but more significantly, London’s reputation has not recovered since the 2008 financial crisis, which required far bigger bailouts in this country than elsewhere, indicating the scale to which UK finance failed.

Germany’s bailouts were very much larger.

Margaret Thatcher destroyed manufacturing in the UK

Manufacturing output was up higher when Maggie left office than when she entered it.

Thatcher was utterly confused when it came to economics. She thought that a £1 increase in the value of activity undertaken to meet human need was equivalent to a £1 increase in the value of a financial asset, like a property or a share, when that is utterly untrue.

Maggies wasn’t stupid enough to confuse income with wealth.

and inflated the exchange rate to bring hot money into the UK, at a cost to us all in terms of inflation,

A higher exchange rate reduces inflation….

The post Historically inaccurate first appeared on Tim Worstall.

The restoration of a Georgian building in Bath once frequented by Jane Austen has unexpectedly provided a tantalising glimpse into the life of the city’s Roman suburbanites.

A network of Roman ditches containing pottery, coins, glassware and a fragment of a military helmet has been found beneath Bath Assembly Rooms in the north of the city.

Experts say the finds expand the known extent of Roman occupation in Bath and suggest further remains are likely to lie under neighbouring Georgian buildings and streets.

Like, you know, under the building my flat is in. Which is fun no?

That area of town also has basements, also underbasements in many places. It is said – said – that you can wander around down there all over the place. Need a miner’s lamp and a pick, true, but what fun if the Roman stuff is just under the floor of the underbasement?

The post What lovely fun first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Ninety per cent of the enslaved Africans transported to America went on British ships,

Comparatively few slaves went to America (here meaning “what would become the US”) anyway. Something like 3 or 4% of the total transatlantic shipments.

No, really…..distasteful as it might be to use an argument from Jefferson Davis “The Great Natural Increase” really was a thing. Cotton slavery – and rice, indigo etc – really was different from sugar. Sugar demanded the constant import of ever more slaves as the extant ones were largely worked to death. Cotton bred up slaves more than imported them. Thus the US – which had v little sugar slavery – had all the vileness of slavery itself without the imports in the same volumes.

That the Brits carried most of the slaves to the US is less of a getcha than we might think.

The post Well, yes, true, but…. first appeared on Tim Worstall.

The El Niño currently heating up the planet burst through the highest temperature ever recorded for the phenomenon on Monday, several months before its expected peak. The heat is so much greater than previous events that scientists have called it “mind-blowing” and “Godzilla-level”. El Niños are natural climate events
…
More than 450,000 people are projected to die from the additional heat brought by the super El Niño in the next six months, according to estimates by climate scientists.

Obviously, the planet just hates us. For this is just a natural cycle here. Nowt to do with us, nor any way to stop it.

…….but may be made worse by global heating.

They’re going to try to hang an awful lot on that “bit”, aren’t they?

The post Gaia hates us first appeared on Tim Worstall.

British mothers who bring their children with them when returning to the UK after fleeing from domestic abuse abroad – which can lead to them being accused of abduction – could be given greater legal protection and support.

The government has agreed to examine how domestic abuse features in international child abduction cases, with a view to giving survivors of domestic abuse more help fighting partners’ demands that they return children to their home countries.

Cue a rise in divorcing mothers insisting they were subject to domesti abuse by dastardly foreigners.

That some really are isn’t the point being made here, it’s that change the incentive to so claim – like, not going to jail for abduction – and you’ll change the number who do claim.

The post Show us the incentive first appeared on Tim Worstall.

“It takes a rare fiscal incontinence to both have the highest tax take in history and see borrowing still shoot up.”

The post Well, yes, yes….. first appeared on Tim Worstall.

The lawsuit was filed against Tesla in February 2022 and alleges that the company did not comply with the law, violating California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act. It alleges that the factory was racially segregated and Black workers were paid less, promoted less and terminated more frequently than their white counterparts.

It is, obviously, necessary to get cause and effect the right way around here. Is the ingoing workforce of the same training and quality across races?

Nope, I’ve no idea either. But it’s one of thsoe important questions when discussing firings and promotions etc. And, sadly, one of those questions unlikely to be even asked…..

The post Chicken and egg first appeared on Tim Worstall.

