Started reading this.
Got to this "The problem is that it is hard to understand and predict a credit bust (or a boom, for that matter) without the right tools – in our case: the right models. Fell about laughing and gave up there and then.
Not learned much from this then have you lads?
Or this, come to that.
Via TBH, from The Independent:
Britain would keep paying into the EU budget for years after a no-deal Brexit under contingency plans drawn up by the European Commission. In a move likely to enrage Brexiteers and cause yet another political row in Westminster, on Wednesday Brussels unveiled proposals for the UK to keep up its payments for the 2019 EU budget and beyond.
Ho hum, in exchange for what, exactly? They've had three years to plan for this.
From The Belfast Telegraph:
The Irish economy could be around 4% smaller in the event of a no-deal Brexit, the Irish Finance Minister has said. Minister for Finance and Public Expenditure & Reform Paschal Donohoe said that although the Irish government are hopeful of a deal, plans must be in place for a “disorderly” Brexit.
From the BBC:
An Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study found that Dutch exports to the UK could drop by 17% in the event of a no-deal Brexit.
While the UK's customs authority HMRC says it has "well-developed plans" for a functioning system from day one, fruit and vegetables are the Dutch exports most vulnerable to disruption.
Also from the BBC:
The head of France's main farmers' union has warned that a no-deal Brexit could have a severe impact on French agricultural exports. Christiane Lambert of the FNSEA union said French wine and spirits producers would be hit hardest, as their sector had a €1.3bn (£1.1bn; $1.5bn) annual surplus in trade with the UK.
From coop.news:
In a press statement published on 17 January, the Spanish federation of agri food co-ops (AGACA) said it regretted the outcome of the vote on the deal, which, it argued, had led to more uncertainty...
Should the UK leave the EU without a trade deal, both sides will have to apply WTO tariffs from 29 March. Under WTO rules, tariffs for agri food products average at 20%. However, they go as high as 100% for meat, dairy and sugar products, between 40% and 90% for grains and 30% or more for fruit and vegetables.
(That last bit is bollocks. If a Spanish business imports food from the UK, it will have to levy EU-mandated import tariffs, not "WTO Tariffs" which aren't compulsory or even guidelines, but recommended maximum limits. The UK can impose any old tariffs it likes up to those limits, or none at all).
But the overall tenor is clear - the EU itself, from the point of view of the top dogs in Brussels, doesn't care about economics, they care about "ever closer political union" and so the UK must be seen to be punished most severely for leaving - for example by being a choice between a completely unacceptable May's Deal and the vague threats of "disorderly Brexit". And then being expected to continue paying in.
Actual producers in EU Member States care very much about economics, i.e. minimal disruptions to trade, I doubt whether they give a hoot whether the UK leaves the EU or not as long as they can keep selling us food and cars and so on, which we are perfectly happy to buy from them. In whose interests is it to disrupt this? Why don't those affected put a bit of pressure on the top dogs in Brussels to stop being such complete bastards?
This all reminds me a bit of the quote from 1984*: "It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.
From The Guardian, 4/1/2019: No-deal Brexit would be catastrophic for UK farmers, warns NFU
Remainers follow up with the claim that in the even of No Deal Brexit, the supermarket shelves will be empty.
It's never made clear why farmers in EU Member States would suddenly stop wanting to sell us food, or whether this is a tacit admission that EU Member States, foremost France want to try and starve us to death, but hey. Fact is, one third of the food we eat is imported from EU Member States.
It's never made clear why UK farmers wouldn't be over the moon if they faced no competition from farmers in EU Member States.
But hey, let's run with it...
I posted about the empty shelves article, and the free traders among us agreed that not imposing tariffs on food imports (from EU Member States or elsewhere) would be a good idea.
Remainer George Carty then leaves the following comment under my empty shelves post:
Wouldn't unilateral free trade just mean that ruthless East Asian mercantilists wipe out what's left of our industry, while cheap American imports wipe out most of our agriculture?
This glosses over the point that under WTO rules, just because we don't impose tariffs on food imports doesn't mean we have to lift tariffs on manufactured goods (even though that would be a good idea) but again, give them enough rope...
This neatly closes the circular logic:
* UK farmers suffer because they can't export to EU Member States.
* UK consumers/retailers suffer because they can't import from EU Member States, shelves will be empty.
* American farmers will fill our shelves again, presumably with "chlorinated chicken" (whatever that is).
