"hundreds of thousands of children lifted out of poverty" very Brownian spreadsheet thinking and talking
Though that is money that gets recycled quickly in our economy.
Much of our economy is driven by consumer spending. If consumers are skint then there is no growth.
There’s a large amount of money tied up in savings. Try freeing that up.
Saving money does free it up, unless saved in an old sock in notes and coins. Few would be able to buy a house but for the savings of others. All investment - new buildings, machinery, fleets of vehicles - comes from money not used for some other purpose. The general term for such money is 'savings'.
Yeh, I know how it works but thanks anyway 👍
Point being many consumers aren’t skint and choose not to spend.
Couple of factors there, I reckon.
The easy one is that everyone who can is squirrelling away more rainy day money than is collectively helpful. The feeling that the welfare state will only help in the most grudging sense if things go wrong (means testing, 2 child limit) doesn't help.
The harder one to solve is that the more you have, the harder it is to justify spending more on other stuff. Partly needs shading into wants, but also Sam Vimes's boots. Once you can spend more upfront, it's cheaper over a lifetime. Good for the individual, less good for the economy.
What I found so difficult to get into my head when I retired was the mindset that I am no longer a saver. I’m, effectively, asking myself for permission to spend what I’ve put aside. It’s an incredibly hard mindset to get out of and I should spend more.
Old news but it seems a tad hypocritical for the BBC, which sacked Jeremy Clarkson for decking a producer, to be repeating Clarkson-era Top Gear on Sunday nights.
It's no surprise that most of the well-heeled citizens of PB regard the years of coalition government as a golden age. However, not all share that view. Osborne's exhortation of 'we're all in this together' in regard to austerity was simply not true. Public sector workers, those on benefits and others bore the brunt of repeated freezes or below-inflation rises in their income, not the middle classes or the rich. And it stored up problems for the future, with consequent demands for pay restoration by those negatively affected. Although, to be fair, the rises in the income tax allowance did help a bit.
Yes. I would add that the enormous cuts in capital spending paved the way for 15 years of economic stagnation. It was particularly damaging since borrowing money was so cheap at that time.
That and precipitating Brexit were their biggest mistakes.
Surely the very fact that the population voted to leave indicates that a referendum was the right thing to do.
You can argue about the tactics, timing, messaging, post Brexit execution etc.
But, if nothing else, the vote to leave proves that membership of the EU lacked democratic legitimacy.
Does it ?
Or does the consistent polling against it, both before the Brexit campaign, and now in recent years, rather show that a sufficiently mendacious campaign can temporarily persuade a majority of anything ?
The point of democracy isn't that it's infallible, and doesn't make big mistakes; it is that it provides some sort of mechanism to put an end to them, once recognised.
One notable (some would also say not able) Brexit minister said much the same.
Old news but it seems a tad hypocritical for the BBC, which sacked Jeremy Clarkson for decking a producer, to be repeating Clarkson-era Top Gear on Sunday nights.
Surely the best argument for getting rid of the child benefit cap is the demographic crisis? Unless some couples have more than two children we face a population timebomb without mass migration - with all the challenges that poses.
The biggest problem for families would seem to be the extortionate cost of housing in this country.
Yes, it's odd to see how many on here complain incessantly about the low child birth rate and then bay loudly againstt the very idea of removing the cap, let alone bringing back Sure Start.
I've heard a rumour, uncorroborated, that people sometimes have children for reasons other than gaining entitlement to benefits.
Of course. But it's the anti benefit side of the argument which most consistently and vociferously argues otherwise.
Carnyx is right to note their inconsistency.
And furthermore many, many people in receipt of the relevant benefit are working.
The 1950s model of dad at work and mum at home isn't working any more. (TBF, it never really did for many people.)
As long as you pay people more on benefits than they would get working you will never fix the issue. given free rent , council tax and the myriad other benefits available many are multiple times better off than they would be working, that is crazy. Total benefits should never be more than the minimum wage ( debateable whether that is at right level ) and should be taxable , that would encourage many. Tax allowance is pitiful at £12.75K and drags anyone at all working into tax. These things are not rocket science.
You’re right, pay people to be idle they will be.
In Durham there is a fuss at the moment, currently a lot of groups qualify for 100% off their council tax, they pay nothing. Reform are, quite rightly in my view, changing this so they will now get a 90% reduction instead although the public consultation favoured 75%. Most councils offer far less of a reduction. Of course the local Labour MP is faking outrage and even asked SKS about it in parliament. However it’s the right thing to do and they need to go faster and further.
Around here its 80% reduction but as Reform have found out, setting Council Tax has 'some' leeway locally. There is a set amount of discount that can be applied/distributed according to local conditions. But as Council Tax is actually a central Government tax (collected by Councils) they are very limited in what they can do.
It's no surprise that most of the well-heeled citizens of PB regard the years of coalition government as a golden age. However, not all share that view. Osborne's exhortation of 'we're all in this together' in regard to austerity was simply not true. Public sector workers, those on benefits and others bore the brunt of repeated freezes or below-inflation rises in their income, not the middle classes or the rich. And it stored up problems for the future, with consequent demands for pay restoration by those negatively affected. Although, to be fair, the rises in the income tax allowance did help a bit.
Yes. I would add that the enormous cuts in capital spending paved the way for 15 years of economic stagnation. It was particularly damaging since borrowing money was so cheap at that time.
That and precipitating Brexit were their biggest mistakes.
Surely the very fact that the population voted to leave indicates that a referendum was the right thing to do.
You can argue about the tactics, timing, messaging, post Brexit execution etc.
But, if nothing else, the vote to leave proves that membership of the EU lacked democratic legitimacy.
Does it ?
Or does the consistent polling against it, both before the Brexit campaign, and now in recent years, rather show that a sufficiently mendacious campaign can temporarily persuade a majority of anything ?
The point of democracy isn't that it's infallible, and doesn't make big mistakes; it is that it provides some sort of mechanism to put an end to them, once recognised.
One notable (some would also say not able) Brexit minister said much the same.
The Brexit support group doesn't take much to get going does it.
David Gentile reported to prison on Nov. 14 to begin a 7-year sentence for what prosecutors described as a $1.6B scheme that defrauded thousands of victims.
Knowing how stupid the people involved are, can we have a plot of spikes in the price of Trump Coin caused by the payoff?
Surely they wouldn’t spike the price?
You’d do an off-market trade to buy Trump Coin directly from his family at an agreed prices.
If anything it would cause a decline in the public price because the purchasers wouldn’t want to hold the stock long term. That said it traded about $160m Friday so liquidity might not be an issue if the going rate is $1-2m for a pardon.
Trump Coin is continually dropping so, based on your analysis, there must be a lot of deals going on.
"hundreds of thousands of children lifted out of poverty" very Brownian spreadsheet thinking and talking
Though that is money that gets recycled quickly in our economy.
Much of our economy is driven by consumer spending. If consumers are skint then there is no growth.
There’s a large amount of money tied up in savings. Try freeing that up.
Saving money does free it up, unless saved in an old sock in notes and coins. Few would be able to buy a house but for the savings of others. All investment - new buildings, machinery, fleets of vehicles - comes from money not used for some other purpose. The general term for such money is 'savings'.
Yeh, I know how it works but thanks anyway 👍
Point being many consumers aren’t skint and choose not to spend.
Couple of factors there, I reckon.
The easy one is that everyone who can is squirrelling away more rainy day money than is collectively helpful. The feeling that the welfare state will only help in the most grudging sense if things go wrong (means testing, 2 child limit) doesn't help.
The harder one to solve is that the more you have, the harder it is to justify spending more on other stuff. Partly needs shading into wants, but also Sam Vimes's boots. Once you can spend more upfront, it's cheaper over a lifetime. Good for the individual, less good for the economy.
What I found so difficult to get into my head when I retired was the mindset that I am no longer a saver. I’m, effectively, asking myself for permission to spend what I’ve put aside. It’s an incredibly hard mindset to get out of and I should spend more.
I’m still saving, and annoyed with myself that I’m not saving as much as when I was working. When I first retired, I spent much more, doing all the things I didn’t have time for when I was working. Now I’m spending less, because of worrying what will happen to my SIPP if there is another 2008 crash, coupled with the knowledge that if I invest more cautiously, it won’t grow as fast over the longer term. The children have their own homes, and don’t really need an inheritance. I am trying desperately to convince myself to spend more, but it goes against the grain.
Surely the best argument for getting rid of the child benefit cap is the demographic crisis? Unless some couples have more than two children we face a population timebomb without mass migration - with all the challenges that poses.
The biggest problem for families would seem to be the extortionate cost of housing in this country.
Yes, it's odd to see how many on here complain incessantly about the low child birth rate and then bay loudly againstt the very idea of removing the cap, let alone bringing back Sure Start.
I've heard a rumour, uncorroborated, that people sometimes have children for reasons other than gaining entitlement to benefits.
Of course. But it's the anti benefit side of the argument which most consistently and vociferously argues otherwise.
Carnyx is right to note their inconsistency.
And furthermore many, many people in receipt of the relevant benefit are working.
The 1950s model of dad at work and mum at home isn't working any more. (TBF, it never really did for many people.)
As long as you pay people more on benefits than they would get working you will never fix the issue. given free rent , council tax and the myriad other benefits available many are multiple times better off than they would be working, that is crazy. Total benefits should never be more than the minimum wage ( debateable whether that is at right level ) and should be taxable , that would encourage many. Tax allowance is pitiful at £12.75K and drags anyone at all working into tax. These things are not rocket science.
You’re right, pay people to be idle they will be.
In Durham there is a fuss at the moment, currently a lot of groups qualify for 100% off their council tax, they pay nothing. Reform are, quite rightly in my view, changing this so they will now get a 90% reduction instead although the public consultation favoured 75%. Most councils offer far less of a reduction. Of course the local Labour MP is faking outrage and even asked SKS about it in parliament. However it’s the right thing to do and they need to go faster and further.
Around here its 80% reduction but as Reform have found out, setting Council Tax has 'some' leeway locally. There is a set amount of discount that can be applied/distributed according to local conditions. But as Council Tax is actually a central Government tax (collected by Councils) they are very limited in what they can do.
I remember discussing with our council leader, Andrew Husband, on a C-L-S local group why his DOGE wouldn’t work.
He wouldn’t have it that it wouldn’t deliver the savings and the approach was right,
He’s finding out the hard way but I found him pleasant, open to discuss, and quite amenable.
"hundreds of thousands of children lifted out of poverty" very Brownian spreadsheet thinking and talking
Though that is money that gets recycled quickly in our economy.
Much of our economy is driven by consumer spending. If consumers are skint then there is no growth.
There’s a large amount of money tied up in savings. Try freeing that up.
Saving money does free it up, unless saved in an old sock in notes and coins. Few would be able to buy a house but for the savings of others. All investment - new buildings, machinery, fleets of vehicles - comes from money not used for some other purpose. The general term for such money is 'savings'.
Yeh, I know how it works but thanks anyway 👍
Point being many consumers aren’t skint and choose not to spend.
Couple of factors there, I reckon.
The easy one is that everyone who can is squirrelling away more rainy day money than is collectively helpful. The feeling that the welfare state will only help in the most grudging sense if things go wrong (means testing, 2 child limit) doesn't help.
The harder one to solve is that the more you have, the harder it is to justify spending more on other stuff. Partly needs shading into wants, but also Sam Vimes's boots. Once you can spend more upfront, it's cheaper over a lifetime. Good for the individual, less good for the economy.
What I found so difficult to get into my head when I retired was the mindset that I am no longer a saver. I’m, effectively, asking myself for permission to spend what I’ve put aside. It’s an incredibly hard mindset to get out of and I should spend more.
I’m still saving, and annoyed with myself that I’m not saving as much as when I was working. When I first retired, I spent much more, doing all the things I didn’t have time for when I was working. Now I’m spending less, because of worrying what will happen to my SIPP if there is another 2008 crash, coupled with the knowledge that if I invest more cautiously, it won’t grow as fast over the longer term. The children have their own homes, and don’t really need an inheritance. I am trying desperately to convince myself to spend more, but it goes against the grain.
I know the feeling. There's also the potential issue of personal care/need for a care/nursing home, the way politics is moving.
David Gentile reported to prison on Nov. 14 to begin a 7-year sentence for what prosecutors described as a $1.6B scheme that defrauded thousands of victims.
Knowing how stupid the people involved are, can we have a plot of spikes in the price of Trump Coin caused by the payoff?
Surely they wouldn’t spike the price?
You’d do an off-market trade to buy Trump Coin directly from his family at an agreed prices.
If anything it would cause a decline in the public price because the purchasers wouldn’t want to hold the stock long term. That said it traded about $160m Friday so liquidity might not be an issue if the going rate is $1-2m for a pardon.
A direct deal like that leaves a trail.
The whole point of TrumpCoin is “I bought some TC, no way for him to know if I did, so there’s no direct trail”
Network Rail will want it closed; it's policy, and there is no upside for them of keeping it open. I'm always baffled as to how pedestrians get killed on railways; trains do not do unpredictable things.
The zebra crossings and road crossings outside all our houses are more risky, as both the unpredictable pedestrians and the unpredictable traffic create risk. The only one near me in recent years was someone at a place called Kings Mill, who pushed his bike across, without looking, wearing headphones.
Many moons ago I was nearly hit by a train on a pedestrian crossing in Salisbury. Basically a footpath that went over the line. Walking to my grans house and almost forgot to look left. When I did the train was right there.*
*Its a long time ago, so may not have been as near a miss as I recall, but I can see how it can happen.**
**Worst near miss was as the non striker when ‘Abdul’*** smashed one straight back and it zoomed just by my head.
"hundreds of thousands of children lifted out of poverty" very Brownian spreadsheet thinking and talking
Though that is money that gets recycled quickly in our economy.