At first, Combs and his legal team issued blanket denials. The lawsuit, they said, had followed an attempt by Ventura to blackmail Combs, and was “riddled with baseless and outrageous lies”. Despite this, they settled it immediately with a $20m sum, but within days more women came forward. A second lawsuit was filed one week after Ventura’s, by Joi Dickerson-Neal, which alleged that, as a student in 1991, she had been drugged and raped by Combs, who had filmed the alleged assault and shared it with other men. Days later came another. In this, Anna Kane alleged that Combs and two others had gang-raped her in 2003 when she was 17. As the cases piled up, Combs’s team continued the denials – describing the lawsuits as “money grabs”. Then a leaked video forced them to change tack. Security footage from a Los Angeles hotel taken in March 2016 showed Cassie Ventura creeping from a room, pursued by Combs, who is wrapped in just a towel. He beats her, kicks her and drags her back.

OK. All of that so far is consistent with either story. Evil bastard doing evil things and dam breached and claims flooding in.

Now 56, he is serving a 50-month sentence for transporting people across state lines for prostitution.

The Mann Act? That’s what he’s actually been found guilty of?

Hmm.

The post Just what did Diddy do? first appeared on Tim Worstall.

That distinction matters because it changes how we think about profit. A genuine business needs sufficient income to survive, invest and continue its activities. But that does not mean maximising profit is its purpose. Profit can be a means of sustaining a business rather than the reason why the business exists.

That then raises a much bigger question. If human work creates value, why does conventional accounting treat labour as a cost while treating the residual profit as belonging to capital?

Actual economics – you know, the sort of stuff Mirrlees got his Nobel for – agrees that labour is a cost of doing something. On the grounds that it is a cost of doing something. But so also is that normal return to capital a cost of doing something. That normal return being what is required to attract enough capital to surivive, invest and so on.

In excess of the normal return is called economic profit, or even excess profit. Which is why Mirrlees says don’t tax normal profit, do tax economic profit.

It’s also a commonplace that economic profit is the vale added by doing this thing, this here, rather than all the other things that can be done in the economy. It’s a signal more than anything else….this is a valuble thing to be doing, look at the gap between the cost of doing it and the value created…….

The post Sigh first appeared on Tim Worstall.

In all this, there is a personal challenge. Do I give up, cower in the corner, and admit that I’ve been promoting something that people do not want, even though, by definition, if 30% of people are now supportive of neo-fascism, 70% are not? Alternatively, do I take a risk and continue to fight for what I think is right?

Who rally would send the bully boys around to an end terrace in Ely?

So, err, what risk?

And then I wonder just who those economists the Telegraph is talking to might be. The claim in the related article is that HMRC’s own data shows equalising capital gains tax rates will reduce yield, but those are Treasury numbers, and they got us into this mess, so I put little weight on their belief in the Laffer curve.

Empirical reality might send ’em ’round, true.

The post Difficult, difficult first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Specialist courtrooms prioritising cases of rape and other serious sex offences are to be introduced across England and Wales, with campaigners welcoming the move as potentially transformative.

The rooms, well. But we can see how this will transform into specialist courts. With their own judges, rules of evidence and so on. Which is what the feminazis have been calling for for decades of course. Rape is not to be judged on the facts, as with other crimes.

As to the delays in cases being heard. That’s across the board, not just rape. And not providing the tolerable administration of justice is violating one of those prime duties of government. If they’d not nationalised British Steel they could have fixed the entire court system…..

The post No, I don’t like this at all first appeared on Tim Worstall.

An extra 2.7 million lives could be saved in the next pandemic if countries share vaccines in a less selfish way, a new study has found – although the death toll in richer countries would rise.

Researchers modelling a hypothetical global outbreak of flu found that fast-tracking vaccine development could cut deaths from 58.5m to 23.9m.

If the vaccines were then distributed equitably, according to population size rather than purchasing power, a further 2.7m lives could be saved overall.

However, in high-income countries, that solidarity-based approach would see deaths rise from 2.4m to 3.9m.

We get to pay for it all but we don’t get the jabs we’ve paid for.

Hmm…..Granny dies so we can send vaccines to Africa. Gonna be a tough political sell when it actually happens, isn’t it?

The post Isn’t this just a joyous proposal first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Labour is considering raising capital gains tax (CGT) to fund a £20bn handout for the lowest earners.
The Prime Minister and Chancellor are understood to be reviewing proposals to raise CGT to as high as 45pc to increase the income tax personal allowance.
The idea is laid out in a Budget submission from the Labour donor Dale Vince, warning that wealth is being “taxed more lightly than work”.
Equalising CGT with income tax would generate £14bn towards the giveaway, the submission claims.

