I'm quite proud of this
On 7 April, I posted an article comparing the car-scrappage schemes with Bastiat's broken-window analogy. The following is the leader from today's FT: Great minds think alike.
Is this the dumbest economic argument in the world?
-What is market value other than "the community's valuation of the external costs and benefits of the activity"?- External costs and benefits are, by definition, costs and benefits that are external to the market value. If they were within…
More political funding from Gordon's Investment Bank
£150m (almost half the total cost of the scheme) for the M80 PFI scheme in Scotland £500m as a starter for the M25 widening, with possibly more to come. It is not clear how these projects meet the EIB's objectives, but very clear how they…
From this week's MoneyWeek...
Good call. Indeed. Heavily over-priced at that.
Gordon's Investment Bank
The European Investment Bank (EIB) "has 6 priority objectives for its lending activity": Cohesion and Convergence Support for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) Environmental sustainability Implementation of the Innovation 201…
The Socialist Utopia
From the English Eclectic blog of Paul Halsall, a socialist historian, in somewhat self-deluding response to Iain Dale's suggestion that we might have to cut public spending: 'I would expect that within less than 10 years we will have the…
Scrappage and broken windows
Henry Hazlitt, in his marvellous Economics in One Lesson, cites Frederic Bastiat's exposition of the broken window fallacy. The fallacy is that vandals breaking a shopkeeper's window have benefited the economy, because the glazier will get…
Right-to-Move-Out, not Right-to-Move
ConservativeHome's ToryDiary reports on a Right-to-Move policy to be announced tomorrow by Grant Shapps. Under this scheme, "good social tenants can demand that their social landlord sell their current property and use the proceeds, minus…
"Falling emissions in declining economy" shock!
Preliminary data released today (as reported in EurActiv, and picked up by OpenEurope) indicates that emissions from the sectors covered by the EU-ETS fell 6% in 2008. Naturally, the pro-EU-ETS brigade have hailed this as evidence that the…
The 14th century solution to moral hazard
Just looking something up in Peter Spufford's -Money and its Use in Medieval Europe-. Came across the following passage, which seems to have relevance to the modern day: -In Barcelona, from 1300, book entries by credit transfer legally…
Government ≠ Country
Alistair Darling, explaining that the downside of reduced bonuses in the City is reduced tax revenues, said (on the Andrew Marr show this morning): -"that's why our income as a country has gone down"-. No Alistair. That's why your income as…
'There's no shame in going to the IMF'. Oh really?
What does it mean if a government has to go to the IMF for funds? The government couldn't run a balanced budget. The economic outlook was so poor that there was little prospect of the budget coming back into balance over a reasonable…