Manchester United can no longer be relegated

Always a disappointing moment in the season.

Update: Actually I'm not sure how sophisticated Football365's calculation is. It seems based on just simply their points, and other teams' maximums. But how can Liverpool be relegated? They would have to lose all their gains, and most of the bottom 5 or so would have to win all theirs. But they can't if they play each other. Anyway Man U are clearly not going down.

Guessing the authors of LRB letters World Record

Where's Norris McWhirter when you need him? I claim a new world record the above. It was on word five of I prefer black that I thought 'I bet that's by our EJH' and so it was.

Macro-Economics with Tim Worstall*: a new series

I think this has the potential for serialisation, so consider this the 2nd in a new series 'Macro-economics with Tim Worstall'. The title will be my attempt to decipher what he is saying.

No.1, here:

Left-wingers believe that raising the price of petrol has no impact on its consumption.

No.2

If a company alters the price of its goods in a country with a fixed exchange rate that system has broken down

Notes: To be honest this is a really difficult one and I would appreciate some help. I don't think he is saying that the Chinese government sets the prices of factories, so he must be referring to the exchange rate, and suggesting that as this company is offering a more advantageous exchange rate to foreigners buying its wares the yuan's 'market value' should be less than it is. It's a puzzle as the article makes clear the yuan is not rigidly fixed and has been rising over the past few years. Furthermore I don't see the difference in this than simply cutting your prices, which of course is what happens under fixed exchange rate systems. Yet this is described as the weird 'prices will out'.

MMR and Melanie Phillips

She's still bangin' on.

Oh sorry, I forgot you're meant to say something like this with respect to Melanie Phillips and her range of conspiracy theories:

...while I sometimes think she goes a little far, isn't she brave.

A textbook devaluation

House prices rise in expensive parts of London , says the Guardian. I can't be bothered to check it, these things often fall apart at the first glance, but let's assume its true. Clearly this is going to be down to foreign buyers, up to 60% in this article.

Maybe they could teach this in economic textbooks? London earns money by selling out ever smaller houses in desirable locations for ever more money. However we'd become rather uncompetitive, and so there has been some cutting of costs, with the average house in a desirable area down about 20% over the year. But also a devaluation, which has made another reduction of 28% for dollar buyers, and 42% for yen buyers. Put together, this is a reduction of 43% and 54% respectively.

This surely needs to become the motor of our economy now the City is defunct. Apparently it earns [ed] more than £12bn of export earnings a year. If say that halves, it is £6bn a year that needs to be made up. With an average house price of about £1m, only 6,000 houses a year extra need to be sold from Kensington & Chelsea to foreigners. Given the borough has probably about 50,000 suitable properties this should keep us going for a bit. In the meantime there should be a huge building campaign on Hyde Park to provide for the years after 2015.

Kensal Rise The Colour

Apparently it's a gorgeous pale golden shimmer

Right-wing economics

It's sometimes hard to keep up. In this post Tim Worstall is at his cryptic best, but as a seasoned Worstallite, I can decipher. When he says 'My word, you mean prices and incentives matter', he is implying that those on the left don't believe this.

As I note in the comments it is loopy, or idiotarian as Tim would say, to suggest that the left doesn't think higher gasoline prices, whether through the market price or higher taxes, curbs consumption.

One of his commenters (who I don't believe is the football commentator, although he is as excitable) seems even further down the line:

Johnathan Pearce // Feb 6, 2009 at 12:26 pm

Amazing, high prices produce an effect. Someone tell Polly, Richard Murphy and Paul Krugman.

Mmm, Paul Krugman doesn't believe that high gasoline prices have an effect.

Is there an addition for Firefox whereby with a simple keyboard shortcut a list of bogeynames is inserted for you that have very little to do with the topic but simply save time? Something like control-shift-B Paul Krugman Pol Pot Stalin Lembit Opik Arthur Scargill Richard Dawkins Boutrous Boutrous Ghali George Clooney Gordon Brown David Hare ... bloody hell it's stuck!

Hassan Butt the fantasist

This has been brewing for months but we now have an admission in court. It's excellent news of course that he wasn't involved in what he says he was, more than making up for the many hours of many people's time that he has wasted.

Food is much cheaper in South Afrrica

I went to the Meat & Wine Company restaurant in Westfield, London, last night and although I couldn't really fault the food, it was very expensive (£6.50 for bruschetta!! How can we survive?). Halloumi starter was £8.50, so we shared it between four. A 300g rump steak with not many chips (both excellent however) was £17.

