He’s plugging sustainable cost accounting again. Gissa Job etc. Where we get this:

And as it turns out, almost no one does seem to think Scope 3 is material. So we end up with the absurd situation where airports claim they are carbon-neutral because they ignore the emissions from the planes that fly from them and coal mines can make the same claim because they say someone else burns the coal that they mine, and they claim that’s got nothing to do with them when glaringly obviously that’s untrue.

Well, someone sells me a car. Which uses petrol. Scope 3 emissions then depend upon how much I use that car. How can the car manufacturer be made responsible for how much I drive?

Which is why Scope 3 emissions are not the responsibility of the people who don’t make the emissions. Well, that plus the fact that my supplier’s Scope 3 emissions are my Scope 1 or 2 therefore they’re already included in the system anyway….

Central bank independence is a policy goal of neoliberal economics that seeks to undermine democratic control of the economy and the accountability of the government for it, but it is not what happens in practice.

In the evidence given to support this it is said that:

What this makes clear is that the purpose of the move was political: it was to reassure markets that a new Labour government would be seeking to prudent with regard to government finances by passing control of interest rates to the Bank of England.

Quite, the point of central bank independence is to take control of interest rates and the money supply away from whatever nutter manages to get elected. Or at least to make it more difficult for whoever does to Zimbabwefie the economy. Which is why it was brought in by a Labour government. They being at most risk of the belief that they will, they therefore gaining the most from the perceived reduction of that risk.

A new report out that Spudda likes from some Scots blokes. Which says:

where economic activity is not
concentrated in a few geographical areas.

That’s a good thing, a wide distribution of economic activity.

very long ‘just-in-time’
supply chains,

That’s a bad thing, a wide distribution of economic activity.

They’re cretins in short. But then Snippa’s approval is going to push us toward that conclusion anyway….

And, as the Bank of England has now acknowledged, the chance that any of the debt that it has bought back from the financial markets will ever be resold back into those same financial markets is remote, in the extreme. None ever has been. In that case, for all practical purposes this debt has been cancelled. UK national debt should, then, be stated net of all quantitative easing because that debt does, in effect, no longer exist.

So, I had a look at the link where the BoE acknowledged this and guess what? I didn’t find it. Surely Snippa cannot be lying to us? Although:

If we were the central bank of the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe, the mechanical transactions on our
balance sheet would be similar to what is actually happening in the UK right now. That is not where you
would find the smoking gun. The difference would be that government would be telling the central bank what
to do, implicitly or explicitly, in order to achieve fiscal objectives while subordinating any inflation objectives, a
situation also known as fiscal dominance. Why would that ultimately lead to inflation? Because, once a
government decides to prioritise its fiscal objectives above its inflation objectives, it is likely to involve
removing central bank independence implicitly or explicitly, and crucially keeping short-term interest rates
lower than would be appropriate to meet the inflation target. The real ex-post financing cost of government
debt could be lower,27 because the debt reduction would be in part achieved via higher inflation. Weimar and
Zimbabwe had central banks that issued however much central bank money was required to achieve the
government’s financing needs, without any credible action to meet inflation objectives.

Yes, that’s right, they do say that explicitly moving to monetary financing of fiscal policy would lead to inflation.

Oh.

Second, this is economically appropriate. As is being widely noted, the savings ratio is rising rapidly as the coronavirus crisis develops. In other words, people are saving higher proportions of their income. That is a natural reaction to economic stress, but only exacerbates the problems that we face because there will be less available to be spent on consumption as a consequence. This, then, means that wealth should be taxed more to encourage the redistribution of income and wealth from those who are saving to those who will spend, and that necessarily means that the wealthy pay more tax so that those on low income, who have the lowest savings ratios, have more income available to them. This will speed economic recovery and alleviate poverty at the same time.

He’s advocating wealth taxation. And yet seems entirely unaware of – certainly hasn’t addressed – the standard economic conclusion from optimal tax theory that wealth shouldn’t be taxed at all.