New jobless claims rise sharply; is the Delta wave beginning to take its economic toll? New jobless claims are the most important weekly economic datapoint with regard to the effects of vaccination progress. At this point, it is also a test of how much the “delta wave” of new cases is setting economic progress back. […] The post New jobless claims rise sharply; is the Delta wave beginning to take its economic toll? appeared first on Angry Bear. [Read More...]

The commitment that the UK government gives 0.7% of its GDP as overseas aid is enshrined in law. Johnson’s government decided to cut this to 0.5%, but didn’t need to put this to parliament because the cut was supposed to be temporary. A large number of Conservative MPs were unhappy with this, and wanted to use parliament to reverse this cut. The parliament’s speaker ruled their attempt invalid, but requested the government to allow a vote on the issue. The government refused. The executive increasingly views parliament with contempt. So much for the sovereignty of parliament. We knew this government thought little of parliamentary sovereignty when it closed it down, illegally, before the last election. The courts forced it to retract that measure, so now the government… [Read More...]

In 2013 I was presenting at a Bank of England conference. The UK recovery had stalled for three years. I cannot remember the details, but I was probably arguing that the economy desperately needed fiscal stimulus, not more austerity. A very well known academic and ex central banker started talking about inflation and the dangers of expectations becoming ‘unhinged’. In my response I came quite close to losing my cool. I wrote this post afterwards, which attempted to analyse why I had got so angry at that word ‘unhinged’. It is, after all, used a lot by central bankers and some economists. But its use makes no sense in today’s world. Here is a passage from that post: “It is as if inflation expectations can be in one… [Read More...]

When cases in another country start growing rapidly, you quarantine in hotels people coming from that country. If they have existing variants of concern, you do the same. You do not wait becausethe PM has a state visit planned hoping things will get better. Once a variant of concern enters the country, you direct all resources to isolating that variant and preventing spread. You do not persist with a failed test and trace system because it is politically embarrassing to overhaul it. You make payments to those asked to isolate automatically. Our government made all these mistakes, and so now we are at the beginningof a new COVID wave. Yet rather than stop further relaxation of the lockdown (not doing stage 3), this government carried on regardless… [Read More...]

Much (unfortunately for Hancock not all) of the material Cummings talked about in his morning testimony we already knew. Like the plans for Herd Immunity (all over by September) and how various people in and outside government realised those plans were time inconsistent (were bound to be changed as hospitals were overwhelmed). As I wroteat the end of April last year, our “Prime Minister and some in his cabinet, even in the face of predictions of hundreds of thousands of deaths, was too contentto do nothing, takeit on the chin, and too fearful of curtailing economic freedoms to interrogate the advice they were given.” Johnson didn’t invent Herd Immunity, but he was happy to go along with it until some of his advisors persuaded him otherwise… [Read More...]

Acting fast The Indian variant (B.1.671.2) of COVID-19 is now fairly well entrenched in parts of the UK and is increasing rapidly. Cases in the North West are rising, sharplyamong the young. For detailed analysis of what we know about this variant and how quickly it is spreading (once we exclude carriers who came from India) it is best to follow Christina Pagel (@chrischirp) e.g. here. She and other experts think that it is of sufficient concern that we should have stopped today’s relaxation of the lockdown. If there is one thing we should have learnt in dealing with COVID (and some of those dealing with pandemics already knew, like Mike Ryan here) is to act fast. If you wait until you know you are… [Read More...]