They Blog For You

Rarely can a Budget have disintegrated so quickly.   Dixons have just announced sales falling by 11% over the last 11 weeks, and are now cutting capital expenditure by 25%.   Oddbins goes bankrupt.   The former Asda boss has predicted a “long-term trend of trading down”.   HMV has just issued its thrid [...]

Five months ago, I forecast that default within some Eurozone countries was going to happen.  Indeed, I suggested Britain ought to encourage certain countries to default - and decouple from the Euro - rather than piling up and parcelling out yet more debt.  How did I come to such a view?  With debts rising [...]

The internal contradictions in Osborne’s economic policy multiply.   Before the election he complained quite rightly that the nation’s private debt was far too high – in the bubble years it reached £1.35 trillion, only slightly less than the nation’s entire GDP which was £1.45 trillion.   It is now £1.56 trillion, [...]

  How much can the Lib-Dems take? Can the anti-nuclear Lib-Dem MPs continue to back a doomed policy? They were clear in their denunciations before the General Election. Simon Hughes never changed his mind. Now Nick Clegg appears to have cracked. The Deputy Prime Minister cast doubt on the future for nuclear [...]

If there is one single indicator illustrating the political health as well as the economic health of a government, it is RPDI (real personal disposable income).   Year on year that tracks changes in the value of household income after taking account of inflation.   For 20 years till 2005 it rose [...]

For lack of any prospect of a real sustainable recovery in the global real economy, the ‘smart’ money (for which read: stupid money) is pouring into the next synthetic boom on a staggering scale.   The basis for these asset inflations is so transparently insubstantial that another financial crash cannot be [...]

                  This week-end I noticed the public sector is still out and about recruiting. The Business Department wants a Chairman and four Board members for a “Technology Strategy Board”. Couldn’t Business  senior officials do whatever work this is meant to require?  Network Rail wants “Business Change Managers”  at up to £90,000 [...]

On Monday 31 January Chloe Smith, Member of Parliament for Norwich North, attended the launch of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Financial Education for Young People as part of a major campaign for compulsory financial education. Over 123 MPs from all parties have joined the group, making it [...]

Chloe Smith, MP for Norwich North, this week encouraged young people locally to enter the "Chance to be Chancellor" competition run by the Citizenship Foundation in partnership with Aviva. The charity is hoping to encourage young people across the UK to engage with, and voice their opinion on, the big economic [...]

This week the economic announcements are likely to show that unemployment is beginning to rise sharply, inflation too is edging up (even before the VAT hike kicks in), and consumer spending portends a further economic slowdown.   That might of course be explained as temporary but necessary pain before things get [...]

At last Labour is confronting the Tory canard that the current austerity is all the fault of the mess that the last Labour Government left behind.   It has been the success of Tory propagandists in switching a bankers-driven financial collapse into (i) a Labour Government-caused train crash and (ii) Labour over-spending [...]

      Last n ight on Newsnight the French Finance Minister gave an accomplished interview. She understood poorly worded questions and spoke well in a foreign language. Her message was perfect spin. She told us all current members of the Euro would remain members. She said there will be no more [...]

Not a Happy New Year for Osborne – a steady trickle of bad economic news is beginning to test even quicker than expected whether his strategy can survive, even before the big ticket cuts kick in.   Even before VAT at 20% goes live at midnight tonight, costing an extra £389 a [...]

The latest reports estimate unemployment in Britain rising to nearly 3 million in 2011.   It is assumed that this is all because of Osborne’s unprecedented orgy of spending cuts.   Of course they will play a big part, but they’re certainly not the whole story.   IMF, OECD and EU figures show [...]

There’s really one basic reason why Labour is not already ten percentage points ahead of this Tory government in the polls.   Aided and abetted vociferously by a Right-wing media, the Tories have succeeded in propagating three fundamental myths – that the country’s in the state it’s in because Labour was guilty of [...]

“If Greece becomes the first country in developed Europe to restructure sovereign debt since the Second World War,” writes Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “it breaks a powerful taboo and risks opening the floodgates to serial defaults in southern Europe and Ireland.” [...]

It was hard on the knees.  Almost two hours of constant flexing to stand up to catch the Speaker's eye is my most regular form of exercise. Getting a question in order also requires some mental agility. I had re-worked in my head a question I wanted to ask Energy Secretary [...]

Fact 1: During 2011, Portugal must raise Euro 38bn, Belgium Euro 85bn, Spain Euro 210bn, and Italy Euro 374bn (Goldman Sachs report quoted in Telegraph). Fact 2:  Ireland, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy need consumer spending to fall by 15pc for their debts to become sustainable [...]

‘We are on course, the plan is working’, siad Osborne in his Autumn Statement (replacing the pre-budget report).   This chutzpah was based on the latest OBR report forecasting growth of 1.8% this year compared with the 1.2% figure given previously.   What he didn’t say is that any extra growth this [...]

A couple of weeks after listening to the great Jesus Huerta de Soto lecturing at the London School of Economics, the House of Commons today publishes my Bill on banking reform.  Read it here. Banks today enjoy a legal privilege that extends to no [...]