average than plumbers and electricians and builders.
ChatGPT and AI though is clearly reducing the level of entry level graduate jobs and if that leads to higher unemployment inevitably that will see yet further rise in support for populist parties
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
My son nearly had a fit when his son, four or five years ago, suggested doing a degree in Golf Management. Turns out it might have been a better bet than that which he actually did, history.
Even history is probably more use than Romanticism and the Lakes - which is what twin B did.
She is starting to regret her chose of GCSEs which rather limited her options forever afterwards as I warned her at the time.
Grandson has, post degree, gone to Australia on a work visa. Valid for a year, easily apparently, extendable to two. Currently working in a bar, which he did while at Uni. Doesn't, ATM, know where, or what he'll end up doing.
Would you really want Rayner, Lammy, Reeves and all the other socialist idiots acting like they had a majority of 174?
The country can just about cope with their incompetence and spite as long as they are timid. We'll stagnate or gradually decline for a few years and then maybe choose more wisely next time.
A bolder Labour government would probably bankrupt us all - see Venezuela or Cuba.
Excellent header - the politicians have yielded power to The Process State. Strangely, this means that increasing numbers of people think the politicians are powerless.
The paradox of democracy - in Switzerland the voters have control. To the point they can remove laws against the wishes of the political class. And create laws, likewise.
Yet the result is *more* stable. Because they have power, the voters of Switzerland have to be responsible.
Given a Swiss setup, the first thing., in the U.K., would be a visit to the IMF. Then people would learn
Switzerland is one of the wealthiest and most educated nations on earth.
Swiss voters are only trusted to have more referendums therefore as they won't use them mainly as populist protest votes as most voters elsewhere often do
It’s more that politicians in Switzerland have to sell their policies or follow what the voters want. “All the respectable parties agree that you can’t have X” isn’t a plan.
No, it is more that Swiss voters have a very high average gdp per capita of $99,000 and are also highly educated so won't just vote for low taxes for themselves and massive spending on themselves with spending cuts only for those on less than them and tax rises only for those earning more than them like voters in most nations would
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
“Swerve Uni and learn a trade” might be the best advice for school leavers. For those in London & SE it might be better to relocate up North for couple of years and get on the property ladder with the money you’ll save
For all but the top 10% of leavers by grade maybe but the top 10% will still provide the lawyers, doctors and bankers and engineers and teachers and academics we need and except for those in education still earn more on average than plumbers and electricians and builders.
ChatGPT and AI though is clearly reducing the level of entry level graduate jobs and if that leads to higher unemployment inevitably that will see yet further rise in support for populist parties
Don't be so sure, the going rate for a fully qualified electrician in London is about £450 per day at the moment according to a friend in the construction industry. Some senior people in those vocations will outearn that rate but it won't be a massive number.
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?
My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".
None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.
Would you really want Rayner, Lammy, Reeves and all the other socialist idiots acting like they had a majority of 174?
The country can just about cope with their incompetence and spite as long as they are timid. We'll stagnate or gradually decline for a few years and then maybe choose more wisely next time.
A bolder Labour government would probably bankrupt us all - see Venezuela or Cuba.
Excellent header - the politicians have yielded power to The Process State. Strangely, this means that increasing numbers of people think the politicians are powerless.
The paradox of democracy - in Switzerland the voters have control. To the point they can remove laws against the wishes of the political class. And create laws, likewise.
Yet the result is *more* stable. Because they have power, the voters of Switzerland have to be responsible.
Given a Swiss setup, the first thing., in the U.K., would be a visit to the IMF. Then people would learn
Switzerland is one of the wealthiest and most educated nations on earth.
Swiss voters are only trusted to have more referendums therefore as they won't use them mainly as populist protest votes as most voters elsewhere often do
It’s more that politicians in Switzerland have to sell their policies or follow what the voters want. “All the respectable parties agree that you can’t have X” isn’t a plan.
No, it is more that Swiss voters have a very high average gdp per capita of $99,000 and are also highly educated so won't just vote for low taxes for themselves and massive spending on themselves with spending cuts only for those on less than them and tax rises only for those earning more than them like voters in most nations would
We don't teach languages well enough in this country, nor do we we, thanks to Brexit, encourage our young people to 'spread their wings' in Europe.
I saw a really interesting video the other day that North Korea are jumping on the outsourced / remote working training, getting their tech savvy citizens to interview for jobs in the West complete using fake CV and enablers in the West to give them the right IDs.
I recently sifted for a couple of jobs at my place. I reckon half of the applications were AI generated. What gets me is, they were very obviously AI generated. I guess companies sift with AI, so perhaps the sifting AI doesn't pick up that they are dealing with AI applications and just likes all the buzzwords.
It's trivially easy to get through ATS, just ask your favourite LLM to generate a CV to get through ATS and it generally works. It's not even a cat and mouse now, I remember towards the end of my last job we had to reintroduce manual sifting and non-obvious keyword matching for roles where we had thousands of applications like those highly coveted junior and mid level ones.
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?
My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".
None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.
Under the Tories no bank was allowed to operate at 70:1 leverage after Barings went bankrupt. That was all on Labour and that's what created the crash in the UK. In retrospect the government should have let RBS and HBOS go bankrupt and only guaranteed 100% of customer deposits. Bailing out the financial services industry and socialising their losses set a terrible precedent and we're still paying for it today.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
My son nearly had a fit when his son, four or five years ago, suggested doing a degree in Golf Management. Turns out it might have been a better bet than that which he actually did, history.