Much of our economy is driven by consumer spending. If consumers are skint then there is no growth.
There’s a large amount of money tied up in savings. Try freeing that up.
Saving money does free it up, unless saved in an old sock in notes and coins. Few would be able to buy a house but for the savings of others. All investment - new buildings, machinery, fleets of vehicles - comes from money not used for some other purpose. The general term for such money is 'savings'.
Yeh, I know how it works but thanks anyway 👍
Point being many consumers aren’t skint and choose not to spend.
Couple of factors there, I reckon.
The easy one is that everyone who can is squirrelling away more rainy day money than is collectively helpful. The feeling that the welfare state will only help in the most grudging sense if things go wrong (means testing, 2 child limit) doesn't help.
The harder one to solve is that the more you have, the harder it is to justify spending more on other stuff. Partly needs shading into wants, but also Sam Vimes's boots. Once you can spend more upfront, it's cheaper over a lifetime. Good for the individual, less good for the economy.
What I found so difficult to get into my head when I retired was the mindset that I am no longer a saver. I’m, effectively, asking myself for permission to spend what I’ve put aside. It’s an incredibly hard mindset to get out of and I should spend more.
I’m still saving, and annoyed with myself that I’m not saving as much as when I was working. When I first retired, I spent much more, doing all the things I didn’t have time for when I was working. Now I’m spending less, because of worrying what will happen to my SIPP if there is another 2008 crash, coupled with the knowledge that if I invest more cautiously, it won’t grow as fast over the longer term. The children have their own homes, and don’t really need an inheritance. I am trying desperately to convince myself to spend more, but it goes against the grain.
I absolutely get this. I recently spent £200 on a Ben Sherman jacket and shirt and T shirt and felt really guilty doing it. It should have been a cheap one from Sainsbury’s or M&S with the Mother in laws discount.
I have been moving some of my SIPP to mixed assets, bonds and cash but a discussion with Ben Pointer the other day has me thinking I need more equities than I have for the long term growth but when everyone is saying the market will crash it worries you. But time in the market beats timing the market.
Our philosophy is they can have the house we will spend the rest.
Network Rail will want it closed; it's policy, and there is no upside for them of keeping it open. I'm always baffled as to how pedestrians get killed on railways; trains do not do unpredictable things.
The zebra crossings and road crossings outside all our houses are more risky, as both the unpredictable pedestrians and the unpredictable traffic create risk. The only one near me in recent years was someone at a place called Kings Mill, who pushed his bike across, without looking, wearing headphones.
Trains aren't very unpredictable, but they are quiet, and potentially very fast compared to road traffic. Oh, and very long stopping distances which mean their drivers are unable to take anything resembling evasive action.
No idea of the circumstances of this incident, but among railway workers, the saying is "it's the second train that gets you" - plenty of people have died over the year having got clear of an approaching train by stepping onto another line, and then being hit by another train, the sounds of which were masked by the first train.
It's no surprise that most of the well-heeled citizens of PB regard the years of coalition government as a golden age. However, not all share that view. Osborne's exhortation of 'we're all in this together' in regard to austerity was simply not true. Public sector workers, those on benefits and others bore the brunt of repeated freezes or below-inflation rises in their income, not the middle classes or the rich. And it stored up problems for the future, with consequent demands for pay restoration by those negatively affected. Although, to be fair, the rises in the income tax allowance did help a bit.
Yes. I would add that the enormous cuts in capital spending paved the way for 15 years of economic stagnation. It was particularly damaging since borrowing money was so cheap at that time.
That and precipitating Brexit were their biggest mistakes.
Surely the very fact that the population voted to leave indicates that a referendum was the right thing to do.
You can argue about the tactics, timing, messaging, post Brexit execution etc.
But, if nothing else, the vote to leave proves that membership of the EU lacked democratic legitimacy.
Does it ?
Or does the consistent polling against it, both before the Brexit campaign, and now in recent years, rather show that a sufficiently mendacious campaign can temporarily persuade a majority of anything ?
The point of democracy isn't that it's infallible, and doesn't make big mistakes; it is that it provides some sort of mechanism to put an end to them, once recognised.
One notable (some would also say not able) Brexit minister said much the same.
The Brexit support group doesn't take much to get going does it.
I think this is a good thing. When I was younger I had issues around people and confidence so I did bar work and it really was transformative for me. It forces you to engage with all sorts of people.
It's no surprise that most of the well-heeled citizens of PB regard the years of coalition government as a golden age. However, not all share that view. Osborne's exhortation of 'we're all in this together' in regard to austerity was simply not true. Public sector workers, those on benefits and others bore the brunt of repeated freezes or below-inflation rises in their income, not the middle classes or the rich. And it stored up problems for the future, with consequent demands for pay restoration by those negatively affected. Although, to be fair, the rises in the income tax allowance did help a bit.
Yes. I would add that the enormous cuts in capital spending paved the way for 15 years of economic stagnation. It was particularly damaging since borrowing money was so cheap at that time.
That and precipitating Brexit were their biggest mistakes.
Surely the very fact that the population voted to leave indicates that a referendum was the right thing to do.
You can argue about the tactics, timing, messaging, post Brexit execution etc.
But, if nothing else, the vote to leave proves that membership of the EU lacked democratic legitimacy.
Does it ?
Or does the consistent polling against it, both before the Brexit campaign, and now in recent years, rather show that a sufficiently mendacious campaign can temporarily persuade a majority of anything ?
The point of democracy isn't that it's infallible, and doesn't make big mistakes; it is that it provides some sort of mechanism to put an end to them, once recognised.
One notable (some would also say not able) Brexit minister said much the same.
The Brexit support group doesn't take much to get going does it.
Nor the car crash denial cabal.
Brexit supporters here spend very little time talking to the loonies, as there's about as much hope of talking some sense into Steve Bray.
Surely the best argument for getting rid of the child benefit cap is the demographic crisis? Unless some couples have more than two children we face a population timebomb without mass migration - with all the challenges that poses.
The biggest problem for families would seem to be the extortionate cost of housing in this country.
Yes, it's odd to see how many on here complain incessantly about the low child birth rate and then bay loudly againstt the very idea of removing the cap, let alone bringing back Sure Start.
I've heard a rumour, uncorroborated, that people sometimes have children for reasons other than gaining entitlement to benefits.
Of course. But it's the anti benefit side of the argument which most consistently and vociferously argues otherwise.
Carnyx is right to note their inconsistency.
And furthermore many, many people in receipt of the relevant benefit are working.
The 1950s model of dad at work and mum at home isn't working any more. (TBF, it never really did for many people.)
As long as you pay people more on benefits than they would get working you will never fix the issue. given free rent , council tax and the myriad other benefits available many are multiple times better off than they would be working, that is crazy. Total benefits should never be more than the minimum wage ( debateable whether that is at right level ) and should be taxable , that would encourage many. Tax allowance is pitiful at £12.75K and drags anyone at all working into tax. These things are not rocket science.
You’re right, pay people to be idle they will be.
In Durham there is a fuss at the moment, currently a lot of groups qualify for 100% off their council tax, they pay nothing. Reform are, quite rightly in my view, changing this so they will now get a 90% reduction instead although the public consultation favoured 75%. Most councils offer far less of a reduction. Of course the local Labour MP is faking outrage and even asked SKS about it in parliament. However it’s the right thing to do and they need to go faster and further.
Around here its 80% reduction but as Reform have found out, setting Council Tax has 'some' leeway locally. There is a set amount of discount that can be applied/distributed according to local conditions. But as Council Tax is actually a central Government tax (collected by Councils) they are very limited in what they can do.
I remember discussing with our council leader, Andrew Husband, on a C-L-S local group why his DOGE wouldn’t work.
He wouldn’t have it that it wouldn’t deliver the savings and the approach was right,
He’s finding out the hard way but I found him pleasant, open to discuss, and quite amenable.
The impression that I get is that genuinely local RefUK councillors are open to persuasion, but they have very conventional, siloed, small-c conservative ideas that they need to be persuaded to adjust in some respects - and that can be tricky as they can also be very closed-minded.
A low birth rate is a consequence of greater wealth, and greater female choice. It isnt to do with the cost of having children. There isnt any civilised area in the world that has managed to materially reverse the trend. Women when given the choice choose to do something else.
This is a large part of it, I think.
The choice is being made by couples, not just women themselves. I know quite a few people in my friend circle who have actively chosen not to have children. Most, if not all of these people are wealthy enough to support them. There is an over assumption that a lot of it is down to cost, but personal choice is playing a much bigger part than ever.
This is especially true amongst degree educated friends, who are in stable jobs* and relationships
*long term jobs, not jobs involving horses
Quite, if it was about cost, you wouldnt have people breeding like rabbits in refugee camps and unstable zones around the world. The poorest places on earth have the highest birth rates.
A low birth rate is a consequence of greater wealth, and greater female choice. It isnt to do with the cost of having children. There isnt any civilised area in the world that has managed to materially reverse the trend. Women when given the choice choose to do something else.
This is a large part of it, I think.
The choice is being made by couples, not just women themselves. I know quite a few people in my friend circle who have actively chosen not to have children. Most, if not all of these people are wealthy enough to support them. There is an over assumption that a lot of it is down to cost, but personal choice is playing a much bigger part than ever.
This is especially true amongst degree educated friends, who are in stable jobs* and relationships
*long term jobs, not jobs involving horses
Quite, if it was about cost, you wouldnt have people breeding like rabbits in refugee camps and unstable zones around the world. The poorest places on earth have the highest birth rates.
Quite a few years back, under the coalition, I think, a leading doctor published an article. It said we are lying to women about delaying children until later in life.
The reaction to this truth - see the graphs for getting pregnant and having a health child - was something like a witch hunting mob.
A low birth rate is a consequence of greater wealth, and greater female choice. It isnt to do with the cost of having children. There isnt any civilised area in the world that has managed to materially reverse the trend. Women when given the choice choose to do something else.
This is a large part of it, I think.
The choice is being made by couples, not just women themselves. I know quite a few people in my friend circle who have actively chosen not to have children. Most, if not all of these people are wealthy enough to support them. There is an over assumption that a lot of it is down to cost, but personal choice is playing a much bigger part than ever.
This is especially true amongst degree educated friends, who are in stable jobs* and relationships
*long term jobs, not jobs involving horses
Quite, if it was about cost, you wouldnt have people breeding like rabbits in refugee camps and unstable zones around the world. The poorest places on earth have the highest birth rates.
The poorer and less future you perceive you have, the more you invest your future in your children.
If 1 in 4 or 1 in 3 will be dead by the age of 5, the more you need.
A low birth rate is a consequence of greater wealth, and greater female choice. It isnt to do with the cost of having children. There isnt any civilised area in the world that has managed to materially reverse the trend. Women when given the choice choose to do something else.
This is a large part of it, I think.
The choice is being made by couples, not just women themselves. I know quite a few people in my friend circle who have actively chosen not to have children. Most, if not all of these people are wealthy enough to support them. There is an over assumption that a lot of it is down to cost, but personal choice is playing a much bigger part than ever.
This is especially true amongst degree educated friends, who are in stable jobs* and relationships
*long term jobs, not jobs involving horses
Quite, if it was about cost, you wouldnt have people breeding like rabbits in refugee camps and unstable zones around the world. The poorest places on earth have the highest birth rates.
The poorer and less future you perceive you have, the more you invest your future in your children.
If 1 in 4 or 1 in 3 will be dead by the age of 5, the more you need.
In many such environments, the children *are* your pension.
Network Rail will want it closed; it's policy, and there is no upside for them of keeping it open. I'm always baffled as to how pedestrians get killed on railways; trains do not do unpredictable things.
The zebra crossings and road crossings outside all our houses are more risky, as both the unpredictable pedestrians and the unpredictable traffic create risk. The only one near me in recent years was someone at a place called Kings Mill, who pushed his bike across, without looking, wearing headphones.
Trains aren't very unpredictable, but they are quiet, and potentially very fast compared to road traffic. Oh, and very long stopping distances which mean their drivers are unable to take anything resembling evasive action.
No idea of the circumstances of this incident, but among railway workers, the saying is "it's the second train that gets you" - plenty of people have died over the year having got clear of an approaching train by stepping onto another line, and then being hit by another train, the sounds of which were masked by the first train.
Indeed, so it is about appropriate behaviour by those crossing tracks.
It's also interesting how much attention cases such as this get compared to those on roads, On railways there are about 5-6 pedestrian deaths on level crossings per annum (ignoring eg people breaking into tracks not at crossings).
And Your Party backs @zarahsultana’s preferred option to allow members also to be members of other left wing parties and groups - subject to the agreement of the party executive.
"hundreds of thousands of children lifted out of poverty" very Brownian spreadsheet thinking and talking
Though that is money that gets recycled quickly in our economy.
Much of our economy is driven by consumer spending. If consumers are skint then there is no growth.
There’s a large amount of money tied up in savings. Try freeing that up.
Saving money does free it up, unless saved in an old sock in notes and coins. Few would be able to buy a house but for the savings of others. All investment - new buildings, machinery, fleets of vehicles - comes from money not used for some other purpose. The general term for such money is 'savings'.
Britain's savings rate is the highest it’s been for decades. Household and corporate debt are historically very low. Yes, we are saving too much and spending too little.
We have real life stats to show the power of spending on economic growth. Not only UK historical GDP but also country comparisons: the USA at one extreme and Japan at the other.
We do need investment. Massively more of it. Not surplus rainy day saving in low yielding assets. But investment is spending. Every pound you spend on that new extension or your child’s university fees is investment, as is every pound your employer spends on training or automation.
