Tim Worstall - It is all obvious or trivial except...

Erm yes….

“It’s very frustrating that the posh areas get cleared and we’re just left, very frustrating but we expect it,” said Peter Thomas, outside his home in Ladywood, against a backdrop of overflowing bins.

Across neighbouring postcodes in Birmingham, the gap between wealthy and deprived parts of the city has been noticeable for residents ever since the bin strikes began last month.

In the innercity district of Ladywood, local people felt frustrated at the lack of action taken over uncollected bins.

Thomas’s neighbour, Gloria Charles, 70, who has lived in her home for over 30 years, felt the uncollected rubbish was a source of embarrassment. The area had missed out on the clear-up operations.

Well, this is disgusting, isn’t it? So what abomination of the political process is this?

while wealthy households pay for removal

How dare the little platoons just get on with things without waiting for the State to perform?

Scabs, eh?

Hmm

April 18, 2025
Tim Worstall
Finance

Two little-known Wall Street companies experienced an “unusual” stock price surge before an announcement naming Donald Trump’s sons to the board, raising fears over potential insider trading.

Shares in drone maker Unusual Machines, which listed on the Nasdaq last year, surged by more than 220pc in the four weeks leading up to the recruitment of Donald Trump Jr on Nov 27.

Meanwhile, shares of fintech group Dominari Holdings, which is headquartered in New York’s Trump Tower, were catapulted 580pc higher in the six weeks before bosses announced Donald Trump Jr had joined its advisory board.

Eric Trump, another of the US president’s sons, joined at the same time.

As ever, check short dated out of the money options trading.

Because, yes, there are still insider traders dim enough to do their trading that way…..in the first place everyone would look.

The good old left, eh?

Birmingham bin strike activists are plotting a new pro-Palestinian party in a “break from Labour”.

Campaigners for Unite, the union behind the bin crisis, have urged colleagues to consider joining forces with “lefty Greens”, other trade unionists and “free Palestine activists” in a new coalition.

In a Facebook post on Wednesday, Unite’s community branch in Birmingham raised the prospect of a new pro-Palestinian party to represent “real workers”.

“Fissiparous” isn’t strong enough for that left.

Also, many activists do indeed buy into that idea that it’s all connected, innit? Until Joo Capitalism can be overthrown in Palestine the none of us can be free.

Binmen themselvesmight be happy with just not suffering an £8 k a year pay loss.

Squeal for Geekiness

An idea I’ve had for a long, long, time. Never been able to find the money to test it. Almost certainly wouldn’t have been a good person to test it if I could have found the money.

Anyway, couple of years back a scientist contacted me to ask amout summat rare earthy. And I said, well, if you can do xy then why not apply it to z because xyz would be a very cool thing to be able to do.

He went silent, his gaze was either internal or thousand yard for 15 seconds and a “Yes, I see”.

Apparently this does, in fact, work. It is possible to do xyz. No, I don’t own a piece of it – ideas don’t, practice does. I’m awaiting more news on “how well” this works in terms of real costs. But so far, without those details, it looks like a very cool – as in no, really cool – soliution to certain recycling problems. And dependent upon costs in volume might, in fact, be the solution to the global rare earths industry.

Which would be very cool indeed.

Yes, yes, I know, mine, money etc. But even without that, very cool indeed. That initial idea I’d been nurturing as a “But this should work” does in fact work. And, given scale costs again, would knock out the major bottleneck and cost in rare earths. Very cool indeed.

Oh, right

America may have given up all appearance of being a democracy by next week.

Then, begin to expect the disappearances to begin, very quickly.

Of course even there Spud’s wrong. If this were to happen – if – then this would indeed be democracy. He who won the election gets to do whatever, it’s the will of the people.

If this were to happen it would be a breach of the rule of law – which is, as we should all know, a limitation upon democracy, that will of the people.

The Spud Manifesto

Teachers attending the conference said the malign impact of poverty went beyond malnutrition, with families needing help to navigate the benefits system

Government’s fucked up and inefficient. Therefore we must have more government in more areas of our lives.

Fairly big news

If true, of course:

An ocean world teeming with alien life may exist 124 light years away from Earth, a study by Cambridge University has hinted.

The exoplanet K2-18b, which exists in the constellation Leo, appears to have an atmosphere containing huge quantities of dimethyl sulfide, a chemical only produced by living organisms such as marine phytoplankton.

Quantities of the chemical are so great that it represents 20 times the biological activity of Earth. The molecule vanishes fairly quickly, suggesting something is continuing to produce it.

Well:

Prof Nikku Madhusudhan, from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, said: “There is no mechanism that can explain what we are seeing without life.

