Liberal Burblings

Archive for November, 2008

Spare a thought for John Humprhys. On Today, he has to play devil’s advocate. He has to earn his salt. It’s not his fault that he ends up sounding like a whining school boy who’s had his sweets taken away from him. It’s not his fault he ends up making Alastair Darling sound reasonable.

This morning he asked Darling “exactly” when growth would restart. What a damned stupid question. Who does Humprhys think the Chancellor is? God?

At several points, as Humprhys bemoaned the economic situation, I was willing Darling to reply “Well John, s*** happens, doesn’t it?” It would have been the honest answer.

This stuff about returning to old Labour is just utter, hysterical nonsense. Even the Daily Mail demonstrates that, while attempting to make the opposite point:

Denis Healey, the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, increased the higher rate of tax on incomes of £20,000 and above to 83 per cent in 1975. Those earning more than £8,000 a year paid 60 per cent.
On top of that, there was a special 15 per cent surcharge for ‘unearned income’. So anyone living on a pension or savings was taxed at up to 98p in the pound.

Against that, 45% for those earning over £12,500 per month or about seven times the national average, is hardly “squeezing the rich”! (Especially when the VAT cut of 2.5 points, such as is, will be more likely to benefit those with plenty of money, rather than average earners)

Come off it!

The news of Timothy Geithner’s nomination as US Treasury Secretary was greeted thus. By who? Well, if it had been a headline from Daily Kos or Huffpo one might not give it a second thought.

But it was from no less an august source than The Economist.

For some reason, the Minnesota Senatorial recount is giving rise to extraordinary outbreaks of political anorakking.

First, we have the ongoing detailed discussion of actual contested ballot paper examples on the Minnesota Public radio site.

Now, Nate Silver on FiveThirtyEight has, remarkably, gone to great lengths to present a regression analysis on the recounting so far and the potential outcome. Here’s a sample that gives you some idea of the level of the analysis:

Now, we can attempt to solve this equation at the statewide level. When we plug in a t of .499956 — Franken was picked on just slightly very less than half of the ballots during the initial count — we get a value for franken_net of .837. That is, Franken will gain a net of .837 votes for every 10,000 cast.

And the conclusion? Al Franken, the Democrat, will be an absolute shoo-in and win by a resoundingly clear margin of 27 votes out of 2,885,555 cast.

That’s a margin of 0.00094%.

……a doddle.

We got pulverised with pulsating red “FINANCIAL CRISIS” graphs with shares going vertically downwards on the BBC News for weeks.

Now shares go up by 10% in one day and do we get a green graph with the arrow going upwards? (Sample helpfully provided below)

Do we heck as like.

It gets mentioned in one sentence by Robert Peston.

FTSE up 9.84%. Dow Jones IA up by 11% in 2 days. But, those poor people sitting round who worried about those pulsating red downward graphs hardly get told about it.

A month ago journalists were telling us all about the London inter bank offer rate (LIBR). Now it hardly gets a look in. That’s because it has dramatically fallen for three month borrowing (see graph below from http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/) so it’s no longer news. Instead we get hysteria about the chancellor’s borrowing.

So let’s briefly recap. First of all we’re told it’s a bank lending crisis. But that’s got better. So then it was a share crisis but now they’ve gone up – albeit for one day – and it doesn’t get a look in. Because now they’ve decided it’s a government borrowing crisis….or a government taxing rich journalists in two years time crisis….

It’s all a great reason to listen to Terry Wogan instead of Today and watch Emmerdale instead of the News.

The news of Timothy Geithner’s nomination as US Treasury Secretary was greeted thus. By who? Well, if it had been a headline from Daily Kos or Huffpo one might not give it a second thought.

But it was from no less an august source than The Economist.

We got pulverised with pulsating red “FINANCIAL CRISIS” graphs with shares going vertically downwards on the BBC News for weeks.

Now shares go up by 10% in one day and do we get a green graph with the arrow going upwards? (Sample helpfully provided below)

Do we heck as like.

It gets mentioned in one sentence by Robert Peston.

FTSE up 9.84%. Dow Jones IA up by 11% in 2 days. But, those poor people sitting round who worried about those pulsating red downward graphs hardly get told about it.

A month ago journalists were telling us all about the London inter bank offer rate (LIBR). Now it hardly gets a look in. That’s because it has dramatically fallen for three month borrowing (see graph below from http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/) so it’s no longer news. Instead we get hysteria about the chancellor’s borrowing.

So let’s briefly recap. First of all we’re told it’s a bank lending crisis. But that’s got better. So then it was a share crisis but now they’ve gone up – albeit for one day – and it doesn’t get a look in. Because now they’ve decided it’s a government borrowing crisis….or a government taxing rich journalists in two years time crisis….

It’s all a great reason to listen to Terry Wogan instead of Today and watch Emmerdale instead of the News.