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Mick Harper
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Italy Goes Fascist

Gradually, the EU is filling up with anti-EU countries. Can the centre hold? Well, that's one of the problems of the EU, the centre believes every move towards an 'ever-stronger union' is a move in the right direction. If they were AE-ists they would understand that fixed polices are always wrong.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Mick Harper wrote:
Italy Goes Fascist

Gradually, the EU is filling up with anti-EU countries. Can the centre hold?


You're having a laugh. It's just a realignment of a centre right coalition that has always been pro-Europe, now probably to be led by Brothers of Italy, the League and old Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italy, all of which have previously been dubbed fascist by some. Italian Exit ain't going to happen. Seriously they are not going off and reissuing the Lira. It's going to be a case of straight on the phone to reassure Brussels, in private..
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Mick Harper
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Yes, that is my broad reading too. But hasn't it come to something when the EU members are holding on to nurse for fear of something worse. I can remember when it was all a bit aspirational.

On a related subject, Greece has finally come out of EU-supervision imposed in exchange for all those emergency bail-outs. Of course the Greeks haven't actually paid off the loans that necessitated the bail-outs but they can at least repent at leisure for the next thirty to forty years while paying them off, according to Al-Jazeera.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Wile E. Coyote wrote:
If the Russians can't slow the attack behind the Oskol, where a long north-south river is protecting them, then they could start going backwards quickly again. They must surely try to hold Lymon for a few days to slow the advance, that is if only to start shelling the Ukrainian troops that are pausing, and then plan for further retreats and buy time for reinforcements.



They have held Lymon for ages, this would be "heroic" if it were not being done by the "baddies"..........
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Mick Harper
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The best example of this general syndrome is Londoners getting the aren't-they-heroes award when their casualties from car accidents with blacked-out headlights outnumber those from bombing. Meanwhile the baddies over in Essen, Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden...
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Mick Harper
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I still don't understand the precipitous fall in the value of the pound and the hike in interest rate for government borrowing. brought on by Truss's dash-for-growth. It is not the amount of debt that counts, it is the capacity to repay the debt or continue paying the interest on the debt that matter. Surely the markets do not believe a British government is going to default after hundreds of years of not-defaulting just because our debt-to-GNP ratio has risen from 88.7% to 91.4% (or whatever it is).

As for the pound/dollar rate, what's it got to do with that?
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Mick Harper
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When Will They Ever Learn?

....is enough to prevent a rout which sent sterling to its lowest-ever value against the dollar

A half-crown (2s 6d, 25p) was known as 'half-a-dollar' because there were always about four dollars to the pound. In the nineteenth century. In the twentieth (and twenty-first) century it has been on the slide. In other words, sterling is always at its lowest ever value against the dollar. It's not a rout, it's a long term trend.

The Governor of the Bank of England has promised he will not hesitate to change interests rates by as much as is needed

Needed to do what? Return to the nineteenth century? Nobody mentioned that a weak pound is nirvana for British exporters who, I seem to remember, have been battered from pillar to post by all and sundry in recent years. (Not least because the Euro has been so weak.)

With a run on the pound ultimately resulting in higher mortgage rates, with savings and pensions eaten away

Hold the apocalypse for just a minute, Kirsty. You can’t have both. Higher interest rates are bad for borrowers (that means mortgages). They are good for lenders (that means savings and pensions). Not only do the latter outnumber the former hugely but cheap mortgages do nothing but fuel house prices and land values to places they ought not to be. That means it is actually harder for people to get on the housing ladder, even though they will be on relatively easy street when they are on it.
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Grant



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And don’t forget that even if the rate goes to 5% it’s still historically low - and half the rate of inflation
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Mick Harper
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The world but not I hath forgot. My folk memory of Evening Standard headlines (our chief source of news because groovers didn't watch telly or listen to the radio but could read other people's headlines on the tube) was

Crisis! Seven Per Cent
Chancellor: temporary measure
'Pound in your pocket safe'

I can't say any more, I did economics at university.
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Mick Harper
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Listening to Rachel Reeves boasting Labour are now the party of fiscal responsibility had me reaching for my Admit One, Sickoes, Ladbroke Grove's Newest Vomitorium. This is the party that proposes meeting current expenditure out of taxation and paying for infrastructure by borrowing. In other words a Krazy-Kwarteng style budget every year forever.

In the not-so-distant future we'll have the greatest infrastructure in the world but won't be able to use it on account of having to hide in the back room from the bailiffs. At least we won't have to worry about energy prices, nobody will sell us any.
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Mick Harper
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Mr Reeves: Had a good conference, darling?
Rachel Reeves: Rather! I was on Newsnight and everything. Why are all the lights off?
Mr Reeves: Well, you remember saying we'd pay for the house by borrowing because it's infrastructure?
Rachel Reeves: Yes dear, it's called a mortgage.
Mr Reeves: I know, you explained it all to me.
Rachel Reeves: So have you been paying the mortgage?
Mr Reeves: Every month, regular as clockwork.
Rachel Reeves: So what's the prob?
Mr Reeves: You said infrastructure was to be paid for out of borrowing so I kept taking out credit cards to pay the mortgage. While you were at Blackpool these blokes came round...
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Mick Harper
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Seventy per cent to own their own homes in the first five years of a Labour government, Starmer announces

This is a typical conference wheeze. The present figure is 65% so he could hardly announce any other number without it being (a) too small, who would care? or (b) too big, accusations of irresponsibility. Yes, sirree, it's an example of The Tyranny of Number [AE principle no 45 (a) (iii).] No discussion of whether home ownership at these rarefied levels is a good thing (nobody else in the world thinks so).

But one thing you can be sure of is that, since the government can't order a coupla million people to buy their own homes, it can only be done by warping the entire housing market even further off the straight and narrow than it already is after a hundred years of governments warping the housing market. And we'll all have to pay for it by higher taxes to provide incentives or live in crappier rented homes because of disincentives or uglier cities to loosen the planning regulations or with mum and dad because house prices have gone through the roof or in cardboard boxes because no-one is renting... or... or... or... Why can't people choose for themselves? It works for most other things.

If only we could live in a free country.
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Mick Harper
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The commentators are only reluctantly mentioning that, after all the kerfuffle, the pound and borrowing rates are gradually returning to the status quo ante.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Wiley reckons that we are discovering Nord Stream leaks because we are looking for them. It is unlikely that the four leaks would occur simultaneously so this must have been happening for some time, it is just now that we are starting to look with satellites. The alternative suggestion is sabotage. However, I can't see sabotage is in anyone's interest. It's the equvalent of two people having fallen out of a tree, arguing who sawed the branch off.

The branch broke.
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Mick Harper
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An interesting theory but why would the Danes and the Swedes specifically be watching their satellite imagery? It could however be misadventure. The Russians have been turning things off and on again (as we computer technicians call it) so it might be that underwater pipelines don't take kindly to this kind of irregularity.
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