Damian Green update

I've just heard Geoff Hoon on Radio 4's "Any Questions?" trying to defend the arrest etc. of MP Damian Green. I can only think he was chosen because he is somehow politically expendable. The transcript will be available in a few days here.

His Wikipedia entry says "His notorious skill is 'stonewalling' - deflecting difficult questions by 'playing a straight bat', or appearing to do so." Maybe so. But all it did - for me and the audience - was pretty much to damn him, and by implication the government.

Default is mine

"Jesse" comments on Ecuador's attempt to repudiate "illegal" foreign debt. But perhaps larger countries may soon say, "What's sauce for the goose..." And then?

A warning from history

Charles I attempts to arrest five Members of Parliament, 6 January 1642

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana

I can't hope to improve on Cranmer's piece regarding Speaker Martin's betrayal of the proudest tradition of his office; I can only echo his cry of "Shame!"

UPDATE

Yet, alas, even Speaker Lenthall had his regrets:

In his will, Lenthall asked to be buried without any state and without a monument, 'acknowledging myself to be unworthy of the least outward regard in this world and unworthy of any remembrance that hath been so great a sinner'. The most he would permit was a plain stone carved with the Latin inscription Vermis sum, which means: I am a worm.

What epitaph will Speaker Martin cause to be inscribed for himself?

Handy-dandy, the pigs are the farmers

Place your political parties in the schema below:At first, I wondered what Hatfield Girl was talking about. Now it's one of the news headlines on the morning radio, and in the papers: the Government has taken to arresting members of the Opposition, like tinpot dictators in faraway countries that it's difficult to believe really exist.

Difficult to believe; that's part of the process. Honestly, I have felt since 1997 (and I am no natural Conservative voter, please believe me) that something was obscurely wrong, that we were all inside someone else's dream. It's like that feeling you get that you've forgotten something, but haven't a clue what it might be.

Before 1997, the Government was Them and we were Us: British, muddling through, ready to heave a brickbat at these clowns who pretend to rule us, but all of us bound by habit and tradition. But in Tony Blair's revolution, the Government claimed to represent all of us: it was the political wing of the British people as a whole, or some such typical Toni verbalfluff.

This is how Nazism took hold - and my mother lived through it. No need for the unions, we the national socialist State represent the worker's best interests, etc.

Fascism, Communism - it's all the same, structurally.

Economics doesn't describe the real world

Michael Panzner has unearthed a couple of good items explaining how the assumptions of classical economics are plain wrong - we are not rational - and so the results are also wrong.

And there I was, planning to use some of my Christmas holiday reading an economics primer.

What is debt?

Here's one way to calculate it (htp: Burning Our Money): GDP less debt owed to foreigners, per capita.

But there's also total debts (foreign and domestic) compared to GDP, in which case the US owes 4 times what it earns, and goodness knows exactly what the equivalent is here in the UK.

And then there's future liabilities - pensions and healthcare costs that have effectively been promised, and will have to be paid for decades to come. The US Comptroller General, David Walker, has been touring the US for two years like Cassandra of Troy, trying to alert the public about this. His latest reported estimate is that these promises are equivalent to a lump sum debt of $53 trillion, and rising annually by $2 - $3 trillion.

It's an unholy mess, on a scale so large that even approximate calculations seem almost irrelevant. However, I strongly suspect that it is a misrepresentation to say that the problem is principally American. If only the truth were made plain - but those in the best position to say, have the greatest incentive to remain silent, or to mislead us.

If the 2003 reflation hadn't happened?

What if the banks hadn't gone for broke from 2002/2003 onward?

In the above graph, I show the Dow, adjusted for CPI, up to 19 November 2008, with an extra: the gold line is the same as what actually happened from the beginning of 1966 to November 1974, adjusted proportionately to the height of the boom at the end of 1999.

Interpreted and represented in this way, even the worst of the crash so far has not caught up with the mid-70s: the Dow closed last Wednesday at 7,997 where 32 years before it would have been the equivalent of 4,911. If that period of history were to repeat itself, the Dow would take another 7 years of whipsawing towards its low of 3,988 in today's terms.

So in my view, the monetary expansion of the last 6 years or so, has merely delayed progress a little. The drunkard has had a few more to put off the hangover.