A country which runs a continuous trade deficit is not under consuming.
Falling household debt (does that include student debt BTW ?) has been matched by increased government debt and household debt is still way above the levels of the 1980s and 1990s:
UK household debt peaked in 2008 - do you remember what happened to the economy that year ? It should be a warning about the dangers of excessive household debt.
Three points here.
1. You make my point for me on government debt. See also Japan (our ghost of Christmas yet to come in so many ways). The less companies and consumers spend, the more government spends and the more debt it racks up. Especially in a country where VAT is a big revenue source.
2. 2008 is both a straw man (spending and borrowing more doesn’t mean spending and borrowing to excess) and only a partial analogue. Despite protestations to the contrary across politics - but generally not by economists - the cause of 2008 was not over-extended British consumers, it was overextended financial institutions exposed to a group of overextended US consumers, triggering a systemic crisis. But banks are now under extended and sweating their assets too much.
3. Our corporate savings are even more woefully high than our household savings. And corporates not spending is an even bigger problem. We have pretty much the lowest business investment rates in the developed world. Then people wonder why productivity doesn’t rise as quickly as in France or the US. The bean counters rule the roost. It’s not necessarily a problem primarily of policy: I think it’s cultural. We are a nation of asset sweaters.
Bring back boom and bust.
A more basic problem is that the conveyer belt of growing, profitable new business is barely a trickle.
The big firms that the government love to cuddle can sustain the system - to an extent.
But for growth and innovation you need new entrants.
Consider the Riddle of Steel
To make green steel is possible. In the Goode Olde Days, someone would have set up a new company, built a new steelworks for their new process.
Why doesn’t that happen?
What’s your evidence that growth depends on new entrants rather than existing companies (of various sizes) doing more? Do you have some economic analysis that shows this?
A low birth rate is a consequence of greater wealth, and greater female choice. It isnt to do with the cost of having children. There isnt any civilised area in the world that has managed to materially reverse the trend. Women when given the choice choose to do something else.
This is a large part of it, I think.
The choice is being made by couples, not just women themselves. I know quite a few people in my friend circle who have actively chosen not to have children. Most, if not all of these people are wealthy enough to support them. There is an over assumption that a lot of it is down to cost, but personal choice is playing a much bigger part than ever.
This is especially true amongst degree educated friends, who are in stable jobs* and relationships
*long term jobs, not jobs involving horses
Quite, if it was about cost, you wouldnt have people breeding like rabbits in refugee camps and unstable zones around the world. The poorest places on earth have the highest birth rates.
Quite a few years back, under the coalition, I think, a leading doctor published an article. It said we are lying to women about delaying children until later in life.
The reaction to this truth - see the graphs for getting pregnant and having a health child - was something like a witch hunting mob.
I believe the medical term is "elderly primagravida" and it exists for a reason
A low birth rate is a consequence of greater wealth, and greater female choice. It isnt to do with the cost of having children. There isnt any civilised area in the world that has managed to materially reverse the trend. Women when given the choice choose to do something else.
The evidence is that people in the UK are now having fewer children than they want. That doesn't mean a return to pre modern birth rates but with lower housing costs and better economic prospects the fertility rate would be higher than 1.4.
That matches with what I’ve seen from personal experience - you can bring up a single child in a 2 bed flat. Even a 3 bed flat - let alone a house - is a big jump in price. Then you have al the other costs. Plus (usually) the mother taking a career hit for each child.
All the childless women I know regret it - and those with 1 nearly always wish they’d had more. And are quite upfront that the cost & space issue was a big factor.
Just as with housing, this is an issue where you face the fewest barriers if you are in the richest or poorest groups in society. If money is no object OR you get taken care of by the state.
It's always those in the middle who have to make difficult choices and sacrifices, and who generally get the poorest value from life.
It's something I noticed as a child, and it contributed to my personal politics in a big way. My sociology teacher didn't like it when I argued that 'stable poverty' was a somewhat preferable state to 'volatile middle classness'.
AJP Taylor used to argue that the Uk avoided revolution because the ruling classes made sure that middle classes had *just enough* of a stake in society that it made sense for them to support the status quo rather than risk revolution.
It’s not clear to me that the condition holds for an increasing segment (age band) of the population.
And Your Party backs @zarahsultana’s preferred option to allow members also to be members of other left wing parties and groups - subject to the agreement of the party executive.
And Your Party backs @zarahsultana’s preferred option to allow members also to be members of other left wing parties and groups - subject to the agreement of the party executive.
"hundreds of thousands of children lifted out of poverty" very Brownian spreadsheet thinking and talking
Though that is money that gets recycled quickly in our economy.
Much of our economy is driven by consumer spending. If consumers are skint then there is no growth.
There’s a large amount of money tied up in savings. Try freeing that up.
Saving money does free it up, unless saved in an old sock in notes and coins. Few would be able to buy a house but for the savings of others. All investment - new buildings, machinery, fleets of vehicles - comes from money not used for some other purpose. The general term for such money is 'savings'.
Yeh, I know how it works but thanks anyway 👍
Point being many consumers aren’t skint and choose not to spend.
Couple of factors there, I reckon.
The easy one is that everyone who can is squirrelling away more rainy day money than is collectively helpful. The feeling that the welfare state will only help in the most grudging sense if things go wrong (means testing, 2 child limit) doesn't help.
The harder one to solve is that the more you have, the harder it is to justify spending more on other stuff. Partly needs shading into wants, but also Sam Vimes's boots. Once you can spend more upfront, it's cheaper over a lifetime. Good for the individual, less good for the economy.
Isn’t that the wrong metric? It’s assuming that the best outcome is always “more GDP”. But if that comes at too high a social cost aren’t we measuring the wrong thing?
I think this is a good thing. When I was younger I had issues around people and confidence so I did bar work and it really was transformative for me. It forces you to engage with all sorts of people.
"hundreds of thousands of children lifted out of poverty" very Brownian spreadsheet thinking and talking
Though that is money that gets recycled quickly in our economy.
Much of our economy is driven by consumer spending. If consumers are skint then there is no growth.
There’s a large amount of money tied up in savings. Try freeing that up.
Saving money does free it up, unless saved in an old sock in notes and coins. Few would be able to buy a house but for the savings of others. All investment - new buildings, machinery, fleets of vehicles - comes from money not used for some other purpose. The general term for such money is 'savings'.
Britain's savings rate is the highest it’s been for decades. Household and corporate debt are historically very low. Yes, we are saving too much and spending too little.
We have real life stats to show the power of spending on economic growth. Not only UK historical GDP but also country comparisons: the USA at one extreme and Japan at the other.
We do need investment. Massively more of it. Not surplus rainy day saving in low yielding assets. But investment is spending. Every pound you spend on that new extension or your child’s university fees is investment, as is every pound your employer spends on training or automation.
A country which runs a continuous trade deficit is not under consuming.
Falling household debt (does that include student debt BTW ?) has been matched by increased government debt and household debt is still way above the levels of the 1980s and 1990s:
UK household debt peaked in 2008 - do you remember what happened to the economy that year ? It should be a warning about the dangers of excessive household debt.
Three points here.
1. You make my point for me on government debt. See also Japan (our ghost of Christmas yet to come in so many ways). The less companies and consumers spend, the more government spends and the more debt it racks up. Especially in a country where VAT is a big revenue source.
2. 2008 is both a straw man (spending and borrowing more doesn’t mean spending and borrowing to excess) and only a partial analogue. Despite protestations to the contrary across politics - but generally not by economists - the cause of 2008 was not over-extended British consumers, it was overextended financial institutions exposed to a group of overextended US consumers, triggering a systemic crisis. But banks are now under extended and sweating their assets too much.
3. Our corporate savings are even more woefully high than our household savings. And corporates not spending is an even bigger problem. We have pretty much the lowest business investment rates in the developed world. Then people wonder why productivity doesn’t rise as quickly as in France or the US. The bean counters rule the roost. It’s not necessarily a problem primarily of policy: I think it’s cultural. We are a nation of asset sweaters.
Bring back boom and bust.
A more basic problem is that the conveyer belt of growing, profitable new business is barely a trickle.
The big firms that the government love to cuddle can sustain the system - to an extent.
But for growth and innovation you need new entrants.
Consider the Riddle of Steel
To make green steel is possible. In the Goode Olde Days, someone would have set up a new company, built a new steelworks for their new process.
Why doesn’t that happen?
What’s your evidence that growth depends on new entrants rather than existing companies (of various sizes) doing more? Do you have some economic analysis that shows this?
Look at the big companies, around the world, over the time period from 1800, onward.
Notice something?
Innovation rarely comes from big, existing companies. Due to socio-economic resistance to change.
Network Rail will want it closed; it's policy, and there is no upside for them of keeping it open. I'm always baffled as to how pedestrians get killed on railways; trains do not do unpredictable things.
The zebra crossings and road crossings outside all our houses are more risky, as both the unpredictable pedestrians and the unpredictable traffic create risk. The only one near me in recent years was someone at a place called Kings Mill, who pushed his bike across, without looking, wearing headphones.
Trains aren't very unpredictable, but they are quiet, and potentially very fast compared to road traffic. Oh, and very long stopping distances which mean their drivers are unable to take anything resembling evasive action.
No idea of the circumstances of this incident, but among railway workers, the saying is "it's the second train that gets you" - plenty of people have died over the year having got clear of an approaching train by stepping onto another line, and then being hit by another train, the sounds of which were masked by the first train.
Indeed, so it is about appropriate behaviour by those crossing tracks.
It's also interesting how much attention cases such as this get compared to those on roads, On railways there are about 5-6 pedestrian deaths on level crossings per annum (ignoring eg people breaking into tracks not at crossings).
I think one of the greatest culture shocks when I visited New Zealand two years ago was the different attitude to rail safety. Firstly I would never diminish in any way the need for serious railway safety but it does seem perverse to me that in a really remote railway station namely Garsdale when you come off the train you have a 200 yd detour to get to your car because you aren't allowed to cross the lines even though you have a good quarter mile visibility in both directions. That involves walking on a road which has four blind exits in the pitch black whereas there is full lighting on the not permitted route.
But in New Zealand the railways lines run for tens of miles along side the state highways without a fence between them. Admittedly they don't have quite the same level of traffic. Our Leeds to Carlisle line has six times as much traffic as the main North Island Kiwi Rail from Wellington to Auckland. In NZ there is one train northbound one day and one southbound the next day - that is again from Wellington to Auckland. If it arrives the same day as it sets off then it is deemed to be on time ! It is one hell of a journey though and rivals the Settle and Carlisle for its beauty.
Oh and if the cockerel at Garsdale station were a dog it would have been put down for attacking people years ago.
"hundreds of thousands of children lifted out of poverty" very Brownian spreadsheet thinking and talking
Though that is money that gets recycled quickly in our economy.
Much of our economy is driven by consumer spending. If consumers are skint then there is no growth.
There’s a large amount of money tied up in savings. Try freeing that up.
Saving money does free it up, unless saved in an old sock in notes and coins. Few would be able to buy a house but for the savings of others. All investment - new buildings, machinery, fleets of vehicles - comes from money not used for some other purpose. The general term for such money is 'savings'.
Britain's savings rate is the highest it’s been for decades. Household and corporate debt are historically very low. Yes, we are saving too much and spending too little.
We have real life stats to show the power of spending on economic growth. Not only UK historical GDP but also country comparisons: the USA at one extreme and Japan at the other.
We do need investment. Massively more of it. Not surplus rainy day saving in low yielding assets. But investment is spending. Every pound you spend on that new extension or your child’s university fees is investment, as is every pound your employer spends on training or automation.
A country which runs a continuous trade deficit is not under consuming.
Falling household debt (does that include student debt BTW ?) has been matched by increased government debt and household debt is still way above the levels of the 1980s and 1990s:
UK household debt peaked in 2008 - do you remember what happened to the economy that year ? It should be a warning about the dangers of excessive household debt.
Three points here.
1. You make my point for me on government debt. See also Japan (our ghost of Christmas yet to come in so many ways). The less companies and consumers spend, the more government spends and the more debt it racks up. Especially in a country where VAT is a big revenue source.
2. 2008 is both a straw man (spending and borrowing more doesn’t mean spending and borrowing to excess) and only a partial analogue. Despite protestations to the contrary across politics - but generally not by economists - the cause of 2008 was not over-extended British consumers, it was overextended financial institutions exposed to a group of overextended US consumers, triggering a systemic crisis. But banks are now under extended and sweating their assets too much.
3. Our corporate savings are even more woefully high than our household savings. And corporates not spending is an even bigger problem. We have pretty much the lowest business investment rates in the developed world. Then people wonder why productivity doesn’t rise as quickly as in France or the US. The bean counters rule the roost. It’s not necessarily a problem primarily of policy: I think it’s cultural. We are a nation of asset sweaters.
Bring back boom and bust.
A more basic problem is that the conveyer belt of growing, profitable new business is barely a trickle.
The big firms that the government love to cuddle can sustain the system - to an extent.
But for growth and innovation you need new entrants.
Consider the Riddle of Steel
To make green steel is possible. In the Goode Olde Days, someone would have set up a new company, built a new steelworks for their new process.
Why doesn’t that happen?
What’s your evidence that growth depends on new entrants rather than existing companies (of various sizes) doing more? Do you have some economic analysis that shows this?
Look at the big companies, around the world, over the time period from 1800, onward.
Notice something?
Innovation rarely comes from big, existing companies. Due to socio-economic resistance to change.
I was hoping for an actual analysis, not just some rhetoric.