An awful lot of people are going to have a go…..

Archaisms R Us

How about this as an education system:

He left Prince Henry’s Grammar School in Otley at 14 to train as an accountant

So, grammar school, passed 11 plus (or whatever it was in the 1930s). War service:

He returned to Leeds and resumed his accountancy training, qualifying in 1949.

And:

Glover’s first job was with an accountancy firm in Windsor before joining Price Waterhouse, where he audited several City livery companies including the Watermen and the Fishmongers, of which he was a freeman. He then moved to Deloitte, which posted him to Recife in Brazil.

Etc etc.

So a – reasonably at least – distinguished professional career after leaving school at 14.

Rather than another decade of grievance studies and then…..

And the reason we don’t return to such a system is?

This is rather fun

For all the strides the body positivity movement has made over the past decade, including within the fashion industry, there have been signs that the thin ideal was always going to make a comeback. You can blame the “wellness” culture that idealises thinness, or the return of 90s fashion, and the “heroin chic” bodies that wore it. Blame the rise of weight-loss injections such as Ozempic, or the way fashion tends to swing back and forth. Or blame the demonisation of “wokeness” and diversity initiatives by conservatives. Or, blame it all, along with the fatphobia that never really went away, even though it pretended to. Models, activists and those of us who had hoped that fashion’s embrace of a range of sizes signified a genuine culture change are left wondering how it could have reversed so quickly. “I think you’re seeing the separation between people that were doing it because there was a movement at the time,” says Standley, “and the people who are truly passionate about it.”

So, fat birds were being used as models. Now they’re not.

Ho Hum.

But something a little deeper.

So, after decades of whining everyone agreed that no, it really is your genes, your hormones, the essential you, to be a tub of lard. It isn’t, in fact, that you just eat too much. Capitalism and the patriarchy perhaps, but deffo not lovely you.

And so celebration of the you. Or even, if we use a few whales then we can sell stuff to the population of whales out there.

Then some utter, utter, invents an injection which suppresses appetite. Anyone who gets the injection loses weight. So, err, in fact those rolls of bubblicious were in fact simply because you ate too much, weren’t they? Not genes, hormones, patriarchy or capitalism but doughnuts by the dozen.

At which point why celebrate? Why not just go back to pointing and jeering? And therefore….

Well, yes, -ish

Russia’s rouble has become the world’s best-performing global currency as Donald Trump’s tariff war upends financial markets.

The rouble has strengthened 38pc against the dollar since the start of the year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, following a dramatic fall in confidence in the US currency.

I’d not put all that much weight behind the performance of something that’s not wholly and freely convertible.

Meanwhile, the rouble has been buoyed by record-high interest rates of 21pc as the Bank of Russia battles to temper inflation and support Vladimir Putin’s struggling war economy.

Also, over time, FX will follow relative inflation rates. So don’t expect it to last all that long….

This is what happens with net zero

Properties burn as turf war rages in Edinburgh and Glasgow

Gang wars over the peat trade, d’ye see?

This amuses

So, checking up on a small miner I wrote about 5 years back. Time for an update?

In their presentation:

“The Rare Earth problem is in the Separation
Plants and the base technology used. Finding
a new method would solve the Rare Earths
Problem.” – Tim Worstall, Global REE Expert

Oh, right. I mean true, but finding myself being used as the proof of the contention they’re trying to prove is, well….

Sigh

I have long argued for the need for interest rate cuts.

Let me be candid: I think there is no justification for base interest rates to be above the rate of inflation. If they are, there is a deliberate exercise in the upward redistribution of wealth going on in a society, and no state can afford that in a world of the type we live in, where the wealthy already have far too much economic power.

Political economist insists there is no time value to money.

Ho Hum.

His nose now reaches Scunthorpe

“High energy prices in the UK undoubtedly play a role in the problems faced by steelmakers. But high energy prices are absolutely not created by net zero policies. Britain is acutely exposed to fluctuations in gas prices, and the gas price also drives UK electricity prices more than in other countries.

Oh Aye?

“Britain’s amazing wind resources offer the potential for cheap, stable energy prices. We need to build the infrastructure of clean power so we can have cheap power for decades. The drive for clean energy also creates a large demand for steel, for wind farms, nuclear power stations and pylons.”

Try running a fucking furnace off windmills you idiot, idiot, tosser.

Other countries including Germany, Sweden and China have industrial strategies to subsidise steel and keep the industry going. Experts said the UK’s failure to have a strategy for steel was the problem, rather than net zero.

So, net zero does produce problems but other people are throwing money at those problems.

It’s actually worth reading that whole piece. It’s the most amazing piece of propaganda masquerading as a news report.