Yes, it is ironic that a number of Micky Mouse degrees are actually more vocational than traditional subjects, where university is more of a finishing school and networking opportunity.
The 'bumps' people suggest are the result of matters outside the government's control - GFC and QE, Covid and lockdown, Ukraine and Energy costs etc. Other countries have managed these crises without government intervention - Iceland, Sweden, Taiwan and Uruguay for Covid. Iceland (again) for the banks.
So to pose the question? Are Western governments so afraid of their populace that they will simply pay-up to avoid confrontation with media-induced frenzies and pass the cost onto future generations?
Have we all reached the 'bread and circuses' stage?
The interesting thing here, for me, is how much bigger the impact was from GFC than from Covid. I'm not sure we fully appreciated the impact at the time of the GFC (I didn't!)
...We entered Covid from a baseline of falling debt to GDP...
Did we? From the graph it appears that debt as a %age of GDP was either stable or very slowly dropping, which makes me think that nominal debt was still rising, albeit slowly.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
My son nearly had a fit when his son, four or five years ago, suggested doing a degree in Golf Management. Turns out it might have been a better bet than that which he actually did, history.
Golf is a big chunk of our leisure and tourist industry and is something this country does rather well. Getting a degree in its management is perfectly sensible, even though it might appear in the occasional 'Look at the crap courses universities are offering our kids' article in the Daily Mail.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
My son nearly had a fit when his son, four or five years ago, suggested doing a degree in Golf Management. Turns out it might have been a better bet than that which he actually did, history.
Yes, it is ironic that a number of Micky Mouse degrees are actually more vocational than traditional subjects, where university is more of a finishing school and networking opportunity.
There are plenty of proper Micky Mouse degrees. The wide argument is that seemingly all Higher Education have been turned into a 3-4 full time degree. Golf Course Management i.e. Green's Keeping, is a real vocation and you require to know a fair bit about a lot of things around turf technology. Does that require a 3 year full time degree and racking up £50k in debt (which in reality will never be paid off) or is a better route you do 2 days a week at college and work at a golf course.
And as I have said before, the other issue is all the these HE institutions becoming universities, they then have to offer a much wider range of courses (many of which are outside their areas of specialism) and somebody somewhere has to foot the bill for all the facilities that a university requires compared to a HE college.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
My son nearly had a fit when his son, four or five years ago, suggested doing a degree in Golf Management. Turns out it might have been a better bet than that which he actually did, history.
Golf is a big chunk of our leisure and tourist industry and is something this country does rather well. Getting a degree in its management is perfectly sensible, even though it might appear in the occasional 'Look at the crap courses universities are offering our kids' article in the Daily Mail.
I wondered about that, during the discussion. It's amazing how my son reacted like his grandfather, my father would have. Terrible thing, genetics!
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?
My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".
None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.
Under the Tories no bank was allowed to operate at 70:1 leverage after Barings went bankrupt. That was all on Labour and that's what created the crash in the UK. In retrospect the government should have let RBS and HBOS go bankrupt and only guaranteed 100% of customer deposits. Bailing out the financial services industry and socialising their losses set a terrible precedent and we're still paying for it today.
Actually that's not quite true: the whole developed world started using Basel-2 Risk Based Capital metrics for banking solvency, and that dramatically understated the riskiness of residential mortgages. (Or perhaps more accurately, it was an example of Soros's reflexively, where the apparent risklessness of mortgages drove their availability, and therefore made them riskier.)
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
My son nearly had a fit when his son, four or five years ago, suggested doing a degree in Golf Management. Turns out it might have been a better bet than that which he actually did, history.
Yes, it is ironic that a number of Micky Mouse degrees are actually more vocational than traditional subjects, where university is more of a finishing school and networking opportunity.
There are plenty of proper Micky Mouse degrees. The wide argument is that seemingly all Higher Education have been turned into a 3-4 full time degree. Golf Course Management i.e. Green's Keeping, is a real vocation and you require to know a fair bit about a lot of things around turf technology. Does that require a 3 year full time degree and racking up £50k in debt (which in reality will never be paid off) or is a better route you do 2 days a week at college and work at a golf course.
And as I have said before, the other issue is all the these HE institutions becoming universities, they then have to offer a much wider range of courses (many of which are outside their areas of specialism) and somebody somewhere has to foot the bill for all the facilities that a university requires compared to a HE college.
Did you know that Disney has its own management education center that gives out qualifications: they truly can be called Mickey Mouse degrees.
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?
My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".
None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.
Actually, Darling probably deserves as much credit for dealing with the crisis.
In any event, though, it's rather less difficult to deal with a crisis that actually ensure long term stability and growth. Sorting out your own mess deserves credit - but it hardly makes him a great PM.
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?
My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".
None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.
Under the Tories no bank was allowed to operate at 70:1 leverage after Barings went bankrupt. That was all on Labour and that's what created the crash in the UK. In retrospect the government should have let RBS and HBOS go bankrupt and only guaranteed 100% of customer deposits. Bailing out the financial services industry and socialising their losses set a terrible precedent and we're still paying for it today.
Northern Rock would of course have had to go bankrupt too on that basis.
