BREXIT - Is This Really Still Rumbling On? 😴
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"Boris Johnson is taking the Kirstie Allsopp approach to how to make Number 10 and Number 11 work for him: that is, just knock through."
“New York has the haircuts, London has the trousers, but Belfast has the reason!0 -
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Sterling/Euro has just gone over 1.20. Good news."I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]0
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And here is a take from the BoE Governor on why The City should not accept the EU rulebook going forwards:
https://telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/02/12/andrew-bailey-hails-chance-restore-citys-independence/
Some relevant parts:
"In his first public grilling since being named next Governor of the Bank of England, Mr Bailey set out a vision of a future system in which the UK champions innovation and a global outlook, rather than focusing on the smaller European Union market."
"The UK is a financial centre that supports global activity, it is not just an EU financial centre and it is important to bear in mind and align ourselves to develop that.”
Mr Woods dismissed fears the country could lose influence after Brexit. He said: “It isn’t at all apparent that our status or influence in international fora has been much affected - those are technical gatherings, and if you make the effort, do work, and bring convincing analysis, you can often make progress.”
Interesting point in there as well about the benefits for FS of operating in common law jurisdictions such as the UK:
Mr Bailey said: “It does not seem to me a random outcome that wholesale financial markets tend to be present in common law jurisdictions. They find it a more natural environment to operate in, something that can be adapted more rapidly.""I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]0 -
Funny that, a Johnson appointee to the role is firmly behind Brexit.
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Funny old world where the Tory Chancellor gets pushed out for not being tax-and-spendy enough.rick_chasey said:Spend spend spend.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
From what I read he wasn't cut tax and still spendy enoughrjsterry said:
Funny old world where the Tory Chancellor gets pushed out for not being tax-and-spendy enough.rick_chasey said:Spend spend spend.
“New York has the haircuts, London has the trousers, but Belfast has the reason!0 -
Funny point from Tom Kibasi: if Tony Blair is Thatcher's greatest legacy, is Dominic Cummings the greatest legacy of John McDonnell?1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
No.10 "refuses to confirm" fiscal rules will be maintained. Given that an "absolutely categorical assurance" is worthless, who knows what that means.1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
Not only that, but now Mikey doesn't have to worry about any colleagues pointing out that talking about an "Australian style deal" is like talking about a Swiss-style coastline.1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
well they arent really, "Additional capacity could be provided by incremental improvements to the existing network", those would be marginal & piecemeal improvements at best lengthening of platforms to allow an extra coach or more Ryanair style seating in trains, and would come at the cost of knocking out most of the existing rail network at weekends for the forseeable future, trust me theyve spent the past decade building crossrail and you get fed up not being able to travel to London at the weekend by train for seemingly years on end.morstar said:
But HS2 will have no impact on this either.elbowloh said:
I was saying that just to other day to a visitor to our (london) office who had come down from Oldham. No matter where you need to go, a lot of the time you need to go in to London centre and then out again, often with a tube connection inbetween.TheBigBean said:Worth noting that transport in London itself all goes into the centre. Very little going in the other directions.
I think we can all acknowledge that some journeys (typically towards a major centre) are often easier than traversing routes.
That doesn’t make HS2 the most effective spend. It benefits travel to London and little else when this is one of the easiest routes to travel already. The capacity argument is undermined in my earlier link.
or "a new conventional railway line" well yes a new conventional railway line would give you arguably the same capacity to Brum, it would presumably be conventional electric and youd have to then ask but so hold on why isnt it HS then ?
and actually the idea is you move the intercity service off the wcml to HS2,which frees up the capacity for the suburban stoppers/freight.
its the combination of capacity with speed, and then the speed/capacity of the link to the north which starts to bring you into competition with shorthaul airlines, and oh look if we kill the demand for people flying London to Manchester,which they do, does Heathrow need its 3rd runway anymore to satisfy that demand for regional slots...?
and if people dont think the existing service is heavily overcrowded,then try getting a train to Birmingham on a Saturday when they have the Christmas market, and on your return journey back to London pick a day when the WCML is blocked, at which you point youll also experience how really slow a train from Birmingham to London can be, Ive flown to Barcelona from London quicker than that flippin return journey was0 -
Nope.tailwindhome said:It's just talk talk.
