"Oh no, they won't!"

From This is Money, spotted by Mombers:

Forecast rises in interest rates could force landlords to raise rents to meet mortgage affordability criteria, or risk being trapped on higher rates, according to a buy-to-let expert. This is because interest costs across the life of a buy-to-let mortgage would more than quadruple, going from £115 a month in interest now, compared to £479 with the rise in one example.

The Office for Budget Responsibility has forecast a worst-case scenario whereby a 'wage spiral' or energy price shock would require the Bank of England to increase base rate to 3.5 per cent in 2023 to curb inflation.

Nope.

Rents are the Maypole around which house prices dance. Current selling prices and/or what people are prepared to borrow is the Net Present Value of the rental income (for a landlord) or the rent saved (for a first time buyer).

More prosaically, prices will settle at approx. the level where the monthly mortgage payments are about the same as the rental value. So sure, if there is a big interest rate hike, selling prices will fall (all things being equal) so that new buyers' monthly mortgage payments are still approx. the same as the monthly rent.

Landlords can't 'pass on' that fall in value any more than they can 'pass on' higher interest rates, a tenant would just move out and rent from a new landlord who had bought at the new lower price/higher interest rate.

If old landlords could 'pass on' higher interest rates and rents went up, then madness would ensue. The new landlords would be able charge the new higher rent, even though their interest payments were still based on the old lower rents i.e. they would be making a super-profit from Day One which would be competed away almost immediately.

When being wrong has never made you look so stupid.

From The Evening Standard:

Half of over-50s have had Covid booster jab... At least 6.1 million booster doses of Covid-19 vaccine have been delivered across the UK.

Half? Really? Clearly, there are about 30 million over-50s in the UK, so that's nowhere near half.

Some outlets read and understood the NHS press release, for example the North West Mail:

NHS delivers Covid booster to half of eligible people aged 50 and over

The key word here is "eligible" i.e. over-50s with underlying health issues, who care for elderly parents, NHS workers and so on.

When being wrong has never felt so right.

At the very least, the correct answer should be "All four answers" but strictly speaking, it would be "All five answers" because the answer "All five answers" is itself correct.

They own land, give them money!

(You know, we really should be numbering these posts)

The latest government initiative in their campaign to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich implement green energy measures is battery farms.

Landowners are being offered up to £50,000 per acre per year to have containers full of batteries sitting on their land. The current agricultural rent is about £120 per acre per year. Where's the money coming from? the government's Green Levy, i.e. higher energy bills for the likes of you and I. The best tax may be the tax that other people pay, but it's even better when they don't know that they are paying it.

Weekly deaths England & Wales to October 2021

Here's the chart based on ONS data.

In April and May, we were undershooting the 2015-19 average, it's crept up since then and we are now about 1,000 deaths/week above that average, which is roughly equal to the official number of daily Covid deaths. Will 'they' panic and impose another lockdown? The SNP are probably gagging for it, but I'm not sure anybody would comply.

The eighteen-year cycle

Illustrated
From WalesOnline

Why is there no Greenhouse Effect in the desert?

The GHE is calculated by working out the effective/expected temperature of 'the surface' of a planet by just looking at how much radiation it absorb (i.e. incoming solar radiation minus the amount reflected) and plugging the number (240 W/m2 average for Earth) into the clever formula.

The 'surface' means 'whatever the sunshine hits first', which on Earth is mainly clouds; or all clouds in the case of Venus. So you are actually calculating the expected temperature of the clouds; the Alarmist trick is to compare/confuse that 'surface' (from the point of view of incoming radiation) with what we mere mortals consider to the the surface i.e. land and oceans, which are of course a lot warmer because of the gravito-thermal effect (unless you go to the top of Mount Everest, which is above the clouds and hence no GHE there either).

The clever formula works much better when applied to Mars or the Moon, which have little or no clouds. The actual surface temperatures are pretty close to the calculated effective temperatures (if you adjust for solar angle and night-time cooling; but there's also little or no atmosphere so you don't need to worry about warmth being transferred from Equator to Poles or from day side to night side).

Luckily, on Earth there are also places with little or no clouds; they are called deserts. The Sahara straddles the Tropic of Cancer, so it gets peak 1,361 W/m2 sunshine at midday during the summer months. Divide that by the sq root of two to get average during a 12-hour day = 962 W/m2; halve that for the 12-hour night = 481 W/m2; then knock off one-fifth reflected = 385 W/m2.

Plug 385 W/m2 into the formula and you get an expected average temperature of 287K. Deserts have a large diurnal temperature range, just like The Moon (they cool down fast during the night because there is no cloud blanket), of (say) 40 degrees. A typical desert near the equator is just above freezing just before dawn and 40 degrees hotter in the early afternoon, so the average actual temperature is about 293K.