The Bush administration of course let Lehmans go bankrupt with no bailout by contrast
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
My son nearly had a fit when his son, four or five years ago, suggested doing a degree in Golf Management. Turns out it might have been a better bet than that which he actually did, history.
Yes, it is ironic that a number of Micky Mouse degrees are actually more vocational than traditional subjects, where university is more of a finishing school and networking opportunity.
There are plenty of proper Micky Mouse degrees. The wide argument is that seemingly all Higher Education have been turned into a 3-4 full time degree. Golf Course Management i.e. Green's Keeping, is a real vocation and you require to know a fair bit about a lot of things around turf technology. Does that require a 3 year full time degree and racking up £50k in debt (which in reality will never be paid off) or is a better route you do 2 days a week at college and work at a golf course.
And as I have said before, the other issue is all the these HE institutions becoming universities, they then have to offer a much wider range of courses (many of which are outside their areas of specialism) and somebody somewhere has to foot the bill for all the facilities that a university requires compared to a HE college.
Probably not - though if that's what you end up doing, it's still far better value than blowing £50k on a history degree. (Even if the latter would be of far greater value to me.)
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?
My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".
None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.
Under the Tories no bank was allowed to operate at 70:1 leverage after Barings went bankrupt. That was all on Labour and that's what created the crash in the UK. In retrospect the government should have let RBS and HBOS go bankrupt and only guaranteed 100% of customer deposits. Bailing out the financial services industry and socialising their losses set a terrible precedent and we're still paying for it today.
Northern Rock would of course have had to go bankrupt too on that basis.
The Bush administration of course let Lehmans go bankrupt with no bailout by contrast
Also fine. Bailing out the banks was a shit idea, the government should have, on day one just guaranteed 100% of customer deposits and then let the banks themselves go under then let the assets get sold off piecemeal. Let the shareholders and bondholders take the hit.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
“Swerve Uni and learn a trade” might be the best advice for school leavers. For those in London & SE it might be better to relocate up North for couple of years and get on the property ladder with the money you’ll save
For all but the top 10% of leavers by grade maybe but the top 10% will still provide the lawyers, doctors and bankers and engineers and teachers and academics we need and except for those in education still earn more on average than plumbers and electricians and builders.
ChatGPT and AI though is clearly reducing the level of entry level graduate jobs and if that leads to higher unemployment inevitably that will see yet further rise in support for populist parties
Don't be so sure, the going rate for a fully qualified electrician in London is about £450 per day at the moment according to a friend in the construction industry. Some senior people in those vocations will outearn that rate but it won't be a massive number.
Which is still less than a newly qualified city solicitor or commercial barrister or investment banker would earn and much less than a partner, member of a FTSE company board or KC would earn.
Though yes at present a good electrician can earn a well above average wage, if most school leavers trained to be electricians however the laws of supply and demand would soon see electricians wages plunge
Renewables have actually improved Texas grid stability. The only thing the state is not doing to give itself an ideal energy setup is building greater connectivity with the rest of the US grid.
It's peak demand time right now in Texas. A thousand megawatts of gas & coal plants have gone offline TODAY, more than 10,000 total. Plenty of power bc solar is cranking out >23,000 megawatts ON PEAK. Your policy is one of energy subtraction that will hurt grid reliability and raise costs... https://x.com/douglewinenergy/status/1939076032239165678
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?
My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".
None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.
Under the Tories no bank was allowed to operate at 70:1 leverage after Barings went bankrupt. That was all on Labour and that's what created the crash in the UK. In retrospect the government should have let RBS and HBOS go bankrupt and only guaranteed 100% of customer deposits. Bailing out the financial services industry and socialising their losses set a terrible precedent and we're still paying for it today.
Northern Rock would of course have had to go bankrupt too on that basis.
The Bush administration of course let Lehmans go bankrupt with no bailout by contrast
Also fine. Bailing out the banks was a shit idea, the government should have, on day one just guaranteed 100% of customer deposits and then let the banks themselves go under then let the assets get sold off piecemeal. Let the shareholders and bondholders take the hit.
On a pure capitalist basis yes but that would probably have led not just to recession but depression and mass unemployment not seen since the 1930s and we all know where that led.
The remaining banks would also have stopped lending to businesses large and small and getting a mortgage would have become near impossible
On ISAs more generally, I'm concerned about the pressure to abolish or severely restrict cash ISAs (leaving stocks and shares ISAs untouched).
This pressure is coming from the financial services industry surprise surprise. I'm hoping that Reeves is not fooled but I don't have high hopes.
I think she sees it as a chance to artificially boost growth.
How? The change would divert savings from the banking sector to the financial services industry. More tax would be raised from those who will not expose their money to risk and therefore have increased taxable savings interest.
Last place on earth I would want to put money in is UK equities or any managed fund.
If forced to do it I suspect we would see even more money in the low cost global trackers and a large amount of stock and share ISAs attached to cash like substitute products
There are UK stocks as good and better than any for making money.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
My son nearly had a fit when his son, four or five years ago, suggested doing a degree in Golf Management. Turns out it might have been a better bet than that which he actually did, history.
Yes, it is ironic that a number of Micky Mouse degrees are actually more vocational than traditional subjects, where university is more of a finishing school and networking opportunity.