I foresee a lot of bullishness to keep everyone on board, the WA passes early next year, a cabinet reshuffle to remove the window dressing morons (Raab, Patel, JRM,Truss, Barclay), a July extension to the deadline (with zero consequence for Boris) and a trade deal agreed by Dec 2021.
Completely wrong
He went the opposite way
“New York has the haircuts, London has the trousers, but Belfast has the reason!0 -
PM: And who's going to pay for it?
Cabinet: Mexico.0 -
“New York has the haircuts, London has the trousers, but Belfast has the reason!0
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Brexit has already happened: this is about the arrangements with the FS sector.elbowloh said:Funny that, a Johnson appointee to the role is firmly behind Brexit.
Which bits of the article do you disagree with or think are wrong?"I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]0 -
“New York has the haircuts, London has the trousers, but Belfast has the reason!0
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Not picking on you Rick but your succinct post echoes the thoughts of most on here.rick_chasey said:Spend spend spend.
A week ago I was the only person on here who was against fiscal irresponsibility and whilst I welcome your conversion my concern is that you are driven by a dislike of BoJo0 -
I wasn't particularly criticising it, for the record.
I'm fairly Keynesian, and I think I've been fairly consistent on that.
Arguably it's a little to soon to be spending lots and it should have happened 10 years ago and so the timing isn't right. I can be quite sympathetic to that argument.
By the same token, I think the rhetoric of the whole 'spending a lot in the north' has merit, though so far it has manifested in an expensive rail project which has dug holes in London and won't be in the north for almost a decade.
I feel quite strongly that the North has enormous potential to be a Flanders style economic success and that it has been badly let down by both national and local governance.
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For those of us who struggle with the format of Twittertailwindhome said:
Every so often you encounter a chart that takes your breath away. This week I saw just such a graph and I’m still struggling to get my head round it.
It depicts something which on the face of it sounds mundane — exports of gold from the UK — and it looks like a hockey stick.
The one this week has much the same shape. Not much of anything for month after month from 1998 when it begins until October 2019. Sure, there were occasional months when the amount of gold leaving British hands would hit a few hundred million pounds. Once or twice it ticks over a billion. But nothing like what occurs in November and December last year: in those months it skyrockets at a rate that doesn’t make any sense. Until then, the monthly average of gold exports was £126 million. Then in November they leapt to £4 billion. In December they doubled to £8 billion. To put it in context, that’s more, in those two months, than we typically export to any single country in the world. It is more than the annual GDP of Jamaica.
Britain does not mine any significant quantity of gold yet we are the world’s hub for the trade in physical bullion. This is something of an accident of history, in much the same way as we are also the world’s centre for the trade in fine wine, despite the fact that we produce very little of the stuff ourselves. Yet gold bullion is so valuable that every time it changes hands it massively distorts the trade figures.
Consider: Britain has not achieved a goods trade surplus, which is where we export more goods than we import, in any single month since comparable records began more than two decades ago. Yet in December that astonishing leap in gold exports meant that the headline figures published this week showed Britain achieving its first goods trade surplus in modern times.
That this was almost entirely down to a mysterious movement of gold bars was seemingly lost on Liz Truss, the international trade secretary, who promptly issued a press release hailing a “record-breaking year for UK exports”.
Well, yes, but only if you include those dodgy gold figures. Exclude them and Britain’s exports are not growing by 5 per cent, as she proclaimed, but by 2.9 per cent — the weakest rate since 2015. Exclude them and actually, far from hitting a new high, exports as a percentage of national income fell last year.
Still, none of this answers the most intriguing question: why did gold exports soar at the end of last year? Was it down to Brexit, with traders switching out of gold in the run-up to Brexit day? Was it to do with the election? Was it central banks repatriating gold or investment banks shifting their portfolios from UK-domiciled funds to EU ones?
We still don’t know. I have spoken to statisticians, to gold analysts and economists, to traders and industry experts. None of them have the foggiest idea what is going on.
One analyst took a look at the chart and spluttered a four-letter word. “That’s crazy,” he said. “Must be a mistake.” Another person pointed to the fact that Poland flew back about £4 billion worth of gold from the UK last year, before remembering that this happened before December and, oh, these kinds of things don’t count as official exports anyway.
