"Pro-Europe CBI poll was rigged, claims ‘no’ lobby"

MBK emailed in this from The Times:

The row centres on the sample used by YouGov, which Vote Leave claims was “wholly unrepresentative” of Britain’s 5.2 million companies.

For example, only 20.5 per cent of the respondents had fewer than 50 employees, despite the fact that 99.2 per cent of British businesses employ fewer than 50 people. Vote Leave also claims that only 22 per cent of the businesses surveyed had a turnover of less than £5 million. The average turnover of private businesses is £673,000.

The CBI is understood to have selected the sample for YouGov from its membership list. In total, 451 of the members selected responded.

All of which seems very likely to me, if you pay attention to these things, you'll find that the larger the corporation, the more pre-EU it is and vice versa. The CBI is the worst of the lot.

They (want to) own land! Give them money!

From www.gov.uk:

Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide, NatWest, Santander, and Virgin Money will be offering Help to Buy: ISAs from 1 December.

You will be able to put away up to £200 a month in the Help to Buy: ISA that the government will then top up by 25%, up to a maximum of £3,000…

You can only claim your bonus when you are buying a home – and the money has to go towards the deposit, so you can’t use it to pay your solicitor’s, estate agent’s fees or any other costs associated with buying a home.

"Why are drugs illegal?"

David Nutt on top form in The Guardian:

... the short answer to the question “why are (some) drugs illegal?” is simple. It’s because the editors of powerful newspapers want it that way. They see getting drugs banned as a tangible measure of success, a badge of honour.

He then ruins an otherwise excellent article by finishing off with this:

And behind them, the alcohol industry continues secretly to express its opposition to anything that might challenge its monopoly of recreational drug sales. But that’s another story.

What has been Seen...

cannot be unseen

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"London on course to become next house price bubble fatality, warns UBS"

From The Telegraph:

Soaring house prices in London have fuelled a "bubble-risk" that has left the capital most in danger of a correction out of all major cities in the world, UBS has warned.

The Swiss bank said foreign demand from investors seeking safe-havens, the Government's help to buy scheme and "alluring yields" on buy-to-let investments had all "propelled London house prices to new heights" as demand continued to outstrip supply.

It's a bit late for that, but actually, the report said that it was artificially low interest rates/easy credit  which pushed up prices, which is indisputably true.

Further, The Telegraph completely contradicts itself. If the yields on buy-to-let are "alluring" than that means they are high, or at least higher than mortgage rates. So for a given absolute rent, that means that selling prices are if anything on the low side relative to rents. Which they are not, so it's factually incorrect as well as flawed logic.

And 'lack of supply' has nothing to do with it:

Its real estate bubble index shows London property is now the second-most unaffordable of the 15 cities studied by UBS, behind only Hong Kong.

The next most expensive places are of course Sydney, San Francisco, Vancouver, Amsterdam, Geneva, Zürich and Paris etc.

So we note as an aside that the most expensive five places are in the Anglosphere.

But we also note that most of the cities on the list are also the largest cities in each country or state*. By definition, those are the places with the most supply, so you can increase supply and people keep coming along and living in the new homes, hey presto, the new homes are now too off the market but the city is even larger.

What happens to prices then?

* Zürich and Geneva are the two largest Swiss towns, their populations are only 366,000 and 178,000 but Switzerland is attractive for other reasons. San Francisco is not that big (850,000), but it is just nice and exclusive, and Sydney and San Francisco also have a large premium for being near the coast - even in the UK where nowhere is that far from the coast, there is a massive premium for houses with a sea view.

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (374)

Today both @K_Niemietz & @MrRBourne mentioned the state's historic absence. It was never so: https://t.co/9Tzgbgiqth pic.twitter.com/hO7zLK0eP9— Land & Liberty (@Land_Liberty) October 29, 2015

BenJamin's favourite Faux Lib responded:

@Land_Liberty @MrRBourne Oh, your theory that if the state dished out free land, call centre workers would become happy subsistence farmers.>— Kristian Niemietz (@K_Niemietz) October 29, 2015

Your truly responded:

@K_Niemietz @Land_Liberty Instead of being call centre workers struggling to pay the rent, their net disposable income after housing costs would go up 50%! - Mark Wadsworth (@Mark_Wadsworth) October 29, 2015

See also: "If we had LVT, smallholders and subsistence farmers would be wiped out." If the Homeys make two equal and opposite arguments, we know that at least one of them must be incorrect and usually both.

