A war and maybe an unprecedented depression: it’s Trump’s mania, but now all of us will pay the price
Polly Toynbee
But oil at $100? Doesn’t seem like something likely to trigger a depression to be honest. Oil’s been higher before and we didn’t have one.
Plus, the price of oil is less important to hte general economy than it used to be.
I don’t know, but is Polly Toynbee being depressed unprecedented?
It generally happens whenever there’s an R in the White House.
But is there an R in the White House? It seems more like an independent who didn’t want to suffer the same costly fate as Ross Perot. He could have possibly run the race as a D though this would gave ment fighting the Clintons sooner rather than later.
Minister on Radio4 this morning saying that they were elected on a manifesto commitment not to offer new oil and gas licences. If that really is what the public want, and I suspect more low incomes voted Labour than high, then they should get their wishes good and hard.
No price support then whether for vulnerable households or not. But you know they’ll do it anyway.
It’s amazing how binding the manifesto can be, when they want.
And it’s the bits hidden in 4-point font at the bottom of page 27 that are non-negotiable while the stuff in big on page 1 is subject to “oh dear, we found an invoice for some paperclips left by the previous administration, can’t do that any more.”
Gordon Tells Court His “Manifesto Pledges are Not Subject to Legitimate Expectation”
Gordon Brown 2008 court case brought by UKIP member.
In coverage of the election, NO ONE ever mentioned Labour’s Manifesto. All said the people voted out the Tory shits.
But ministers are free to pretend.
Not just the Guardian, as Steve noted yesterday, the doom-laden hysteria is the same all over the MSM.
In the Hate Mail today:
Brummer is probably not far wrong though.
In previous recessions and depressions we were a largely monocultural high trust society which had (I hate the term) ‘shared values’ learned or at least taught in school and church and in the media.
People who lived through WWII could cope with not going to Magaluf and buying a second hand sofa.
People who’ve known only bread, circuses, free money and a left wing education and culture, and are from every corner of the earth, are going to struggle a lot more.
Gamecock’s first wife, The Good One, was a bank branch manager. She was in the business of handling money. She had zero special knowledge of economics. Finance was making car/home/business loans. When someone mentions ‘bankers’ as authorities on finance and economics, I smile.
It’s Polly, Tim. The definitive deluded midwit, trapped within her narrative, because should she ever step outside it her entire identity would dissolve.
Apparently Iran has mined the Strait. But also, apparently, “friendly” ships can still pass though. So either the mines are under positive remote control, or there remains an un-mined channel. Given that it’s reported the mines are magnetic or limpet, there must still be a channel open, but clearly we’re being encouraged not to reach that conclusion.
You know what this reminds me of? Face masks. Social distancing. Y’know, you have to stay 2 metres apart outside, in a breeze.
Cunts.
Mines (whether on sea or land) are, by themselves, just a nuisance. Somebody discovers one the hard way, everything stops for a while until at least a safe lane is cleared and marked, life then continues as everyone knows “don’t step past the red markers”.
They’re much more effective when “covered by observation and fire” – when efforts to find and mark a route through, are getting shot at; or even when the clear lane is known, using it puts you in the crosshairs of the enemy’s weapons.
The reason Hormuz is such a nasty place to try to force opposed passage through, is that it’s got a 270° threat axis just from Iranian territory (where they have a lot of mobile, inconspicuous, long-ranged anti-ship missiles – until they pull the covers back and elevate the launcher, they’re just A. N. Other box-body truck) while shipping is, even without mines, in the confined Vessel Transit Scheme; and with mines picking its way through a narrow Q Route.
If Iran say “this ship can go through” then the missile TELARs ashore stay out of sight and the tanker gets a pilot aboard to guide them. If you try to follow that route uninvited… you may find yourself sharing your quarters with a half-ton high-explosive warhead. (Countermeasures against antiship missiles are significantly degraded if you’re slow and stuck in a narrow lane)
Just to show how difficult these coastal-launched missiles are to find and kill… back in 2006, during Israel’s fighting in southern Lebanon (leading the UK to launch Operation HIGHBROW, lifting about 2,000 people out of Beirut) the Iranians were able to move one of their antiship missile systems into the Beirut area, set it up, fire several missiles (damaging the Israeli corvette Hanit and sinking an unfortunate Egyptian freighter) and escape undetected and unscathed – all under the intense Israeli search-and-destroy of Operation CAST LEAD.
I should think it more difficult today. Infrared sensors should enable seeing camouflaged sites.