There are plenty of proper Micky Mouse degrees. The wide argument is that seemingly all Higher Education have been turned into a 3-4 full time degree. Golf Course Management i.e. Green's Keeping, is a real vocation and you require to know a fair bit about a lot of things around turf technology. Does that require a 3 year full time degree and racking up £50k in debt (which in reality will never be paid off) or is a better route you do 2 days a week at college and work at a golf course.
And as I have said before, the other issue is all the these HE institutions becoming universities, they then have to offer a much wider range of courses (many of which are outside their areas of specialism) and somebody somewhere has to foot the bill for all the facilities that a university requires compared to a HE college.
Probably not - though if that's what you end up doing, it's still far better value than blowing £50k on a history degree. (Even if the latter would be of far greater value to me.)
One of grandson's grouses about his degree was that because of Covid the trips he was expecting didn't happen, and many lectures and tutorials were on line only. He also didn't have the social life that his father, who had an engineering degree, had reminisced about.
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?
My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".
None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.
Under the Tories no bank was allowed to operate at 70:1 leverage after Barings went bankrupt. That was all on Labour and that's what created the crash in the UK. In retrospect the government should have let RBS and HBOS go bankrupt and only guaranteed 100% of customer deposits. Bailing out the financial services industry and socialising their losses set a terrible precedent and we're still paying for it today.
Actually that's not quite true: the whole developed world started using Basel-2 Risk Based Capital metrics for banking solvency, and that dramatically understated the riskiness of residential mortgages. (Or perhaps more accurately, it was an example of Soros's reflexively, where the apparent risklessness of mortgages drove their availability, and therefore made them riskier.)
It still beggars belief that we bought into the US group think on the mortage debt when we had very recent experience of a house price crash right here, and especially in the south east.
25% house price inflation should have been setting off all sorts of alarm bells.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
My son nearly had a fit when his son, four or five years ago, suggested doing a degree in Golf Management. Turns out it might have been a better bet than that which he actually did, history.
Yes, it is ironic that a number of Micky Mouse degrees are actually more vocational than traditional subjects, where university is more of a finishing school and networking opportunity.
There are plenty of proper Micky Mouse degrees. The wide argument is that seemingly all Higher Education have been turned into a 3-4 full time degree. Golf Course Management i.e. Green's Keeping, is a real vocation and you require to know a fair bit about a lot of things around turf technology. Does that require a 3 year full time degree and racking up £50k in debt (which in reality will never be paid off) or is a better route you do 2 days a week at college and work at a golf course.
And as I have said before, the other issue is all the these HE institutions becoming universities, they then have to offer a much wider range of courses (many of which are outside their areas of specialism) and somebody somewhere has to foot the bill for all the facilities that a university requires compared to a HE college.
Probably not - though if that's what you end up doing, it's still far better value than blowing £50k on a history degree. (Even if the latter would be of far greater value to me.)
Not if you want to be a history teacher or professor or work in a museum
Would you really want Rayner, Lammy, Reeves and all the other socialist idiots acting like they had a majority of 174?
The country can just about cope with their incompetence and spite as long as they are timid. We'll stagnate or gradually decline for a few years and then maybe choose more wisely next time.
A bolder Labour government would probably bankrupt us all - see Venezuela or Cuba.
Excellent header - the politicians have yielded power to The Process State. Strangely, this means that increasing numbers of people think the politicians are powerless.
The paradox of democracy - in Switzerland the voters have control. To the point they can remove laws against the wishes of the political class. And create laws, likewise.
Yet the result is *more* stable. Because they have power, the voters of Switzerland have to be responsible.
Given a Swiss setup, the first thing., in the U.K., would be a visit to the IMF. Then people would learn
Switzerland is one of the wealthiest and most educated nations on earth.
Swiss voters are only trusted to have more referendums therefore as they won't use them mainly as populist protest votes as most voters elsewhere often do
It’s more that politicians in Switzerland have to sell their policies or follow what the voters want. “All the respectable parties agree that you can’t have X” isn’t a plan.
No, it is more that Swiss voters have a very high average gdp per capita of $99,000 and are also highly educated so won't just vote for low taxes for themselves and massive spending on themselves with spending cuts only for those on less than them and tax rises only for those earning more than them like voters in most nations would
We don't teach languages well enough in this country, nor do we we, thanks to Brexit, encourage our young people to 'spread their wings' in Europe.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
“Swerve Uni and learn a trade” might be the best advice for school leavers. For those in London & SE it might be better to relocate up North for couple of years and get on the property ladder with the money you’ll save
My nieces are nine and six. I'm glad they're not a few years older. Hopefully by the time they are making those big decisions, we'll have a better understanding of the impact of a lot of changes.
But not yet a better understanding of whatever the next wave of changes over the horizon is...
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?
My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".
None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.
Under the Tories no bank was allowed to operate at 70:1 leverage after Barings went bankrupt. That was all on Labour and that's what created the crash in the UK. In retrospect the government should have let RBS and HBOS go bankrupt and only guaranteed 100% of customer deposits. Bailing out the financial services industry and socialising their losses set a terrible precedent and we're still paying for it today.
Northern Rock would of course have had to go bankrupt too on that basis.
The Bush administration of course let Lehmans go bankrupt with no bailout by contrast
Also fine. Bailing out the banks was a shit idea, the government should have, on day one just guaranteed 100% of customer deposits and then let the banks themselves go under then let the assets get sold off piecemeal. Let the shareholders and bondholders take the hit.