Worth pointing out that this was the plan all along

More graduates face earning the minimum wage as the salary gap between university leavers and the country’s lowest earners disappears.

Rapid increases in the National Living Wage mean a full-time worker on the UK’s lowest salary now earns £25,500. Meanwhile, one in 10 graduate roles were advertised at £25,000 at the end of last year, according to Indeed data.

Around a quarter of entry-level roles requiring a degree offered an average salary of £27,765, scarcely more than the legal minimum.

Graduate entry always did pay less than skilled manual work. But less than burger slinging?

The useful point here is that this has always been the plan. You know that insistence upon greater equality? A smaller Gini? Less income inequality? This is it. Wage compression. It’s the same thing.

This is all meant and planned.

Sigh

The minimum wage has long been lauded as the UK’s most successful intervention for low-paid workers since its introduction in 1999, persistently proving critics who warned of job losses wrong.

Lauded by idiots perhaps.

The UK now has one of the highest minimum wages in the world

The costs were always there. But as neoclassical economics insists, everything happens at the margin. A low minimum wage has low costs because very few people are paid low wages. As the minimum wage rises it bites more. So, the costs rise.

When are the costs too high? Well, that’s a political matter, obviously. But before now…..

Yes?

Computed tomography scans – also known as CT, or Cat, scans – may be causing 1 in 20 cancers, a study has found.

About five million of the scans, which use X-rays to create detailed internal pictures of the body, are carried out each year on the NHS. But new research from the University of California (UC) suggests they could lead to lung, breast and other cancers, with a tenfold increased risk for babies.

There are no solutions, only trade offs.

This has all been known for a very long time. The only interest here is that they’ve upped the rate at which they think it happens.

Well, yes, it is a good point, isn’t it?

The only reason I mention it is that, in this day and age, I somehow find it hard to imagine a white actor being hired to play a black historical figure. While Mr Gatwa gets to play Marlowe, the writer of Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus, I somehow doubt that, say, Keira Knightley would be cast to play the Nobel Prize-winning African-American novelist Toni Morrison, or that Hugh Grant would get the nod to portray the great Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. I tend to suspect that such casting would be considered not just inauthentic, but disrespectful. If not downright racist.

Nowadays, in fact, casting white actors to play black characters is unacceptable even in cartoons. This may seem curious, given that a cartoon’s audience is unable to see what race the actors are. None the less, we know it’s true, because in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the Fox TV network announced: “The Simpsons will no longer have white actors voice non-white characters.” As a result, Harry Shearer, who is white, no longer voices the character of Dr Hibbert, who is black.

The same happened on another popular US cartoon, Family Guy. For 20 years, the character of Cleveland Brown, who is black, had been voiced by Mike Henry, who is white. But after the Black Lives Matter protests, Mr Henry announced that he was quitting the role, saying: “Persons of colour should play characters of colour.”

In summary, then, here are the new rules. A black actor may play a real-life historical figure who was white. But a white actor may not even provide the voice for a completely fictional character who is black. Please update your records accordingly.

We might even describe it as racist double standards.

The thing is…..

The UK government can never go bust.

You might have been told by economic commentators that we are in danger of doing so.

At some point in time, you might hear a rumour that there is a crisis with regard to the UK’s national debt, and will we ever be able to repay it, and all of that talk is complete and utter nonsense.

I repeat my point; the UK government can never go bust.

There is one very simple and very straightforward reason for saying so. Unlike you and unlike me, the UK government can create money of its own.

It has actually happened that people in charge of the printing press have printed so much that each piece they print hsa no value. So, owning a printing press is not, in fact, an absolute guarantee of not going bust.

FFS Spud

As is clear, the trend in the UK has been towards growing inequality,

Erm, in the last 20 years, to falling.

but the critical lines here are the darker green dotted and yellow ones. They compare gross and post-tax incomes.

Note that they move together.

Tax does not redistribute income in the UK.

Nor does the benefits system, with benefits income being included in gross income.

Gross income includes benefits but not taxes. Inequality by gross income is lower than that by original income. Therefore benefits reduce inequality. This really isn’t that difficult.

In summary, we have a tax and benefits system that fails to deliver redistribution of income, let alone wealth, in this country.

All the measures of inequality are lower after the influence of the varied parts of the tax and benefit system than original income. Therefore the tax and benefits system lowers inequality.

As it happens George Monbiot was on this this morning. And he managed to get it right. The tax system on incomes is pretty progressive. The tax system as a whole isn’t. The benefits system is progressive. The tax and benefits system as a whole is progressive.

Imagine, being outwitted in economics by George Monbiot.

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