Let’s look at something a bit more concrete. Forbes offers the top 5 best-performing stocks of 2025 in the US as…
Palantir, founded 2003 GE Vernova, founded 2024 as a spin out from GE, founded 1892 NRG Energy, founded 1989, as a spin out from something that goes back to 1909 Howmet Aerospace, founded 1888 Seagate, founded 1978
I think Starmer/Reeves probably know they've walked into a trap over the child benefit cap, but they have a parliamentary party of over 400 MPs to manage - many of whom are very left-wing - just to stay in office.
Good morning
Badenoch unequivocally said this morning she will reinstate the 2 child cap - 'we have to draw the line somewhere'
What about when she's supporting a Reform - Con coalition?
Smart politics by Farage. Possibly the first I can think of. It is one of those policies that voters don't support but it improves the image of Reform in an area that they need improving.
It's no surprise that most of the well-heeled citizens of PB regard the years of coalition government as a golden age. However, not all share that view. Osborne's exhortation of 'we're all in this together' in regard to austerity was simply not true. Public sector workers, those on benefits and others bore the brunt of repeated freezes or below-inflation rises in their income, not the middle classes or the rich. And it stored up problems for the future, with consequent demands for pay restoration by those negatively affected. Although, to be fair, the rises in the income tax allowance did help a bit.
Yes. I would add that the enormous cuts in capital spending paved the way for 15 years of economic stagnation. It was particularly damaging since borrowing money was so cheap at that time.
That and precipitating Brexit were their biggest mistakes.
Surely the very fact that the population voted to leave indicates that a referendum was the right thing to do.
You can argue about the tactics, timing, messaging, post Brexit execution etc.
But, if nothing else, the vote to leave proves that membership of the EU lacked democratic legitimacy.
Does it ?
Or does the consistent polling against it, both before the Brexit campaign, and now in recent years, rather show that a sufficiently mendacious campaign can temporarily persuade a majority of anything ?
The point of democracy isn't that it's infallible, and doesn't make big mistakes; it is that it provides some sort of mechanism to put an end to them, once recognised.
The point is more that there was substantial proportion of the population who wanted to leave but which hadn’t been tested in 40 years. Irrespective of who won or lost.
It’s the same with Scotland - if they had a new referendum in say 2040 (+25 years) that would be entirely reasonable.
“Democratic legitimacy” is not quite the same as “democracy” - it refers to formally tested popular support for a constitutional arrangement
David Gentile reported to prison on Nov. 14 to begin a 7-year sentence for what prosecutors described as a $1.6B scheme that defrauded thousands of victims.
Knowing how stupid the people involved are, can we have a plot of spikes in the price of Trump Coin caused by the payoff?
Surely they wouldn’t spike the price?
You’d do an off-market trade to buy Trump Coin directly from his family at an agreed prices.
If anything it would cause a decline in the public price because the purchasers wouldn’t want to hold the stock long term. That said it traded about $160m Friday so liquidity might not be an issue if the going rate is $1-2m for a pardon.
Trump Coin is continually dropping so, based on your analysis, there must be a lot of deals going on.
Yes. If I could be bothered to dig I’d be intrigued to see the number of coins outstanding and the number owned by the founder pool.
"hundreds of thousands of children lifted out of poverty" very Brownian spreadsheet thinking and talking
Though that is money that gets recycled quickly in our economy.
Much of our economy is driven by consumer spending. If consumers are skint then there is no growth.
There’s a large amount of money tied up in savings. Try freeing that up.
Saving money does free it up, unless saved in an old sock in notes and coins. Few would be able to buy a house but for the savings of others. All investment - new buildings, machinery, fleets of vehicles - comes from money not used for some other purpose. The general term for such money is 'savings'.
Britain's savings rate is the highest it’s been for decades. Household and corporate debt are historically very low. Yes, we are saving too much and spending too little.
We have real life stats to show the power of spending on economic growth. Not only UK historical GDP but also country comparisons: the USA at one extreme and Japan at the other.
We do need investment. Massively more of it. Not surplus rainy day saving in low yielding assets. But investment is spending. Every pound you spend on that new extension or your child’s university fees is investment, as is every pound your employer spends on training or automation.
A country which runs a continuous trade deficit is not under consuming.
Falling household debt (does that include student debt BTW ?) has been matched by increased government debt and household debt is still way above the levels of the 1980s and 1990s:
UK household debt peaked in 2008 - do you remember what happened to the economy that year ? It should be a warning about the dangers of excessive household debt.
Three points here.
1. You make my point for me on government debt. See also Japan (our ghost of Christmas yet to come in so many ways). The less companies and consumers spend, the more government spends and the more debt it racks up. Especially in a country where VAT is a big revenue source.
2. 2008 is both a straw man (spending and borrowing more doesn’t mean spending and borrowing to excess) and only a partial analogue. Despite protestations to the contrary across politics - but generally not by economists - the cause of 2008 was not over-extended British consumers, it was overextended financial institutions exposed to a group of overextended US consumers, triggering a systemic crisis. But banks are now under extended and sweating their assets too much.
3. Our corporate savings are even more woefully high than our household savings. And corporates not spending is an even bigger problem. We have pretty much the lowest business investment rates in the developed world. Then people wonder why productivity doesn’t rise as quickly as in France or the US. The bean counters rule the roost. It’s not necessarily a problem primarily of policy: I think it’s cultural. We are a nation of asset sweaters.
Bring back boom and bust.
A more basic problem is that the conveyer belt of growing, profitable new business is barely a trickle.
The big firms that the government love to cuddle can sustain the system - to an extent.
But for growth and innovation you need new entrants.
Consider the Riddle of Steel
To make green steel is possible. In the Goode Olde Days, someone would have set up a new company, built a new steelworks for their new process.
Why doesn’t that happen?
What’s your evidence that growth depends on new entrants rather than existing companies (of various sizes) doing more? Do you have some economic analysis that shows this?
Look at the big companies, around the world, over the time period from 1800, onward.
Notice something?
Innovation rarely comes from big, existing companies. Due to socio-economic resistance to change.
I was hoping for an actual analysis, not just some rhetoric.
Let’s look at something a bit more concrete. Forbes offers the top 5 best-performing stocks of 2025 in the US as…
Palantir, founded 2003 GE Vernova, founded 2024 as a spin out from GE, founded 1892 NRG Energy, founded 1989, as a spin out from something that goes back to 1909 Howmet Aerospace, founded 1888 Seagate, founded 1978
That doesn’t obviously support your hypothesis.
I would think the hypothesis is more wrong than right. It was existing Canal companies and existing mining companies which established the railways in England. Newcomen, Boulton and Watt, Trevithick might have been sort of startup companies but they were working on earlier designs and innovating from them.
Last month at our history soc we had an excellent talk from an expert about the Mines Royal and the German copper prospecting at Keswick in the 16th C. William Cecil was a main investor. The argument could be made, and was made that that in turn became the model for the East India Company etc etc whihc eventually lead to the Establishment
"hundreds of thousands of children lifted out of poverty" very Brownian spreadsheet thinking and talking
Though that is money that gets recycled quickly in our economy.
Much of our economy is driven by consumer spending. If consumers are skint then there is no growth.
There’s a large amount of money tied up in savings. Try freeing that up.
Saving money does free it up, unless saved in an old sock in notes and coins. Few would be able to buy a house but for the savings of others. All investment - new buildings, machinery, fleets of vehicles - comes from money not used for some other purpose. The general term for such money is 'savings'.
Yeh, I know how it works but thanks anyway 👍
Point being many consumers aren’t skint and choose not to spend.
Couple of factors there, I reckon.
The easy one is that everyone who can is squirrelling away more rainy day money than is collectively helpful. The feeling that the welfare state will only help in the most grudging sense if things go wrong (means testing, 2 child limit) doesn't help.
The harder one to solve is that the more you have, the harder it is to justify spending more on other stuff. Partly needs shading into wants, but also Sam Vimes's boots. Once you can spend more upfront, it's cheaper over a lifetime. Good for the individual, less good for the economy.
What I found so difficult to get into my head when I retired was the mindset that I am no longer a saver. I’m, effectively, asking myself for permission to spend what I’ve put aside. It’s an incredibly hard mindset to get out of and I should spend more.
I’m still saving, and annoyed with myself that I’m not saving as much as when I was working. When I first retired, I spent much more, doing all the things I didn’t have time for when I was working. Now I’m spending less, because of worrying what will happen to my SIPP if there is another 2008 crash, coupled with the knowledge that if I invest more cautiously, it won’t grow as fast over the longer term. The children have their own homes, and don’t really need an inheritance. I am trying desperately to convince myself to spend more, but it goes against the grain.
I’ve found giving it away solves that problem - it’s not really “spending” but you can find a local cause that you like and put something back into the community
"hundreds of thousands of children lifted out of poverty" very Brownian spreadsheet thinking and talking
Though that is money that gets recycled quickly in our economy.
Much of our economy is driven by consumer spending. If consumers are skint then there is no growth.
There’s a large amount of money tied up in savings. Try freeing that up.
Saving money does free it up, unless saved in an old sock in notes and coins. Few would be able to buy a house but for the savings of others. All investment - new buildings, machinery, fleets of vehicles - comes from money not used for some other purpose. The general term for such money is 'savings'.
Britain's savings rate is the highest it’s been for decades. Household and corporate debt are historically very low. Yes, we are saving too much and spending too little.
We have real life stats to show the power of spending on economic growth. Not only UK historical GDP but also country comparisons: the USA at one extreme and Japan at the other.
We do need investment. Massively more of it. Not surplus rainy day saving in low yielding assets. But investment is spending. Every pound you spend on that new extension or your child’s university fees is investment, as is every pound your employer spends on training or automation.
A country which runs a continuous trade deficit is not under consuming.
Falling household debt (does that include student debt BTW ?) has been matched by increased government debt and household debt is still way above the levels of the 1980s and 1990s:
UK household debt peaked in 2008 - do you remember what happened to the economy that year ? It should be a warning about the dangers of excessive household debt.
Three points here.
1. You make my point for me on government debt. See also Japan (our ghost of Christmas yet to come in so many ways). The less companies and consumers spend, the more government spends and the more debt it racks up. Especially in a country where VAT is a big revenue source.
2. 2008 is both a straw man (spending and borrowing more doesn’t mean spending and borrowing to excess) and only a partial analogue. Despite protestations to the contrary across politics - but generally not by economists - the cause of 2008 was not over-extended British consumers, it was overextended financial institutions exposed to a group of overextended US consumers, triggering a systemic crisis. But banks are now under extended and sweating their assets too much.
3. Our corporate savings are even more woefully high than our household savings. And corporates not spending is an even bigger problem. We have pretty much the lowest business investment rates in the developed world. Then people wonder why productivity doesn’t rise as quickly as in France or the US. The bean counters rule the roost. It’s not necessarily a problem primarily of policy: I think it’s cultural. We are a nation of asset sweaters.
Bring back boom and bust.
A more basic problem is that the conveyer belt of growing, profitable new business is barely a trickle.
The big firms that the government love to cuddle can sustain the system - to an extent.
But for growth and innovation you need new entrants.
Consider the Riddle of Steel
To make green steel is possible. In the Goode Olde Days, someone would have set up a new company, built a new steelworks for their new process.
Why doesn’t that happen?
What’s your evidence that growth depends on new entrants rather than existing companies (of various sizes) doing more? Do you have some economic analysis that shows this?
Look at the big companies, around the world, over the time period from 1800, onward.
Notice something?
Innovation rarely comes from big, existing companies. Due to socio-economic resistance to change.
I was hoping for an actual analysis, not just some rhetoric.
Let’s look at something a bit more concrete. Forbes offers the top 5 best-performing stocks of 2025 in the US as…
Palantir, founded 2003 GE Vernova, founded 2024 as a spin out from GE, founded 1892 NRG Energy, founded 1989, as a spin out from something that goes back to 1909 Howmet Aerospace, founded 1888 Seagate, founded 1978
That doesn’t obviously support your hypothesis.
So you’ve managed to ignore the existence of Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel etc etc.
Or indeed the company that now launches about 90% of tonnage to Earth orbit.
David Gentile reported to prison on Nov. 14 to begin a 7-year sentence for what prosecutors described as a $1.6B scheme that defrauded thousands of victims.
Knowing how stupid the people involved are, can we have a plot of spikes in the price of Trump Coin caused by the payoff?
Surely they wouldn’t spike the price?
You’d do an off-market trade to buy Trump Coin directly from his family at an agreed prices.
If anything it would cause a decline in the public price because the purchasers wouldn’t want to hold the stock long term. That said it traded about $160m Friday so liquidity might not be an issue if the going rate is $1-2m for a pardon.
A direct deal like that leaves a trail.
The whole point of TrumpCoin is “I bought some TC, no way for him to know if I did, so there’s no direct trail”
Sure but then Trump’s founder pool needs to be continually selling into the market and the buying is just supporting the price. Surely that would have been reported by some enterprising journalist?
It's no surprise that most of the well-heeled citizens of PB regard the years of coalition government as a golden age. However, not all share that view. Osborne's exhortation of 'we're all in this together' in regard to austerity was simply not true. Public sector workers, those on benefits and others bore the brunt of repeated freezes or below-inflation rises in their income, not the middle classes or the rich. And it stored up problems for the future, with consequent demands for pay restoration by those negatively affected. Although, to be fair, the rises in the income tax allowance did help a bit.
Yes. I would add that the enormous cuts in capital spending paved the way for 15 years of economic stagnation. It was particularly damaging since borrowing money was so cheap at that time.
That and precipitating Brexit were their biggest mistakes.
Surely the very fact that the population voted to leave indicates that a referendum was the right thing to do.