The standard estimate – best guess, you know, guesstimate – is that the peak of the Laffer for CGT is 18%. Therefore a 45% rate isn’t going to fund anything, is it?

In May, Louise Haigh, the Prime Minister’s second-in-command, called for CGT to be brought closer in line with income tax, saying this would “shift the tax burden away from punishing work and towards unproductive capital accumulation”.

Investing in stuff is now unproductive capital accumulation? Jeebus, we’re screwed, right? But then put a convicted fraudster into government and what happens next, eh?

And there’s this little joy too:

His £14bn figure is based on a previous report from think tank CenTax, which called for a wider overhaul of the duty to mitigate avoidance. This included both an additional rate and a higher rate of 45pc and 40pc, as is the case for income tax, as well as scrapping the rule which says CGT bills are wiped on death.

We shouldn’t take recommendations from them because they’re cunts. They are in fact insisting that both inheritance tax and also capital gains tax should be paid on each and every asset. You know, cunts.

The post Perhaps it wouldn’t first appeared on Tim Worstall.

“Conflict of interest rules aren’t an accusation that someone has done something wrong,” said Tzeporah Berman, chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. “They exist to protect an institution’s integrity by ensuring professional, financial or governmental interests that could reasonably be perceived to influence its work are disclosed and appropriately managed.”

“If the IPCC’s conflict of interest system can look at an IPCC vice-chair working for the Saudi energy ministry, Aramco employees serving as lead authors, and this concentration of authors from Saudi state-linked institutions and find nothing that needs to be managed, then the policy is clearly not fit for purpose,” she said.

That we should also exclude anyone tied up with Greenpeace, FoE and all the rest – for being biased extremists – doesn;t seem to register, does it? For, obviously, those are *good* extremists.

The post Anyway, so the Saudis and the IPCC first appeared on Tim Worstall.

says Dr Kari De Pryck, a political scientist at the University of Geneva, who is an expert in the organisation’s governance.

Just, tee hee, you know, fnarr fnarr?

The post Sorry, but…… first appeared on Tim Worstall.

The average Londoner pays £5,000 more in tax than the services they receive. The south-east contributes £2,000 a head, and the east of England breaks even. The rest of England, like the three other nations, is also a recipient of money from the capital region.

London wages are indeed higher. This gets caught in the estimates of inequality. But the costs of living in London are also higher. Not just rent, but a pint and so on. We do not have equal prices across geography. These higher costs are not included in estimates of inequality.

That is, we might be measuring inequality of income but we’re not measuring inequality of consumption – and it’s of consumption that actually matters to how people live their lives.

Add into this that London stands out, much much more, than the capital or other richer regions of other countries does. And we’ve our explanation for why the UK has, apparently, higher inequality than other countries It’s geographic, yes, and a result of bad measurement.

The post UK inequality is lower than most suppose first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Though UK farmers produce sufficient quantities of staple foods such as meat, milk, eggs and wheat to meet most domestic demand, the country relies heavily on overseas growers for vegetables and fruit – imported fruit makes up more than 80% of supply.

So, roughly speaking, we already do what the Greenie campaigners insist we should. Grow what we can grow here here and import the things that cannot be grown here. So, that’s settled then.

The post This international food trade first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Reparations campaigners believe that the harmful legacies of slavery persist in economic underdevelopment, poor health among the African diaspora, and contemporary racism against black people.

But given that the African diaspora – sans poor Haiti – is richer than Africa the payments would seem to be required the other way around, no?

Anyway, the correct answer is “Fuck Off”

The post I suppose it’s an idea, yes first appeared on Tim Worstall.

To have introduced such economically demented measures simply for political expediency is totally unforgivable.

But that’s why political control of an economy is such a bad idea. Because things economically demented will be imposed for political reasons.

BTW, that’s Nigel talking about Jeremy Hunt.

The post Well, yes first appeared on Tim Worstall.

Young people who drop out of education and work should be tracked through a single data system to ensure they do not fall through the cracks in state provision, the former cabinet minister Alan Milburn will recommend.

More suveillance, more control, more state.

The unified database would allow schools, colleges, councils, job centres, youth services and mayoral strategic authorities to share information and see in real time when a young person stops attending education or work. The system would track people from the age of 16 to 24. Currently, monitoring and support end at 18.

They just can’t help themslves, can they?

The post All rather 1984, no? first appeared on Tim Worstall.