Tim Worstall

You'll be aware that the shocking rise in inequality in the US is being used as the justification for all sorts of nonsense: from something must be done all the way to this is something therefore let's do this. The problem is with the initial statement: that inequality has risen. For it isn't actually obvious that it has. The reason being one of those little points that I bang on about so often: the results of your measurements depend entirely upon what it is that you're measuring.

I'm not sure that I've seen this extremely interesting form of argumentation before. Quantas, the Australian airline, is in dire financial straits. Their international routes are losing bucketloads and are being subsidised by their very juicy profits on their domestic routes. Etihad, the parent company of Emirates, is looking to raise its stake in Virgin Australia. Quantas is arguing that this must not be allowed to happen:

The great thinkers at the nef have insisted that we must reform the UK banking system in the following manner:

We need new institutions such as a Post Bank, Social Investment Bank, Green Investment Bank and new mutual, local and regional banks to provide a diverse, competitive and resilient banking system fit for the 21st century.

Regular readers will know that I'm perfectly happy to take what the climate scientists tell me about climate science. Where I start to stray from the path of green orthodoxy is those same scientists then tell us the economics of what we ought to do about it all. Something they are not competent to comment upon as they really don't understand the economics. I do accept the economics of climate change as laid out by the economists who have studied the economics of climate change.

Vuk picks up on an important point about the Soviet economy of old. Growth in that economy was almost entirely a matter of greater inputs into the economy. This is a strategy that clearly runs out of steam when you've no more inputs to add: and run out of steam that sort of economy did. But we can take this argument further, as Paul Krugman did when examining the Japanese economy of the 80s and 90s. Here.

The general tenor of the screaming about the British banking system comes, of course, from the general ignorance of those doing the screaming. Apparently it's this mixture of casino banking with retail that caused all the bank falling over syndrome. That and the general greed of shareholder driven banking which must also be curbed.

As I've said here and elsewhere often enough those who preen upon how many green jobs they are creating simply do not understand the most basic point: jobs are a cost of a scheme, not a benefit. Thus the pointing at how many green jobhs are being created is really the squeals of the innumerate telling us all how expensive their schemes are. However, I've just found out that it could be considered worse than this. For here is what the US's Bureau of Labor Statistics defines as a green job:

That's the upcoming collapse of the European banking system that is. George Soros says that the main cause of the current and coming problems is the very odd decision that the regulators made about capital weights on sovereign debts.

I'm as surprised as you are at my agreeing with them both but there is a great truth in this statement:

“The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity.” So declared John Maynard Keynes 75 years ago, and he was right....

Gosh, this is just lovely. The Labour Party is going off to study the German economy and try to work out what makes it tick. So that it can be replicated here in the UK.

Hmm.

It argues that strong local and regional banks underwritten by local authorities have been crucial in providing loans to small and medium-sized enterprises, in contrast with the UK where the big four large remote banks have been repeatedly criticised for failing to fund industry.