OK, that's six degrees warmer than expected and these are only back of an envelope calculations, but it's nowhere near the much vaunted 33 degree Greenhouse Effect, despite there being more CO2 than average above the Tropics (the troposphere is thickest over The Equator and thinnest over The Poles).

[We could also dispense with the whole concept of averaging sunshine over 24 hours and look at the hypothetical peak radiation of about 1,000 W/m2 at midday in summer, plug that into the formula and we get peak temp of 364K = 91C. Temperatures get nowhere near that, but to the extent they do, that might explain the 6 degree discrepancy?]

The answer to the question in the title is of course "Because there are no bloody clouds over the desert, and the Greenhouse Effect on Venus or Earth is purely down to clouds and their altitude!", just in case you were wondering.

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (490)

One objection that often floats about is that while you can establish reasonably reliable relative values for generic types of land and buildings - urban homes, factories, offices, retail premises, farmland etc, there will always be a few outliers.

I agree, things like stately homes and theme parks in the middle of the countryside (or ski-runs in the Cairngorms or whatever outlandish examples people come up with) aren't bought and sold very often. It's difficult to say what they'd sell for or rent for, and how that would be split between building value and location value.

So what?

Even with conceptually simple taxes like income tax, there are endless grey areas. Who is and isn't UK resident? Where's the line between a gift out of gratitude and a payment for services? What's a taxable dividend and what's a non-taxable return of capital? If a shareholder also works for a company, is the money they get from the company dividend, wages or a loan?

There are thousands of pages of legislation, guidance and legal cases on all these issues; it's sometimes impossible to understand why a Tax Tribunal decided that somebody's receipt from a certain source was taxable or not, and sometimes they decide the opposite way round to what you'd initially expect, given the basic facts. But they are the Tribunals and I'm not.

Nonetheless, the bulk of what you'd think is taxable income is actually taxed; some people wriggle through loopholes; others have to pay tax on stuff where the sensible person would assume it's non-taxable. Some tax is never paid and HMRC just writes it off. Overall collection rates about 90% of theoretical receipts. And we accept this as 'good enough'.

Conversely, LVT assessments for 98% of land by value are a doddle i.e. developed land in urban areas where there is plenty of data on rents and selling prices. Farmland is about 2% by value, that's not too difficult either (the tax would be tens of pounds per acre per year at most, unless we just exempt it). And collection rates will be very high - who cares where the owner lives? If they run up massive arrears, the land and buildings just get auctioned off and they get the balance.

As to stately homes and theme parks, valuers just have to make up some general rules or haggle on a case-by-case basis. If they end up getting the benefit of the doubt and are under-taxed, so what? Most of the stately homes which the National Trust owns were given away by owners who couldn't afford the running costs, and even with their membership and entry fees most of them aren't particularly profitable, so they can't be worth much, possibly next to nothing i.e. not worth taxing.

"Now we're short of bus drivers!"

From The Daily Mail:

The driver shortage across the UK has now spread into the bus network as public transport staff swap bus routes for work as truckers.

The wage increase promised to attract new HGV hauliers has led public transport staff to make a change, impacting the number of journey's on offer and resulting in the axing of others. Bus drivers can earn £32,500 on average, but can now earn up to £78,000 behind the wheel of a lorry instead.

Well of course, this was bound to happen. Anybody who's mastered the skill of negotiating buses through congested cities and along narrow country lanes (as well as the stress of idiot passengers and trying to stick to the timetable) will master lorry driving within a couple of days.

So then wages for bus drivers will go up a bit, and more people will train up to be bus drivers, ex-bus drivers will go back into bus driving etc.

In free markets, this sorts itself out, usually much sooner that you'd expect. And on another bright note, my assumption that the petrol queues would fizzle out after two weeks appears to have been correct. I went for 'two weeks' because that is the typical gap between visits, there is of course a wide spread.

"Was the switch to green fuel behind the petrol crisis?"

Asks The Daily Mail:

Retailers have blamed the spiralling petrol crisis on the government's switchover to greener fuel. Industry leaders said they had been 'emptying their tanks as fast as we could' ahead of the rollout - which left them short during the recent panic buying. They demanded an inquiry into the forecourt chaos that has left pumps dry across the country...

Crowd behavious is unpredictable and something must have triggered it somehow, so it's not implausible. Like people who are trampled to death in stampedes at open air gatherings, there must have been a first person who pushed too hard or tried to squeeze in where they didn't fit.

However, in answer to the question, I think on balance "no", because the timeline doesn't fit. E10 was introduced on 1 September and we (i.e. I and all the other motorists in the queues on 24 September) first saw reports of shortages the day before, i.e. 23 September, so that's a three-week gap, in which time surely the petrol stations would have handled the transition.