All those speculators running riot, eh? Terrible, isn't it, especially when we can show that specluators helped to lower the oil prices.
It appears that politicians think ther constituents are dumb. Well it's true that they were elected by them, so there's some proof at least.
Not so dumb: denying a researcher the data to test whether the actions by politicians were dumb.
Why we might not want to trust the IPCC. They've told us how many climate change might threaten with greater water stress....but not how many will be made safer from water stress at the same time. So we're not told that the sum total will be fewer suffering from water stress.
One reason why banning short sales might be a bad idea. It will bankrupt the Wall Street brokers.
More banning short sales: why stop people from trying to tell the truth as they see it?
Banks going down like ninepins, fortunes being wiped off the stock market, inflation haywire, loans unobtainable – the market's messed up, hasn't it? The newspapers tell us that even the most ardent defenders of the free market are calling for government action.
Well I'm not. It's perfectly obvious to me that it's governments and regulations that have messed up, not free markets – because in the financial wonderland that our regulators have created, free markets do not exist.
Much of the problem comes down to US government 'anti-redlining' legislation, which forced institutions to lend to people in parts of town where the local property market was bad collateral. Lenders knew they'd have to comply or face regulator's retribution. True, the rules meant that a lot of people were able to own their own home for the first time. Unfortunately they also meant a lot of 'sub-prime' debts on the institutions' books.
That was no problem when everything was booming. But the 'prudence' of Gordon Brown, and Alan Greenspan's confident mastery of the markets now turn out to have been prolonged, stealthy, credit binges. It was great for politicians and business, at the time. The trouble is that after every binge, there's a hangover. In the cold light of day, nothing quite looks so clever.
Like Northern Rock. The Bank of England thought it was taking too many risks months before it collapsed – but the Financial Services Authority did nothing. When it failed, three regulators – the Treasury as well – were all stepping on each other's feet.
This week's turmoil owes its origin not to the free market, but to politicians engineering booms in which everything seemed to succeed, and in reassuring investors that their money was completely safe. Financial markets are better regulated by their customers looking carefully before parting with their cash, not by distant regulators.
Don’t get me wrong; I love Adam Smith. In particular I love and support his description of the “negligence and profusion resulting from the separation of ownership and control in a business enterprise".
However it pains me no end to see this concept brought up to support a prior argument (policy-based evidence rather than evidence-based policy, as some wag put it recently) – especially when there is a far more likely explanation to hand.
Chris Dillow, an experienced writer on economics at the Investors Chronicle wrote this in an article in The Times on 18th September:
"There’s a pattern here. The biggest shocks to the financial system have all come from stockmarket companies. By contrast, hedge funds, which many expected to cause trouble, have been innocent bystanders. These are, generally, owned as private partnerships. So one form of ownership has caused a crisis, and another hasn’t".
Come on, Chris. You’re not a politician – a species which uses statistics like a drunken man clinging to a lamppost – for support rather than illumination.
Surely the explanation that sticks out a mile is that hedge funds are fund managers and not banks. The shocks to the financial system have come from banks – who are heavily controlled by the Bank of England and the government in one of the clearest examples of corporatism you are ever likely to see. In contrast, hedge funds (whose activities are extremely diverse and include funds offering deliberate reduction of risk as well as the opposite) are plain vanilla fund managers. It is true that many other plain vanilla fund managers are also privately owned and are surviving but the point is they are not banks.
The credit crunch is now spreading outside the financial sector and it will be interesting to see further analysis by Mr Dillow. In the meantime his perfectly valid concern about the “cost of separating ownership from control" should be applied to voters and government – now there’s a real gulf to consider. It’s funny, and it may be a coincidence, but I don’t recall Chris Dillow praising the virtues of small government.
Traditionally, higher education has been a luxury - something for wealthier people, and wealthier countries. Over the last 35 years, however, it has become more of a necessity. Whatever their income, people are getting more of it. Countries today are sending a higher percentage of their youngsters through higher education than countries with the same GDP level back in the early 1970s. People think of the US as the leader in higher education, but in fact countries like Korea and Japan have higher penetration: modern technology needs well-educated workers.