You can argue about the tactics, timing, messaging, post Brexit execution etc.
But, if nothing else, the vote to leave proves that membership of the EU lacked democratic legitimacy.
Does it ?
Or does the consistent polling against it, both before the Brexit campaign, and now in recent years, rather show that a sufficiently mendacious campaign can temporarily persuade a majority of anything ?
The point of democracy isn't that it's infallible, and doesn't make big mistakes; it is that it provides some sort of mechanism to put an end to them, once recognised.
The point is more that there was substantial proportion of the population who wanted to leave but which hadn’t been tested in 40 years. Irrespective of who won or lost.
It’s the same with Scotland - if they had a new referendum in say 2040 (+25 years) that would be entirely reasonable.
“Democratic legitimacy” is not quite the same as “democracy” - it refers to formally tested popular support for a constitutional arrangement
Except in the 10 or so general elections held over that period.
"hundreds of thousands of children lifted out of poverty" very Brownian spreadsheet thinking and talking
Though that is money that gets recycled quickly in our economy.
Much of our economy is driven by consumer spending. If consumers are skint then there is no growth.
There’s a large amount of money tied up in savings. Try freeing that up.
Saving money does free it up, unless saved in an old sock in notes and coins. Few would be able to buy a house but for the savings of others. All investment - new buildings, machinery, fleets of vehicles - comes from money not used for some other purpose. The general term for such money is 'savings'.
Britain's savings rate is the highest it’s been for decades. Household and corporate debt are historically very low. Yes, we are saving too much and spending too little.
We have real life stats to show the power of spending on economic growth. Not only UK historical GDP but also country comparisons: the USA at one extreme and Japan at the other.
We do need investment. Massively more of it. Not surplus rainy day saving in low yielding assets. But investment is spending. Every pound you spend on that new extension or your child’s university fees is investment, as is every pound your employer spends on training or automation.
A country which runs a continuous trade deficit is not under consuming.
Falling household debt (does that include student debt BTW ?) has been matched by increased government debt and household debt is still way above the levels of the 1980s and 1990s:
UK household debt peaked in 2008 - do you remember what happened to the economy that year ? It should be a warning about the dangers of excessive household debt.
Three points here.
1. You make my point for me on government debt. See also Japan (our ghost of Christmas yet to come in so many ways). The less companies and consumers spend, the more government spends and the more debt it racks up. Especially in a country where VAT is a big revenue source.
2. 2008 is both a straw man (spending and borrowing more doesn’t mean spending and borrowing to excess) and only a partial analogue. Despite protestations to the contrary across politics - but generally not by economists - the cause of 2008 was not over-extended British consumers, it was overextended financial institutions exposed to a group of overextended US consumers, triggering a systemic crisis. But banks are now under extended and sweating their assets too much.
3. Our corporate savings are even more woefully high than our household savings. And corporates not spending is an even bigger problem. We have pretty much the lowest business investment rates in the developed world. Then people wonder why productivity doesn’t rise as quickly as in France or the US. The bean counters rule the roost. It’s not necessarily a problem primarily of policy: I think it’s cultural. We are a nation of asset sweaters.
Bring back boom and bust.
A more basic problem is that the conveyer belt of growing, profitable new business is barely a trickle.
The big firms that the government love to cuddle can sustain the system - to an extent.
But for growth and innovation you need new entrants.
Consider the Riddle of Steel
To make green steel is possible. In the Goode Olde Days, someone would have set up a new company, built a new steelworks for their new process.
Why doesn’t that happen?
What’s your evidence that growth depends on new entrants rather than existing companies (of various sizes) doing more? Do you have some economic analysis that shows this?
Look at the big companies, around the world, over the time period from 1800, onward.
Notice something?
Innovation rarely comes from big, existing companies. Due to socio-economic resistance to change.
I was hoping for an actual analysis, not just some rhetoric.
Let’s look at something a bit more concrete. Forbes offers the top 5 best-performing stocks of 2025 in the US as…
Palantir, founded 2003 GE Vernova, founded 2024 as a spin out from GE, founded 1892 NRG Energy, founded 1989, as a spin out from something that goes back to 1909 Howmet Aerospace, founded 1888 Seagate, founded 1978
That doesn’t obviously support your hypothesis.
I would think the hypothesis is more wrong than right. It was existing Canal companies and existing mining companies which established the railways in England. Newcomen, Boulton and Watt, Trevithick might have been sort of startup companies but they were working on earlier designs and innovating from them.
I have to say I consider that a very bold claim. They built the first waggon ways but in terms of what we would consider railways, public services carrying goods and passengers (in particular) they fought tooth and nail to prevent them.
Look at the big companies, around the world, over the time period from 1800, onward.
Notice something?
Innovation rarely comes from big, existing companies. Due to socio-economic resistance to change.
Innovation eats into existing companies profit margins.
The World's largest manufacturer of steam shovels declined to pursue small cheap hydraulic backhoes...
Are NVIDIA, Apple and Pfizer not innovating?
Can't comment on Pfizer, but Nvidia and Apple get most of their revenue from putting out new products that are very slight improvements on last year's model. They haven't done anything that would disrupt their business model, not for many years.
Companies innovate when they have nothing to lose and much to gain. Since we're taking the tech industry, a case in point is AMD. A relatively small player, driven to the edge of bankruptcy by a much larger competitor, Intel. So they decided there was nothing left but to take risks, throw every new innovation they could drag up into one product that might save them.
Eight years later AMD is now worth almost twice as much as Intel, still benefiting from the fruit of that desperation.
"hundreds of thousands of children lifted out of poverty" very Brownian spreadsheet thinking and talking
Though that is money that gets recycled quickly in our economy.
Much of our economy is driven by consumer spending. If consumers are skint then there is no growth.
There’s a large amount of money tied up in savings. Try freeing that up.
Saving money does free it up, unless saved in an old sock in notes and coins. Few would be able to buy a house but for the savings of others. All investment - new buildings, machinery, fleets of vehicles - comes from money not used for some other purpose. The general term for such money is 'savings'.
Britain's savings rate is the highest it’s been for decades. Household and corporate debt are historically very low. Yes, we are saving too much and spending too little.
We have real life stats to show the power of spending on economic growth. Not only UK historical GDP but also country comparisons: the USA at one extreme and Japan at the other.
We do need investment. Massively more of it. Not surplus rainy day saving in low yielding assets. But investment is spending. Every pound you spend on that new extension or your child’s university fees is investment, as is every pound your employer spends on training or automation.
A country which runs a continuous trade deficit is not under consuming.
Falling household debt (does that include student debt BTW ?) has been matched by increased government debt and household debt is still way above the levels of the 1980s and 1990s:
UK household debt peaked in 2008 - do you remember what happened to the economy that year ? It should be a warning about the dangers of excessive household debt.
Three points here.
1. You make my point for me on government debt. See also Japan (our ghost of Christmas yet to come in so many ways). The less companies and consumers spend, the more government spends and the more debt it racks up. Especially in a country where VAT is a big revenue source.
2. 2008 is both a straw man (spending and borrowing more doesn’t mean spending and borrowing to excess) and only a partial analogue. Despite protestations to the contrary across politics - but generally not by economists - the cause of 2008 was not over-extended British consumers, it was overextended financial institutions exposed to a group of overextended US consumers, triggering a systemic crisis. But banks are now under extended and sweating their assets too much.
3. Our corporate savings are even more woefully high than our household savings. And corporates not spending is an even bigger problem. We have pretty much the lowest business investment rates in the developed world. Then people wonder why productivity doesn’t rise as quickly as in France or the US. The bean counters rule the roost. It’s not necessarily a problem primarily of policy: I think it’s cultural. We are a nation of asset sweaters.
Bring back boom and bust.
A more basic problem is that the conveyer belt of growing, profitable new business is barely a trickle.
The big firms that the government love to cuddle can sustain the system - to an extent.
But for growth and innovation you need new entrants.
Consider the Riddle of Steel
To make green steel is possible. In the Goode Olde Days, someone would have set up a new company, built a new steelworks for their new process.
Why doesn’t that happen?
What’s your evidence that growth depends on new entrants rather than existing companies (of various sizes) doing more? Do you have some economic analysis that shows this?
Look at the big companies, around the world, over the time period from 1800, onward.
Notice something?
Innovation rarely comes from big, existing companies. Due to socio-economic resistance to change.
I was hoping for an actual analysis, not just some rhetoric.
Let’s look at something a bit more concrete. Forbes offers the top 5 best-performing stocks of 2025 in the US as…
Palantir, founded 2003 GE Vernova, founded 2024 as a spin out from GE, founded 1892 NRG Energy, founded 1989, as a spin out from something that goes back to 1909 Howmet Aerospace, founded 1888 Seagate, founded 1978
That doesn’t obviously support your hypothesis.
I would think the hypothesis is more wrong than right. It was existing Canal companies and existing mining companies which established the railways in England. Newcomen, Boulton and Watt, Trevithick might have been sort of startup companies but they were working on earlier designs and innovating from them.
I have to say I consider that a very bold claim. They built the first waggon ways but in terms of what we would consider railways, public services carrying goods and passengers (in particular) they fought tooth and nail to prevent them.
Indeed
We are talking at the level of trying to bribe members of parliament not to pass railway acts. With cash or shares.
"hundreds of thousands of children lifted out of poverty" very Brownian spreadsheet thinking and talking
Though that is money that gets recycled quickly in our economy.
Much of our economy is driven by consumer spending. If consumers are skint then there is no growth.
There’s a large amount of money tied up in savings. Try freeing that up.
Saving money does free it up, unless saved in an old sock in notes and coins. Few would be able to buy a house but for the savings of others. All investment - new buildings, machinery, fleets of vehicles - comes from money not used for some other purpose. The general term for such money is 'savings'.
Britain's savings rate is the highest it’s been for decades. Household and corporate debt are historically very low. Yes, we are saving too much and spending too little.
We have real life stats to show the power of spending on economic growth. Not only UK historical GDP but also country comparisons: the USA at one extreme and Japan at the other.
We do need investment. Massively more of it. Not surplus rainy day saving in low yielding assets. But investment is spending. Every pound you spend on that new extension or your child’s university fees is investment, as is every pound your employer spends on training or automation.
A country which runs a continuous trade deficit is not under consuming.
Falling household debt (does that include student debt BTW ?) has been matched by increased government debt and household debt is still way above the levels of the 1980s and 1990s:
UK household debt peaked in 2008 - do you remember what happened to the economy that year ? It should be a warning about the dangers of excessive household debt.
Three points here.
1. You make my point for me on government debt. See also Japan (our ghost of Christmas yet to come in so many ways). The less companies and consumers spend, the more government spends and the more debt it racks up. Especially in a country where VAT is a big revenue source.
2. 2008 is both a straw man (spending and borrowing more doesn’t mean spending and borrowing to excess) and only a partial analogue. Despite protestations to the contrary across politics - but generally not by economists - the cause of 2008 was not over-extended British consumers, it was overextended financial institutions exposed to a group of overextended US consumers, triggering a systemic crisis. But banks are now under extended and sweating their assets too much.
3. Our corporate savings are even more woefully high than our household savings. And corporates not spending is an even bigger problem. We have pretty much the lowest business investment rates in the developed world. Then people wonder why productivity doesn’t rise as quickly as in France or the US. The bean counters rule the roost. It’s not necessarily a problem primarily of policy: I think it’s cultural. We are a nation of asset sweaters.
Bring back boom and bust.
A more basic problem is that the conveyer belt of growing, profitable new business is barely a trickle.
The big firms that the government love to cuddle can sustain the system - to an extent.
But for growth and innovation you need new entrants.
Consider the Riddle of Steel
To make green steel is possible. In the Goode Olde Days, someone would have set up a new company, built a new steelworks for their new process.
Why doesn’t that happen?
What’s your evidence that growth depends on new entrants rather than existing companies (of various sizes) doing more? Do you have some economic analysis that shows this?
Look at the big companies, around the world, over the time period from 1800, onward.
Notice something?
Innovation rarely comes from big, existing companies. Due to socio-economic resistance to change.
I was hoping for an actual analysis, not just some rhetoric.
Let’s look at something a bit more concrete. Forbes offers the top 5 best-performing stocks of 2025 in the US as…
Palantir, founded 2003 GE Vernova, founded 2024 as a spin out from GE, founded 1892 NRG Energy, founded 1989, as a spin out from something that goes back to 1909 Howmet Aerospace, founded 1888 Seagate, founded 1978
That doesn’t obviously support your hypothesis.
So you’ve managed to ignore the existence of Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel etc etc.
Or indeed the company that now launches about 90% of tonnage to Earth orbit.
Those were Forbes’ choices, not mine. But none of Microsoft, NVIDIA, AMD, Apple or Intel are “new entrants” either! They are all well-established now. The nearest thing to a new entrant, then, in your list is SpaceX, who are 23 years old.
Old news but it seems a tad hypocritical for the BBC, which sacked Jeremy Clarkson for decking a producer, to be repeating Clarkson-era Top Gear on Sunday nights.
"hundreds of thousands of children lifted out of poverty" very Brownian spreadsheet thinking and talking
Though that is money that gets recycled quickly in our economy.
Much of our economy is driven by consumer spending. If consumers are skint then there is no growth.
There’s a large amount of money tied up in savings. Try freeing that up.
Saving money does free it up, unless saved in an old sock in notes and coins. Few would be able to buy a house but for the savings of others. All investment - new buildings, machinery, fleets of vehicles - comes from money not used for some other purpose. The general term for such money is 'savings'.
Britain's savings rate is the highest it’s been for decades. Household and corporate debt are historically very low. Yes, we are saving too much and spending too little.
