Neville Hill

A great article about a great album.

Mark Hollis' response to New York 'sandwiches' was utterly correct.

Beckford Bottle Shop is also great.

The Star is my favourite pub, in part because you could walk in from the 1920s and not notice anything amiss.

Landrace is fantastic

The Truss debacle was only due to higher borrowing inasmuch as that higher borrowing was a massive surprise and delivered a surprising, massive fiscal stimulus when the economy was already overheating with inflation in double-digits and the BoE ramping up rates.

Although higher borrowing from a new Labour PM could mean higher interest rates, I don't think they'd be the end of the world. A policy mix of higher interest rates, higher public spending and unchanged (or lower) taxes might prove less politically and economically suboptimal than where we are now.

It’s one of our few remaining areas of comparative advantage

And convert ‘oo’ into ‘u’

Genius move by Starmer. Correctly identifying that what the economy and electorate needs is more unimaginative technocratic neoliberalism.

Chart showing “Electricity Supplied”, “Electricity Available” and Productivity in Britain / UK since 1920. The three measures rise in similar patterns (albeit on different scales until a point in the early 2000s, when electricity supplied drops and productivity growth slowed down. The authors draw a line at this point, and write “decommissioning of facilities including coal, oil and nuclear”. The chart is nonsense

I’ve seen it again today, so here goes: this chart, and the research note it comes from, is extremely silly and misleading.

It purports to show a drop in electricity availability in Britain coinciding with the productivity slowdown. It shows nothing of the sort…

“An improvement in productivity has caused the slowdown in productivity“

Welcome to Credit Suisse everyone!

In which case, maybe we have found a solution to France's fiscal problems!

A key problem is time consistency. Why would any country believe that a US security guarantee (that they've effectively handed over $$$$ for) made by this administration will be worth anything in 1, 5, or 10 years' time?

(costs don't always disappear just because you move them off the budget; as I regularly say, failing to repair a bridge is a bigger unfunded commitment and burden on future generations than borrowing money to repair it)

Show me the Monnet

A literal and metaphorical bazooka

Yes, that was the bit that they didn't plan to publish in the Telegraph.

It’s an appalling, embarrassing, piece of analysis.

“Should we do some causal inference?”

“Nah, fuck it, draw a big red circle and it’ll go viral on LinkedIn”

That river is definitely alive!

Thoroughly enjoying this.

Amazing. Thank you for popping this into my feed. I’d never have heard it otherwise.

Quite. They don’t account for that in those charts of strong US vs shitty European GDP that are doing the rounds on LinkedIn at the moment.

Brilliant

To celebrate the recent FT 'best books of 2024' news and because tariffs & trade wars are now back in a big way, I'm giving away a free copy of my new book Pax Economica press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

One winner will be chosen at random. To be considered, just 'repost' and 'like' this post!

Agree: I think he was called either Emmanuel Macron or Mario Draghi!!! The problem, as the problem has been since 2009, is that the Germans said and say "nein" to such ideas.

To butcher a quote from Dixon's 'On the psychology of military incompetence': "Spreads will look a darn sight worse with a load of bloody Russians running around"

You could argue that the fact that the economy doesn't do anything interesting but just steadily declines, accompanied by an equally deteriorating security situation to the east, are in fact the real crises and are far more serious and existential than a few basis points on French spreads.

Good to see that the Greek gods are still operational.

Agree. We just need to be unsparing and ruthless about what’s in our interest. Which means being dewy-eyed about neither the EU nor the ‘special relationship’.

The Huw Locke exhibition that’s on at the British Museum now does just that in a really effective, interesting, thoughtful way.