Is it not possible that this largely cancels out - UK farmers will just sell more domestically and export less. If the French government imposes a blockade on us (not sure how that will go down with les gilets jaunes), other countries will take up the slack. I don't see how you can paint the Americans as the baddies in all this - they are the ones NOT imposing a trade blockade.
* The year the film was released, not the book by George Orwell.
Something in an article that was in City AM a year ago has been bugging me ever since.
Most of it is good stuff...
When a politician blithely commits to “making childcare higher quality”, you wonder how much any new regulation of the sector will push up prices, and hence make formal care less affordable...
When Jeremy Corbyn states that the existence of profits in certain industries means lower prices could be delivered under nationalisation, you consider whether public ownership is more likely to become captured by producer interests or suffer from worse profitability.
When governments continually tell us that HS2 will be “good for the economy” because the economic benefits exceed the costs, you consider whether other investments, such as road schemes in areas with bottlenecks, would generate even higher returns.
When someone calls for banning plastic bags for environmental reasons, you think about what the effects of paper bags are for the scale of landfill sites, or the health impact of repeat use of linen bags given hygiene risks.
Agreed to all that. But his first real life example is a very bad one:
Remember when the coalition government’s policy of “free” school meals for five to seven year-olds was announced in 2013?
Campaign groups rallied to praise the £600m commitment, claiming it would enhance educational attainment, based upon results from narrow pilot schemes. It was only economists who seemed to question whether this spending really obtained the best bang for the buck to increase attainment, or whether the money could be better used in other departments — or even, heaven forfend, be left with taxpayers.
Of course those lunches aren't "free", that's a nonsense. But the alternative is not 'leaving the money with taxpayers', it's making the self-same taxpayers make their kids a packed lunch or give them some lunch money for the school canteen.
In the grander scheme of things, funding basic* school lunches for all kids out of progressive taxes (income tax or LVT) ticks all my boxes:
1. It's like a Citizen's Income, non-means tested and mildly redistributive downwards. Vastly better than means-tested "free school meals" for a minority with all the stigma, cheating and administrative hassle.
2. Saves parents the hassle of sorting out a packed lunch or remembering to give their kids some lunch money, which they might or might not spend as intended (or have taken off them by school bullies).
3. It must work out much cheaper per meal if the school bulk-buys and everybody gets the same.
4. ... so it's not necessarily worse value for a better-off parent. They pay £5 extra tax and their kid gets a school dinner costing £2.50., but in the absence of school-lunches-for-all, they might end up paying £5 anyway (or spending a bit less than that but wasting ten or twenty minutes a day sorting it out). They've lost nothing and low-income parent is up £2.50.
5. It is good for solidarity between pupils, they all get the same. School lunches a bit crap? Every kid can moan about it equally, same as moaning about having to wear a school uniform. Best kind of quality control is, teachers sit in the same canteen and eat the same meals as the kids (they did that at my school).
6. It protects kids with low-income or lazy/forgetful parents from being humiliated by the lucky kids with posh lunch boxes/lots of lunch money.
7. At the margin, it helps educational attainment of kids with low-income or lazy/forgetful parents. It's difficult to concentrate when you are hungry, as the advert says. And has similar health benefits.
* The word "basic" is important here. Funding fancy school trips abroad for all would clearly be a total waste of money.
From City AM, in response to this article:
It seems that the EU has a paranoid concern that unless it keeps Northern Ireland under its control as a kind of buffer zone, it will have to erect something like a Maginot Line of defences along its side of the Irish land border to keep out undesirable products such as US-style 'chlorinated chicken'.
Why should that be? Is there any good reason for the EU to assume that once we have become a third country, we will automatically become a hostile power, determined to use that weak point in the EU's external frontier to flod the EU Single Market with non-compliant goods?
At present, the UK has domestic laws which implement Single Market rules, and it is that UK domestic legal arrangement which is effective in keeping non-compliant goods out of the 0.1 per cent of UK GDP which is carried across the land border into the Irish Republic and the rest of the EU.
So why should the EU not be satisfied if the UK now pledges to pass and strictly enforce laws expressly designed to prohibit the carriage across the land border of any goods which the EU deemed unacceptable?
Dr D R Cooper
From the BBC:
A no-deal Brexit threatens the UK's food security and will lead to higher prices and empty shelves, retailers are preparing to warn MPs...