It’s not a case of “camouflaged sites” (significant ones of which have likely been smoking craters for a week or three already), it’s the issue of there being tens of thousands of Mercedes lorries driving Iran’s roads… of which a hundred or so are actually mobile missile launchers.
You’ve got a minute or two at most between “vehicle stops, deploys jacks, pulls back cover, elevates launchers” and “missiles away, vehicle goes back to being a random truck”.
The Iranians have been sponsoring Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis et al for decades and have gained plenty of experience of how to hide their weapon systems, and still being able to use them without losing too many.
If there was an easy way to defeat them… someone would have done it already.
Thx for explanation.
So Iran has said they won’t attack shipments of oil to friendly countries – China, Bangladesh, South Africa types presumably. But how do they tell – if a vessel headed to Port of London carries a Pally flag just for the lols, or Vietnamese to be neutral, their spotter drone if they still have any wouldn’t know whether it’s one of ours. So how does Iran know what to attack?
At a guess… if you pay for the oil up front, and add the appropriate “pilotage fee”, the Iranians put a team of IRGCN aboard to guide you through the Q Route (and reassure that they won’t shoot at the ship with their own people aboard).
If you try to run the Strait without their say-so, you either discover a mine or you win a few Noor missiles.
They don’t care where the oil goes once you’re out in the Indian Ocean… as long as they got paid for it.
Thinking of the red markers, I remember my first holiday in the western Balkans, rather remote part of Croatia, walking around in the back of beyond and wondering “why are these rocks painted red?”. I am still here and still have all limbs attached.
Oil was $114 four years ago under Biden. No tears from commie press.
I wish the Septics and the Yids every success in whatever their endeavour truthfully turns out to be (difficult to say, because the messaging has been very poor). I’d be quite happy with bashing the moolahs every few months, just based on first principles.
However, I feel sure that I recall OMB telling us some days ago that he’d already won and that the moolahs’ armed forces were effectively neutered.
So I find myself wondering how the moolahs are able to close the Hormuz strait. And, whilst I marvelled at the Septic operation which felled Fordow last summer, and other similar precision kills (Israeli ditto), I fear this present escapade might turn into yet another Yankee shitshow firestorm with nothing to show for it, but, or and, somehow five million dusky Levantines show up on my doorstep.
The problem is people not understanding (and Trump isn’t alone in this) that blowing up some big stuff doesn’t mean it’s over. You destroy big military stuff, but now what you face is small military stuff. The French resistance blowing up a bar that your soldiers hang out in, the Taliban making IEDs from weedkiller explosives. And it’s a bugger to find them because it’s handfuls of blokes operating semi-autonomously.
Desert Storm was a success because the goal was getting the Iraqis out of Kuwait. The locals all wanted them out too. Same with the Falklands.
There is that, although Netanyahu has been clear: 1. Destroy nuclear capability; 2. destroy ballistic missile capability (each needs the other); 3. bring about the conditions for regime change or you’ll have to keep doing 1. and 2 ad infinitum, which gets tiresome and expensive.
The question is whether this has all been left too late. The mullahs may be away with the fairies but they intend to succeed, and so have put highly intelligent and shrewd measures in place to make it exceedingly difficult to stop them.
And, of course, they continued to develop these measures while pretending to negotiate for all those years. Of course they did. Taqqiya.
difficult to say, because the messaging has been very poor
The messaging has been perfect tho
I don’t understand why people don’t understand, in the Year of Our Lord 2026, Trump’s MO. He wrote a book about it and everything.
This is the Art of the War.
The rhetorical bombardment is just as much a weapon as the physical destruction of the terror regime – Trump is sowing maximum fear, paranoia and strategic confusion in the minds of the surviving regime officials. They don’t know whether to expect a royalist uprising, the total obliteration of their infrastructure, or if a faction of their colleagues are about to cut a deal with the Satans.
They do know that Israel is hunting down individual regime checkpoints and nonce judges every day. This is what maximum pressure, short of a physical invasion or surprise fission party, looks like.
If Iran was a boxer, he’s getting killed in the ring. Desperately trying to ward off a flurry of blows from all angles. Tzun Trump has the strength of a raging fire, all the force of a great typhoon, and is mysterious as the dark side of the Moon.
Incidentally, this war has united the Arab states on the same side as Israel and the USA (!). Yuge! Yet lackwits insist Iran is winning, somehow. Wishcasting and dreams.
Many of the Arab states were already on the same side as Israel and the USA. Egypt recognised the state of Israel in the 1970s, Turkey in the 1950s, Jordan in the 1990s, UAE, Morocco, Sudan and Bahrain in the past decade as part of the Abraham Accords. Saudi Arabia haven’t signed but there is close co-operation between them.
