London Banker: Because they now have the role of market maker of last resort, central banks should become much more active in ensuring that any asset permitted to be classed as capital by a bank can be liquidated on demand in a public market. If this is so, then they must needs take a view…
Read More again with the central bank thingOK, I’ve added hundreds more government meetings to the Lobster Project webscraper and run the analytics script. We’re up to 3,825 lobbying events between 2,725 entities, which lobster.py reports processing in 4.63 seconds. Here are two depressing findings. First of all, Francis Maude is still the fourth most lobbied minister, although his gatekeepership has dropped…
Read More the good news is that the No.1 lobby is no longer a bank…What is it with Tories and loan-sharking? We all know about Francis Maude, the toxic pusher and secret ruler of the world, or at least we all should – he was a director of a company offering dodgy “debt consolidation” deals, and also Spanish sub-prime mortgages that were marketed as an inheritance tax avoidance scheme.…
Read More …wi nowt taken outTime for a non-Thursday music post. And again: In other “things that are good” news, I want one of these. In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile’s experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous…
Read More it’s not Thursday, so…Time for a non-Thursday music post. And again: In other “things that are good” news, I want one of these. In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile’s experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous…
Read More it’s not Thursday, so…Yadda yadda China cyberwar. I make the point that the Chinese infosec environment is characterised by chaos, there isn’t a well-defined centre of activity probably enjoying offical tolerance or more like the old Russian Business Network*, and that the great firewall is about censorship and also a sort of trade-barrier protecting the locals from competition.…
Read More Chaos as a deliberate strategyDavid “I was right” Blanchflower’s Right Blog is right. On this occasion he’s right about polling results. The public apparently thinks that Osborne’s fiscal policy is bad for the economy, unfair, too fast, excessive, and is affecting their lives directly. They’re also worried about unemployment and public service cuts. Which they also think are “necessary”…
Read More Irrational policy designBecause Chris Dillow has spam-bucketed me again, like quite a few TypePad sites periodically do, this comment will go here instead. Chris discusses a paper claiming that fiscal stimulus will not work because the central bank will put up interest rates and the exchange rate will rise, and quite sensibly points out that it doesn’t…
Read More don’t forget the powerJust as so much Blair era culture-page handwringing about why my kids came back from university, in hindsight, was a way of not talking about wages, student debt, and housing, people tend to lose sight of the central role of politics when they make arguments about “filter bubbles”. The original post over at Flipchart Fairytales…
Read More Boundaries. Now there’s dull for youIn the light of this it’s fairly clear that open data as a project is now over. (Hey, it was the week it turned out the government wants to just throw away the Forensic Science Service’s archive, you know, just hire a skip because who wants a load of old stuff, right?) Tory plans seem…
Read More the Conservatives really do hate you as much as you feared