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August 2015

And Ritchie’s wrong about QE of course

From the Bank of England:

Unlike helicopter money, QE is reversible by its very nature. A central bank can respond to improving economic conditions by selling the purchased securities in the open market. Even without active sales, the government securities will eventually mature and automatically destroy the associated reserves.

Well, this would be a nice little earner, that’s for sure

But there are simple solutions. First, we need to appoint a cabinet-level minister to be responsible for HMRC who would be answerable for it in both parliament and to other departments and agencies. Second, HMRC needs to be subject to more rigorous and independent review than has been provided by the National Audit Office. What we need instead is an Office for Tax Responsibility, well-funded and well-staffed, accountable to either the Treasury or Public Accounts Committee, or perhaps both. Third, any group seeking to make representation during tax consultations should be able to bid for funding to cover the reasonable costs of doing so. Only then will ordinary taxpayers, small businesses, pensioners, charities and others be truly represented in these processes.

Both Murph and I would spend our time doing nothing but that. For “funding to cover reasonable costs” would be rather above the market rate that either of us is able to covet under normal circumstances.

£750 a day, £1,000 a day, for a Senior Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute sound fair to you? 250 days a year?

That is what Murph means he should be allowed to get his snout into let me assure you.

The Woo is strong with this one

Robert Conquest worked for the Foreign Service!!! All his work is paid propaganda. His books distort history in order to pretend Socialism is horrible and Capitalism, oh so wonderful. Stalin did not kill 25 million people. This is pure propaganda. It was under 500,000. This is well-documented. From 1917 to 1922 18 countries and 16 legions invaded the Soviet Union. Winston Churchill was quoted with saying, “We need to strangle the baby in the crib.” That being said, the West paid at least tens of thousands of people to act as agents to destroy the Soviet Union. Of course, the Soviet Union had every right to kill these agents provocateurs. If you want to know more read Grover Furr’s Book on the subject. The famine in the Ukraine was fabricated by William Hearst. Read “Fraud, Famine, and Fascism” by Douglas Tottle. One of the reasons was to hide the 3 to 9 million people who died of starvation during the Dust Bowl in the US while our government was burning to keep wheat prices high. Robert Conquest is the man who equated Stalin to Hitler. Let’s get the facts straight: While the US was dallying in Western Europe, The Soviet Union lost 28 million lives so that we would not be saluting “Heil Hitler” today. It was the Nazis who created concentration camps, but it was the Soviets who liberated them. That’s right, the Soviets!! While the US was court-martialing pilots for the unauthorized use of dropping bombs on trains heading to the camps, the Soviets were freeing those prisoners. Finally, let’s discuss why we ever got the 40 hour work week, social security, free education, abolition of child labor, and women and minorities got the right to vote. It wasn’t because US capitalism woke up one day and said it was wrong to work people 12-16 hours a day, 7 days a week from the age of 6. It was because Workers in the US and Western Europe were looking at the Soviet Union, the first successful Workers Revolution and were saying to themselves, “Hey, if they can have it there, maybe we need a revolution, too if our masters won’t give us those same right.” The Ruling Elites got scared and decided to give concession which they are now taking back, calling it austerity. Interesting how there’s always money to subsidize Exxon Mobile & Monstanto, always money for war, but none for education, housing, etc..that benefit workers. Anyway, with the fall of the Soviet Union, you tell me how’s capitalism working for you? Because it’s not working for me nor for 1/2 the population of Americans who know live near or at the poverty level. At least under Stalin everyone was entitled to a job, housing, utilities, education to the university level, and medical. More than I can say for the American freedom to be hungry, homeless, and denied medical care for lack of funds.

Jeebus.