This whole Arab-Israel thing is old and busted. After the Iranian Revolution in 1979 the new hotness was Saudi vs Iran, Sunni vs Shia. Iran shooting at Qatar and UAE changes nothing. They’re Sunnis like Saudi Arabia. They have US airforce bases because they’re part of the broad alliance of Saudi/Sunnis and USA. And there’s scraps in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq between forces funded by Saudi and Iran where there’s a mix of the two. Where do you think the Syrians that booted out Assad got their weapons from? It was Saudi Arabia.
Trump played a brilliant trump card the other day by saying that he was in negotiations with the IRGC. This had the depleted IRGC leadership running around accusing each other of negotiating, and denying it was them. Class.
.
Steve, that is heartening and amusing and I hope your optimism is well-founded.
But the fact remains that the Straits are still the moolahs’ bitch, the moolahs, or their IRGC proxies are still in place, they’re still lobbing ordnance wherever they want to long after we’ve been told they were crushed, and the Yanks (less so the Yids) have a tendency to fuck this kind of thing up.
As someone here said a while back, Trump also has a tendency to throw a lawn dart then rush over to paint a bullseye wherever it lands.
He’s already told us that the Yanks have won. Ok, good. So what are they still doing there?
OTOH, what does a moolah victory look like? Well, if they remain in place then, given the poor messaging – obviously we disagree about that – then who is to say that that is not victory?
The Septics are great at Shucks and Aw. Not so good at anything after the first couple of weeks.
As I say, I hope I am wrong. Time, and historians, will tell …
The spider is still alive, but it’s crippled and the poison sacs are emptying – daily launches rapidly trending towards nothing.
OTOH, what does a moolah victory look like? Well, if they remain in place then, given the poor messaging – obviously we disagree about that – then who is to say that that is not victory?
People can say whatever they want. If “survival” is the regime’s victory condition, meh. Everyone would love to see the back of the mullahs, but failing that, a significantly diminished regime that can no longer sustain uranium enrichment or Hezbollah, and that has united the Arabs against them, is better than where we would be if Trump and Bibi hadn’t struck. Sanctions, no fly zones, and airstrikes can go on forever. The Ayatollah’s empire of dirt would take a generation or more to recover their losses from the past few weeks.
That’s another reason for Trump Tzu – unless you’re actually going to invade a large country of 90 million people, it’s impossible to guarantee the removal of the regime. They’re giving the tree a good hard shake and seeing what falls out. There’s good reason to be optimistic though.
But look at the numbers… this is what Western media believes Iranian victory looks like
Numbers down, but no zero.
Sure, but it’s been less than a month against a regime that’s been digging in for nearly 50 years and look at that curve. That’s a death slope of Iranian military capabilities.
Iran is a much bigger and better armed country than Yugoslavia was in 1999, but they’re doing worse than the Serbs. Serbia managed to at least down a plane, and didn’t convince all of their neighbours to join the war against them.
Reasons to be cheerful.
The price we’re all going to pay is actually that of the civil war which will inevitably eventually by engendered by the decision – supported wholeheartedly and even enthusiastically by this stupid old fraudster – to allow hundreds of unidentified men, who will certainly include some members of the IRGC (and ISIS etc), never mind the rapists and drug dealers, to land on our shores every week.
I’m not so sure. Businesses in the UK today are close to the edge. It won’t take much to push them over. And once the dominoes start falling who knows where it could end? All the constant attacks on businesses over the last few years have as we know already caused many businesses to close, or reduce staff, and the ability to withstand an energy price shock is getting smaller and smaller. And its not even possible to argue that some sectors are doing well and can take up the slack, because all these shocks are universal ones. It doesn’t matter what your business does, it needs people and energy. And many have debts to service too. Everyone is getting slammed. Remember we haven’t had a proper recession for 15+ years (Covid doesn’t count, thanks to all the printed money forced into the economy). If we get one now so many businesses are teetering that once some start to go it could get ugly fast.
And again, as I constantly bang on about, economists forget the human element. Businesses are people. And the people who own and run businesses are getting tired of doing it. Its become a constant banging of the head against an increasingly hard wall. If you make any profits the tax man takes most of them anyway. I was talking to a chap I know yesterday, he runs a haulage and agricultural contracting company. His fuel bill has gone up by £20k a week. He’s being taken to an employment tribunal by a former employee who feels hard done by because he was paid less than other employees (who did different jobs). How much do you think its going to take for him to say ‘F*ck it, I’ve had enough of this sh*t’ and close the business down, sell his yard for housing development and retire to somewhere with more sun and lower taxes than the UK? My feeling is an awful lot of small businesses in the UK are one more hammer blow away from either going under or just shutting up shop and using the accumulated capital of the business to retire.