We have real life stats to show the power of spending on economic growth. Not only UK historical GDP but also country comparisons: the USA at one extreme and Japan at the other.
We do need investment. Massively more of it. Not surplus rainy day saving in low yielding assets. But investment is spending. Every pound you spend on that new extension or your child’s university fees is investment, as is every pound your employer spends on training or automation.
A country which runs a continuous trade deficit is not under consuming.
Falling household debt (does that include student debt BTW ?) has been matched by increased government debt and household debt is still way above the levels of the 1980s and 1990s:
UK household debt peaked in 2008 - do you remember what happened to the economy that year ? It should be a warning about the dangers of excessive household debt.
Three points here.
1. You make my point for me on government debt. See also Japan (our ghost of Christmas yet to come in so many ways). The less companies and consumers spend, the more government spends and the more debt it racks up. Especially in a country where VAT is a big revenue source.
2. 2008 is both a straw man (spending and borrowing more doesn’t mean spending and borrowing to excess) and only a partial analogue. Despite protestations to the contrary across politics - but generally not by economists - the cause of 2008 was not over-extended British consumers, it was overextended financial institutions exposed to a group of overextended US consumers, triggering a systemic crisis. But banks are now under extended and sweating their assets too much.
3. Our corporate savings are even more woefully high than our household savings. And corporates not spending is an even bigger problem. We have pretty much the lowest business investment rates in the developed world. Then people wonder why productivity doesn’t rise as quickly as in France or the US. The bean counters rule the roost. It’s not necessarily a problem primarily of policy: I think it’s cultural. We are a nation of asset sweaters.
Bring back boom and bust.
A more basic problem is that the conveyer belt of growing, profitable new business is barely a trickle.
The big firms that the government love to cuddle can sustain the system - to an extent.
But for growth and innovation you need new entrants.
Consider the Riddle of Steel
To make green steel is possible. In the Goode Olde Days, someone would have set up a new company, built a new steelworks for their new process.
Why doesn’t that happen?
What’s your evidence that growth depends on new entrants rather than existing companies (of various sizes) doing more? Do you have some economic analysis that shows this?
Look at the big companies, around the world, over the time period from 1800, onward.
Notice something?
Innovation rarely comes from big, existing companies. Due to socio-economic resistance to change.
I was hoping for an actual analysis, not just some rhetoric.
Let’s look at something a bit more concrete. Forbes offers the top 5 best-performing stocks of 2025 in the US as…
Palantir, founded 2003 GE Vernova, founded 2024 as a spin out from GE, founded 1892 NRG Energy, founded 1989, as a spin out from something that goes back to 1909 Howmet Aerospace, founded 1888 Seagate, founded 1978
That doesn’t obviously support your hypothesis.
I would think the hypothesis is more wrong than right. It was existing Canal companies and existing mining companies which established the railways in England. Newcomen, Boulton and Watt, Trevithick might have been sort of startup companies but they were working on earlier designs and innovating from them.
I have to say I consider that a very bold claim. They built the first waggon ways but in terms of what we would consider railways, public services carrying goods and passengers (in particular) they fought tooth and nail to prevent them.
Indeed
We are talking at the level of trying to bribe members of parliament not to pass railway acts. With cash or shares.
OTOH the railways just bought up some of the canals.
And indeed in some cases built railway lines on top of the canals. Examples of the latter - Glasgow to Greenock (?), the last bit of the railway line down to Portsmouth, and IIRC possibly the Bridgwater-Glastonbury line.
It's no surprise that most of the well-heeled citizens of PB regard the years of coalition government as a golden age. However, not all share that view. Osborne's exhortation of 'we're all in this together' in regard to austerity was simply not true. Public sector workers, those on benefits and others bore the brunt of repeated freezes or below-inflation rises in their income, not the middle classes or the rich. And it stored up problems for the future, with consequent demands for pay restoration by those negatively affected. Although, to be fair, the rises in the income tax allowance did help a bit.
Yes. I would add that the enormous cuts in capital spending paved the way for 15 years of economic stagnation. It was particularly damaging since borrowing money was so cheap at that time.
That and precipitating Brexit were their biggest mistakes.
Surely the very fact that the population voted to leave indicates that a referendum was the right thing to do.
You can argue about the tactics, timing, messaging, post Brexit execution etc.
But, if nothing else, the vote to leave proves that membership of the EU lacked democratic legitimacy.
Does it ?
Or does the consistent polling against it, both before the Brexit campaign, and now in recent years, rather show that a sufficiently mendacious campaign can temporarily persuade a majority of anything ?
The point of democracy isn't that it's infallible, and doesn't make big mistakes; it is that it provides some sort of mechanism to put an end to them, once recognised.
The point is more that there was substantial proportion of the population who wanted to leave but which hadn’t been tested in 40 years. Irrespective of who won or lost.
It’s the same with Scotland - if they had a new referendum in say 2040 (+25 years) that would be entirely reasonable.
“Democratic legitimacy” is not quite the same as “democracy” - it refers to formally tested popular support for a constitutional arrangement
Except in the 10 or so general elections held over that period.
A manifesto is a bundle of policies - it doesn’t validate an overall structure.
In any event your argument leads to the conclusion the referendum was right because the voters voted for the Tories and therefore they are not to blame for holding it
Look at the big companies, around the world, over the time period from 1800, onward.
Notice something?
Innovation rarely comes from big, existing companies. Due to socio-economic resistance to change.
Innovation eats into existing companies profit margins.
The World's largest manufacturer of steam shovels declined to pursue small cheap hydraulic backhoes...
Are NVIDIA, Apple and Pfizer not innovating?
Can't comment on Pfizer, but Nvidia and Apple get most of their revenue from putting out new products that are very slight improvements on last year's model. They haven't done anything that would disrupt their business model, not for many years.
Companies innovate when they have nothing to lose and much to gain. Since we're taking the tech industry, a case in point is AMD. A relatively small player, driven to the edge of bankruptcy by a much larger competitor, Intel. So they decided there was nothing left but to take risks, throw every new innovation they could drag up into one product that might save them.
Eight years later AMD is now worth almost twice as much as Intel, still benefiting from the fruit of that desperation.
Pfizer (and most big pharma) doesn’t have the risk appetite for R&D so they buy in successful biotechs instead
"hundreds of thousands of children lifted out of poverty" very Brownian spreadsheet thinking and talking
Though that is money that gets recycled quickly in our economy.
Much of our economy is driven by consumer spending. If consumers are skint then there is no growth.
There’s a large amount of money tied up in savings. Try freeing that up.
Saving money does free it up, unless saved in an old sock in notes and coins. Few would be able to buy a house but for the savings of others. All investment - new buildings, machinery, fleets of vehicles - comes from money not used for some other purpose. The general term for such money is 'savings'.
Britain's savings rate is the highest it’s been for decades. Household and corporate debt are historically very low. Yes, we are saving too much and spending too little.
We have real life stats to show the power of spending on economic growth. Not only UK historical GDP but also country comparisons: the USA at one extreme and Japan at the other.
We do need investment. Massively more of it. Not surplus rainy day saving in low yielding assets. But investment is spending. Every pound you spend on that new extension or your child’s university fees is investment, as is every pound your employer spends on training or automation.
A country which runs a continuous trade deficit is not under consuming.
Falling household debt (does that include student debt BTW ?) has been matched by increased government debt and household debt is still way above the levels of the 1980s and 1990s:
UK household debt peaked in 2008 - do you remember what happened to the economy that year ? It should be a warning about the dangers of excessive household debt.
Three points here.
1. You make my point for me on government debt. See also Japan (our ghost of Christmas yet to come in so many ways). The less companies and consumers spend, the more government spends and the more debt it racks up. Especially in a country where VAT is a big revenue source.
2. 2008 is both a straw man (spending and borrowing more doesn’t mean spending and borrowing to excess) and only a partial analogue. Despite protestations to the contrary across politics - but generally not by economists - the cause of 2008 was not over-extended British consumers, it was overextended financial institutions exposed to a group of overextended US consumers, triggering a systemic crisis. But banks are now under extended and sweating their assets too much.
3. Our corporate savings are even more woefully high than our household savings. And corporates not spending is an even bigger problem. We have pretty much the lowest business investment rates in the developed world. Then people wonder why productivity doesn’t rise as quickly as in France or the US. The bean counters rule the roost. It’s not necessarily a problem primarily of policy: I think it’s cultural. We are a nation of asset sweaters.
Bring back boom and bust.
A more basic problem is that the conveyer belt of growing, profitable new business is barely a trickle.
The big firms that the government love to cuddle can sustain the system - to an extent.
But for growth and innovation you need new entrants.
Consider the Riddle of Steel
To make green steel is possible. In the Goode Olde Days, someone would have set up a new company, built a new steelworks for their new process.
Why doesn’t that happen?
What’s your evidence that growth depends on new entrants rather than existing companies (of various sizes) doing more? Do you have some economic analysis that shows this?
Look at the big companies, around the world, over the time period from 1800, onward.
Notice something?
Innovation rarely comes from big, existing companies. Due to socio-economic resistance to change.
I was hoping for an actual analysis, not just some rhetoric.
Let’s look at something a bit more concrete. Forbes offers the top 5 best-performing stocks of 2025 in the US as…
Palantir, founded 2003 GE Vernova, founded 2024 as a spin out from GE, founded 1892 NRG Energy, founded 1989, as a spin out from something that goes back to 1909 Howmet Aerospace, founded 1888 Seagate, founded 1978
That doesn’t obviously support your hypothesis.
So you’ve managed to ignore the existence of Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel etc etc.
Or indeed the company that now launches about 90% of tonnage to Earth orbit.
Those were Forbes’ choices, not mine. But none of Microsoft, NVIDIA, AMD, Apple or Intel are “new entrants” either! They are all well-established now. The nearest thing to a new entrant, then, in your list is SpaceX, who are 23 years old.
But a few decades ago they didn’t exist.
IBM was the Big Beast of IT.
Companies are born, grow old and eventually die when their products are obsolete. A few manage to innovate to stay relevant. But that is more the exception.
Look at the big companies, around the world, over the time period from 1800, onward.
Notice something?
Innovation rarely comes from big, existing companies. Due to socio-economic resistance to change.
Innovation eats into existing companies profit margins.
The World's largest manufacturer of steam shovels declined to pursue small cheap hydraulic backhoes...
Are NVIDIA, Apple and Pfizer not innovating?
Can't comment on Pfizer, but Nvidia and Apple get most of their revenue from putting out new products that are very slight improvements on last year's model. They haven't done anything that would disrupt their business model, not for many years.
Companies innovate when they have nothing to lose and much to gain. Since we're taking the tech industry, a case in point is AMD. A relatively small player, driven to the edge of bankruptcy by a much larger competitor, Intel. So they decided there was nothing left but to take risks, throw every new innovation they could drag up into one product that might save them.
Eight years later AMD is now worth almost twice as much as Intel, still benefiting from the fruit of that desperation.
And AMD were founded in 1969, so they’re not a new entrant and run against Malmesbury’s hypothesis.
I think a lot of this is down to lack both of planning and of preparing the ground with the electorate.
In the 2010 general election the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and even Labour warned that there was going to be austerity, in the form of tax rises and spending cuts. In the 2024 general election this honesty was not forthcoming: the Conservatives had just implemented an unaffordable tax cut, the Liberal Democrats' spending pledges were greater even than the Greens', and Labour seemed to think that the problem could be solved by saying 'growth' three times and clicking their heels together.
Labour entered government having told us that we wouldn't all have to pay; the only tax rises would be on those dastardly non-doms and villainous private schools (Labour bogeymen of long standing). They even called Sunak a horrible liar for saying otherwise. As usual, it is in their moment of triumph that politicians paint themselves into a corner.
(Listening to recent 'New Statesman' podcasts it is worth noting that many journalists and commentators, including those friendly to Labour, wondered at the time what the plan was, and were told in very vague terms that attracting inward investment was a big part of it. Andrew Marr's rather grandiose 'Question Time' prediction of a wall of money sweeping into the safe haven of the UK makes a little more sense in that context.)
In short, they had a plan for winning the election, but not for governing. The next government - and despite it all I think it is likely to be Labour in some form or another - needs to learn from this mistake.
If socialists learned from their mistakes they would not be socialists.
Look at the big companies, around the world, over the time period from 1800, onward.
Notice something?
Innovation rarely comes from big, existing companies. Due to socio-economic resistance to change.
Innovation eats into existing companies profit margins.
The World's largest manufacturer of steam shovels declined to pursue small cheap hydraulic backhoes...
Are NVIDIA, Apple and Pfizer not innovating?
Can't comment on Pfizer, but Nvidia and Apple get most of their revenue from putting out new products that are very slight improvements on last year's model. They haven't done anything that would disrupt their business model, not for many years.
Companies innovate when they have nothing to lose and much to gain. Since we're taking the tech industry, a case in point is AMD. A relatively small player, driven to the edge of bankruptcy by a much larger competitor, Intel. So they decided there was nothing left but to take risks, throw every new innovation they could drag up into one product that might save them.
Eight years later AMD is now worth almost twice as much as Intel, still benefiting from the fruit of that desperation.
Pfizer (and most big pharma) doesn’t have the risk appetite for R&D so they buy in successful biotechs instead
A model that suggests you need both new entrants and established companies. The new entrants can innovate, but they can’t get to market, so they sell up to Pfizer.
"hundreds of thousands of children lifted out of poverty" very Brownian spreadsheet thinking and talking
Though that is money that gets recycled quickly in our economy.
Much of our economy is driven by consumer spending. If consumers are skint then there is no growth.
There’s a large amount of money tied up in savings. Try freeing that up.