If the UK were to revert to WTO rules, the retailers warn that would "greatly increase import costs that would in turn put upward pressure on food prices"...
The letter spells out the UK's food relationship with Europe, with nearly one third of the food in the UK coming from the EU.
*sigh*
I can't track down the actual wording of the letter, which was no doubt a bit more nuanced than the BBC claim.
1. At worst, one-third of shelves will be empty. let's not forget that Norway and Switzerland seem to manage somehow, it can't be insurmountable.
2. What retailers should have said (and quite possibly, did say) is "Dear Government, for the time being, whatever happens with Brexit, can you please exempt food imports from any sort of quotas and duties and ensure that Customs wave through anything that was clearly grown in an EU Member State?".
This in turn boils down to "Dear Government, please make sure that nothing changes post-Brexit".
"Do nothing" should always be first on the list of options to be considered, and in the circumstances, would clearly be the best for all concerned.
George Eaton, on Twitter: To understand the problems with the Norway model, ask Norwegians – insightful piece by @hettieveronica on why it isn't a panacea for Brexit Britain.
Me: What a pathetic argument: "it isn't a panacea". You can use this put down in any situation and all it shows is that you're a bit of a condescending twat. Nothing ever is "a panacæa", it's a question of choosing least bad option.
George Carty: Surely the main problem is the Irish border (again) -- IIRC we can't be in EFTA and also (as required by the GFA) in a customs union with the EU.
Me: No we can't, but that wasn't my point. I could equally say "Second referendum is not a panacea", or "Cancelling withdrawal and just staying in EU is not a panacea", or "No Deal Brexit is not a panacea" and those statements are all equally true and equally unhelpful.
Do you think the Yanks were like this in July 1945, to wit:
"Dropping the Bomb on Hiroshima is not a panacea" vs
"Invading the Japanese home islands is not a panacea" vs
"Calling the whole thing off and leaving the Japanese occupation of vast swathes of South East Asia is not a panacea"??
The Bank of England has come up witha scary figure as the "cost" of Brexit, £500M a week.
Of course it turns out that this is the difference between the size of the economy now and where the BoE thinks the economy would be if we hadn't voted to leave the EU. Since no-one, not even the BoE, knows what might have been to any degree of accuracy, the "where we would be" figure could be anything they like to produce. There's no build up to this figure, just a wish list of what it could have been (and, judging by recent history, wouldn't have been) spent on. It would have been more convincing if they'd said how many Trident missiles or jets for the new aircraft carriers we could have bought for the £60Bn.
It's also a bit of a puzzle where all this extra economic activity would be coming from, given that we are now at pretty well full employment.
There was a great tongue in cheek comment under a video by PBS Space Time:
"Dark energy = dark matter x speed of darkness squared"
I think we can leave it at that, the 'search for dark matter' is a massive great scam, just like the search for the Loch Ness Monster.
From Hansard, debate on Tenant Fees Bill, 23 January 2019:
Bob Blackman Conservative, Harrow East:
The issue for us was that four weeks [maximum deposit] would lead to a position whereby the tenant had an incentive to say, “Okay, I won’t pay the last month’s rent—just take it out of the deposit,” and then if the landlord could reasonably wish to claim money from the deposit because of damage or other reasons, they would have to pursue court action to recover it.
That would be grossly unfair on good landlords, who are the vast majority in this country.
Other members of the Committee promoted six weeks, so we ended up with the view that five weeks struck a balance between giving tenants an incentive to pay their last month’s rent, in the knowledge that they would get back their deposit had they been good tenants, and landlords being forced to go through a proper claim process to recover moneys as a result of damage by a tenant.
He's wrong in principle and wrong in logic. If a tenant has wrecked the place and plans to move out soon, then whether he's paid three, four, five or six weeks' deposit, he won't bother paying the rent any more, and he either leaves of his own accord or waits until he is evicted.
I thought that most tenants didn't bother paying the last month's rent* anyway, which makes perfect sense. They need the money for the deposit on the next place. Landlords and letting agents often wait weeks before returning a deposit to those tenants gullible enough to pay the last month's rent. If the tenants pay it, it is often very difficult for them to scrape the next deposit together, so they can't move out at all. Catch 22.
* I used to be a BTL landlord, most of them didn't bother paying the last month's rent, so I kept their four-week deposit instead, never bothered me and everybody's happy.
