Is Britain doomed (again)?

Pity the poor Brits.  They just can’t catch a break.

After years of reporting of lying Boris Johnson, a change to a less colourful PM in Rishi Sunak has resulted in a smooth media pivot to an end-of-empire narrative.  The New York Times, no less, amplifies suggestions that Blighty will soon fall behind Poland or even – get your atlas ready – Slovenia.  So dire is the situation we are told that even a reversal of Brexit may not be enough to save a once-proud nation.

You really can’t have it all

The politics of reality have made for a strange year.

In Germany, an improbable rainbow coalition burnt lots of coal so it could close its nuclear power stations.  Americans decided an unpopular Biden was marginally less problematic than Trump.  Vladimir Putin overestimated his attractiveness and underestimated Ukraine’s. The Brits fell out of love with their Brexit government.  And China’s Xi is finding it hard to get out of unstable lockdown and into stable growth.

Incumbents are unpopular all over the show – even New Zealand now.  But that doesn’t always mean oppositions are doing much better.

Princess in fairy tale but happy ending unlikely

For people who sought to escape from the glare of unwelcome publicity, Harry and Meghan Windsor show no signs of going away.

Their latest business venture – an eponymous blockbuster Netflix docudrama – may or may not prove a success but there is no question that it’s on a grand scale.

Who says Britain’s Conservative MPs are not future oriented?

In fact, they are acutely focused on what job they might be able to get after the next general election, due in 2024.

Prospects looked worse after new Chancellor Jeremy Hunt delivered his mini-budget on Thursday.  His programme: rolling tax increases for the next six years.  And because tax thresholds are not being raised in line with rising prices and wages, persistent inflation (which also seems more likely) will make it more painful.

Have a smidgen of sympathy for the poor multi-millionaire.  Under the current bipartisan rules of the game, there is no alternative if the growth in debt is to be curbed.  Those who produce the most, must give the most.

Excellent writing on the New Right. The Old might read

An insightful mini-essay from Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen on how his “own preferred slant of classical liberalism is being replaced” by what – for want of an agreed term – he categorises as the “New Right”. 

At his level of intellectual discourse, this means “the smart young people I meet who in the 1980s might have become libertarians”.

Presumably they didn’t.  But nonetheless “the New Right doesn’t entirely reject the basic principles of free market economics”. (Is ‘entirely’ redundant here?) 

Supply chains are the least of it – labour markets signal change

It seems such a long time since our governments (well the left-wing ones anyway) were steering us deftly through the pandemic?

Sure – there were a few glitches – ‘transitory’ inflation for one.  But there was a catch-all explanation – supply chain disruption. And normal service would be resumed shortly.

But like most comfortable explanations, there seems to be a little more to it than that.

Just don’t call it creative destruction, Rishi

The MPs of Britain’s ruling Conservative party don’t lack confidence.

Having defenestrated PM Liz Truss, the choice of the non-Parliamentary party as leader, they decided to take no more silly risks, and installed their own choice, former Chancellor Rishi Sunak, without troubling to consult the membership.

Time will tell if the members thank them.

Courtesy is so important in politics

It is perhaps unfortunate that the UK’s Conservative party MPs have never thanked the party members for saving them from the disaster of Theresa May’s premiership.

Perhaps they weren’t even grateful, seeing how quickly they recoiled at the members’ choice of Liz Truss.  Truss – who announced on Thursday she would step down – wasn’t even given enough time to dig a shallow grave, in contrast to May, who was indulgently permitted to erect an elaborate mausoleum and find out that no-one else would join her there.

Liz Truss – living in interesting times

Despite the buffeting, politicians in recent years have done a surprisingly good job at seeming to be in charge.  Of course the markets and central bankers have helped them out a bit.  

So it will have come as a shock to Britain’s PM (for now) Liz Truss, that things could fall apart so quickly, and so very comprehensively. 

Lessons galore from Bernanke’s Nobel prize

Nobel prize committees are responsible for briefly focusing the world’s attention on some pretty recondite stuff.  Sometimes with comic results.  But occasionally, they get it just right.

As the years rack up since 2008 global financial crisis, Ben Bernanke’s economics prize – resting in part on his work on the financial collapse of the Great Depression – looks righter and righter.

It was certainly the world’s good fortune (that or G. W. Bush’s foresight) that put the leading contemporary scholar of the monetary and banking disasters of the 1930s in the chair of the US central bank at the right time.