Man in a Shed: Signs of the times

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Signs of the times

Just a few observations:

I now get spam email about debt counselling - not just the usual pharmaceutical and biological enhancements.
Last night I saw an actual bank advert about saving up for something in the future - rather than taking a loan out to have it now.
Labour MPs have suddenly discovered the budget they were cheering over a year ago is going to cost them lots of votes (which they care about) and their hard working but low income constituents money (which they obviously only care about once the electoral results become obvious ).
BBC interviewers are starting to question housing experts on why there isn't a house price bubble - and the experts spin and twist like their jobs depended on it - which we are all starting to realise they do. ( Ref conversation with Halifax spokesperson on R4 this morning - update The TPA has a great post on this point - and rightly congratulates Evan Davis on a purposeful interview. Like Wat Tyler I has to check at the end of the interview that the Halifax economist wasn't a Treasury official or junior minister. Wat Tyler's best line is the reference to the greatest house price crash since the Black Death !).

Its a sign of the times.

No comments:

The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman