The Obscurer

Month: February, 2008

Wednesday 13th February 2008

Pump It Up (When You Don't Really Need It?)

The BBC managed to get awfully excited by yesterday’s inflation figures; both Five Live and Newsnight led on the news that the Consumer Price Index had risen, from 2.1% to 2.2%, while the more widely trusted Retail Price Index had also gone up, from 4% to 4.1%. Cue doom and gloom all round.

But is that it? Inflation up by 0.1%, leaving the CPI at just 0.2% over the government’s target? If the inflation rate had risen by any less it wouldn’t have risen at all. Jackie Long on Newsnight preceded her report by stating, “in some ways, today’s official inflation figure could have been read as a bit of good news”. “But we decided to run with the story anyway”, I interjected, finishing her sentence for her. And fair enough; no doubt the guests were booked in the studio, the bulk of the report had been filmed, and we don’t want to be wasteful when there are some potentially straitened times ahead.

I don’t want to sound complacent, I appreciate that the economy is in a tricky position just now, and that while inflation, unemployment and interest rates are still historically very low there are storm clouds on the horizon, with concerns over commodity prices, the knock-on effect of the slowdown in the US, and the amount of personal debt in the UK economy; but still, talk about talking ourselves into a recession before it has even happened.

There are a couple of things I could do with being answered, though, by anyone out there with the requisite knowledge. Whilst I acknowledge that the state of the public finances is a concern in itself, what is all this talk bemoaning the way it is restricting our ability to use fiscal policy? For years monetarists have told us that we shouldn’t use fiscal policy at all, even if we are in a position to do so. That always seemed a bit daft to me; after all, changes in taxation have a fiscal effect even if you don’t want them to. Now, however, not only is fiscal policy seen as desirable but almost magical, as if any tax cuts or increases in public spending will only have the wished for effect in stimulating demand without adding to the inflationary pressures that are already a worry and inherent in the world economy. So what’s going on there?

Secondly, if part of the concern at the moment is the high level of personal debt and the bubble in the housing market, themselves a consequence of the low interest rates we have enjoyed for so long, is it really a good idea to cut interest rates still further in response? Isn’t that a bit like reacting to the sight of an over-inflated tyre that is leaking air and looks as if it is about to burst by pumping in even more air, when really we should be looking at releasing some of the pressure through the valve? In other words, rather than calling for a frantic cutting of interest rates and considering fiscal stimulus packages, shouldn’t we just accept that a slowdown will have to happen at some time, that it may well be happening now, and that rather than strive to prevent it or delay it just so it can wreak even more havoc another day we should prepare for a downturn, perhaps even for some sort of recession, and we should be putting our efforts into engineering as soft a landing as possible?

Or have I just demonstrated why my career in economics stalled abruptly on my graduation day?

3 Comments
Friday 8th February 2008

A Penny For The Old Guy

A couple of years ago, when talking about Guido Fawkes and his role (or lack of it) in Mark Oaten’s withdrawal from that month’s Lib Dem leadership race, I signed off by saying that “with luck our paths won’t cross again”. Well, no such luck unfortunately, and while I would love to take DonaldS’s advice and “just ignore him”, that is easier said than done if you read many of the blogs I do. It can be just as hard to escape Guido elsewhere, be it making a tit of himself on Newsnight, or being credited by Dianne Abbot on This Week with breaking the story that brought down Peter Hain (true, if by “breaking a story” you mean adding a footnote to something the media had been running with for days.)

