15 Dec 2021

There seems to be a puzzling disconnect between the available facts from South Africa about Omicron (that it spreads quickly but has relatively benign health consequences) and the gloomy and even panicky reaction in the UK from the government, the self-appointed “science” and the political opposition, such as it is.  It is almost as if the establishment, if that’s the right word, has an ulterior motive in keeping the fear going, even at the expense of the usual suspects such as children, people with undiagnosed conditions like cancer and, of course, the leisure and travel industries.  As this website is about money, I will speculate about financial motives. Fighting Covid has been extraordinarily expensive. The UK government has borrowed more than £550 billion since April 2020. Clearly this money has gone to some obvious recipients like vaccine manufacturers and the rapacious “approved” PCR testers but also to the NHS, to local councils and in the form of furlough payments to employers of the temporarily unemployed. I don’t suppose that many people associated with any of these groups, the pharma companies aside, actually want the pandemic to continue. But be aware that this is potentially a very big week for the UK Treasury. In March 2020 it was agreed that the Bank of England’s Asset Purchase Facility could be increased from £445 billion (it was full at the time) by £200 billion and later in the year by another £100 billion and again (in November) by a further £150 billion for a total of £895 billion (popularly known as QE or quantitative easing).  Since April 2020 the Bank has duly bought gilts steadily from institutional holders. We have only the detailed figures up to the end of September but at the consistent rate at which it was operating it should have reached its £895 billion target this very week (13th December). Over that period the Bank purchasing arm has bought £3 of gilts for every £4 that it has issued on behalf of the government. In other words, 75% of this extraordinary borrowing has been funded by what one might call an elaborate accounting trick.    Unless the QE facility is ramped up again, the government...

26 May 2020

Despite the fact that the UK government appears, like Gilbert’s Duke of Plaza-Toro*, to be leading from behind, I suppose that this fearful fog of indecision will eventually dissipate and some kind of hobbled phoenix will stumble out of the smoking ashes of the economy. In passing, I would like to bestow their share of responsibility on the political opposition, including the trade unions, who constantly urge caution and demand something called “safety” for all, in the calculated knowledge that the worse the economic consequences of lockdown, the worse for the government.  Can they really be that cynical? Oh yes. THE DAMAGE DONE But whether you believe that lockdown was a) catastrophically late or b) completely unnecessary, (and history may one day deliver a verdict but you won’t find it on Twitter this afternoon), a vast amount of economic damage has been done. And the longer paralysis continues, the worse it will be.  And given that the government is now a follower of international decisions rather than a decision maker itself, we must look at the US, Germany, France (!), Sweden and pretty much anywhere else you care to name to see how our future might look.   Donald Trump has an election to win in November. (Ladbrokes still has him as the marginal favourite, which seems surprising). Naturally, he is desperate to get America back to work and, as his son says, make it great again, again. Whether you think he is gambling with people’s lives or trying to save them from destitution actually doesn’t matter. What matters is what has already happened.  The US unemployment rate jumped from 3.5% in February to 4.4% in March to 14.7% in April. That’s 23 million Americans out of work. But it will be more than that. The total of initial unemployment claims is at nearly 39 million by the end of last week. That looks like an unemployment rate closer to 25%, an utterly unimaginable number.  If it turns out that “it’s the economy, stupid” then Trump’s Thanksgiving turkey is cooked unless there is a near-magical recovery. Whatever you think of Trump, and there is no need to say or even think it out loud, a...