I do not justify the murder of 500,000 people, because a portion were innocent. However, many were paid spies and agent-provocateurs. Again, going back to history-the USSR was attacked by every capitalist government in the world. To defend itself it had no choice. How do you justify though the mass genocides committed by Capitalists governments for power; whether Turkey, the US, Belgium, or Great Britain? Isn’t this what Hitler was emulating; other capitalist governments? It was the bankers & Ruling elites of the US and Great Britain who put Hitler in power; fearing a socialist revolution there. Bankers did not put Stalin in power. The very opposite. Fascism, not socialism is an extension of Capitalism. When people no longer believe in fake bourgeois elections then the Ruling Elite have to use force. In fact, if when Hitler decided to put Jews & political prisoners in concentration camps, he cited the murder of 20 million Native Americans by the US government. When he was asked who was his mentor, he replied, Woodrow Wilson. He said it was Wilson who showed him the power of propaganda & force. Remember it was Wilson who jailed Eugene Debs for making an anti-war speech, Debs was sentenced to 25 years in for making an anti-war speech during WW1. Why Hitler cited the genocide of the Indians instead of the British murdering 84 million Indians in India I don’t know. In fact, Churchill was involved with the British man-made famine as he was with using poison gas in the USSR in 1917. Stalin was not happy to make a pact with Hitler. He had no choice. The USSR lost millions trying to defend itself from 16 legions and 18 countries from 1917-1922. The Soviet Union had to make a pact. As to diving Poland: The part partitioned to the USSR, the McCurran line used to belong to Russia until WW1. As to equating Hitler with Stalin: Perhaps Nazi Germany it should be Winston Churchill. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is far from being any reliable source. He wrote propaganda books for the US government. He was a Tzarist supporter and vicious anti-Semite. He admired Hitler for his Final Solution.

Hmm

Remember when you were a child and were taught Native Americans were savages. Then you grew up and realized that was an excuse for the US to commit genocide on Natives in order to strip them of their land and natural resources. I am here to put forward facts. I cannot change beliefs. I am aware that since you were a child you have been led to believe many lies either by the media controlled by the Ruling Elites or through the text-books you read as a child in school; again written by the Ruling Elite who publish textbooks. Of course, the Ruling Elites will say nothing good about socialism. Just like once upon a time they had nothing good to say about Natives, until we almost slaughtered them all or Jews. Ignaz Semmelweis was considered a lunatic, too for promoting hand-washing between doing autopsies and helping women give birth. The problem was not facts. The problem was beliefs. The doctors had developed strong beliefs from their miseducation.

Julie Bindel on prostitution, again

The right of men to buy sex appears to be paramount, according to Amnesty.

No love, that’s not it at all.

It’s the right of consenting adults to do as they wish with their fiddly bits which is paramount. Anal, blow jobs, troilism, straight old missionary two backed beast, these are all things which are entirely legal for any combination of consenting adults to do (except, weirdly, I think still, three or more men with no women present in the UK) in private and often enough in near public too.

That the consent is rented from one or more of the participants for cash money does not and should not change this legal position.

It’s not to my taste, and I’m under the definite impression that it’s not to Ms. Bindel’s. But this is rather the point of this freedom and liberty shtick, that what other consenting adults wish to consent to isn’t any of our damn business.

And there, really, is an end to the argument. Prostitution should remain legal on the very simple grounds that some people are entirely happy to do it. And it ain’t your or my business to stop them.

Trustees liabilities being paid off

The charity, which received £3m in a government rescue package a week ago, used part of its government grant to pay overdue staff wages, a move reportedly against the conditions of the funding.

I assume trustees have broadly the same responsibilities as directors? Can be sued for shennannigans? Like not having the funds to continue trading but continuing to trade?

Tristram Hunt goes Wibble, Wibble

For what’s the point of being a forward looking politician if people are just getting along and solving shit without you?

“Smartphones are psychologically addictive, encourage narcissistic tendencies and should come with a health warning.” That was the conclusion of a recent University of Derby study which highlighted the disturbing downside to our digital obsession.
But it could be even worse than that. Smartphone addiction could be damaging educational standards and exacerbating inequality. Advanced digital technology is now an everyday component of classroom and community, but we need to think much smarter about its long-term impact.
As shadow Education Secretary, I have a recurring conversation in the schools I visit. Primary head teachers explain to me the challenge they face in getting their pupils up to the relevant level of progress, given their various developmental delays. In particular, more children are presenting with serious difficulties when it comes to speech and language. In disadvantaged communities, children’s ability to talk, to play, to interact is often markedly behind. When I ask if the condition is getting worse, all heads say yes – and they blame the iPhone.

Yeah, right.

Pupils not being up to speed in English might have more to do with the number of children from families which do not speak English. Which has been rising rather, hasn’t it?

Robert Conquest has died

And sadly the Torygraph obit, while fulsome, misses the best story:

We now accept Stalin’s slaughter as obvious fact, but at the time the full scale of the horror wasn’t widely known. Conquest was a pioneering figure, then, in documenting the reality of Soviet rule. That is the source of the apocryphal story about him.