Originally, I believe, this was a South African company, and their Joburg branch's menu is online. Clearly this is an extreme comparision, a South African company, serving steak, against its sole UK branch (maybe sole European branch). On the other hand the meat in London is from Britain, not South Africa.


Anyway the two things I had - £8.50 and £17.00 in the UK, are (note an html menu rather than the UK's annoying PDF one) are 39 and 82 rand each. The steak might not come with chips in S.Africa, in which case it would be 97. If we go the latter a purchasing power parity (PPP) exchange rate to the rand is 4.5 for the cheese and 5.7 for the steak. In the fact the rate is 14.6, so the starter was 3 times more expensive, and the steak 2.5 times.

The PPP Meat & Wine Co. exchange rates for each item varies, and can be ranked. The best value in South Africa (or worst in the UK) is the carpacchio of beef starter, at 2.8, followed by (unsurprisingly) Boerwors sausage, at 3.5. The steaks range from 4 to 5.7, and the nearest in price was a lamb shank at 6.7, so only a bit less than half the price.

Luckily there's always Veuve Cliquot, which at 890 rand, and 64 pounds, works out at
13.9 rand to a pound - a positive bargain in London.

The only thing I'm not sure about is whether one needs to add a South African sales tax; the UK prices include VAT.

Carol(e) Thatcher

Good lord the nutters really are taking over, aren't they? A Telegraph journalist asserts that there is a "political vendetta" against Carol Thatcher (Carol Thatcher, note, not Mrs Thatcher). "Sir" Mark Thatcher declares that the BBC is "behaving like the Stasi". The Times, which almost to a man has covered the story well, has more details.

Thatcher, who had been drinking, her spokeswoman admitted, is alleged to have referred to “the golliwog frog”, thought to be a reference to the French player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, who has a white French mother and a black Congolese father. As some rolled their eyes and others challenged Thatcher about her use of the word, she is said to have responded, “well, he’s half-golliwog”,

But still it continues. Mrs Thatcher, apparently, unbelievably, has described Carol(e)'s sacking as 'political correctness gone mad'.

Does anyone remember it was not long ago the Telegraph was seen as a better newspaper than The Times?

Guantanamo and Alan Johnson

Alan Johnson, not the Minister and Trade Unionist but the Professor at Edge Hill University, lays down a challenge to the 'left'.

It seems some facts can never come into focus for the left. Gitmo recidivism is currently running at 11%.

Some people have suggested that the 'left' can't focus on these figures because they are untrue, and point to a report by the Seton Hall Law Department (press release here) as undermining both Johnson's 11% figure and Johnson's recidivism claim .

It is possible that Johnson was unaware of the report, but another, which I suggest might be closer to the truth, is that he is directly challenging its findings. This is why he says 'some facts can never come into focus' before asserting a figure in which he believes, and explains the timing of his article (the report came out last month). Unfortunately, and something that will come as a surprise to readers of his authoritative journal, Democratiya, he provides no footnotes or backing for his claim, or counter-claim, whichever it is.

I will email him to ask for more details.

Newspaper articles coming your way soon

WHY OH WHY CAN'T LONDON TRANSPORT BE ENGINEERED TO WORK IN SNOW CONDITIONS AS OCCUR ONCE A DECADE

ps Ooh the Ft joins in, and the commenters are worth a read. Sample:

We used to run a empire as we used to have some guts. Now, the liberalist nutjobs have deemed free-thinking too dangerous to society and we have become menances to ourselves.

The tragic waste of British talent

Six A grade A-levels in August, but in this economy no hope of finding a job, and reduced therefore to snowball fights late at night in central London (from BBC news homepage).

Devaluation

Oliver makes a few criticisms of this Telegraph article on the euro (Chris Dillow says some aren't important, link somewhere on the right), and I would add another, which seems to be ignored by many right-wing experts on the economy (and bloggers such as Tim Worstall), although used to be widely known, which is not everyone can devalue. The Telegraph says:

The one-size-fits-all inflexibility of the eurozone deprives single currency members of the vital weapons of devaluation

So Spain needs to save its economy by devaluing against Germany, and Germany, whose economy is hardly doing any better, needs to devalue against Spain. Meanwhile the UK and US need to devalue against both, and in turn they need to devalue against the UK and US.

It doesn't take a genius to work out this isn't going to be possibe. Perhaps they could all devalue against China? But China isn't big enough to mean that was a major devaluation for any of them, and in fact China isn't keen on that idea - it's exports are falling too.

In fact, of course, there is kind of one way in which everyone can devalue, and that is through higher inflation - devaluing the currency against the price of goods and services. And deep down perhaps this is what they want -- it's certainly a justifiable position, but not one that used to be made by Conservatives.