Damian Green

His arrest, whilst hilarious, is almost certainly wrong. It's worth noting that he can no longer enter the United States without a visa, an unfortunate state of affairs but one that I am sure he whole heartedly approves of.

Tax bombshell? Tax reality...

Just one day after the pre-Budget report the girlfriend received her pay slip, and has been charged £2,000 more income tax in a month. If this is repeated across the country then the government will raise about £80bn in November alone*! That should ensure no PSBR, although I can't see how it help hard-pressed retailers.

* The alternative theory is that she is being made liable for the country's entire national debt. This seems unfair.

Indian shootings

Blimey, on this day last year I had just checked out of the Taj Mahal hotel, Mumbai.

I agree with Nick Cohen!

As he says, an obvious way to save money for the government at this time is by scrapping ID cards. I think it was Keynes who suggested that printing bank notes, putting them in bottles and burying them in the ground, would be better than nothing in getting out of a recession. But even compared to that the ID cards scheme is pretty useless. Other obvious candidates are scrapping Trident (as Edward Pearce,who I'm sure used to be a Tory, says in today's Guardian) and those two aircraft carriers, neither of which we'll ever be able to afford actually sailing anywhere.

Really?

Andrew Porter, the Political Editor of the Telegraph, says:

As a proportion of GDP, this is the highest level of government debt ever recorded - even more than Britain ran up in the wake of the Second World War.

I thought government debt as a % of GDP was about 250% just after the second world war?

Churchill and Australia

It looks an interesting book and one to buy if they ever translate it and turn it the right-way up for us here in England. The Guardian article* is perhaps more harsh on Churchill than the book, which Paul Keating gives rather a good speech about here.

* There are some good comments. One noting that if the Australians didn't like him, there were people in other Empire countries that thought even less. But my favourite is 'Did FDR go to Hiroshima?'. That's either clever or stupid, but I can't tell which.

So proud

This blog is the second google result for the search naked pensioners

Currency speculation update

I am being beseiged with requests to update you on how the currency speculation is going. My loyal readers will remember that this took the form of investing in a Citibank dollar account when the exchange rate with sterling was higher than 2. On average the exchange rate I received was 2.01 to the pound. Today it is about 1.48, which means a gain of about 36%.

That's not bad although it doesn't compare to my one very successful investment of the last four years which was the short oil ETF, which is up something like 150% in about four months. Both however might have involved rather an unacceptable amount of risk - the short oil ETF was suspended for a while whilst it seemed owners of it might just become another unsecured creditor of AIG, whilst it seems Citibank itself is rather teetering, and as a foreign bank account owner I am not sure what the regulations are.

ps After this week's further collapse, sterling's euro exchange rate in terms of the old DM is now around 2.26, just off the (1993? 1994?) low of about 2.20. This is just 7.6 francs to the pound - to get 10 you need 1.52 euros to a pound.

Melanie Phillips is still with the Spectator

She is travelling. Thanks to one of my commenters, btw, for showing us this article earlier this year in the Jewish Chronicle. Read it all, but the paragraph linked to:

For the overwhelmingly Democrat-supporting American Jews, voting for a Republican is as unthinkable as eating a ham sandwich on Yom Kippur. Indeed, a number of them would rather eat a ham sandwich on Yom Kippur, because their conviction that religion is bunk and has nothing to do with being Jewish comes second only to their conviction that Republicans are the acme of evil.

is particularly astounding. She is talking hear about 77% of American Jews, who apparently are 'fools' and aren't particularly 'in tune with authentic Jewish ethics such as truth, justice and the difference between right and wrong').

Whole Foods Market

A couple of years ago a Whole Foods landed at the end of my street like a spaceship full of Moonies. I just woke up one morning and there it was. You have to bear in mind that, in Camden Town, we'd only ever had the sort of corner shops where you have to fight through waist-high crowds of shoplifting Ewoks to choose between a single packet of out-of-date trail mix and a pack of pre-holed beige tights.

That's strange, I was under the impression that Whole Foods Market in Camden Town was a branch of the not particularly different Fresh & Wild for years before that.

Has Melanie Phillips been sacked?

Two hours and 20 minutes to go. If Melanie Phillips doesn't make a blog post in this time then that's the first time in two months that she has gone two whole week days without blogging for the Spectator. Is this the start of that magazine's fightback?

UK growth prospects

I find it rather strange that the press, in particularly the Tory press, hasn't made more the IMF's truly awful economic outlook for the UK updated yesterday. The Fund now predicts UK growth will slump to negative 1.3% in 2009, from its previous forecast of negative 0.1%. This is mainly, however, due to the collapse in 2008 growth, Q4 to Q4 GDP change in 2009 will be negative 0.5%, better than 2008's Q4 to Q4 change of 0.9%.

It might possibly be related to the collapse in George Osborne's popularity, at least measured in certain ways.

Catchy headline

The Telegraph greets Obama's election with this headline:

Barack Obama benefits from changing make-up of American voters

Can anyone make any sense of this?

Those who have for the past eight years worked to bring down the America that defends and protects life and liberty are today ecstatic. They have stormed the very citadel on Pennsylvania Avenue itself.

Melanie Phillips, obviously. Presumably she is accusing Obama of treason, and believes he should be arrested. I don't know whether she has just realised that no-one is listening to her, and so is assured that nothing she says has consequences, or is simply no longer able to understand what she is saying herself. Her friends, of whom I believe one occasionally reads these pages, really need to say something and quickly.

US election

On Betfair at 13:05 I can place $1,000 on Mccain to win at 12.5 to 1. On Intrade I can sell him at 11.0.

So if we sell $1,375 of McCain on Intrade and buy $1,000 of Mccain on betfair, do I work it out correctly that:

If McCain wins we get $12,500 on betfair, and lose 1,375/11 * 1000, which is 12,500 on Intrade. So we break even.

If Obama wins we lose $1,000 on betfair, but make $1,375 on Intrade.

I suppose there are costs, which presumably could be paid for by reducing our Intrade bet a bit. And maybe the combined impact of credit risk and not having read the contract might make up the rest. Or have I just got my numbers wrong?

I have no money so this is theoretical only.

ps One problem might be if you can't bet in dollars on Betfair.

The Spectator

At first I thought Clive Davis was playing a game with someone in which the objective was to see what was the maddest conspiracy theory they could get Melanie Phillips to print. But now I think in fact he's doing it as a last gasp stand on behalf of the reputation of the Spectator, in that by publicly stating how absurd it is he is warning Melanie Phillips off repeating it. I think he might be too late.