I would frame it as "let the market clear". The big jump in government debt was the price of failing to do that.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
My son nearly had a fit when his son, four or five years ago, suggested doing a degree in Golf Management. Turns out it might have been a better bet than that which he actually did, history.
Even history is probably more use than Romanticism and the Lakes - which is what twin B did.
She is starting to regret her chose of GCSEs which rather limited her options forever afterwards as I warned her at the time.
Grandson has, post degree, gone to Australia on a work visa. Valid for a year, easily apparently, extendable to two. Currently working in a bar, which he did while at Uni. Doesn't, ATM, know where, or what he'll end up doing.
He'll need to work out quickly as he will need to fit into a particular category. I have a lot of family there. Most went to Sydney on visas but the last one had to go to Western Australia due to restriction on visa numbers. None of the second generation have any interest in coming back here.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
My son nearly had a fit when his son, four or five years ago, suggested doing a degree in Golf Management. Turns out it might have been a better bet than that which he actually did, history.
Yes, it is ironic that a number of Micky Mouse degrees are actually more vocational than traditional subjects, where university is more of a finishing school and networking opportunity.
There are plenty of proper Micky Mouse degrees. The wide argument is that seemingly all Higher Education have been turned into a 3-4 full time degree. Golf Course Management i.e. Green's Keeping, is a real vocation and you require to know a fair bit about a lot of things around turf technology. Does that require a 3 year full time degree and racking up £50k in debt (which in reality will never be paid off) or is a better route you do 2 days a week at college and work at a golf course.
And as I have said before, the other issue is all the these HE institutions becoming universities, they then have to offer a much wider range of courses (many of which are outside their areas of specialism) and somebody somewhere has to foot the bill for all the facilities that a university requires compared to a HE college.
Probably not - though if that's what you end up doing, it's still far better value than blowing £50k on a history degree. (Even if the latter would be of far greater value to me.)
There lies the problem. We have a difficulty in our society of working out whether HE and education generally is about intrinsic value and humanistic development, or whether it is firstly about the jobs market and devil take the hindmost. And even if you can work that out, then putting a price on knowing about Elamite cuneiform as opposed to the price of golf course management or being a solicitor.
There has always been a tension between the principles. IMHO the costs have tilted the seesaw too much in the direction of job/money based courses.
The figures attached are a bit old, but show the trend.
Would you really want Rayner, Lammy, Reeves and all the other socialist idiots acting like they had a majority of 174?
The country can just about cope with their incompetence and spite as long as they are timid. We'll stagnate or gradually decline for a few years and then maybe choose more wisely next time.
A bolder Labour government would probably bankrupt us all - see Venezuela or Cuba.
Excellent header - the politicians have yielded power to The Process State. Strangely, this means that increasing numbers of people think the politicians are powerless.
The paradox of democracy - in Switzerland the voters have control. To the point they can remove laws against the wishes of the political class. And create laws, likewise.
Yet the result is *more* stable. Because they have power, the voters of Switzerland have to be responsible.
Given a Swiss setup, the first thing., in the U.K., would be a visit to the IMF. Then people would learn
Switzerland is one of the wealthiest and most educated nations on earth.
Swiss voters are only trusted to have more referendums therefore as they won't use them mainly as populist protest votes as most voters elsewhere often do
It’s more that politicians in Switzerland have to sell their policies or follow what the voters want. “All the respectable parties agree that you can’t have X” isn’t a plan.
No, it is more that Swiss voters have a very high average gdp per capita of $99,000 and are also highly educated so won't just vote for low taxes for themselves and massive spending on themselves with spending cuts only for those on less than them and tax rises only for those earning more than them like voters in most nations would
We don't teach languages well enough in this country, nor do we we, thanks to Brexit, encourage our young people to 'spread their wings' in Europe.
English is the best language in the world!
It's a very useful commercial language, undoubtedly, but being fluent in English alone can be restricting. Unless one is doing business solely with Anglophone countries. Which neither of my sons do.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
My son nearly had a fit when his son, four or five years ago, suggested doing a degree in Golf Management. Turns out it might have been a better bet than that which he actually did, history.
Yes, it is ironic that a number of Micky Mouse degrees are actually more vocational than traditional subjects, where university is more of a finishing school and networking opportunity.
There are plenty of proper Micky Mouse degrees. The wide argument is that seemingly all Higher Education have been turned into a 3-4 full time degree. Golf Course Management i.e. Green's Keeping, is a real vocation and you require to know a fair bit about a lot of things around turf technology. Does that require a 3 year full time degree and racking up £50k in debt (which in reality will never be paid off) or is a better route you do 2 days a week at college and work at a golf course.
And as I have said before, the other issue is all the these HE institutions becoming universities, they then have to offer a much wider range of courses (many of which are outside their areas of specialism) and somebody somewhere has to foot the bill for all the facilities that a university requires compared to a HE college.
Probably not - though if that's what you end up doing, it's still far better value than blowing £50k on a history degree. (Even if the latter would be of far greater value to me.)
Not if you want to be a history teacher or professor or work in a museum
I was talking about of you ended up in golf course management (or an equivalent trade).
The argument was about Mickey Mouse / vocational degrees. My point is that while they certainly ought to be far better structured (something along the lines of part time study coupled with apprenticeship, perhaps), for those ending up in those jobs they're still far better value than an art degree.