There just doesn’t seem to be much resilience left in the UK economy, either monetarily, or psychologically.
And again, as I constantly bang on about, economists forget the human element. Businesses are people. And the people who own and run businesses are getting tired of doing it. Its become a constant banging of the head against an increasingly hard wall.
It’s not just small businesses. I had a roofer round yesterday to look at a simple job. I’ve used him before, he’s a good guy in his 50s who just wants to earn a living and get on with his life. Yesterday he was moaning like mad, which he didn’t do a couple of years ago because he’s been forced to be VAT registered and now he has to do his tax return every 3 months and he’s ready pissed off at how much it’s costing him.
On the plus side he’s taken a leaf out of Spuds book and gone in to partnership with his wife. She’s a lovely woman but believe me, she isn’t going up any ladders.
He’ll be even less happy when he has to start filing quarterly tax returns under MTD.
Edit: I see that was already on the radar. Though as far as I’m aware partnership income isn’t included in MTD so far, its just sole traders and property income (at the moment, which will change undoubtedly).
MTD for IT has to be one of the most pointless additional burdens. Quarterly digital returns. Not ‘mini-tax returns’ as no tax adjustments made. Merely reports of income and expenditure. So software package required. Quarterly filed returns and with the best will in the world we’re not going to be able to charge less than £100 +VAT per filed return for our clients. And a ‘year end report’ still needed – which is basically a tax return to include other sources of income and where tax adjustments and calculations will be done so we’ll be charging the same as for the ‘old’ tax return. So an extra £480 (inc VAT) cost for our clients p.a.
And the plan is that within 3 years people with TURNOVER (not profit) exceeding £20k a year will have to do this.
Cannot think of a single benefit to anyone for this. We don’t want the work. While we’re doing this shit pointless compliance we can’t be doing anything constructive.
Yeah, partnership income excluded for now from MTD for IT.
Being imposed by twats who have obviously never run a business.
“Partnerships” include most law and many accountancy firms. Funny that.
I’ve been doing “MTD” since I first registered for VAT 30 years ago. In Excel. Download the bank statement as a CSV, use a formula to calculate the VAT and strip it out. Manually sort out those items which included VAT and those which didn’t. Total. No looking at invoices or receipts.
Then I used to fill in their silly fucking paper forms including the to/from EU stupidity. Now I generate a little CSV and use Portico free bridging to submit it. Takes me 15 minutes.
I’d rather not have to do this shit and am deeply sympathetic to those who now do, but if the number of your line items is not vast, this works.
Of course, it’s inaccurate, but I’ve both over- and under-paid, so I couldn’t care less. I’ve found, though experience and that of others, that if you get an inspection they won’t stop until they find something, no matter how trivial. So I give the cunts something to find, say “terribly sorry”, and they can fuck off.
Will Portico just take a CSV that I can prepare myself and submit it? That would be ideal for me. I’ve been trying to find what the data upload format and process is. I already keep all my accounts in an annual spreadsheet that calculates the information I need to submit. Every July all I do it copy about ten numbers from the last row of my spreadsheet and paste them into the HMRC website. Takes me less time that it takes for the kettle to boil.
My turnover is less than £20K, and it’s been impossible to find out what’s supposed to happen to people like me. Just leave me TF alone and let me enter my numbers into the webpage would be best.
“MTD for IT has to be one of the most pointless additional burdens.”
I figure there’s got to be a reason, and my spidey senses tell me that it’ll be something to do with getting hold of self employed and investment income faster than they do now. As it stands if you’re on SA you pay your tax up to 22 months after you received the income/made the profit. So you get to use to for a considerable time, make money on it even. The Tax Mafia don’t like this. They want their protection money quicker. So my guess is MTD is to set up the infrastructure for quarterly reporting, and then at some point the hammer will come down and you’ll be expected to pay tax quarterly as well. They assume that everyone who is a sole trader is the sort of tradesman whose income and expenses are fairly evenly distributed so demanding tax ‘as you go’ won’t affect them that much. And if they’ve even considered that there are people who run sole trader businesses that have considerable fluctuations in income and expenditure (and which span several tax years) then they’ll be happy to drive those into incorporating to avoid the problem. Its a win/win. Get the investment/property income and tradesman type self employed labour income taxes after a maximum of 3 months, plus drive all the difficult cases like farmers and builders into incorporating where they are easier to keep an eye on.
My guess is its a calculated assault on the self employed who those in government see as almost universally tax evaders (and Reform voters, so another reason to screw them into the ground).
