Fun Online Polls: Airport expansion and elections

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll (thank you everybody who took part) are as follows:

At which airport would it be best to build additional runways?

Thames estuary (new airport) - 40%
Luton - 29%
Stansted - 13%
Heathrow - 10%
Gatwick - 8%

So there we go, despite me putting forward the arguments for Luton (good traffic links north and south, by road or rail, far enough away from big towns not to bother people but near enough for people to able to commute there etc), the people have spoken and Thames estuary it is.

I'd be interested to know what the arguments for starting from scratch with the Thames estuary are.
--------------------------
And lo to this week's Fun Online Poll.

There are plenty of statistics on how many people voted for which party and thus how many don't vote, and reasonable estimates of swings from one party to another.

Because I'm now in the business, I'd be interested to know "How do you make up your mind how to vote at elections?"

Vote [sic] here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: QE and airport expansion

The responses to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Would it make any big difference if the UK gilts held by the Bank of England were cancelled?

No (the correct answer) - 53 votes
Yes (the wrong answer) - 23 votes

So well done, seventy per cent of you. The other thirty per cent ought to stop reading and believing what other people think and read up on some basic bookkeeping.

If you want to understand any productive business (cars, films, dentistry, plumbing, whatever) then there are thousands of things you need to know about or have experience in, and I doubt that anybody knows everything about any of them. Banking, on the other hand, is a pure paper exercise, you start with blank pieces of paper and write numbers on them. You are allowed to write as many positive numbers as you like, provided somewhere is prepared to accept the corresponding negative, and provided you are prepared to accept your original bit of paper going round in a circle and ending up as a negative number on the other side of your balance sheet.

Money is not a thing in itself, it is a unit of measurement, and without there being somebody somewhere who wants to borrow money* (i.e. is prepared to be in debt) then 'money' cannot come into existence. If you take all the financial assets (including the cash in your pocket) and all the financial liabilities, it always nets off to precisely nothing.

* Even in a system where the only legal tender is gold coins, 'money' cannot exist until somebody wants to borrow a gold coin and somebody else is prepared to lend him it. In that split second, a new financial asset and a new financial liability have been created out of nowhere (the number of actual gold coins in existence stays exactly the same).
-------------------------
Yesterday, James Higham asked which would be the best place to build new runways in the south east of England (assuming that this is necessary or desirable, let's skip that debate).

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Luton votes against the EU

More details here.