Sam Bowman

We've got a host of great fringe events organized for the Conservative Party Conference this year. I feel a little selfish – I didn't organize them, but the line-up of topics and speakers is pretty much a dream team. Come along to as many as you can: you can watch dull speeches by politicians at home, but you can't find a panel on booze, drugs and tobacco that features Chris Snowdon, Alex Massie and Dan Hamilton anywhere else.

The Brazilian advert that the Guardian wants to ban.

Today is the 130th birthday of Ludwig von Mises. Mises was, in my opinion, the greatest economist of all time as the man who systematized the Austrian school of economics and developed some of its key insights.

You’d think that after a decade of creating one of the world’s biggest financial powder keg in living memory, the leaders of the EU would have a little humility about their plans to tax financial markets. Alas, not. Today’s outline of the financial transaction tax proposal by Jose Manuel Barroso confirms that they plan to throw more gunpowder onto the keg.

With all the marching and political grandstanding against "cuts" that we've seen so far this year, it's easy to forget that the UK's deficit is still as big as Greece's, and government spending accounts for 50.1% of all GDP. As a superb piece by Julian Harris in Monday's City AM showed, there hasn't been anything in the way of cuts yet:

Tyler Cowen reports in on how austerity is affecting Ireland:

Ireland now has had two quarters of considerably stronger than expected growth, it’s now both gnp and gdp [1.1% in Q1 and 1.6% in Q2], and domestic demand (!) is up, and borrowing rates are down, though employment remains miserable. Even I am surprised by the positive signs here (I never bought the doctrine of expansionary fiscal austerity, though I saw austerity as necessary for Ireland)