The 'bumps' people suggest are the result of matters outside the government's control - GFC and QE, Covid and lockdown, Ukraine and Energy costs etc. Other countries have managed these crises without government intervention - Iceland, Sweden, Taiwan and Uruguay for Covid. Iceland (again) for the banks.
So to pose the question? Are Western governments so afraid of their populace that they will simply pay-up to avoid confrontation with media-induced frenzies and pass the cost onto future generations?
Have we all reached the 'bread and circuses' stage?
The problem is that recessions are part of the economic cycle and should be accounted for in the cycle. The cycle should be debt rising during and immediately after the recession, then falling afterwards, before the next one hits again.
The problem is Gordon Brown claimed (falsely) to have abolished boom and bust and broke the cycle. He may have abolished booms, but busts still happen, as they inevitably always will.
When the recession hit in 2008 we should have had falling debt-to-GDP and a budget surplus, as we did in 2002. It was a political choice, not economics or a cycle, that meant we had rising debt-to-GDP even before the financial crisis hit.
That was a catastrophic mistake.
In 2020 we didn't have a budget surplus but we at least had falling debt-to-GDP in the preceding years, so the impact of a global pandemic ended up being less than the impact of a fairly routine economic crisis in 2008, as we weren't so horrifically exposed with rising debt even before the crisis hit.
I remember telling a derivatives trader (who was having a cig) as I entered the building (ABN-AMRO) that Ed Balls had declared an end to boom-and-bust on TV. He went pale and started phoning people.
Entry-level jobs in freefall after launch of ChatGPT
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
My son nearly had a fit when his son, four or five years ago, suggested doing a degree in Golf Management. Turns out it might have been a better bet than that which he actually did, history.
Yes, it is ironic that a number of Micky Mouse degrees are actually more vocational than traditional subjects, where university is more of a finishing school and networking opportunity.
There are plenty of proper Micky Mouse degrees. The wide argument is that seemingly all Higher Education have been turned into a 3-4 full time degree. Golf Course Management i.e. Green's Keeping, is a real vocation and you require to know a fair bit about a lot of things around turf technology. Does that require a 3 year full time degree and racking up £50k in debt (which in reality will never be paid off) or is a better route you do 2 days a week at college and work at a golf course.
And as I have said before, the other issue is all the these HE institutions becoming universities, they then have to offer a much wider range of courses (many of which are outside their areas of specialism) and somebody somewhere has to foot the bill for all the facilities that a university requires compared to a HE college.
Probably not - though if that's what you end up doing, it's still far better value than blowing £50k on a history degree. (Even if the latter would be of far greater value to me.)
One of grandson's grouses about his degree was that because of Covid the trips he was expecting didn't happen, and many lectures and tutorials were on line only. He also didn't have the social life that his father, who had an engineering degree, had reminisced about.
Anecdotally there was a lot of parties during covid in University halls of residence.
And unless you were one of the really unlucky cohort lockdown would only have affected a part of your course.
I think some Unis and some courses took a long time to get back to face to face and probably have kept some remote activity. But we shouldn't forget that everyone was affected, not just students.
An interesting piece in The Guardian - Britain is sick. Massive inequality and chronic poverty combined with front line service cuts means an NHS under siege and incurring enormous costs from people made ill by previous cuts.
I'll keep making this point until the hard of thinking (hello Labour!!!) get it - cuts without reform cost more money than you save.
We're going to need to spend more now on actual frontline healthcare to save a lot more in the long term and that means making savings on the stuff we are wasting money on. Cutting sickness welfare is not the answer, making people healthier is.
Indeed. So much of Cameron and Osborne's programme of savings and long-term prudence turned out to be anything but that. Avoiding productive long-term investments, like the current governments crazy decision to scrap most of their green growth plan, can have parallel effects in the economic sphere.
The problem comes when trying to get people to acknowledge that there is a limit to spending. We have plenty of MPs who quite simply don’t believe that you can’t just stick it on the national credit card
Indeed, but, conversely, this can also just as easily become a fetishisation of cuts in themselves, and as an end in themselves.
Cameron and Osborne shouted this narrative almost every day, and yet they left the country in an even worse condition than when they started.
The problem they had was a structural deficit.
The response was *reduce the rate of increase of government spending* to above inflation, but below the rate of increase in GDP. Spending was never actually cut, overall.
So the key question is where do you cut, and where do you borrow or spend. Cameron and Osbourne seem to have got the calculus badly wrong, and all the bills are coming in now.
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Invent a time machine and tell people to vote Tory in 1997?
For an even bigger financial bubble and crash, yes.
How? Ken Clarke would have kept control of interest rates and would have raised taxes during the 97-01 term. The bubble was all on Brown and Blair.
The MBS and derivatives bubble (and subsequent crash and credit crunch) would have happened anyway assuming no change in America. The key question therefore is, would the City under the Tories have been more or less likely to become a feckless Wall St tribute act?
My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".
None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.
Under the Tories no bank was allowed to operate at 70:1 leverage after Barings went bankrupt. That was all on Labour and that's what created the crash in the UK. In retrospect the government should have let RBS and HBOS go bankrupt and only guaranteed 100% of customer deposits. Bailing out the financial services industry and socialising their losses set a terrible precedent and we're still paying for it today.
Northern Rock would of course have had to go bankrupt too on that basis.