Jim, that’s no doubt part of it, but they’ve already got the ‘payments on account’ system to get tax up-front. Yes, that’s based on estimates, and they can expect to collect more tax if they use more up to date figures (or could in normal times, when people’s income generally went up…), but I’d be surprised if it was huge amounts.
My feeling was that it was actually more about tax credits (or whatever they are these days) so they can make you report a ‘change in circumstances’ more often and so reduce your handouts.
Even the payments on account are still a long way behind. the January one is close to the end of the tax year in question, and the July one 4 months after it ends. That still means you get to hold on to your income for far longer than the State would like. I don’t think its about necessarily raising huge amounts more in tax straight away (after all if the self employed moved to pay tax quarterly there would be an initial jump in tax as people caught up , but then it would settle to roughly the same amount, all things being equal). I think its about trying to catch up with the fly by night merchants.
There’s loads of people who own property and fly under the radar because they are on PAYE otherwise, plus getting all those tradesmen to have to make constant returns makes fiddling the figures harder. More returns = more data for some big computer to crunch and look for anomalies.
To be frank I suspect that a lot of the diversity are putting themselves down as self employed and declaring a fraction of their income, if any. One the carers who looked after my late father is still in touch with my mother. This woman has been working as a live in carer, earning good money (£800-900/week), all as nominally self employed. Her accountant (another bit of diversity) never filed her tax returns and eventually HMRC caught up with her and she ended up with a £20k tax bill for back tax and interest. She has no money (as she’d been sending it all back to South Africa) and HMRC started taking money direct from her account, but she’ll never pay it all back. There’s too many people in the country like her now who have no knowledge or experience of what ‘self employment’ means, nor any qualms about barefaced lying to HMRC. So we are all going to suffer as HMRC try to get a handle on such shenanigans.
I’d be surprised if HMRC are deliberately going after the diversity. I rather think they’re obsessed with the Long Tail. They think their whizzy new AI computer will make it economic for them to go after the really small-timers for tiny sums of money, because their graph tells them there are billions to be had that way if they can manage it.
And the self-employed are fascist gammon filth anyway, who would never ever be worthy of a Civil Service job, so that’s another win.
That they’ll introduce loads of friction, reduced economic activity, and other costs elsewhere in the system by doing this, and the government will in total be worse off, isn’t their problem.
I suspect one of the main, if unspoken, motivations for all this is that extra complication leads to extra fuckups leads to extra fines. I also suspect the VAT threshold will be reduced significantly at some point. too.
On the subject of fines, HMRC keeps trying to fine the freehold company for my property (four of us own share of freehold) for not filing tax returns, even though it is not obliged to do so.
Exactly.
Do I detect a business opportunity for reinforced ladders with added stabilisers?
And of course its almost certainly true that the private sector of the economy is in recession right now, and has been for some time. GDP is hardly growing, and the State is spending £££ like the proverbial, which of course all shows up as a positive in the figures. So the private sector must be contracting to make the sums add up.
Does anyone ever work out a private sector GDP calculation that strips out govt spending?
Well, GDP = Consumption + Investment + Government Spending + Net Exports, so even if some of those are fuzzy, Government Spending is a known figure and GDP is a known figure, so you can get the aggregate unknown from the two knowns.
2024/5 UK GDP was reported as £3.04 trillion.
2024/5 UK Government speding was £1.37 trillion.
So, non-government GDP was £1.67 trillion.
Total GDP is forecast to increase by 0.1%. With known government spending increases you will be able to calculate non-government GDP increase(decrease).
I’ve been feeling that, but I’ve done the calculations and unfortunately, after the government takes most of my released capital off me there will only be enough left over to keep me alive for about five years. If I keep the business going it keeps me alive forever.
Good luck with that.
The British economy is like Wile E Coyote when he’s just run off a cliff. He keeps going for a bit. We’re at that stage.
We’re just waiting for the bit where he looks down, then falls.
(at which point, Rachel Thieves blames Trump and Brexit).
From personal experience, I’d put the actual private sector recession to about September last year. It was when all those briefings emerged about the November budget. At that point, everyone started to get very fearful, and nothing has happened since to change their minds.
Of course, there’s a deal of ruin, spanning decades, which underpins all of that. The crooked timber, so to speak.
Bring it on, and about time too.
Occasionally people get shot and walk around for a bit until they die. The British economy is like a bloke who was shot 30 seconds ago.
How bad do things have to get before they go back to blaming Fatcher?
I suspect we’re going to find out.
No doubt they’ll blame everyone they can think of.