Here’s a common version of the story as recounted by the Guardian:

When his history of Stalin’s purges, The Great Terror, was republished after the fall of communism, his American publisher asked him to suggest a new title. He came up with “I told you so, you fucking fools”.

Sadly, though, it never happened. According to Conquest himself, his friend Kingsley Amis (the famous British writer) made it up.

Not quite that Amis made that story up, but that Amis quipped that that should have been the title. And he was right, too.

My word

Kids Company, a youth charity which received £3 million of government funding a week ago, has reportedly told the government that it will close its services on Wednesday evening.

So, get the grant to cover the financial holes that the trustees could be responsible for then close?

Or am I projecting here?

Completely off topic but when do we get to see the bankruptcy report into the Work Foundation?

Oh well done Ritchie!

He does have a habit of just throwing everything including the kitchen sink into his arguments, doesn’t he?

RBS is to begin its return to the private sector. Way back in October 2008 I suggested it should be fully nationalised instead. I stick to that view.

Well, OK, it’s an idiot view but, one of the justifications is:

What is more, if they had been done so many of the massive mis-selling and other abuse issues that still hang around the neck of RBS (and so the government) would not have happened.

PPI started in 1990 and ended in 2010. The interest rate swaps would actually have been just fine if it hadn’t been for the collapse of interest rates in 2008. All of the stories and compensation come from contracts entered into before that date.

So, quite how RBS being nationalised in 2008 would have meant that these things wouldn’t have happened I’m not sure.

Unless he’s just insinuating that a nationalised bank wouldn’t have to answer for these things, being able to tell customers to just fuck off?

Ritchie identifies a new corporate tax gap!

Quick, quick alert the media!

That should be celebrated as good news. It shows that tax
campaigning can work. Unfortunately, however, as one gap
recedes another one is emerging into view. And it is not one
that is just a consequence of sharp practice by clever corporates:
it is an intended consequence of government policy.
It means that I now think that the total UK large company
corporate tax gap has increased even higher than it ever was,
to £13bn a year. This is the consequence of the new ‘corporation
tax policy gap’, which might be as high as £8bn a year.
This new tax gap represents the gain that large companies
have made since 2008 as a result of the extensive changes
in UK tax policy that they have secured. As example, the
corporation tax rate for large (but not small) companies has
reduced from 30 per cent to 20 per cent over that period. In
addition, whilst UK multinational groups were once taxed,
at least in theory, on their worldwide income, they are now
only taxed in the UK on the income they have arising in this
country. This is in direct contrast, for example, to the vast
majority of individual UK citizens, who are still taxed on
everything they earn (unless, that is, they’re non-doms). This
policy change has increased the appeal of tax havens to UK
based multinational companies enormously. And numerous
other changes, such as more generous reliefs for R&D and
the tax treatment of offshore treasury functions have also
greatly helped big business.
The result is that in 2015 the UK corporation tax yield
(excluding North Sea revenues) will be £8bn less than forecast
in 2010. Part of this may be down to growth not meeting
expectations, but at least £4bn may be due to tax rate reduction,
as forthcoming report for the TUC will demonstrate.
Meanwhile, it is easy to allocate the rest of the shortfall to
specific reliefs and allowances given based on Office for
Budget Responsibility and Treasury forecasts at the time
that they were introduced.

Snigger.

Note that the tax gap started with, the law says these people should be paying and they ain’t.

Then it moved on to, well, if the politicians were capable of writing the law properly then these people should be paying this amount and they ain’t. That’s the spirit rather than the letter of the law stuff.

Now we move on to a third tax gap. Note that Ritchie really is saying that this gap is as a result of the express aims and desires of government in setting tax laws and rates. But that’s still a tax gap: because Ritchie thinks these people should be paying this amount, the politicians don’t so they’re not.

But it’s a tax gap because Ritchie.

We really do have an LHTD.

Oh, so that’s OK then

Malaysia’s Prime Minister has some $700 million in his banks accounts. The corruption investigation has found that it’s not money diverted from a state investment fund. It’s just donations from well wishers.

Malaysia’s anti-corruption agency has said that nearly $700 million deposited into the prime minister’s personal bank accounts were from “donations” and not related to a mounting scandal.

Well, that’s OK then, isn’t it?

After all, bribery is a much lesser crime than stealing.

14 years for rigging Libor?