Saving money does free it up, unless saved in an old sock in notes and coins. Few would be able to buy a house but for the savings of others. All investment - new buildings, machinery, fleets of vehicles - comes from money not used for some other purpose. The general term for such money is 'savings'.
Britain's savings rate is the highest it’s been for decades. Household and corporate debt are historically very low. Yes, we are saving too much and spending too little.
We have real life stats to show the power of spending on economic growth. Not only UK historical GDP but also country comparisons: the USA at one extreme and Japan at the other.
We do need investment. Massively more of it. Not surplus rainy day saving in low yielding assets. But investment is spending. Every pound you spend on that new extension or your child’s university fees is investment, as is every pound your employer spends on training or automation.
A country which runs a continuous trade deficit is not under consuming.
Falling household debt (does that include student debt BTW ?) has been matched by increased government debt and household debt is still way above the levels of the 1980s and 1990s:
UK household debt peaked in 2008 - do you remember what happened to the economy that year ? It should be a warning about the dangers of excessive household debt.
Three points here.
1. You make my point for me on government debt. See also Japan (our ghost of Christmas yet to come in so many ways). The less companies and consumers spend, the more government spends and the more debt it racks up. Especially in a country where VAT is a big revenue source.
2. 2008 is both a straw man (spending and borrowing more doesn’t mean spending and borrowing to excess) and only a partial analogue. Despite protestations to the contrary across politics - but generally not by economists - the cause of 2008 was not over-extended British consumers, it was overextended financial institutions exposed to a group of overextended US consumers, triggering a systemic crisis. But banks are now under extended and sweating their assets too much.
3. Our corporate savings are even more woefully high than our household savings. And corporates not spending is an even bigger problem. We have pretty much the lowest business investment rates in the developed world. Then people wonder why productivity doesn’t rise as quickly as in France or the US. The bean counters rule the roost. It’s not necessarily a problem primarily of policy: I think it’s cultural. We are a nation of asset sweaters.
Bring back boom and bust.
A more basic problem is that the conveyer belt of growing, profitable new business is barely a trickle.
The big firms that the government love to cuddle can sustain the system - to an extent.
But for growth and innovation you need new entrants.
Consider the Riddle of Steel
To make green steel is possible. In the Goode Olde Days, someone would have set up a new company, built a new steelworks for their new process.
Why doesn’t that happen?
What’s your evidence that growth depends on new entrants rather than existing companies (of various sizes) doing more? Do you have some economic analysis that shows this?
Look at the big companies, around the world, over the time period from 1800, onward.
Notice something?
Innovation rarely comes from big, existing companies. Due to socio-economic resistance to change.
I was hoping for an actual analysis, not just some rhetoric.
Let’s look at something a bit more concrete. Forbes offers the top 5 best-performing stocks of 2025 in the US as…
Palantir, founded 2003 GE Vernova, founded 2024 as a spin out from GE, founded 1892 NRG Energy, founded 1989, as a spin out from something that goes back to 1909 Howmet Aerospace, founded 1888 Seagate, founded 1978
That doesn’t obviously support your hypothesis.
I would think the hypothesis is more wrong than right. It was existing Canal companies and existing mining companies which established the railways in England. Newcomen, Boulton and Watt, Trevithick might have been sort of startup companies but they were working on earlier designs and innovating from them.
I have to say I consider that a very bold claim. They built the first waggon ways but in terms of what we would consider railways, public services carrying goods and passengers (in particular) they fought tooth and nail to prevent them.
Indeed
We are talking at the level of trying to bribe members of parliament not to pass railway acts. With cash or shares.
OTOH the railways just bought up some of the canals.
And indeed in some cases built railway lines on top of the canals. Examples of the latter - Glasgow to Greenock (?), the last bit of the railway line down to Portsmouth, and IIRC possibly the Bridgwater-Glastonbury line.
The Gloucester-Ledbury railway was mostly built on an old canal.
The canal in question was the last narrow canal built in the country and much of it was engineered to be easily converted to a railway.
Ironically, however, the section actually converted to a railway was an older section built before railways had been considered commercial...
"hundreds of thousands of children lifted out of poverty" very Brownian spreadsheet thinking and talking
Though that is money that gets recycled quickly in our economy.
Much of our economy is driven by consumer spending. If consumers are skint then there is no growth.
There’s a large amount of money tied up in savings. Try freeing that up.
Saving money does free it up, unless saved in an old sock in notes and coins. Few would be able to buy a house but for the savings of others. All investment - new buildings, machinery, fleets of vehicles - comes from money not used for some other purpose. The general term for such money is 'savings'.
Britain's savings rate is the highest it’s been for decades. Household and corporate debt are historically very low. Yes, we are saving too much and spending too little.
We have real life stats to show the power of spending on economic growth. Not only UK historical GDP but also country comparisons: the USA at one extreme and Japan at the other.
We do need investment. Massively more of it. Not surplus rainy day saving in low yielding assets. But investment is spending. Every pound you spend on that new extension or your child’s university fees is investment, as is every pound your employer spends on training or automation.
A country which runs a continuous trade deficit is not under consuming.
Falling household debt (does that include student debt BTW ?) has been matched by increased government debt and household debt is still way above the levels of the 1980s and 1990s:
UK household debt peaked in 2008 - do you remember what happened to the economy that year ? It should be a warning about the dangers of excessive household debt.
Three points here.
1. You make my point for me on government debt. See also Japan (our ghost of Christmas yet to come in so many ways). The less companies and consumers spend, the more government spends and the more debt it racks up. Especially in a country where VAT is a big revenue source.
2. 2008 is both a straw man (spending and borrowing more doesn’t mean spending and borrowing to excess) and only a partial analogue. Despite protestations to the contrary across politics - but generally not by economists - the cause of 2008 was not over-extended British consumers, it was overextended financial institutions exposed to a group of overextended US consumers, triggering a systemic crisis. But banks are now under extended and sweating their assets too much.
3. Our corporate savings are even more woefully high than our household savings. And corporates not spending is an even bigger problem. We have pretty much the lowest business investment rates in the developed world. Then people wonder why productivity doesn’t rise as quickly as in France or the US. The bean counters rule the roost. It’s not necessarily a problem primarily of policy: I think it’s cultural. We are a nation of asset sweaters.
Bring back boom and bust.
A more basic problem is that the conveyer belt of growing, profitable new business is barely a trickle.
The big firms that the government love to cuddle can sustain the system - to an extent.
But for growth and innovation you need new entrants.
Consider the Riddle of Steel
To make green steel is possible. In the Goode Olde Days, someone would have set up a new company, built a new steelworks for their new process.
Why doesn’t that happen?
What’s your evidence that growth depends on new entrants rather than existing companies (of various sizes) doing more? Do you have some economic analysis that shows this?
Look at the big companies, around the world, over the time period from 1800, onward.
Notice something?
Innovation rarely comes from big, existing companies. Due to socio-economic resistance to change.
I was hoping for an actual analysis, not just some rhetoric.
Let’s look at something a bit more concrete. Forbes offers the top 5 best-performing stocks of 2025 in the US as…
Palantir, founded 2003 GE Vernova, founded 2024 as a spin out from GE, founded 1892 NRG Energy, founded 1989, as a spin out from something that goes back to 1909 Howmet Aerospace, founded 1888 Seagate, founded 1978
That doesn’t obviously support your hypothesis.
So you’ve managed to ignore the existence of Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel etc etc.
Or indeed the company that now launches about 90% of tonnage to Earth orbit.
Those were Forbes’ choices, not mine. But none of Microsoft, NVIDIA, AMD, Apple or Intel are “new entrants” either! They are all well-established now. The nearest thing to a new entrant, then, in your list is SpaceX, who are 23 years old.
But a few decades ago they didn’t exist.
IBM was the Big Beast of IT.
Companies are born, grow old and eventually die when their products are obsolete. A few manage to innovate to stay relevant. But that is more the exception.
So, if we take your words “new entrants” to mean “at least 23 years old”, then you have one company that proves your case? I was hoping for rather more concrete evidence and less goalpost moving.
Lots of companies continue for a long time. Intel are 57 years old and ain’t doing badly. Nintendo are doing well at 136. Sainsbury’s are fine at 156. Anheuser-Busch InBev go back 173 years. Löwenbräu are 642 years old.
I think Starmer/Reeves probably know they've walked into a trap over the child benefit cap, but they have a parliamentary party of over 400 MPs to manage - many of whom are very left-wing - just to stay in office.
Good morning
Badenoch unequivocally said this morning she will reinstate the 2 child cap - 'we have to draw the line somewhere'
She is right but the savings should be put into increasing child benefit for most parents which is a better use of taxpayer funds than ending the child benefit cap for parents on university credit
OT - The Govt may be a little chaotic but just look at the results. Net immigration is apparently collapsing which is what I've been told should be the Govt's sole concern and on top of that the economy is in brilliant shape. I know because Kemi Badenoch told me.
A low birth rate is a consequence of greater wealth, and greater female choice. It isnt to do with the cost of having children. There isnt any civilised area in the world that has managed to materially reverse the trend. Women when given the choice choose to do something else.
To an extent, though easing cost of childcare and increasing child benefit helps a little.
The biggest factor though is religion, the more religious the nation the higher its fertility rate and the developed world is increasingly secular.
Look at the big companies, around the world, over the time period from 1800, onward.
Notice something?
Innovation rarely comes from big, existing companies. Due to socio-economic resistance to change.
Innovation eats into existing companies profit margins.
The World's largest manufacturer of steam shovels declined to pursue small cheap hydraulic backhoes...
Are NVIDIA, Apple and Pfizer not innovating?
Can't comment on Pfizer, but Nvidia and Apple get most of their revenue from putting out new products that are very slight improvements on last year's model. They haven't done anything that would disrupt their business model, not for many years.
Companies innovate when they have nothing to lose and much to gain. Since we're taking the tech industry, a case in point is AMD. A relatively small player, driven to the edge of bankruptcy by a much larger competitor, Intel. So they decided there was nothing left but to take risks, throw every new innovation they could drag up into one product that might save them.
Eight years later AMD is now worth almost twice as much as Intel, still benefiting from the fruit of that desperation.
Pfizer (and most big pharma) doesn’t have the risk appetite for R&D so they buy in successful biotechs instead
A model that suggests you need both new entrants and established companies. The new entrants can innovate, but they can’t get to market, so they sell up to Pfizer.
Increasingly biotechs launch themselves in the US before selling and partner ex US (because of the complexity). They only sell when Pharma pays more (due to a lower cost of capital / return expectations from their investors)
I think Starmer/Reeves probably know they've walked into a trap over the child benefit cap, but they have a parliamentary party of over 400 MPs to manage - many of whom are very left-wing - just to stay in office.
Good morning
Badenoch unequivocally said this morning she will reinstate the 2 child cap - 'we have to draw the line somewhere'
She is right but the savings should be put into increasing child benefit for most parents which is a better use of taxpayer funds than ending the child benefit cap for parents on university credit
What is the justification for redirecting funding from children living in poverty to those not living in poverty, which is the effect of Kemi's proposal?
And Your Party backs @zarahsultana’s preferred option to allow members also to be members of other left wing parties and groups - subject to the agreement of the party executive.
I see Your Party have agreed that neither Corbyn nor Sultana will be party leader but instead it will be led by a panel of members. So if Your Party won the next general election would we then be led by a panel of Prime Ministers?
I think Starmer/Reeves probably know they've walked into a trap over the child benefit cap, but they have a parliamentary party of over 400 MPs to manage - many of whom are very left-wing - just to stay in office.
Good morning
Badenoch unequivocally said this morning she will reinstate the 2 child cap - 'we have to draw the line somewhere'
She is right but the savings should be put into increasing child benefit for most parents which is a better use of taxpayer funds than ending the child benefit cap for parents on university credit
What is the justification for redirecting funding from children living in poverty to those not living in poverty, which is the effect of Kemi's proposal?
As the state should be funding average earning families to have more children not encouraging parents on universal credit to be having more than two children
@viewcode here. I need to ask a legal question: specifically what can be said regarding an ongoing case. @Cyclefree, @DavidL and other lawyers of PB, can you assist? Shouldn't take longer than five minutes.
And Your Party backs @zarahsultana’s preferred option to allow members also to be members of other left wing parties and groups - subject to the agreement of the party executive.
I see Your Party have agreed that neither Corbyn nor Sultana will be party leader but instead it will be led by a panel of members. So if Your Party won the next general election would we then be led by a panel of Prime Ministers?
There's going to be a chair, a vice chair and a spokesman. Not sure if the spokesman will be an MP, but I presume there will be a leader of the parliamentary party who would be the PM candidate. Or maybe they would elect a PM candidate for the occasion.
And Your Party backs @zarahsultana’s preferred option to allow members also to be members of other left wing parties and groups - subject to the agreement of the party executive.
I see Your Party have agreed that neither Corbyn nor Sultana will be party leader but instead it will be led by a panel of members. So if Your Party won the next general election would we then be led by a panel of Prime Ministers?
More likely, we would have a nominal (one might also say Constitutional) Prime Minister, but they would be required to defer to the leadership panel for any actual decision-making.
Like Benn's model for early 80s Labour, only far worse.
And AMD were founded in 1969, so they’re not a new entrant and run against Malmesbury’s hypothesis.
That's debatable, AMD in its current from only dates to 2009. They started design work on the Zen architecture, which saved them, in 2012.
If you take an established company, spin-off almost all of it, sack most of the staff and bring in new management you have something that's not too far away from a start-up. They have no baggage and not much left to lose.
I think Starmer/Reeves probably know they've walked into a trap over the child benefit cap, but they have a parliamentary party of over 400 MPs to manage - many of whom are very left-wing - just to stay in office.