The Bush administration of course let Lehmans go bankrupt with no bailout by contrast
Also fine. Bailing out the banks was a shit idea, the government should have, on day one just guaranteed 100% of customer deposits and then let the banks themselves go under then let the assets get sold off piecemeal. Let the shareholders and bondholders take the hit.
I would frame it as "let the market clear". The big jump in government debt was the price of failing to do that.
Yes because it is not as if the banking system is deeply integrated into the wider economy. Obviously wages would be paid as normal and trade payments and receipts continue without banks. Or would they?
The trouble with simplistic ‘rescue X and let Y die’ solutions is the whole system is interlocked in unknown and probably unknowable ways.
Comments
The PM surely does not expect anyone to believe he did not realise taking over £5billion from the disabled was wrong because he was abroad
https://x.com/hackneyabbott/status/1939592745045115014?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
Neither unlimited spending or a Caneroonist narrativeil of cuts are going to get is out of this, I would say.
Rut like pigs and produce fresh taxpayers you scumbags
It would be interesting to know what the average numbers and proportions are.
Of course if Reeves want people to risk more of their money she needs to stop any talk of restrictions on DC pensions.
Swiss voters are only trusted to have more referendums therefore as they won't use them mainly as populist protest votes as most voters elsewhere often do
https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article/antonelli-handed-three-place-grid-penalty-for-silverstone-after-verstappen.7GIpi2rLTwmOXHW5VfgFWT
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/how-rishi-sunaks-election-nightmare-unfolded-6ddgxd6cj
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2024/09/28/the-blob/
The 'bumps' people suggest are the result of matters outside the government's control - GFC and QE, Covid and lockdown, Ukraine and Energy costs etc. Other countries have managed these crises without government intervention - Iceland, Sweden, Taiwan and Uruguay for Covid. Iceland (again) for the banks.
So to pose the question? Are Western governments so afraid of their populace that they will simply pay-up to avoid confrontation with media-induced frenzies and pass the cost onto future generations?
Have we all reached the 'bread and circuses' stage?
Yes - throwing money at the problem both makes it go away and makes the politician look good for the next couple of years because repayment only becomes a problem when you've left power.
In fact, a main difficulty with direct democracy is that it's virtually impossible to run a serious foreign policy.
Switzerland is small and surrounded by stable democracies so that doesn't really matter at the moment, but for a country with pretensions to great power status like our own, it is difficult to see how it would work - statesmen could not negotiate credibly if every action were subject to unpredictable referenda.
It would be like the US system, where every treaty has to be approved by 2/3 of the Senate, on steroids.
In terms of cattle grids, we have the type used in Cambridge to keep the sheep on the collage backs and off the road. I've seen a couple of outraged-tabloid "pandering to a few bloody cyclists" reports where the sheep got out, and the actual cause seems to be around getting an artist not a professional designer to design it, so it leaves loopholes.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-65925909
There's also an issue whether these are structurally strong enough to take motor vehicles, but they should be OK for public footpaths, multiuser trails etc.
There's this type of thing, which is sold as "wheelchair-friendly" (my photo quota), but imo is not thought through and designed following the assumptions of a third party. It is risky because wheelchairs can come off it, looks like sheep could cross it, and would struggle with eg 3 wheeler wheelchairs or carriages.
No grid is 100% - there were reports in Yorkshire of sheep rolling across 8ft wide traditional grids on their backs.
I'm working up some ideas to get my local NT estate to start them thinking about this, as a more controlled environment than out in the countryside, for a place to start. They let sheep mingle with the public and keep cattle fenced off (risk to people in the breeding season), and I think the answer to start with for accessible walks (alongside the traditional circuits on their map, and possibly a legal responsibility to provide) is to start inside the cattle grid zone around the property, and go from there.
For such places I'm interested in a sheep-resistant grid that can be laid across a traditional cattle grid as a possible trial, in the centre of a single track grid so most heavy vehicles would go either side. We'll see.
There's also the possibility that landowner should keep the livestock off the public highway - whether it is a public footpath or a public road. Certain landowners would be unhappy, but it's an issue that needs more thinking.
I don't see how we stop effwits letting them out for a laugh. But that applies to any gate anywhere, just as scrotes can ring your doorbell and run away, and is a policing thing.
It is similar to the bank loan question: if you owe the bank £1000 but have no assets, you have a problem. If you owe the bank £1,000,000,000 and have no assets the bank has a problem. Whose problem is the joint huge indebtedness of western nations?
Though tbf Kemi's deputy Mel Stride was upraiding Angela Rayner at PMQ about the UK's inability to control what was happening in the Middle East iirc, so perhaps they have aspirations.
Half the people I worked with lost their jobs (through no fault of their own or the business).
While some guardianistas joked about the 'mancession'.
There were 214,934 entry-level jobs on offer in May this year, down by 32pc from just three years ago, according to figures from online jobs board Adzuna. This decline is outpacing the number of overall vacancies, which have fallen from 1,091,909 to 858,465, or 21pc, over the same period.
“2025 looks like one of the most challenging years we’ve ever seen for 18 to 25-year-old jobseekers. Economic uncertainty, stagnant growth, low business confidence and sticky inflation are all contributing to rates of entry-level hiring being down significantly year on year."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/06/30/entry-level-jobs-in-free-fall-after-launch-of-chatgpt/
I role of LLMs in this is probably being overstated as a lot of businesses are still very wary / sceptical, all the other conditions thrown in though lead to a terrible mix.
