It’s not really in the spirit of capitalism for a thing to get more expensive after you’ve bought it; though anyone with a student loan will know that it’s very much in the spirit of late capitalism. EasyJet has been able to offer its guarantee because it’s 70% hedged, though only until September. (In other words, it’s made financial deals to lock in a price for 70% of its fuel needs.)
It’s those speculators losing money now fuel prices have moved. Isn;t that lovely? That financial speculation that Spud declares achieves nothing does, in fact, transfer risk from us mere consumers out here to hte rich bastard speculators who are actively seeking risk to speculate upon. Society is made better thereby.
Does he not know that you do not buy a loan? A loan is what you use to buy something with.
And the price of the education someone bought with the loan didn’t go up – just the interest payment on the loan.
Prices changing to reflect different equilibriums of demand and supply or time-value of money is not “in the spirit of capitalism”?!?!?
So much retard in one sentence.
Just to remind you…
You should have warned me that article came with a massive photo of her face! Quite shocking on my large home office monitor.
Sorry. She’s certainly no oil painting. Could explain a lot.
More like an oil spillage.
“People adapt: they buy electric cars, they install solar panels, they take trains, they stay home. This is already happening, Southan says. “People are still travelling, but they are choosing places that feel easier, safer or more predictable. Short-haul and regional travel are benefiting, while more complex long-haul routes are under greater scrutiny.””
Trains? I’m sorry, have you ever compared London to Avignon? You could run the route on SAF for less than the rail fare.
“People adapt”
Translation: middle class prosperity is diminishing. Which is the goal of climate mania.
Unless I have dreamed inflation, everything gets more expensive after you’ve bought it.
Never mind that, the only consistent and coherent pieces the climate bellends at the Guardian should be carrying are ones headlined GOOD – FLIGHTS ARE GETTING CANCELLED.
In what way are student loans anything to do with capitalism? The government sets the price and the monopoly provider is controlled by the government.
If there was a market for capitalist student loan providers, the 17-year-olds applying for places would get a far better idea of how valuable a course is likely to be. Of course there isn’t because the university sector doesn’t want that information disseminated.
Hold on, doesn’t *everything* get more expensive after you’ve bought it? It’s called inflation, and it is an ever-present part of prices, certainly from my reading since Napoleon. After I bought a loaf of bread for 125p a year ago a few weeks later it got more expensive and cost 150p. After I bought my house for X,000, thirty years later it is more expensive, it would cost somebody 5X,000 to buy it.
Your loaf of bread probably wasn’t worth more a few weeks after you’d bought it.
More expensive but not necessarily more valuable. When I sold my parents’ house (in one of the less desirable parts of the country) after my mother died the inflation-adjusted return was almost exactly what they paid for it 50 years before.
Using the phrase “late capitalism” is a dead giveaway that the writer is a lefty moron.
True. They definitely wouldn’t have liked the early mill-owning, pit-owning capitalism.
“That financial speculation that Spud declares achieves nothing does, in fact, transfer risk from us mere consumers out here to hte rich bastard speculators who are actively seeking risk to speculate upon. Society is made better thereby.”
Hmm. My experience of buying and selling things forward is that when the deal suits the person offering it (because prices have moved in their favour) everything goes smoothly. The problem comes when things have moved against the person offering the deal. Then they are always looking for (and often finding) reasons not to keep their end of the bargain. I mean in the case of Easyjet, someone somewhere is eating the extra cost of the jet fuel that is currently being delivered to their airports. What happens if that entity goes bust? No more cheap fuel for Easyjet is the answer. Then your forward contract hasn’t really helped at all.
A little example closer to home – the tenant who grows cereals on my farm had bought a whole load of fertiliser forward, before the Gulf conflict kicked off. The supplier now says he can’t supply it because ‘its on a boat somewhere’. But I’ll bet a pound to a penny if you rang them up and asked to buy 500 tonnes of AN at the current inflated price they’d have lorries of it arriving next week. What is my tenant to do? Try suing a multinational conglomerate? Good luck with that, the only winners there would be an even bigger bunch of c*nts, ie lawyers.
So forward buying and selling is another one of those autistic economist ideas that ignores human nature (again). Sounds great on paper, tends not to work so well in practice, because no one likes losing a bundle, and will do everything they can to wriggle out of doing so.
I ordered a tank of heating oil, on what turned out to be the day before Trump started bombing Iran. Paid up front, price fixed, delivery in ten days’ time.
I was pleasantly astonished when it actually turned up.
You were lucky, plenty found their existing orders had been ‘misplaced’.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgrz790l8g2o