And countries with higher proportions of young people have higher life expectancies. Maybe it's just that richer countries can afford more education and more healthcare. But there's more to it. After the collapse of the Soviet system, Russia's GDP nosedived. So did life expectancy. But the life expectancy of university graduates continued to rise. Perhaps education helps people to deal with changing events.
The link between education an longevity has another aspect. Inequalities in GDP between different countries haven't changed much since the 1970s. There has been a slight narrowing, but a gap between rich and poor persists. However, even the very poor are now getting more education, and living much longer than before. And people value life very highly: when you take that into account, world inequality is much less than the GDP figures suggest.
With graduates earning more and living longer, there are certainly gaps, even within countries. But you don't close that gap by taxing graduates. Higher education delivers a good return on investment: you want more of that, not less. And the way to create a thriving education sector is just the same as for other sectors, be it manufacturing, utilities, telecoms or transport – end the state monopolies and let competition flourish.
What can you do when your broker won't stop buying things on your account?
This plan isn't that far off our own for UK taxation. Depressing that The Treasury doesn't even seem to understand it, let along agree with it, isn't it?
Just as we have security theatre so we have legislative theatre. It looks like something is being done but at best it'll make things no worse.
And finally, does anyone at all know of an open access bike system that has worked?
The Blair government had a sense of mission. They believed that the government had lost touch with the people, and that the country's problems required strong leadership to sort out. They were fully prepared to accumulate executive power in order to sort out these problems. Institutions that slowed them down or got in the way - the media, parliament, the cabinet, the judiciary - they saw as part of the problem, to be sapped or sidelined. Since they were in tune with the people and knew what the people wanted, they were unapologetic about scrapping institutions, re-writing the constitution, or diluting principles such as trial by jury, double jeopardy or habeas corpus. The perceived threat of terrorism simply strengthened their belief that they had to breach through the old institutional and legal barriers.
Hence it is that we find, some years later, that information on us is recorded and shared with countless American authorities; that scores of officials can enter our homes quite legally; that we can be spot-fined by the local litter warden and arrested for any offence, however minor; and held under anti-terrorist legislation when we shout insults at the Home Secretary.
Do not expect government politicians to show embarrassment for any of this. They fully endorse it all as necessary to achieve what we, the public, demand of them.
That is, of course, at odds with the liberal principle that I subscribe to, which sees government power as the main threat to our liberties, rather than their main defender. The only question is whether, with the traditional barriers against government power now trampled underfoot, any other set of politicians is likely to be able to raise them once again – or indeed would want to.
An article on the BBC’s website entitled ‘UK slipping down graduate league’ attracted my attention. Interesting, I thought, this must be an evaluation of how the quality of students popping out of British universities has slipped below that of other countries. Not the case. Instead, the article read like a fistful Blairite nonsense about the knowledge economy, and how we need more people in universities in order to compete with the rising economies of China and India. You get the idea.
The article suggests that politicians may need to suck us for more taxes to raise the number of young people going to university to upwards of 60 percent. No thanks. As I was wisely told when I was a kid: “just because everyone else is doing it, that doesn’t mean you have to". Countries competing in graduates to improve their economies remind me of synchronized swimmers at the Olympics: a lot of splashing, looks pretty, but not much result. A lesson can be learned from Eastern Europe. When working in a bar to pay for my own questionable education, a fair number of the ubiquitous Polish waitresses had been educated ad infinatum, persuaded by massive state subsidies. Little good it did them. There were no jobs in Poland. Their universities did not deliver a growing, competitive economy.
The solution to all this is simple, but frankly beyond the stomach of most politicians. Free universities from the state, and in so doing allow the market to decide the price for education. If it is value for their time and money, the student will choose to go to university. We don't an aribitrary target, be it 50 percent, or 60 percent, or whatever. The economy is far more dynamic and flexible than that.