Good morning
Badenoch unequivocally said this morning she will reinstate the 2 child cap - 'we have to draw the line somewhere'
She is right but the savings should be put into increasing child benefit for most parents which is a better use of taxpayer funds than ending the child benefit cap for parents on university credit
What is the justification for redirecting funding from children living in poverty to those not living in poverty, which is the effect of Kemi's proposal?
Look at the big companies, around the world, over the time period from 1800, onward.
Notice something?
Innovation rarely comes from big, existing companies. Due to socio-economic resistance to change.
Innovation eats into existing companies profit margins.
The World's largest manufacturer of steam shovels declined to pursue small cheap hydraulic backhoes...
Are NVIDIA, Apple and Pfizer not innovating?
Can't comment on Pfizer, but Nvidia and Apple get most of their revenue from putting out new products that are very slight improvements on last year's model. They haven't done anything that would disrupt their business model, not for many years.
Companies innovate when they have nothing to lose and much to gain. Since we're taking the tech industry, a case in point is AMD. A relatively small player, driven to the edge of bankruptcy by a much larger competitor, Intel. So they decided there was nothing left but to take risks, throw every new innovation they could drag up into one product that might save them.
Eight years later AMD is now worth almost twice as much as Intel, still benefiting from the fruit of that desperation.
Pfizer (and most big pharma) doesn’t have the risk appetite for R&D so they buy in successful biotechs instead
A model that suggests you need both new entrants and established companies. The new entrants can innovate, but they can’t get to market, so they sell up to Pfizer.
Increasingly biotechs launch themselves in the US before selling and partner ex US (because of the complexity). They only sell when Pharma pays more (due to a lower cost of capital / return expectations from their investors)
Pharma faces a significant regulatory burden, but now the UK has left the EU, the market you gain going through the UK system is rather limited. It's more attractive to go through the US or EU systems.
And AMD were founded in 1969, so they’re not a new entrant and run against Malmesbury’s hypothesis.
That's debatable, AMD in its current from only dates to 2009. They started design work on the Zen architecture, which saved them, in 2012.
If you take an established company, spin-off almost all of it, sack most of the staff and bring in new management you have something that's not too far away from a start-up. They have no baggage and not much left to lose.
So, that shows how an established company can be successful, so it still goes against Malmesbury’s hypothesis.
I think Starmer/Reeves probably know they've walked into a trap over the child benefit cap, but they have a parliamentary party of over 400 MPs to manage - many of whom are very left-wing - just to stay in office.
Good morning
Badenoch unequivocally said this morning she will reinstate the 2 child cap - 'we have to draw the line somewhere'
She is right but the savings should be put into increasing child benefit for most parents which is a better use of taxpayer funds than ending the child benefit cap for parents on university credit
What is the justification for redirecting funding from children living in poverty to those not living in poverty, which is the effect of Kemi's proposal?
Problem with this is it's a particularly poor "when did you stop beating your wife" question.
If we were actually concerned with children in poverty, we'd almost certainly get way more bang for our £3bn bucks by sending it as overseas aid to places that are genuinely poor.
Instead we're borrowing £3bn we haven't got to dole it out to the feckless parents of kids who are pretty well off in global terms - and doing it in a way that doesn't improve the kids life chances.
The IFS did a (very balanced) podcast a month or so ago on the two child limit, and the really striking thing was that their study found *no* effect in the school readiness survey from imposing the two child limit. So we can reduce *child poverty* via scrapping the two child limit, but without actually improving outcomes for children.
That's quite remarkable (I was expecting at least some measurable effort), and tells you that the problems for these kids are not really related to household income.
My sister did a load of education stats for one of the devolved governments. Her comment to me was that the *only* "inputs" which influence educational outputs are those which function as proxies for parent interest in their kids. Everything else was just noise.
So poor parents who care - their kids do fine. Poor parents who don't care - their kids outcomes are unfortunately poor, and no amount of government largesse will fix them because it's not really a money problem.
And AMD were founded in 1969, so they’re not a new entrant and run against Malmesbury’s hypothesis.
That's debatable, AMD in its current from only dates to 2009. They started design work on the Zen architecture, which saved them, in 2012.
If you take an established company, spin-off almost all of it, sack most of the staff and bring in new management you have something that's not too far away from a start-up. They have no baggage and not much left to lose.
That's not quite true: there's a fair amount of old AMD/ATI DNA in there, if you don't mind the pun
And AMD were founded in 1969, so they’re not a new entrant and run against Malmesbury’s hypothesis.
That's debatable, AMD in its current from only dates to 2009. They started design work on the Zen architecture, which saved them, in 2012.
If you take an established company, spin-off almost all of it, sack most of the staff and bring in new management you have something that's not too far away from a start-up. They have no baggage and not much left to lose.
So, that shows how an established company can be successful, so it still goes against Malmesbury’s hypothesis.
Question is - what counts as an established company? Mine is 222 years old this year, but I bought it as a dried up husk on the verge of bankruptcy. We have some plant and machinery accrued in the previous 200 years (we still use a big hydraulic press built in 1900, bought second hand by the business in 1946), but are effectively running as a startup in the growth phase (we're at 6 employees from January, 4 years ago when I took over, it was me and two sub contractors).
I completely reinvented and fixed one of our main processes about 18 months in - the previous owners would never have taken that risk (it was pretty hairy at the time, basically burning all the cash I had, and some I probably didn't, on R&D, and relying on it coming good), but I realised that without fixing it we were finished. Having done that it's made us profitable enough to gradually grow and pick up staff and market share.
And AMD were founded in 1969, so they’re not a new entrant and run against Malmesbury’s hypothesis.
That's debatable, AMD in its current from only dates to 2009. They started design work on the Zen architecture, which saved them, in 2012.
If you take an established company, spin-off almost all of it, sack most of the staff and bring in new management you have something that's not too far away from a start-up. They have no baggage and not much left to lose.
That's not quite true: there's a fair amount of old AMD/ATI DNA in there, if you don't mind the pun
The old Optetron architecture is still going strong in Zen CPUs!
I do worry about AMD though, my gut tells me that Intel are set to have an empire strikes back moment again and they're nowhere in the GPU market vs Nvidia. I don't know why I think Intel are going to make a comeback, but I do just have a funny feeling they've got something cooking that will give them a very clear lead in CPU performance and that 18A-P looks like a very good node after all the shite coming out of Taiwanese sources trying to bury it before it fully launched.
Comments
Richard does something crazy involving wheels.
And I beat the shit out of an assistant producer.
He wouldn’t have it that it wouldn’t deliver the savings and the approach was right,
He’s finding out the hard way but I found him pleasant, open to discuss, and quite amenable.
The whole point of TrumpCoin is “I bought some TC, no way for him to know if I did, so there’s no direct trail”
*Its a long time ago, so may not have been as near a miss as I recall, but I can see how it can happen.**
**Worst near miss was as the non striker when ‘Abdul’*** smashed one straight back and it zoomed just by my head.
***Not his real name.
I have been moving some of my SIPP to mixed assets, bonds and cash but a discussion with Ben Pointer the other day has me thinking I need more equities than I have for the long term growth but when everyone is saying the market will crash it worries you. But time in the market beats timing the market.
Our philosophy is they can have the house we will spend the rest.
No idea of the circumstances of this incident, but among railway workers, the saying is "it's the second train that gets you" - plenty of people have died over the year having got clear of an approaching train by stepping onto another line, and then being hit by another train, the sounds of which were masked by the first train.
https://www.thetimes.com/business/companies-markets/article/young-accountants-will-be-sent-to-pull-pints-to-learn-people-skills-vnl33t3fh
I think this is a good thing. When I was younger I had issues around people and confidence so I did bar work and it really was transformative for me. It forces you to engage with all sorts of people.
The reaction to this truth - see the graphs for getting pregnant and having a health child - was something like a witch hunting mob.
If 1 in 4 or 1 in 3 will be dead by the age of 5, the more you need.
It's also interesting how much attention cases such as this get compared to those on roads, On railways there are about 5-6 pedestrian deaths on level crossings per annum (ignoring eg people breaking into tracks not at crossings).
It’s not clear to me that the condition holds for an increasing segment (age band) of the population.
Notice something?
Innovation rarely comes from big, existing companies. Due to socio-economic resistance to change.
But in New Zealand the railways lines run for tens of miles along side the state highways without a fence between them. Admittedly they don't have quite the same level of traffic. Our Leeds to Carlisle line has six times as much traffic as the main North Island Kiwi Rail from Wellington to Auckland. In NZ there is one train northbound one day and one southbound the next day - that is again from Wellington to Auckland. If it arrives the same day as it sets off then it is deemed to be on time ! It is one hell of a journey though and rivals the Settle and Carlisle for its beauty.
Oh and if the cockerel at Garsdale station were a dog it would have been put down for attacking people years ago.
The World's largest manufacturer of steam shovels declined to pursue small cheap hydraulic backhoes...
Let’s look at something a bit more concrete. Forbes offers the top 5 best-performing stocks of 2025 in the US as…
Palantir, founded 2003
GE Vernova, founded 2024 as a spin out from GE, founded 1892
NRG Energy, founded 1989, as a spin out from something that goes back to 1909
Howmet Aerospace, founded 1888
Seagate, founded 1978
That doesn’t obviously support your hypothesis.
The Tories are famous for doing the reverse
Oh, not that ho.
It’s the same with Scotland - if they had a new referendum in say 2040 (+25 years) that would be entirely reasonable.
“Democratic legitimacy” is not quite the same as “democracy” - it refers to formally tested popular support for a constitutional arrangement
Last month at our history soc we had an excellent talk from an expert about the Mines Royal and the German copper prospecting at Keswick in the 16th C. William Cecil was a main investor. The argument could be made, and was made that that in turn became the model for the East India Company etc etc whihc eventually lead to the Establishment
Or indeed the company that now launches about 90% of tonnage to Earth orbit.
Companies innovate when they have nothing to lose and much to gain. Since we're taking the tech industry, a case in point is AMD. A relatively small player, driven to the edge of bankruptcy by a much larger competitor, Intel. So they decided there was nothing left but to take risks, throw every new innovation they could drag up into one product that might save them.
Eight years later AMD is now worth almost twice as much as Intel, still benefiting from the fruit of that desperation.
We are talking at the level of trying to bribe members of parliament not to pass railway acts. With cash or shares.
And indeed in some cases built railway lines on top of the canals. Examples of the latter - Glasgow to Greenock (?), the last bit of the railway line down to Portsmouth, and IIRC possibly the Bridgwater-Glastonbury line.
In any event your argument leads to the conclusion the referendum was right because the voters voted for the Tories and therefore they are not to blame for holding it
IBM was the Big Beast of IT.
Companies are born, grow old and eventually die when their products are obsolete. A few manage to innovate to stay relevant. But that is more the exception.
The canal in question was the last narrow canal built in the country and much of it was engineered to be easily converted to a railway.
Ironically, however, the section actually converted to a railway was an older section built before railways had been considered commercial...
Lots of companies continue for a long time. Intel are 57 years old and ain’t doing badly. Nintendo are doing well at 136. Sainsbury’s are fine at 156. Anheuser-Busch InBev go back 173 years. Löwenbräu are 642 years old.
The biggest factor though is religion, the more religious the nation the higher its fertility rate and the developed world is increasingly secular.
Like Benn's model for early 80s Labour, only far worse.
If you take an established company, spin-off almost all of it, sack most of the staff and bring in new management you have something that's not too far away from a start-up. They have no baggage and not much left to lose.
https://www.nps.gov/mora/learn/photosmultimedia/webcams.htm
The mountain is out, as we say in this area.
You should be able to see visitors there later today.
The main picture here helps explain the origin of some early flying saucer stories:
https://www.nps.gov/mora/planyourvisit/weather.htm
(For the record: I have skied there in every month except October.)
If we were actually concerned with children in poverty, we'd almost certainly get way more bang for our £3bn bucks by sending it as overseas aid to places that are genuinely poor.
Instead we're borrowing £3bn we haven't got to dole it out to the feckless parents of kids who are pretty well off in global terms - and doing it in a way that doesn't improve the kids life chances.
The IFS did a (very balanced) podcast a month or so ago on the two child limit, and the really striking thing was that their study found *no* effect in the school readiness survey from imposing the two child limit. So we can reduce *child poverty* via scrapping the two child limit, but without actually improving outcomes for children.
That's quite remarkable (I was expecting at least some measurable effort), and tells you that the problems for these kids are not really related to household income.
My sister did a load of education stats for one of the devolved governments. Her comment to me was that the *only* "inputs" which influence educational outputs are those which function as proxies for parent interest in their kids. Everything else was just noise.
So poor parents who care - their kids do fine. Poor parents who don't care - their kids outcomes are unfortunately poor, and no amount of government largesse will fix them because it's not really a money problem.
This just arrived in my computer. Why Have meat prices gone up in the US? One for Farage
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/T4Tv_9GuL3s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MxXsdUe7xk
I completely reinvented and fixed one of our main processes about 18 months in - the previous owners would never have taken that risk (it was pretty hairy at the time, basically burning all the cash I had, and some I probably didn't, on R&D, and relying on it coming good), but I realised that without fixing it we were finished. Having done that it's made us profitable enough to gradually grow and pick up staff and market share.
I do worry about AMD though, my gut tells me that Intel are set to have an empire strikes back moment again and they're nowhere in the GPU market vs Nvidia. I don't know why I think Intel are going to make a comeback, but I do just have a funny feeling they've got something cooking that will give them a very clear lead in CPU performance and that 18A-P looks like a very good node after all the shite coming out of Taiwanese sources trying to bury it before it fully launched.