Blimey:

Tom Hayes, a 35-year-old trader, has been sentenced to 14 years in prison after becoming the first person to be convicted by a British jury of rigging Libor rates following a trial at London’s Southwark Crown Court.
The jury unanimously found Hayes guilty of eight counts of conspiracy to defraud, after a week of deliberations at the end of a two-month trial.
The Serious Fraud Office argued that Hayes was at the centre of a network of traders at 10 firms that conspired to manipulate the Libor benchmark between 2006 and 2010. Since the scandal was uncovered, more than half a dozen banks have paid billions of pounds in fines and several have fired their chief executives.
During the hearings, Hayes claimed that he only admitted dishonesty during interviews with the Serious Fraud Office in 2012 to avoid extradition to the United States. He reversed his position and pleaded not guilty to eight counts of conspiracy to defraud in December 2013.
Mr Justice Cooke told London’s Southwark Crown Court that the sentence was intended to send a message to the rest of the banking world.

So everyone, you’ve got a banker jailed. Hope you’re all happy now?

But this does raise a very interesting little question. There were two sets of Libor rigging. Firstly, the minor stuff like this, shifting the rate to favour one book or another. And different people doing it too, to favour their own book: some of those attempts at least cancelling each other out. The wider world in general wasn’t very much defrauded by it all.

Then there was the systematic rigging of Libor at the depths of the crash. Recall, Libor is the rate at which a bank says it can borrow in size from other banks. But at that bottom there was no interbank market: no one could borrow in size from a bank. Libor was thus infinite. But it wasn’t reported sa being such: thus it was systematically fiddled.

Who is going to go to jail for that?

If justice were to be done there then there’d be more than a few collars being felt at the BoE and the Fed…..for everyone knew and everyone approved of said manipulation.

Now this really is a sexist plot

Women may have finally smashed through the glass ceiling to join men in the boardroom but when it comes to office temperatures they are yet to come in from the cold.
A new study has shown that air conditioning units are designed for the body temperature and metabolism of men and leave most women shivering .
Most climate control systems in modern offices are based on the resting metabolic rate of a 40-year-old man, which runs up to 30 per cent faster than a woman’s.
So while men are comfortable in the workplace, the majority of women would need conditions to be nearly four degrees warmer, leaving them forced to don jumpers and cardigans in the summer to keep warm.

If this is the sort of thing that’s determined to be a problem now then the world’s pretty much solved, eh?

But they let this one drop at the recent monthly meeting on how we do keep the women oppressed. It’s to make yer nips stick out in yer summer dress, see? Not that I’m supposed to tell you this of course, could get into all sorts of trouble for saying so

Someone at the door, wonder who that could be……

Remarkable, Corbyn’s even more deluded than the Murphmeister

Murph always insists that his £120 billion tax gap cannot be entirely closed. He thinks that a bit of it can be but obviously not all of it. Here’s Corbyn:

Detailed analysis conducted in 2014 by left-leaning economist and tax expert Richard Murphy indicates the government loses £120 billion in tax revenues annually. The £120 billion figure is made up of £20 billion in tax debt, £20 billion in tax avoidance and £80 billion in tax evasion.

Corbyn says this revenue could double the National Health Service’s (NHS) budget. He says Britons cannot expect a progressive tax system unless tax laws are robust and enforceable.

The NHS costs £120 billion a year. Jezza is assuming that all of that tax gap can be collected.

Man’s even madder than the Lord High Tax Denouncer.

The box of frogs called and want their reputation back.

Ritchie really doesn’t get this does he?

QE, bail out the banks, didn’t work. Peoples’s QE is fundamentally different, does indeed have the BoE print new money, identical to process banks use to create money to lend to businesses.

Proper version here.

Umm, QE did work, it wasn’t to bail out the banks, it was to prevent deflation and a Depression. It did that: that’s working.

And printing M0 is simply in no way at all the same as the method by which banks create M4 in the credit creation process.

Looks like Murph has forgotten what Milton Friedman taught us all about monetarism, eh?

And I would suggest that he takes a little less speed before talking on the radio really.

Still, at least he now admits that peoples’ QE would create inflation. Which printing more M0 and spending it into the economy will do. But he’s still missing the point. That QE is reversible when V returns to normal and peoples’ QE ain’t. So it will be a lot more inflationary than he is admitting.

Finally, was he described as “the” economic advisor to the Corbyn campaign? Or “an”? And how happy is Jezza with either?

Finally finally, how consistent is either with being charity grant funded? Isn’t that a little close to partisan party politics for that sort of funding?