What about the poor? Well, the poor are not stupid. And if they are, they really should not be thinking about going to university. Thus, if it is worth their time and money, they can borrow the money to invest in their future. If people don’t go to university they can do an apprenticeship, start a business or get a job. All potential paths to personal wealth that will also benefit the economy. Simple.
KPMG recently released its annual survey of worldwide corporation tax rates. The key finding is that corporation tax rates have continued to fall in 2008. The average corporation tax rate in the 109 countries surveyed was 26 percent. In the OECD, the average was 27 percent (down 11 percent in the last 12 years). In the EU, the average rate is just 23 percent (down from 38 percent in 1996).
All of that is good news for the world economy (and you won't hear that said very often at the moment). Unfortunately, however, it's bad news for Britain. The reason? At 28 percent, Britain's corporation tax rate is higher then the international, OECD and EU averages. Indeed, our tax rate is dramatically higher than some of our nearest competitors – most notably Ireland, where corporation tax is just 12.5 percent.
This is a problem because it discourages corporations from investing in the UK, and encourages corporations that are already based here to move overseas. This costs us both jobs and economic wealth. High corporation taxes also tend to drive up prices for consumers, and keep down wages for workers (since corporations tend to shift the burden of taxes downwards). Needless to say, high rates also divert effort and resources away from production and towards developing tax minimization strategies.
As Matthew Sinclair writes here, all of this means that cutting corporation tax can actually increase revenue as the economy grows and there are more profits to tax. That doesn't matter much to me – the government already spends far too much of our money – but it might make tax cuts an easier pill for the politicians to swallow. With that in mind, what are they waiting for?
More conference news – the Lib Dems have vowed to tackle much-needed police reform.
Proposals aim at some very welcome decentralisation – scrapping central targets and providing for directly elected police authorities, which can define local priorities, set budgets and vary taxes where necessary. Whether the plans are ‘radical’ or not is subject to debate. All three of the main parties are starting to at least talk the talk of decentralization.
The moves do put the Lib Dems one step ahead of the Labour government who, for all their talk of localization, look set to retain their grip on policing – setting national standards and using the powers in the Police Reform Act 2002 to specify practice and impose solutions on local police authorities. The Conservatives seem to have the clearest sense of what a decentralized system would look like with proposals for locally elected police commissioners and the abolition of the National Plan.
Ian Johnston, head of the Police Superintendent’s Association, has been making headlines over the past few days with his admission that the quality of service provided by the police is negligible. Indeed, public confidence in the police is extremely low – not helped by the perception that crime is getting worse or the unnecessary sideshow provided by Sir Ian Blair and Tarique Ghaffur. It is heartening then to see some kind of consensus emerging over the need to modernize, decentralize and make the police force more accountable to the people that they serve.
Banks going down like ninepins, fortunes being wiped off the stock market, inflation haywire, loans unobtainable – the market's messed up, hasn't it? The newspapers tell us that even the most ardent defenders of the free market are calling for government action.
Traditionally, higher education has been a luxury - something for wealthier people, and wealthier countries. Over the last 35 years, however, it has become more of a necessity. Whatever their income, people are getting more of it. Countries today are sending a higher percentage of their youngsters through higher education than countries with the same GDP level back in the early 1970s. People think of the US as the leader in higher education, but in fact countries like Korea and Japan have higher penetration: modern technology needs well-educated workers.
The Blair government had a sense of mission. They believed that the government had lost touch with the people, and that the country's problems required strong leadership to sort out. They were fully prepared to accumulate executive power in order to sort out these problems. Institutions that slowed them down or got in the way - the media, parliament, the cabinet, the judiciary - they saw as part of the problem, to be sapped or sidelined. Since they were in tune with the people and knew what the people wanted, they were unapologetic about scrapping institutions, re-writing the constitution, or diluting principles such as trial by jury, double jeopardy or habeas corpus. The perceived threat of terrorism simply strengthened their belief that they had to breach through the old institutional and legal barriers.
An 
KPMG recently released its 
More conference news – the Lib Dems have vowed to tackle much-needed police reform.