advertisement


The Premiership of Mary Elizabeth Truss.Sept 2022 - Oct 2022

sideshowbob said:
Nope, your rush to defend this turns out to be an error:

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...alist-manhandled-out-of-tory-party-conference
Click to expand...
Thank you. Briefly about the article:

The photographer may well have won an award, but it isn't written which one. There are all sorts. Not that this is a crucial information, but not mentioning it looks amateurish. A journalist should just not write it if he hasn't got any accurate information.

My 'rush to defend it' is directed against the guy who filmed and put it on social media. I agree with publicising acts of violence, but at least I would have blurred the faces of the security personnel. They have rights like we do, at least as long as not the entire light has been made on the affair.

At the venue, trying another entry wasn't a very sharp move by the photographer. It's all logical that the security guys warn each other, they have earpieces for a reason.

Apart from that, it looks like the brutality wasn't necessary indeed, the party apparently had reasons to apologise. I hope light will be made, yet I maintain the bit about the missing blurring. At least the Guardian could have done it on its site, showing people unblurred is a very tabloidish habit.
 
Cheese said:
Thank you. Briefly about the article:

The photographer may well have won an award, but it isn't written which one. There are all sorts. Not that this is a crucial information, but not mentioning it looks amateurish. A journalist should just not write it if he hasn't got any accurate information.
<snip>
At the venue, trying another entry wasn't a very sharp move by the photographer. It's all logical that the security guys warn each other, they have earpieces for a reason.

Apart from that, it looks like the brutality wasn't necessary indeed, the party apparently had reasons to apologise. I hope light will be made, yet I maintain the bit about the missing blurring. At least the Guardian could have done it.
Click to expand...
Just adding my own observations to this: the award thing isn't crucial, as you say, but picking up on it seems odd. What the statement shows is that the person is a professional, recognised within his profession as working to high standards. What would be an irrelevance is describing what the award was for. You assume the journalist hasn't got accurate information, I assume he just made an editorial decision to cut unnecessary chaff.

As the photographer was accredited, with a press pass, when he's refused entry at one door, the most natural course is to assume the doorman has made a mistake, and rather than press the issue, just go to another door and assume the doorman there knows his job. Suggesting that trying a second door is an act of provocation feels a bit bizarre to me.
 
kensalriser said:
I think it's undeniable that certain asset values have grown hugely since circa 2000/2001, which marked the beginning of two decades of central bank intervention. Housing, art, wine, classic cars, watches, any top end collectible. This shouldn't be surprising as the QE essentially flowed straight to wealthy people who used it to buy things that wealthy people buy. So there was plenty of inflation, it just didn't manifest as CPI inflation.
Click to expand...

But this is, at best, an argument that a better mechanism for QE (helicopter money, investment, government spending, whatever.) rather than saying anything useful about asset prices or inflation and certainly not ZIRP.

Also the point of the QE is obviously not to cause inflation but to cause growth in demand. Inflation is only interesting here as evidence that the QE is working and can be tapered off.

I just find this "ZOMG asset prices!" as spectacularly missing the point of the problem here which was that interest rates were at zero and the government had ruled out fiscal policy and the economy remained stuck in a slump / borderline recession.
 
I was thinking about saying something on the tyres thread about winder tyres never being necessary in Sussex.

Therefore, having now thought it, we're in for a repeat of 1963. You heard it here first!
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
the award thing isn't crucial, as you say, but picking up on it seems odd.
Click to expand...
Not untrue, shooting at the Guardian is my guilty pleasure and not relevant in any way. But I can't imagine this "has won some sort of award I think" sentence in my (very good) local paper, such a non-proven information makes me think of a guy bragging at the pub. My remark was irrelevant indeed, but that the guy has won an award is just as irrelevant in this context, the journo just wanted to add some weight to his article. If you want to do that, do it properly.

Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
As the photographer was accredited, with a press pass, when he's refused entry at one door, the most natural course is to assume the doorman has made a mistake, and rather than press the issue, just go to another door and assume the doorman there knows his job. Suggesting that trying a second door is an act of provocation feels a bit bizarre to me.
Click to expand...
It certainly wasn't a provocation, the photographer just tried. This certainly wasn't a reason for resorting to brutality.