Guido is at best a knob, someone who ruthlessly hunts down political scandal by regularly checking his in box and tossing his newfound trivia and hearsay the way of the world wide web, all the while dressing up his gossip-mongering as some sort of libertarian master plan to bring down the political class. Well, he had to do something when the serious projects where he masqueraded under his real name such as Global Growth went nowhere. Alongside his failure to break the Hain story, Guido’s successes include the aforementioned erroneous claim regarding Oaten (which only works if you equate paedophilia with homosexuality), something about a love-child triangle amongst some journalists that is of no interest to anyone other than the individuals involved, and his revelation that John Prescott shags around a bit. If that latter story were an attempt to undermine politicians and show them as a separate class of “others” then I would consider it a failure, adultery being a fairly common human fallibility. Certainly Guido’s muckraking doesn’t have the desired effect on me; reading his blog and the comments therein usually makes me sympathise with a group of people I otherwise have little time for. Far from destroying the political class he is merely an echo chamber for the already disaffected; I doubt he has changed anyone’s mind on the matter of our public servants.

So why am I wittering on about him, then? Good question. I have recently been following this story regarding Tim Ireland who made some allegation about Guido on his Bloggerheads site; I’m not bothering to repeat them here because they are the least interesting facet of the affair. Tim gets criticised by his opponents sometimes as being obsessive, and worse; I prefer dogged myself, although I admit he can take things a bit far at times. Anyway, the allegations were straight forward enough, so it would have been a simple matter for Guido to have just refuted them; so why didn’t he? Instead he reached for his lawyer, a tactic he has used before.

Fair enough you may say, and perhaps this shows that Tim’s attack was the straw that broke the camel’s back, a consequence of the running sore that is his and Guido’s relationship. But then Sunny Hundal at Liberal Conspiracy revealed that he too had had the frighteners put on him, in his case simply because his site had linked to Tim’s original post. Sounds as if someone is getting a little out of hand. All this is reminiscent of the sort of tactics employed by Schillings, with the libel laws being used not to put a stop to lies, but to silence free speech, and coming from someone who once complained that “the libel laws in Britain have long been overly restrictive and frustrated Guido’s efforts…Guido has a few things he has been itching to write about some very rich people.”

Perhaps he just meant richer people. We are all hypocrites to a greater or lesser extent, but even so it is still rare to find such a cut and dried example of the art. I have a lot of time for the more thoughtful libertarians out there who are dedicated to their high ideals of freedom and liberty, but by his actions Guido seems more the instinctive, knee-jerk sort, who dreams of ending state coercion not so it can guide us from the world of the dead hand to that of the invisible hand, but just to ensure that he can pay less tax while power resides with those with the deepest pockets. Or perhaps I am showing my ignorance of what libertarians really stand for.

All of which is a long and roundabout way of saying that, for what it’s worth, should Tim and Sunny require the support of a blog that hardly anybody reads, they’ve got it.

7 Comments
Tuesday 5th February 2008

Raise A Toast

I bring good news for those of you fortunate enough to be within spitting distance of a Sayers or Hampsons bakers.

Introducing new “Toast Plus”, a bold and startling innovation. Just in case, whether through failing eyesight or sheer laziness, you are unable to read the accompanying photograph (left), “Toast Plus” re-imagines the humblest of breakfasts by offering the delighted consumer the possibility of “thick cut toast with a choice of toppings”. Interested? Better still; each topping retails for a mere 15 pence each.

I’ll level with you. I really don’t think that coming up with the concept of selling toast and toppings is worthy of branding the whole experience “Toast Plus”, still less of designing a little accompanying logo of a stylised half-eaten slice of bread. I always thought that toasting some bread and slapping on some spread and jam was a pretty open-sourceish, public-domainy kind of thing. Just what have the bakers done to claim it as their own? Should they really be troubling the patent office? Sure, they boast of their toast being “mega thick”, but that is an option only denied most of us because of the tyranny of the sliced loaf that some of their fellow baking brethren have foisted upon us.

I am not disparaging bakers in general, I acknowledge that they are vital to the production of bread, which is an important ingredient in toast; but if we allow one of their number to get away with this, then we can only imagine what could happen next…

Air™A refreshing blend of Nitrogen and Oxygen, with just a hint of Argon. Perfect for that early-morning pick-me-up, when taken copiously whilst exercising, or for just everyday breathing.

5 Comments