According to the FT US Fed governor Lael Brainard gave a public speech yesterday that laid out why that organisation want to unwind US quantitative easing.
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I think some wires are crossed here. Yesterday the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility issued a report saying (if I might, I think fairly summarise) that the UK’s fiscal risk was high, the chance of a recession significant, and the expectation that there will be a need for considerable additional public borrowing very high indeed. Not one of these facts suggests that the UK is even remotely close to considering this issue. I’ll be candid; I doubt it will be in my lifetime, and I’m planning on living a long time yet.
From Thursday’s Times:
The Bank of England should consider unwinding its £435 billion quantitative easing programme earlier than planned, one of its eight policymakers has suggested.
Ian McCafferty, one of three rate-setters who voted for an increase last month, said that the Bank ought to review its policy of leaving QE unchanged until interest rates are close to 2 per cent.
Well done to the Dicktater there.
Tim – I think you may be mistaken in the positioning of the auto-proctologist’s finger which is in fact to be sought (or more likely not) enveloped well to the south.
Private Eye is putting the boot into Corbyn.
https://i.imgur.com/9KnaigN.jpg
Speaking of the FT, I’m back in the UK for the first time in 6 months and leafing through the FT magazine I notice that columnists Simon Kuper* and Robert Shrimsley** are STILL moaning about Brexit. It’s a grand old gig when your employer pays you to do exactly the same thing each week…
The FT is also still shoehorning Brexit warnings into every single article of course.
And the arts section contains an article which makes a series of apologies for Max and Engels – “For all the mass murders committed in their name….”
Meanwhile the leading personal finance article, agonises about whether paying ones cleaner in cash leaves one partially liable for tax dodging. Apparently, cash in hand work costs the Treasury some £6bn a year…
Good to know that Britain’s biggest business newspaper is such a staunch defender of freedom and markets…
* an arsehole
** another arsehole, whose father was a rather more distinguished journalist
Not only the FT, MC. But columnists in The Times, everyone at the Grawn, and so on and on. The remainiacs will never give up. They are traumatised by brexit. They’ll be gibbering about it when they are old and senile – even when the euro has collapsed and Schengen has been abandoned. For the next 50 years, every negative episode in the UK economy will be blamed on the ‘root cause’ of brexit, and every positive episode will be redefined as negative – or would have been even more positive if only we were still in the EU.
Add the Economist to that list of newspapers that’s got Brexit Derangement Syndrome. The Britain section is getting painful to read.
@MC
Yes the paying cash = aiding tax evasion is an odd argument.
I pay cash when I buy a can of coke in Tesco. Should I ask them to prove they have declared it?
@ AndrewC
Not if you believe that (i) people earning less than half the median income should be paying income tax on the excess of income over that they need to live on – never let it be mentioned that we (yes, we, out of our taxes, not the Curajus State) are paying them “Tax Credits” because they do *not* have enough to live on (according to Joseph Rowntree or the Resolution Foundation) and (ii) everyone who takes cash is doing so to evade tax..
Last time I paid a workman cash it was to avoid bank charges (his, not mine) rather than tax (the next time I paid him it I dropped a cheque in his front door because he’d got his bank charges sorted).
Last week I was told “I got a tax refund of £100+ because the agency shouldn’t have deducted tax since my income was only £5k for the year” – he’d been out of pocket of more than a week’s wages for months because the agency was scared stiff of HMRC.
If Ms Barrett is that worried about her cleaner’s tax, maybe she could do her own housework and take off a couple of stone?