About press passes: the universal press passes which were widely used until the nineties are totally worthless today, they won't get you in anywhere, not even your local cattleshow. Some newspapers issue their own press passes, a Times pass will certainly open you some doors, but forget about the Parliament or any other small venue with a minimum of security required. Nowadays you need accreditations for pretty much everything. BTW a press pass is not an accreditation, this term means a signed and countersigned letter of recommendation issued by, say, the media office of the Houses of Parliament (or whatever this may be called) for Question Time, the Church of England for Elizabeth's Funeral, etc. etc. Could the photographer present such a letter ? This isn't stated anywhere.

In any case, even if he didn't have an accreditation, there was no reason for using force. So either the photgrapher has forgotten to tell us something, or the security team. If I got it right, an official statement has not been issued from the latter yet.
 
laughingboy said:
Here's a left-wing think tank's paper on low interest rates and productivity: 'Our most important finding was that extraordinary monetary policy has very little direct effect on firm-level investment strategies'.

But I sense that Ponty is talking about the financial sector and its highly-remunerated workers, which is not what this study looks at (it looks at food & drink and construction companies).
Click to expand...
Thanks, that’s interesting, although it seems to be aimed at testing claims that low interest rates impact positively on productivity, rather than negatively - design might be different were it the other way around. From the summary, the results actually suggest one mechanism by which low interest rates might have a negative effect: shareholders expect cheap borrowing to fund “expanded” rather than “enhanced” production. Shareholder pressure on firms to focus on using cheap debt for speculative purposes would be another, Ponty’s point about the deflationary effect on wages another (why invest in enhanced production when labour is so cheap?) and the blunting of competition another still (dud firms sustaining themselves on credit). These are just things that occur to me, very much a non-economist, I’m sure there are arguments as to why they’re not that significant.
 
Seanm said:
This is good on why, when it comes to Bank of England orthodoxy and Truss’s reckless shenanigans, they’re *both* worse. “Uncoordinated class war” is exactly what it is.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/06/economic-chaos-class-war-british-liz-truss
Click to expand...

1. Why did the BoE seek to increase mortgage rates in August 2022?

2. I’m less confident that a burst housing bubble will be easy to deal with, precisely because the older housing stock is prohibitively expensive to make energy efficient and corporate investors will shy off for that reason. Of course there may be green subsidies for landlords (but can they afford it?), and the energy requirements may be watered down (by this government - but what about future governments?)


Apart from that, I agree with you, Sean - an excellent clear bit of journalism.
 
mandryka said:
1. Why did the BoE seek to increase mortgage rates in August 2022?

2. I’m less confident that a burst housing bubble will be easy to deal with, precisely because the older housing stock is prohibitively expensive to make energy efficient and corporate investors will shy off for that reason. Of course there may be green subsidies for landlords (but can they afford it?), and the energy requirements may be watered down (by this government - but what about future governments?)


Apart from that, I agree with you, Sean - an excellent clear bit of journalism.
Click to expand...
Time for the state to step in then - and I don't mean by subsidising landlords.
 
droodzilla said:
Time for the state to step in then - and I don't mean by subsidising landlords.
Click to expand...


I expect the state to water down the energy requirements which are being proposed, maybe by putting a ceiling on the cost of making the home meet the requirement. It's a big problem -- a huge stock of old housing which is very inefficient, and which is very hard to make efficient. The obvious thing to do is "nuance" the definition of efficiency, and to take a reality check on what can be achieved.

It has, by the way, been proposed to make energy inefficient houses harder to mortgage (not BTL mortgages, just any mortgage) by requiring that the mortgage companies hit % targets of efficient properties in their portfolio. It has even been proposed to make it illegal to sell energy inefficient homes.

For the moment, everything is in the air.
 
matthewr said:
But this is, at best, an argument that a better mechanism for QE (helicopter money, investment, government spending, whatever.) rather than saying anything useful about asset prices or inflation and certainly not ZIRP.

Also the point of the QE is obviously not to cause inflation but to cause growth in demand. Inflation is only interesting here as evidence that the QE is working and can be tapered off.

I just find this "ZOMG asset prices!" as spectacularly missing the point of the problem here which was that interest rates were at zero and the government had ruled out fiscal policy and the economy remained stuck in a slump / borderline recession.
Click to expand...

It was more of an observation than an argument. I'm not remotely knowledgeable enough to say what caused what, but it's always good to identify the data as a starting point. It seems clear that there was inflation but only in certain asset classes that had little or no effect on growing the wider economy, and it seems equally clear that zero/low interest rates had little or no effect on sluggish growth. QE and low interest rates have proved to be very blunt tools.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.


advertisement


Back
Top