The most plausible explanation I’ve heard is that this was simply an accounting change: one of London’s leading gold custodians, an American investment bank, shifted some of the gold from one column of its accounts to another. The gold didn’t leave the country; someone simply fiddled with a spreadsheet. Even so, that raises further questions: is that bank in trouble? Why do it now? Who ordered it: the bank holding the gold or the gold’s owners? If the latter, then who owns so much gold that they could single-handedly distort this country’s trade figures and surface in Britain’s national accounts?
We may never know the answer because there are few sectors in the City as cloak and dagger as the gold business. What we do know is that there is a lot of gold in London — more, probably, than in any other city in the world. The total amount in storage is going up rather than down.
On the one hand this is encouraging: Brexit has not made Britain any less attractive a destination for foreign investors. On the other, that hockey stick chart is a reminder. Britain is a complex, sophisticated economy. It is a great trading nation doing business with all corners of the world. Yet in the end, all of those statistics can be overshadowed by our other line of business: being a great place for rich people to stash their stuff, whether that’s financial investments, bottles of wine or bars of gold.0 -
To be fair to Rick, a lot of people on here are driven by that.surrey_commuter said:
Not picking on you Rick but your succinct post echoes the thoughts of most on here.rick_chasey said:Spend spend spend.
A week ago I was the only person on here who was against fiscal irresponsibility and whilst I welcome your conversion my concern is that you are driven by a dislike of BoJo"I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]0 -
Twitter gold.
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Someone unwinding a position after they were suckered in by Project Fear?berkshire_commuter said:
For those of us who struggle with the format of Twittertailwindhome said:
Every so often you encounter a chart that takes your breath away. This week I saw just such a graph and I’m still struggling to get my head round it.
It depicts something which on the face of it sounds mundane — exports of gold from the UK — and it looks like a hockey stick.
The one this week has much the same shape. Not much of anything for month after month from 1998 when it begins until October 2019. Sure, there were occasional months when the amount of gold leaving British hands would hit a few hundred million pounds. Once or twice it ticks over a billion. But nothing like what occurs in November and December last year: in those months it skyrockets at a rate that doesn’t make any sense. Until then, the monthly average of gold exports was £126 million. Then in November they leapt to £4 billion. In December they doubled to £8 billion.
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It's not really a position if I'm reading that right. It's physical bullion. If you were trading it you'd just swap the contracts, and keep them in the safe. You wouldn't be ferrying it out of the UK.0
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Honest question here Rick - can you explain the 'Flanders style economic success' in relation to the North of England? I've never heard that phrase before.rick_chasey said:
I feel quite strongly that the North has enormous potential to be a Flanders style economic success and that it has been badly let down by both national and local governance.
"I spent most of my money on birds, booze and fast cars: the rest of it I just squandered." [George Best]0 -
Okely dokely neighbourStevo_666 said:
Honest question here Rick - can you explain the 'Flanders style economic success' in relation to the North of England? I've never heard that phrase before.rick_chasey said:
I feel quite strongly that the North has enormous potential to be a Flanders style economic success and that it has been badly let down by both national and local governance.0 -
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elbowloh said:
Okely dokely neighbourStevo_666 said:
Honest question here Rick - can you explain the 'Flanders style economic success' in relation to the North of England? I've never heard that phrase before.rick_chasey said:
I feel quite strongly that the North has enormous potential to be a Flanders style economic success and that it has been badly let down by both national and local governance.
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It's not a phrase. Flanders was once upon a time a poor relation to Walonia and now it is leaving it in its wake. It's not reliant one one big city, and a lot of its success was off the back of heavy infrastructure investment, both in terms of travel but also in the various ports which were having their lunch eaten by Rotterdam.Stevo_666 said:
Honest question here Rick - can you explain the 'Flanders style economic success' in relation to the North of England? I've never heard that phrase before.rick_chasey said:
I feel quite strongly that the North has enormous potential to be a Flanders style economic success and that it has been badly let down by both national and local governance.
I guess my point is that it's a region that used to have competitive advantages which were eroded away and through good state investment and governance it is now doing rather well.
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