What's very clear is that we couldn't afford a second bailout on that scale - the UK's credit simply isn't good enough now - and that Covid probably added another decade to the time needed to recover.
Turns out it might have been a better bet than that which he actually did, history.
We're all in this together was a nice slogan but the truth was we weren't and the oldies were give an opt out.
She is starting to regret her chose of GCSEs which rather limited her options forever afterwards as I warned her at the time.
Historically there wasn't a particular debt spike in the 30s for the very late 20s stock market crash either - which suggests perhaps too much state intervention following the GFC... - various large wars (Napoleonic; WW1; WW2) did put the debt up but following those wars we were obviously able to run a surplus to get things back under control again.
It's a parallel to Net Zero by Year X when the planet's CO2 emissions both continue and continue to rise.
https://x.com/JeremiahDJohns/status/1939396882511380519
Good enough for a moment, at least.
Not quite sure how that's going to play out over the next couple of years.
We've just made two aborted attempts to dock in Stornoway.
High winds, Rough sea.
Now heading out to open water to turn around for our third attempt.
Four hours behind schedule.
The Company is providing line dancing in the Queens Ballroom to keep our spirits up!
The problem is Gordon Brown claimed (falsely) to have abolished boom and bust and broke the cycle. He may have abolished booms, but busts still happen, as they inevitably always will.
When the recession hit in 2008 we should have had falling debt-to-GDP and a budget surplus, as we did in 2002. It was a political choice, not economics or a cycle, that meant we had rising debt-to-GDP even before the financial crisis hit.
That was a catastrophic mistake.
In 2020 we didn't have a budget surplus but we at least had falling debt-to-GDP in the preceding years, so the impact of a global pandemic ended up being less than the impact of a fairly routine economic crisis in 2008, as we weren't so horrifically exposed with rising debt even before the crisis hit.
We entered the GFC from a baseline of already rising debt to GDP.
We entered Covid from a baseline of falling debt to GDP.
If your baseline is debt to GDP is rising by 2% per annum, then the crisis worsens it by 8%, then you now have a 10% increase in debt.
If your baseline is debt to GDP is falling by 2% per annum, then the crisis worsens it by 8%, then you now have a 6% increase in debt.
Our pre-crisis deficit and change in debt-to-GDP matters as much, if not more, than the crisis itself. Most crises actually end up with fairly similar amounts of countercyclical expenditure, but the difference is what that countercyclical expenditure is being added to.
ChatGPT and AI though is clearly reducing the level of entry level graduate jobs and if that leads to higher unemployment inevitably that will see yet further rise in support for populist parties
My answer to this is certainly not less likely and most probably more. Yes, I know there was a speech by Peter Lilley. But that was an outlier and against the grain. In the years preceding the crash the Tory message was for lighter regulation because "those guys know what they're doing".
None of this is to excuse Brown btw. He got enamoured of the City (or rather its tax revenues) and took his eye off the ball. He dealt with the crisis brilliantly as PM but as Chancellor was culpable for our extreme vulnerability to it.
And as I have said before, the other issue is all the these HE institutions becoming universities, they then have to offer a much wider range of courses (many of which are outside their areas of specialism) and somebody somewhere has to foot the bill for all the facilities that a university requires compared to a HE college.
In any event, though, it's rather less difficult to deal with a crisis that actually ensure long term stability and growth. Sorting out your own mess deserves credit - but it hardly makes him a great PM.
The Bush administration of course let Lehmans go bankrupt with no bailout by contrast
Though yes at present a good electrician can earn a well above average wage, if most school leavers trained to be electricians however the laws of supply and demand would soon see electricians wages plunge
The only thing the state is not doing to give itself an ideal energy setup is building greater connectivity with the rest of the US grid.
It's peak demand time right now in Texas. A thousand megawatts of gas & coal plants have gone offline TODAY, more than 10,000 total. Plenty of power bc solar is cranking out >23,000 megawatts ON PEAK. Your policy is one of energy subtraction that will hurt grid reliability and raise costs...
https://x.com/douglewinenergy/status/1939076032239165678
The remaining banks would also have stopped lending to businesses large and small and getting a mortgage would have become near impossible
He also didn't have the social life that his father, who had an engineering degree, had reminisced about.
25% house price inflation should have been setting off all sorts of alarm bells.
There has always been a tension between the principles. IMHO the costs have tilted the seesaw too much in the direction of job/money based courses.
The figures attached are a bit old, but show the trend.
https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/19-01-2023/sb265-higher-education-student-statistics/subjects
https://x.com/benhabib6/status/1939563432757404127?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
Unless one is doing business solely with Anglophone countries. Which neither of my sons do.
The argument was about Mickey Mouse / vocational degrees.
My point is that while they certainly ought to be far better structured (something along the lines of part time study coupled with apprenticeship, perhaps), for those ending up in those jobs they're still far better value than an art degree.
https://x.com/F1BigData/status/1939396055155560887
So I probably started the run.
And unless you were one of the really unlucky cohort lockdown would only have affected a part of your course.
I think some Unis and some courses took a long time to get back to face to face and probably have kept some remote activity. But we shouldn't forget that everyone was affected, not just students.
The trouble with simplistic ‘rescue X and let Y die’ solutions is the whole system is interlocked in unknown and probably unknowable ways.
Is Mr Habib attempting to poach Rupert?
Is Mr Habib attempting to poach Rupert?