Friday 16 November 2007

Cheap Food Policy

By Christmas the weekly family food bill will have risen by as much as a quarter.

In the meantime Northern Rock 'borrowed' another £2 thousand million from the Bank of England in the past week alone.

The Labour regime's Lending Front to the Loyal Heartlands financing from the Bank of England has risen dramatically from 'only' £500 million last week. Northern Rock has grabbed close to £25 thousand million since it first got the chance on September 14.

The estimate is based on the "other assets" category in the Bank of England's weekly accounts, which quantifies the central bank's lender of last resort support.

Lowering fuel taxes instead of directing such a grotesquely high level of tax payers' money at such an undeserving object would reduce food-price rises and spread tax-funded largesse to the whole country rather than nationalizing the northeast in its entirety, never mind just its Labour bank.

11 comments:

Newmania said...

I think Population has got to get back on the agenda HG. In the end Malthus may well be right ...well eventually he must be.

I may take up poaching

hatfield girl said...

Eggs or fish, it'll have to be in Lewes, N. Poached smoked fish with perfect egg, touch of rice with saffron....

Malthus was wrong at the time because of the extraordinarily fast growth rate of labour productivity .
Can't get that now, not least with the exhaustion of physical resources, so before long he'll be right after all - puts a new twist to 'in the long run we are all dead' doesn't it.

He's well worth a reread; a kind of rather long-winded 18th century blogger putting ideas up for general consideration from the interested, rather than a thesis and all the evidence adduced to support it.

Anonymous said...

Agree, this is now bordering on the speechless-beyond words by Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.

However, in all the commentaries on various media I have read, I have yet to see any explanation of what the situation, and consequences thereof, would have been had NR simply been declared bankrupt, its mortgage lending books taken over by a reputable financial organisation, and the financial hit(s)been taken by those - presumably City financial - organisations which kept lending to NR with such gay abandon.

Anyone care to illuminate/speculate?

CityUnslicker said...

to answer FI;

This is what the BoE wanted to happen all along. Nothin greally would have happened. A few thousand jobs would have gone in the Northern shires; perhaps not even that many.

Shareholders would have suffered, the government looked a little silly too.

But overall, not a lot. The worst case scenario is that it would have taken B&B down too; but this might happen anyway.

Pure panic from the Treasury has cost us this mess. I am quitely confident Mr Darling will soon be looking for new employment along with Mr King.

Anonymous said...

Guido lays in, as ever ..

http://www.order-order.com/2007/11/gordons-favourite-banker-resigns.html

looks like the ex-CEO made a nice killing before it all went to pot though.

Something is here, as well....

http://in.geocities.com/binty.uhuru/multicolorinvite.html

Anonymous said...

Pure panic at a one of the major pillars of the ZanuLabour funding community biting the dust.

Northern Crock was a heavy investor in various charities - some rather political.

Bush told the Enron guys to go pound sand when they asked to be rescued. Gordon has failed that test of integrity....

hatfield girl said...

Granite (they really do pick'em when it comes to names) is another £50 billion . It feels as if the UK has adopted the old Italian Lira as its currency with all these noughts. Sometimes the thought drifts across the mind that there might be more than just Northern Rock subprime wrapped up in there. After all, the whole NR/Granite/NR Foundation set up did seem rather lacking in caution, and formal, external supervision was a bit lax.

If there is the belief, along with Karl Liebnicht and Rosa Luxemburg, that realised socialism will bring the end of economics as a science, together with exemption from its rules and disciplines, and Gordon's in the Treasury and utopia is yours to grasp, you might very well end up short by more than the defence budget of the United Kingdom.

On the political and culturally undemocratic hinterland that is both permitted and revealed by all this, more of 'Labour's' under-governance and mindset may yet be displayed.

hatfield girl said...

On the financial and jobs retention fallout City has said it all so succinctly there's nothing to add.

Anonymous said...

It was Bukharin, not Liebnicht, who said that socialism would bring the end of economics as a science, together with Rosa Luxemburg.

True in the sense that socialist rulers can dispose of resources as they please. False in the sense that economic laws cannot be ignored.

For instance, Soviet planners' pretence that they could fix both prices and quantities of goods - something not even the most powerful monopolist can do - led to repressed inflation and total disorganisation of the economy, and is the root of Soviet-type regime collapse.

Equally, the non-sustainability of Labour regime economic policies will lead to its collapse.

hatfield girl said...

And, C, will Applegarth and Wanless be found floating in a canal somewhere in the north east, and Brown shot after confessing to economic incompetence in one of Straw's new, special, juryless financial courts?
Or will he be brought down over inappropriate attitude to relations with the United States?

Anonymous said...

CU 17/11 - 23.19. Thanks vm for that explanation and apologies for tardy response (been away from my laptop for a while). What you explain is rather what I had been thinking, so perhaps I am not quite as financially illiterate as I had thought! Is anybody in the City making a book on what the final total outlay on all this is expected to be? But it really is bordering on the scandalous just to save someody some embarrassment and a fairly minor provincial financial institute.