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From today's Evening Standard:

Oliver Healey writes (Letters, 27 October) that "A London income tax could be used to eliminate the in-work poverty that millions of Londoners face because of high living costs".

The dividing line is not between high and low earners. It's between those lucky enough to have bought their own home more than 10 or 15 years ago and private tenants. A long-standing owner-occupier can live quite comfortably on a modest income, but private tenants lose half their income in rent and really struggle, even on above-average salaries.

What would bridge this gap is a London-wide property value tax to be distributed to all Londoners as a universal dividend. An average household in an average value home would break even; owners of "prime London"* would finally start paying for the privilege; and renters/recent purchasers would be able to use their universal dividend to cover half their rent or mortgage, thus reducing their living costs to a tolerable level.

Mark Wadsworth, Young People's Party

* With the benefit of hindsight, I should have included "BTL landlords". Ah well.

"Lord Carter's plans for saving the NHS £5bn a year"

From the BBC:

Lord Patrick Carter, a Labour peer as it happens, is advising Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt on how hospital budgets can be better spent.

In June he said up to £5bn a year could be saved annually by 2020. In his first report then he argued that some of it could be delivered by smarter procurement of hospital supplies and some by better management of staff rosters.

Now he has attempted to put more flesh on the bone, outlining other areas which could contribute to that £5bn figure.

All sounds lovely, but that reminds me of another topic, the notion that organisations have to pay their more senior employees "competitive salaries".

Clearly, at lower and middle levels, you have to pay people roughly the same as the competition would pay them or as much as they could earn in similar level jobs in a different kind of business.

But I'm not sure that applies to the higher echelons.

When deciding the salary of all these NHS senior managers on six and seven figure salaries, the only real comparative is how much they - with their particular skills - could earn by doing something else, which in most cases would be four or five figures.

As to doctors, there is no particular need to pay as well as in other countries. Let's assume 3 million qualify worldwide as doctors each year; America wants to take on 1 million new doctors for $200,000 each. Is there any particular need for all other countries to offer $200,000?

Of course not; once those 1 million jobs are taken, the other 2 million will have to take whatever is left. As long as the lowest paying country is still paying enough to make seven years of medical school (or however many years it is) worthwhile, then that is enough. Many European countries recruit doctors and nurses from low-income countries - all they have to offer such people is enough to make sure that they end up slightly better off than they would have been working as a doctor in their own country.

Compare and contrast with footballers' salaries; the top teams have to attract the top players to remain top teams, so wages get bid up in the Premier League, the top football players can thus soak up all the super-profits which top clubs make (i.e. they collect rent). Does that affect wages in the Championship where the super-profits are much lower? No, not really. Why would it? Salaries in the Championship are based on those lower super-profits.

Furthermore, football teams in the same league are directly competing with each other - so Chelsea has to try and outbid Arsenal etc. But one hospital is not really competing against other hospitals in any meaningful sense, and they are certainly not competing across borders.

Just sayin', is all.

Baseless health-scare story of the day

From the Daily Mail:

They are the go-to device for anyone trying to quit smoking - or seeking a lesser evil than cigarettes.

But e-cigarettes could trigger problem drinking, a new study has warned. People who use the devices are significantly more likely to consume more alcohol than those who don't use them, researchers claim.

Moreover, those using e-cigarettes and alcohol together report drinking more. Usually, when people quit smoking they also quit drinking, the researchers said. Therefore, those who use e-cigarettes to quit smoking may miss out on this added benefit of quitting, they said.

The researchers concluded by urging people not to ignore the 'knock on' effects of e-cigarette use.

Not even Dick Puddlecote or Christopher Snowdon in their bitterest full-on satire mode could have dreamed up this level of bullshit.